Take on Memes

A meme is a unit of cultural transmission. It takes its name from the French word “meme,” which means “same”, but also contains echoes of mimetic and memory. Whereas genes are passed on biologically, memes are units of information passed on by imitation and reproduction. Willingly or unwillingly, we absorb memes from the time we are born. Taking on these units of information is as important to our survival as a healthy set of genes might be.

From the start, people who have specific skills for childbirth, have had this knowledge passed along to them.   They weren't born with the information but have learned it from other mothers, midwives, or doctors. Beyond the latest technological tools for microsurgery, the fact that the doctor might wear glasses to help him see is itself a product of memes. When someone discovered that a piece of curved rock crystal could magnify things, he transmitted this information to someone else. This information about glass is only one of the millions of memes that assist us in our daily lives. With poor eyesight, the doctor might not have been able to attend medical school and go on to save lives. Simple eyeglasses help us see the information that helps us learn what cannot be passed on by those closest to us.  We speak, we write, we read, we learn, and we ask. Languages are produced by memes. From our family units, to our communities, our religions, our inner selves and our worldview, all of these belief systems are learned by imitation.

Memes are not new, but they have only recently been named. The study of meme dynamics helps us understand ourselves as a species on more than just a biological level. There are many branches of meme theory - meme warfare, memes as parasites, the study of macro memes (religion & theories) and micro memes (words & habits), the brain as a host for memes, the extinction & replication of memes, adaptation of memes by natural selection, and the death of memes. Memes are passed on and caught by word, by mouth, by action, by all of our senses. Memes live in us, in the media, on the internet. It has been said that “a human being is an animal infested by memes”. Humans can be faulty carriers of memes.  Computers are better at this as they can quickly calculate possible outcomes, but computers, for the moment, lack some of the tools for processing memes like morality and inspiration.

Memes mutate by re-imagining themselves in light of other memes. Much like our galaxy’s spiral form, memes, when reproduced, are not exact replicas of their seed, but are sown on another level up or down a spiral path of the long human march.

Unfortunately, many people these days consider memes to be a joke, a way of poking fun at a cultural icon.  The importance of the word and what it has done for humanity has been trivialized and discounted.  Without memes, there would be no Internet, yet the online memes that helped to create it have eaten their own mother. 

Dreaming in Bytes

The brain is like a sponge, absorbing experiences during the day that may be acted on immediately and stored for later. Knowledge is constructed by integrating this new information into a semi-permanent file.  When we weigh it up against what we already know and find it compatible, we accept it as truth. There is a critical factor in this judgment, which is skepticism.  If something doesn't seem quite right to us, these unresolved experiences often come out in dreams. Our brains have filed these preoccupations into folders where they can be accessed and put forward for resolution at a later date. When an unsettling replay resists classification, the process of dreaming tries to re-enact a scene to understand what occurred, matching it with similar settings, characters, and emotions.  If the unresolved event is eventually understood, it can pass into our knowledge base as an evidential cohesive fact. If it is not resolved, it is put back into storage so it can be returned to the luggage carousel at a future date and mixed with a different set of suitcases to see if it now makes sense.
 
Some cultures believe that dreams are an alternate reality, and this, to me, is akin to the theory of a parallel universe – neither proved nor disproved. Some believe that knowledge is passed on in dreams, and to some extent, this is true, but waking reality plays a larger part in our understanding of the world. Since empirical knowledge is stored in an area that is accessible in dreaming, the mixed salad of our dreams also contributes to our knowledge base. When some undigested experience resurfaces in dreams, it can play out in a way that helps us understand it better.  It isn't often that dreams are understood immediately, but the practice of writing them down can reveal their truth long after the fact, even if it is only to reinforce our emotional state at the time we dreamed them.  Often, we don't recognize this state until it has passed and been filed in our memory. The way experiences are processed may have a territorial factor that harks back to the disgraced belief in phrenology, but has now returned thanks to the technology of CAT scans and MRIs. When someone says something is “in the back of my mind”, common experience tells us that the brain cells used for storing more permanent knowledge are located deep in the cranial filing cabinet. Frontal brain cells, among other things, control our more immediate facial and lingual responses. When a person says something is “on the tip of my tongue,” it is an indication that the frontal engine is trying to access the dustier reaches of our minds before it can move the information forward.

