Ben Applegate

10/26/04

Riding the Speeding Bullet:

Globalization as a Memetic Phenomenon

 

When writing on globalization, the greatest temptation, it seems, is to take one of two sides. Either economic globalization is going to lead to social fragmentation on a dystopic scale, as Robert Kaplan proposes, or world peace and prosperity, as Thomas Friedman seems to believe. Either cultural globalization is going to lead to a worldwide army of consumer soldiers with cultures no different from their counterparts half a world away or it will lead to a reversion to humanity’s tribal days, empowering individuals so vastly that they will be able to turn the world into a battleground for their personal squabbles. Try as writers may to insist on the primacy of one or the other, however, the truth is both are happening simultaneously. How can we explain these seemingly contradictory trends? Where all these writers’ analyses break down is in judging why cultures react the way they do to globalization. Friedman points out many different interactions of the Lexus and the olive tree, but never quite comes to present a framework for those interactions. Similarly, Cowen generalizes by saying that "older cultures are forced to give way to newer ones," but this is patently untrue when one considers a culture like Japan’s, which, though already entirely integrated into the new world network, still retains many of its most ancient traditions. In fact, some even see Japan entering a period of cultural ascendancy analogous to its period of economic ascendancy in the 1980s. Japan’s culture, which has been distinct for thousands of years, is certainly not entirely new. Yet Japanese cultural products are increasingly pouring onto the streets of nations like South Korea, France and the United States.

Though many journalistic writers, Cowen most explicitly, spot the trends that are evidence of the process, none of them form or refer to a coherent theory to tie these myriad trends together. The key lies in an unlikely corner: the new synthesis of the work of Charles Darwin. The application of the evolutionary algorithm to culture, known as meme theory or memetics, provides just the tools we need to understand and process the globalizing world.

Memes as replicating units are based on humans’ ability to imitate. As one of the very few organisms capable of true imitation (in which one organism watches the actions of another and can repeat them), human behavior becomes an environment to which Darwin can be applied. Darwin’s algorithm consists of three processes: variation, selection and retention. If these three occur, then evolution must occur. [1] In terms of the human mind, it works as follows: a human being acquires behavior from other humans through imitation or from instinct, but this acquisition is not perfect. Humans make mistakes, whether they are following directions like a recipe (what social scientists call a "tuition" [2]) or imitating someone’s actions directly, as at a dance class. Once acquired, these imperfect copies are synthesized with every other meme in the new brain, often blending or combining with others in new ways in what Hinde calls the "self-system." [3] This provides the engine for variation. However, as any undergraduate knows, there is infinitely more knowledge in the world than any one human brain can acquire. We are forced to choose which memes to remember, and even then there are some we inadvertently forget later. This means memes are selected; some survive while others "die." Finally, of course, our brains allow us to retain memes and pass them on to others, starting the process over again. [4]

Memes travel in groups that I call meme systems. According to meme theory, memes that are selected and succeed in implanting themselves in the most brains eventually develop superior replicating mechanisms, just as biological organisms develop adaptations to reproduce as much as possible. These replicating mechanisms attach themselves to meme systems to protect and promulgate them, and they can be found anywhere from the Ten Commandments to the riff in a song that becomes "stuck in your head." This portion of the theory is especially key to a memetic theory of globalization: memes that are passed on to more brains develop better and better replication mechanisms (they find more and more ways to get "stuck in your head").

Seeing the world in memetic terms shifts the focus from homogenization versus fragmentation to the changing terms of cultural evolution. As Friedman notes in his three "democratizations," individuals today are more powerful than they ever have been. The most important of these democratizations for meme theory is the democratization of information. Human beings literally all over the world are communicating with their peers across borders more than ever before. In memetic terms, this means that, whereas the world until now had been dominated by vertical transmission, or the passing on of memes from one generation to the next, it is increasingly coming to be dominated by horizontal transmission, the passing of memes between peers rather than from elders.

The consequence of this is that, where under vertical transmission a meme may have been passed on perhaps once or twice in a generation, from parent to child, under horizontal transmission the same meme can jump into virtually limitless numbers of brains. With the modern marvel of e-mail, for instance, a single chain letter or joke can travel across the world, implanting itself into thousands of brains, in a single day. Cowen nearly finds this perspective in his concepts of "across diversity and within diversity." Similarly, what he calls "operative diversity" is analogous to horizontal transmission across cultures, while "objective diversity" is his measure for levels of cultural variation, just as evolutionary biologists measure changes in genetic variation over time. Cowen points out that globalization is often destructive. This could be described as memetic selection taking its toll. As new meme systems with supercharged transmission mechanisms arrive on the scene of a culture that has up to now progressed slowly through vertical transmission, they can quickly push out the old. In many ways globalization provides a vigorous memetic selection engine, causing what might be termed a cultural mass extinction event. This is the case in cultures who complain they are victims of homogenization.

