“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” ―CS Lewis
The meme is to social history what the gene is to natural history. A gene is passed from one individual to another by genetic means. The meme is an element of a culture or social system passed from one individual to another by imitation. They are like viruses in that they are contagious, infecting the weak minded; the weakened mind is the result not only of predisposition, but also of demoralized social contexts. However, to describe such memes as “mind viruses,” as we hear in the rhetoric from some on the libertarian right, is to my ears problematic.
People often forget—or perhaps never realize—that there are different forms of inheritance. One form is ancestry. Another form is wealth. With memes, the inheritance is cultural. Enculturation and socialization explain a great deal of attitude and behavior. This is obvious. Yet there is a double standard in the political space that grasps the obvious when explaining the behavior of one group, while denying it for another group. Perhaps out of frustration, this has led to the development of the idea of the “woke mind virus.”
On average, a black men is eight times more likely to murder than a white man. Is this genetic? Some believe it is. I don’t see the evidence for that. For the science of our times, the assumption is something of a nonfalsifiable proposition, which is to say that, presently, we are lacking an adequate method for showing that the greater likelihood of criminal behavior in the son of a criminal father is in any part genetic. Any man, black or white, may or may not mimic his relatives’ criminality. There are many false positives, so even if we could show this, what could we do about in a just society founded upon individualism?
Indeed, this may be something not even worth bothering with. As Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi show in their general theory of crime (see Chapter 8 of their popular book by the same name), even if we generously suppose such a genetic inheritance, even with very large samples, the variance explained is near zero.
But the son can inherit his criminality from his father through cultural transmission in the same way that the son can inherit criminality from his peers. Moreover, wealth inheritance is highly correlated with cultural transmission, as well, which is why crime is strongly correlated with the economic situation of families and communities. Perhaps we need to tease this apart from genetics, but we don’t really need to.
For sure, the cultural attitude that devalues law-abidingness is transmitted in social contexts. The less committed one is to obeying the law and social norms generally, the more likely he is to commit crime and other forms of deviance. Why progressives are obsessed with denying the facts of this truth for their favored groups is also memetic.
Early in my career as a criminologist, I denied the power of cultural transmission. I was wrong. Culture is powerful. Only the ideological deny this. My personal project is to get out of my head such ideological distortions.
To return to what I said early regarding “mind viruses,” i.e., the problem of those who conceptualize memetics as a kind of germ, propagating in spite of fact, logic, and truth, I don’t dismiss the idea, but rather dislike the metaphor, even while I use the construct of social contagion. I don’t like biologisms. My view is that they may lead to dangerous ends in the same way that fetishizing genetic inheritances led to eugenics.
Either way, the maxim is thus and valid: beliefs that survive aren’t necessarily good or true, and are moreover associated with groups. Put another way, memes that survive and their associated behaviors and rituals are neither intrinsically necessary nor rationally justifiable, and we must therefore judge groups on the basis of their memes.
Memes that support law-abidingness are to be promoted. Social contexts that support commitment to just laws and functionally-beneficial actions and tolerances are worth defending and preserving. We do this through laws and proper moral teachings. Memes that don’t support law-abidingness are to be recognized and discouraged openly and without hesitation.
We are presently living in a time where deviancy is tolerated. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s mid-1990s thesis “defining deviance down,” published in Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, lays out the problem with this (this argument was also advanced a decade earlier in The Atlantic by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in their “broken windows” thesis). The results of this perverse tolerance are all around us. We are told to be nonjudgmental. But the demand is often arbitrary and, in any case, invalid. We all judge others. And we should.
I don’t agree that the “woke mind virus” is communism rebranded. What Elon Musk is referring to is not communism but really the New Fascism that I have described on the pages of Freedom and Reason. It is progressivism. The mind virus that concerns Musk—and rightly so—exists in the context of corporate statism. It is an illiberal praxis. As George Orwell showed, communism as instantiated by Soviet-style socialism parallels many of the aspects of fascism, but to misdescribe it makes it harder to combat it, as it exists in the capitalist mode of production, a system that presents with a class structure very different from that of the Soviet Union.
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