Filing cabinets of memory can work like a zip file, remaining compressed, occupying little space until a trigger or command asks for an unzip and the file or memory expands. Often, this trigger occurs in dreaming.  Memory access during a dream isn’t a perfect search, but all of our memory searches in waking time aren’t always successful.  When we are awake, an unexpected memory or desire can drift forward at an inappropriate moment. Unrelated events, scenes, and people can populate dreams, sometimes causing perplexing combinations. Often, we wake from dreams asking ourselves, “What was that about?” Unless we can separate extraneous elements from relevant ones, we can’t make sense of our dreams.

Sometimes a dream - more often a nightmare - will wake us. Before we wake, our body will try to react to an event in the dream, and we will kick, move our arms, try to speak, grunt, or shout aloud. Sometimes we enter a half-waking limbo, where we know we are dreaming, wish to wake up but can’t, and consciously try to move or make a noise that will wake us. Informed by the body's need, our knowledge base tells us that we are dreaming as the body struggles to overcome sleep paralysis. Our survival instinct knows that remaining in a panic state for a long time will be traumatic to the brain, and therefore signals the brain to push us up into consciousness. This struggle can also be thought of as the workings of the frontal brain and the rear brain to communicate. It is now widely accepted that the brain stem at the back of the brain controls the motor functions like breathing, heartbeat, etc., and the survival instinct is based there. Since messages travel across protein networks, it takes time to assemble the appropriate files to travel the circuits from the back to the middle knowledge base to the frontal cortex. It can take a few seconds to wake up from a nightmare. We are, after all, humans, not high RAM computers.

Generally, our brain tries to do what is best for our body. The body is the vessel for the brain. Included in this instinctual health program are dreams. Our mind tries to digest our experiences in an automatic defrag, which takes place every night. Defrag is short for defragmentation, which attempts to re-file stray bits of information so there are more blocks of stable usable space available for new memories. Unless we defragment our brains for a period every 24 hours, we do not remain effective, rational, or sane in our waking lives.

There are computer programs that suggest the user should delete information that is not connected to any usable material or that has not been accessed for a long time. Much like a computer, our brains sometimes tell us that certain bytes of information are gone, permanently deleted, but this is not actually the case. Microsoft and other computer systems would have us believe that deleted information is unrecoverable, but those who understand computers on more than a superficial level know that everything which was once there is still there. This is also true for the brain. We don’t really forget, we only can’t remember. Sometimes what we thought we had forgotten will return to us at unexpected moments. Sometimes lost memories return in dreams.

Dreams are natural, useful, healthy, elusive things. We benefit by understanding them. The antidote to fear is self-knowledge. The antidote to communal fear lies in understanding our world. Dreams help all of us in all realms.

The Feelgood Virus Rules the West

In Western society, feeling good has become a guide for how to behave and what to buy.  The criterion for whether or not a thing has value is whether it feels good to the person who interacts with it.  The opposite of this is that if something doesn’t feel good, it has no value. In our lives, apparently, we should only keep what makes us feel good. The problem with this belief is that nothing has ever happened or been invented that advanced the well-being of mankind without some struggle, and struggle doesn’t feel good. Schools often teach that correcting children might stifle and therefore damage their creative spirit, so we must always praise everything a child does. This is not to say that criticism and punishment should flourish, but a balance between praise and criticism helps children understand the reality of the world.  Participation trophies are more damaging than helpful.

It may be that the prosperous post-war society in which parents and society indulged their children by giving them “all the things I never had” spawned the “Me” generation. If you indulge a child too much, he will expect to be rewarded with everything he wants and that he is the center of the universe. He is disappointed when his adult experience tells him otherwise. The “Me” generation couldn’t come to terms with the fact that they were not the most important people on earth. Those born after the Second War were taught to follow their dreams at the expense of everyone and everything else. It's a hard lesson when they realize that following their dreams doesn't necessarily result in success, either financially or in personal fulfillment.  Sometimes those dreams are unrealistic and unachievable.  A child can dream of being an astronaut, but if he doesn't have the intelligence, physical qualities and skills to get there, he will be disappointed. An American astronaut is required to be no taller than 190 cm, and chopping off his feet will not get him into space.
  