If this logic works, it should mean that the highly selected meme systems of Western civilization, with its greater predominance of horizontal transmission, should quickly sweep away the memetically "primitive" cultures that have just begun to come in contact with the outside world. However, since these new ideas do not kill the organisms they insert themselves into but rather nest in them, the break is not as clean as it is in biological evolution. The new memes, especially in adults whose self-system is well established, more often than not collide and combine messily with what is already present.

Once inside a creative brain meme systems can separate and recombine. Globalization may have, as Cowen puts it, "liberated people from the tyranny of place" in part, but it has not liberated them from their own self-system. Traditionalist memes, or those perceived as traditional, can under certain circumstances steal the new, highly selected replication mechanisms of new meme systems and create new systems that take advantage of modern communication to promote ancient cultures, often in somewhat warped forms. These new meme systems possess the same replication machinery as Western systems, but are at the same time more similar to what is already present and so can be more appealing to the native population. Examples of this kind of recombination include the Meiji reformers of nineteenth-century Japan, the al Qaeda movement of Osama bin Laden, and the Falun Gong of China. There are Western examples too, like the Christian graphical tracts of Jack Chick and traditionalist media men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

On the receiving end, human curiosity is just as prevelant in Western cultures as it is in developing countries. Teenagers reaching outside their cultural mainstream in the U.S. are likely to grab cultural products from far away places like Japan, China and India. Examples include the incredible rise in popularity in the U.S. of various forms of Buddhism since the 1960s. If local developing economies leverage the new world network effectively they too can benefit. Successful examples include the village of Yomitan on Okinawa, which lifted itself up out of the destructive cycle of non-sustainable Tokyo development money that pervades the local tourist economy in Japan’s poorest prefecture and created a genuine local export economy based on specialty sweet potatoes and local crafts. [5] Unfortunately this requires creativity and the mounting of a significant learning curve that is simply too high for many local cultures, though prominent Westerners like Paul Simon and Ry Cooder and cosmopolitan Western media like NPR sometimes help local artists bridge these gaps.

When addressing how likely it is Western meme systems will implant intact in foreign cultures and, conversely, how likely it is that local cultures will be able to export themselves to the West, the main problem is cultural compatibility. What Friedman calls the "golden arches theory" is actually just one way of determining how compatible one cultural system has become with another. Friedman’s idea states that a country with McDonald’s is unlikely to go to war with another country with McDonald’s, since they share a common world market and consumer culture. As was revealed to moderate embarrassment soon after the publication of his book, this is not always the case. The war in the former Yugoslavia showed that countries integrating into the global market do not necessarily feel constrained to be peaceful. This would suggest that other factors are also at work. Helpful in analyzing what these other factors may be involves taking a closer look at the essence of Friedman’s concept.

What is really necessary for McDonald’s to move into a country? It is true that McDonald’s buildings must be built, but what the success of a consumer venture like this really indicates is that the instruction "Go to McDonald’s to buy and eat their food" has been successfully transmitted into the cultural mix in question. This shows that the culture has reached a certain level of compatibility with the Western liberal meme system, but it is naturally only part of that system. Examining the larger picture of cultural compatibility is ultimately more accurate and rewarding for international peace studies than focusing solely on a country’s participation (or lack thereof) in the global market. Other considerations include sexual attitudes, degree of cosmpolitanism, and where the culture places on the democratic spectrum.

Globalization can create the ethnic divisions that Chua presents, it can increase the richness of culture as Cowen argues, it can make a country more peaceful in accordance with Friedman and it can also make a country more fragmented and warlike. It certainly makes it harder to hold onto our still-fragile formulation of civil rights, as Barber argues. However, these are all symptoms of the same phenomenon, an observable increase in global communication between peers that has not changed any of our fundamental human impulses. It has simply sped them up by several orders of magnitude. Friedman and Barber both recognize that this phenomenon has one definitive characteristic: it is fast, getting faster, and cannot be stopped by any one person. If human culture started out evolving at a leisurely walking pace, we are now riding a bullet into the future, and often the scenery is so blurry we can’t even tell in which direction we’re headed, much less make an attempt to change course.

Notes
(some missing)

 

1. Blackmore, Susan, The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1999.

 

2. Cloak, F. T., "Is a cultural ethology possible?" Human Ecology, 3, 161-82.

 

3. Hinde, Robert A., Why Good is Good: The sources of morality. New York: Routledge, 2002.

 

4. Blackmore, ibid.

 

5. Sasaki, Masayuki, "Sustainable Development in Okinawa for the 21^st Century" in Okinawa: Cold War Islanded. Chalmers Johnson. Cardiff, CA: Japan Policy Research Institute, 1999.