Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander

A photo of a lamp with the text'judgmental lamp is judging you'

Figure 6: Judgmental Lamp by Lawrence Turmer, taken from the The Stacks at Unique Design but now lost to time

While many commentators refer to memetics as a maligned science, it seems the actual criticisms are powerful but minimal. The single greatest criticism is of Dawkins himself: his peers refer to his proposal of the meme as anything from pseudoscience to difficult to quantify. This criticism makes a great deal of sense to me, but I think that in a field like anthropology—as opposed to biology—the evidence to quantify a meme is readily available; the internet is full of self-proclaimed memes that actually do fulfill the Dawkins definition of the term. The thinking behind the meme works well to describe things related to mass production or digital reproduction.

A second serious criticism comes as a result of Blackmore attempting in The Meme Machine to place the meme above the gene, essentially claiming that human genetics was “just” memetic. And that criticism, from what I can tell, is the same scientific community that criticized Dawkins saying, “I don’t think so” to defend against what they believe is an attempt to replace well established scientific law—study of the gene and genetics—with something more theoretical. Again, their criticism makes good sense, but it seems rooted very much in the sciences, an argument that isn’t as dire in the social sciences or humanities.

A final criticism, also lodged primarily toward Blackmore, is that if one takes the idea of replication “literally” and we consider the meme to be the ultimate replicator, and hence the dominant way that anything and everything transmits, it contradicts the idea of free will and becomes a theory of “everything.” This could be a reason for concern, but it’s also an absolutist argument; the meme doesn’t have a motivation other than to replicate. To think that this removes free will seems like an argument that would need for the meme to have a motive and a desire to control. All viewers are free to ignore the meme; the meme is not a serious threat to free will.