The isolation of individuals in a “Me” society has been exacerbated by indulgent parents, a tolerant society, the media, and a culture of fear, until almost an entire society is composed of disconnected individuals who substitute their imaginary sense of belonging for the slings and arrows of real life. There are exceptions to this world of isolation, such as participation in team sports, but only for players, since a spectator retains their isolation.  Players are indoctrinated by coaches who tell them the motive for playing is that it “feels good to win”. Pep talks are dominated by the dream of feel-good victories.  If teams or athletes come in second, it is seen as having no value. People can convince themselves that they belong to something important when, as spectators, they join together with other sports fans.  They celebrate this form of virtual belonging because it makes them feel good, but they are not doing anything active.  They count on the actions of their team or sports hero to make them feel good.  By themselves, they contribute nothing except noise. 

Pop music and films are geared to sales and encourage fans to buy products to take home. People still go to concerts, clubs, and movies, but the driving force behind the production of these events is to sell products for people to feel good with a replica version of the original.  Music concerts are loss leaders and intended to sell merchandise.  Films may not make the most money in their original cinema runs, but they bank on income from future sales.
 
The experimental drug culture from the ‘60’s onward encouraged drug taking as a way of “feeling good”. Of course, taking a drug is a personal experience as the user is the only one who feels the effects. Observers might see the results, but the experience is personal. No two trips from taking LSD are identical.  Drugs are taken for escape and entertainment. Alcohol is the same.
In less affluent societies, people have more pressing needs than “feeling good,” so the idea that this “feeling” is a reason for making decisions is viewed as an obscene Americanism. Someone who must expend all of his energy to search for food to give him strength for the next day doesn’t jeopardize his life by basing his decisions on what feels good. Most other societies have a much more solid foundation for making decisions, such as whether an act is in harmony with the society they live in, and is harmful or helpful to their community. Western society’s soul has come detached from its moorings, so it searches for something to fill the gaps left by former anchors like religion.  Religion has taken a battering from science. Worship may make a believer feel good, but so many people these days are no longer satisfied with the answers offered by religious texts. 

If a man in a poor country has scraped together enough money to buy a product, his choices would probably be based on usefulness, reliability and price. He might base his decision on what might help himself or his family, but to choose something because it “feels good” would be the least of his reasons for making a choice. It is true that choosing something for its rightness (usefulness, reliability and price) makes the buyer feel good, but choosing a product based only on its wow factor would be considered a foolish purchase.

The western marketing colossus attempts to create needs where none previously existed by exploiting human characteristics such as pride, envy, and a desire to feel superior. Television, which is watched worldwide, is an ideal medium for insinuating these new needs into every level of society. Feeling good is an easy sell, but the downside to the pitch is that we think we need these things that make us feel good because they cover up the emptiness.  This is not to say that man doesn’t have a desire to feel good, but to believe that this desire is a philosophy, a way of life, or a reason for action, makes for an empty life spent travelling between one indulgence and another.  It is an existence without heart, spirit or soul.

Sculpture in Public Places

Sculpture was born from figurines crafted at the dawn of man.  Some tribes practised cave painting, while others made their totems in stone, clay, ivory, and wood.  Egyptians cut obelisks from native rock, Greeks constructed temples with columns and statues, Romans built arches and colossi, and kings erected monuments to their battles and themselves. In the democratic age, unexpected icons like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sydney Opera House appeared to celebrate industry, science, nationhood, and the arts. Those who live in the countryside have mountains, trees, and the sky for spiritual nourishment, while the citizens of cities can only hope that their overlords allow them an integrated and aesthetic environment that reflects their culture, history, and community.

Large European cities like London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin have sculptures from every era that juxtapose the old and the new.  Rome has the visible bones of the old empire flanked by Fascist parade avenues, Catholic churches, palaces of rich families, and human-scale squares which have room for neo-classical fountains, cafes, souvenir shops, chic boutiques, neon, noise, roaring motorbikes, and all the racket that a living city generates.

Anyone who has ever lived in the country knows the claustrophobia of the city and how it feels to be confined to narrow streets and towered over by buildings. Humans need open space for their souls to breathe. Those who live in large cities are bombarded with sensory input, which is responsible for the stress and the excitement of city living. Early in the development of American cities, land for squares and public spaces was set aside. As cities grew, it wasn’t practical for the inhabitants to travel long distances to get the open space they craved, so parks were created. Sometimes this land was donated by civic-minded benefactors or, in the case of many European parks, ex-royal pleasure grounds were made public.  If we accept that we have to live and work in crowded cities to support ourselves and our families, we should have input on what our public spaces will be like. Sculpture is often the last thing to be added to a park because it is expensive and subject to damage by disgruntled residents.  A park is a natural home for sculpture, as it is already a beautiful location, so even a ragamuffin piece could look handsome there. Sculptures may become favourites, go unnoticed, or become universally disliked, and as all dictators have observed from their reserved seats in hell, statues can be knocked down and dragged away. 

Street settings for sculpture are more problematic, but can have interesting solutions. West Berlin and East Berlin were both restructured after the Second World War, and have done an excellent job of incorporating sculpture into a modern city.  West Berlin has a drainage problem, calling itself the Venice of the North, and supports a network of above-ground water pipes, but sculptural solutions have been found in giant modern pieces such as Adolf Behrens “Berlin,” a loose knot of fluted stainless tubes. It's in startling contrast to the sad, truncated tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church or the mounted statue of Frederick the Great, but the contrasts of history live comfortably together.  Wide country streets in North America became main thoroughfares with large football field intersections that would dwarf a Roman fountain, and in a strictly capitalist society, public art doesn't generate revenue, so it ostensibly has no purpose.
 
After the war, East Berlin created its version of Soviet chic, with interminable rectangular blocks of buildings and the windswept spaces between them, which, for some, hold a severe beauty. Yet the official East German artistic vision is a retro space-age TV tower.  From almost anywhere in the city, you can find your direction by it, like navigating by the moon and stars. It fits its situation because it rises from launchpad-sized Alexanderplatz.  Appropriate sculpture can add scale, history, mystery, and importance to a place. A sculpture, however, must be chosen to have particularity and universality. It should represent its era, its location, and also have longevity, not only in design, but also in the public imagination.

Equipping public spaces to be more livable has a price. Someone has to buy, install, and maintain whatever is installed there.  Architects and planners now create spaces in front of large buildings by using corner cutoffs and building setbacks.  Depending on the size of the found space, benches & shrubs are possible. Sculpture in these locations occupies less space and is less expensive.
Sculpture in public places democratizes art by bringing it outdoors. Living with art is no longer a preserve of the privileged. Yet in a rather American way, we tend to segregate our duties and pleasures. For open space, city dwellers go to a park, go to a mall for shopping, go to a sports complex for exercise, and go to a gallery for art. This fragmented approach makes every facet of every activity suffer by dislocating it from everything else. A sane, healthy living space should be integral to its surroundings.

Public parks are good things; people need them. Sculpture parks, however, are a step backward as they reinforce elitism and segregation. We should surround ourselves with some of the best examples of what artists, sculptors, architects, and town planners can produce. It is possible to be surrounded by beauty and thoughtfulness in the street, the bank, the shopping mall, and in the workplace, without having to make a trip to a gallery.

Old can mix with new, and different interests create diversity. Variety makes a powerful statement. Look at I.M. Pei’s glass and steel pyramid in front of the Louvre, Botero’s chubby bronze characters in a Florentine piazza, Chicago’s reflective Cloud Gate known affectionately as "The Bean" planted in windswept concrete, Joe Farfards’s circular filigreed iron corral “Mind’s Garden” in a flat Regina field, the HSBC atrium in Vancouver which barely contains Alan Storey’s precise monumental motion “Pendulum” The behind-glass location of the latter, solves the problem of vandalism and protects the piece from weather, but should a sculpture be protected from being climbed on and touched? Yet the original of Michelangelo’s David is kept indoors. The Copenhagen harbour mermaid has been damaged at least eight times, but has always been put right. Like painting over graffiti, repairing damage and supporting creative alternatives to youthful self-expression is good policy in maintaining any public space and its sculptures. 

Much effort and expense are channelled toward winning garden awards, yet in the Northern Hemisphere, flowers bloom only half the year. The same applies to Northern fountains; water freezes. Good choices of sculpture to be installed should thrive in all weather. Government and business often overlook the practical and healing role that well-chosen installations have in making a place attractive and memorable. Sculpture is an ideal candidate for lifting any location from banal to sublime.
A wealth of locations for locating public art exist, but local governments, when deciding how money should be spent, often overlook the practical and beautiful role sculpture has in making a place important. They concentrate on lighting and the smooth flow of traffic. Citizens' groups, which have a tendency to celebrate themselves by erecting boosterist welcome signs that are reminiscent of frontier-town timber gateways, could spend the same time, money and effort installing something that transcends politics and commerce.  Well-chosen sculptures that make people contemplate their society and how they fit into it are more valuable than banal beautification projects like painting flowers on crosswalks.  A statue of a politician is about as enlightening as a painted flower.
  
These decorations are fads that fade quickly, while a timeless work of art should say something profound to those who see it daily.

Technology As The Fifth Element

Men once thought that life was based on four elements – earth, air, fire & water. We have now splintered these elements into particles so tiny that the primal cornerstones of creation have lost meaning to us. Yet these four elements continue to exert a hypnotic influence on humans. We can gaze into a fire, be mesmerized by a fast river running, be moved by the otherworldly spirit of a landscape, and be shocked by the power of a hurricane. In the 20th century, a new equally attractive fifth element took shape. These days, we can fly through cyberspace, feeling by turns contemplative, spiritual, stunned, and enlightened.  When developing technologies created the first radio, then TV, and then the Internet, it became a repository of knowledge, thought, beauty, power, and creation, just as earth, air, fire, & water once were to ancient man.

The ubiquity of TV and the Internet has made the world a village where all information is accessible to everyone. Some lament this fact, but anti-global demonstrators never asked a man in a third-world village for his opinion. In many countries, people are glued to their televisions and computers, watching films and soap operas from everywhere. These soap operas are understood mostly by women for the same reasons – fantasy and escape into another world that is far from their own, but with the same simple dramas of their everyday lives. It is not true that if an Italian woman watches The Bold & the Beautiful, Italian culture will be destroyed. The artificial settings of most soap operas are as foreign to an Italian housewife as they are to an average American.

Anti-global protesters take offence at the opening of a McDonald's on every corner in every part of the globe, but even if a McDonald's existed on every street, it wouldn't have much effect on people's traditional eating habits.  Dining at McDonalds is not a rule, but a choice.  A McDonalds in Rome doesn’t spell the end of Italian cooking. The anti-globalists seem to think that people are not capable of making their own choices, that when confronted with a traditional dish and a hamburger, they will choose the hamburger. This is like saying that women should be covered from head to toe because the sight of her skin might stimulate a man's appetite to such an extent that he loses control of himself. This insults both women and men. Free will exists.

The anti-globalists say that multinational companies use clever brainwashing techniques in marketing to the have-nots, and they are correct, but poor people are not automatically fooled by advertising.  We buy things based on a variety of factors – the least of which is that we've seen an item advertised on television or online. If we see an ad on television, it is never for something we need. If the ad was for something essential, the expensive hard sell wouldn’t be necessary. To say that the obesity epidemic in America is caused by the companies that sell the food to those who are already overweight is a red herring. The truth is that the cultural identity of America is consumerism, which prefers that individuals not think for themselves. Governments collaborate with multinationals in keeping individuals on the straight & narrow consumer path. Governments and companies prefer citizens who do as they are told, and use intimidation and shame to enforce this. Advertisers exploit human weaknesses, including the desire to feel superior to others. And how has shopping become a cure for unhappiness? Shopping malls on a Sunday have become the new churches, and their merchandise the new God.  Yet to say that these marketing techniques will eliminate cultural identity insults the intellect of men and women.  Rather than cry foul when multinationals attempt to export consumerism, time and energy would be better spent on teaching individuals to examine their choices, to think critically about what they do, what they consume, and why.  

Our new technologies have pushed us ahead at warp speed to absorb information and make choices based on what we know. For our advancement and survival, we have always used information passed on from others.  We build on the shoulders of the past. Television and the Internet are simply tools for passing on memes in an accelerated fashion. When an ancient man shared the concept of the wheel with his tribe, were there protesters who claimed that the wheel would ruin their society that was built on beasts of burden? Probably. Do all anti-globalization protesters walk or ride horses to their demonstrations? Probably not.  We can understand the harmful consequences of rampant consumerism by looking at our own society, even as we are in the process of exporting it. 

Our digital technology has the same power as any of the four cornerstone elements, and like the originals, it is an element that we can use to survive and thrive, or to distribute false information and do harm.  As the creators of global consumerism, it is our responsibility to educate those new to the technology about the power and pitfalls of this 21st-century element, so they don’t fall into the same traps we did. Perhaps some bright spark on the other side of the world has an antidote that will counter the sickness of greed and will use the latest technologies in ways that ensure there is enough for all, without killing the messenger in the process.