Survival of the Fittest Ideas:

The New Style of War -- a Struggle Among Memes

an excerpt from a speech by David Brin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 1989 by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

3. The third worldview is (as I just alluded), one that I call The East.

Of the three opposition memes discussed today (there are more, but these are the most important and all we have time for), The East is demonstrably both traditional and sane... after its own fashion. It's been around for a very long time, after all. During most of recorded history it was the dominant theme in China and several other parts of this planet. The East's principal motif, homogeneity, was most eloquently mapped out and prescribed by the sage known in the west as Confucius.

Everyone should subsume their sense of self to the larger group, to the nation, to the tribe, whatever. It's more complicated than that, of course. For example, while the Eastern Meme hews to the ancient human pattern of pyramidal social hierarchies and a highly privileged leadership class -- just like Paranoia, Feudalism, and Machismo -- it also moderates many of the worst effects of hierarchy. It does this by believing deeply in skill, professionalism, and taking the advice of meritocratic civil servants. Indeed, this bent toward meritocracy allows some social mobility! The brightest sons (and yes, daughters) of the peasantry can rise up, gradually, if they don't offend or get too far out of line.

The crux: individualism is dangerous. Deviation and eccentricity are worse. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

One can see how such a meme would make governing large populations easier. Capital isn't wasted too much on feathers for male strutting (as in Machismo), nor excessively on arms and war (as in Paranoia). If the East wins, you will probably have peace, some preservation of the environment, some pandas, some trees. Suppression of women is traditionally limited in scale and may even evaporate somewhat in a modern version. Humans might eventually, slowly, get out into space. But when or if we ever met aliens, we won't understand them -- because by then the very notion of diversity, let alone finding it attractive or interesting, will have been extinguished.

I don't think it would be very much fun living in a human civilization dominated by some Eastern Meme. But then, if I'd been brought up under Eastern Memes, I might not consider "fun" to be such a fundamental desideratum! (In many oriental languages, we're told, there was no real word for the concept.) In any event, the Eastern Worldview is the only one which, as I said before, has a proved track record... which has been demonstrably able to operate a civilization for thousands of years in a manner that's fairly decent, in its way. Though we here in this room would find life tyrannical and oppressively boring.

4. Finally, there is a fourth meme, one which has always been a minor theme, a tiny minority in every culture -- until ours. What is that fourth meme? One could possibly call it The West, but I find that self-serving and tendentious. Rather, in an article a few years ago, I called it the Dogma of Otherness.

The Dogma of Otherness is a worldview that actually encourages an appetite for newness. A hunger for diversity. An eagerness for change. Tolerance, naturally, plays a major role in the legends spread by this culture. (Look at the underlying message contained in most episodes of situation comedies!) A second pervasive thread, seen in the vast majority of our films and novels, is suspicion of authority.

Historically, this is a very strange meme, one which encourages such art forms as science fiction, and is in turn spread quite effectively by such forms. Its notion of a Golden Age, for instance, does not reside in some lost, lamented past but in a future that our children may create, if we hand them tools and a better world to work with. The importance of this reversal in the perceived timeflow of wisdom cannot be overstated. It represents a sea change in the human relationship with time.

Naturally, this way of looking at the world was rare in the past. Even today, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this meme "owns" territories like Europe or America. Even where it is strongest, it must contend ceaselessly with any other forces inimical to its goals. There are lots of Californians, for instance, who personally emphasize macho, paranoiac or homogenizing values, instead of tolerance and otherness.

What we can say, nevertheless, is that Otherness has become powerful in the official morality of most western societies. Look at the vocabulary used in most debates on issues concerning the public. So-called "political correctness" can be seen in ironic light, as a rather pushy patriotism in favor of the tolerance meme! But even the other side often wraps itself in phrases like "freedom," or "color blindness," or "individual rights."

Even more important, though, is the fact that millions accept the deeply utopian notion that our institutions must be improvable, and that active criticism is one of the best ways to elicit change.

All right, I've put up four strawman worldviews, suggesting that they are engaged in a struggle over the deep programming of human minds. Feel free to accept or reject this arrangement... after all, it's only a model. Or a meme.

Still, I've thought of an amusing experiment you might play, using these four protagonists. Try to picture what might happen if a ship full of extraterrestrials landed in a Macho culture, or a Paranoid one, or in the East.

You get three wildly different scenarios, don't you? Now imagine if aliens made contact with people brought up in the fourth way I mentioned -- under the Dogma of Otherness. Forget Hollywood pathos about nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Try to picture a flying saucer setting down in today's Los Angeles. The National Guard might be called out to encircle the vessel, but they wouldn't face inward. They would be far too busy facing in the opposite direction, protecting our alien visitors from autograph hounds, groupies, and hordes seeking novelty.

The first thing that Californians would ask aliens is -- "Have you got any new cuisine?"

This fourth worldview is related to what we started out discussing this evening... the Look Forward way of conceptualizing truth and knowledge. The notion that, while some theories may be better than others, all can profit from criticism and experimentation.

Emphasizing diversity, this meme even welcomes a little disturbing eccentricity, now and then. You can earn a living as an iconoclast in the West today, especially if you make it entertaining. One gets ego points for being different, if you do it with style.

Make no mistake, this competition among driving inner memes is one of life or death.

Not necessarily (I hope!) for the human beings who host these infectious ideas, but almost certainly among the memes themselves. For one cannot be both tolerant and paranoid, or both deeply conformist and loving of eccentricity, can one? Again, I am not talking about nations or religions or superficial cultural things like language or rituals -- though diversity of such things will certainly thrive far better under Otherness than under any of the other worldviews that proved so intolerant across millennia. No, it's a war over whether diversity itself can and will be a paramount human value.

How is the war going?

I can't really say which zeitgeist is winning at this point. Though the Paranoia Meme, held intact for so long by the Russian Empire, does seem to be dissolving, slowly, as a new generation takes over which never knew war. (Indeed, it's remarkable how closely events have followed the memic model since I first began speculating about this, five years ago.)

The western worldview has a few advantages, such as the growing acceptance of English as the world's common tongue, and the fantastic effectiveness of the modern university in educating modern minds. Liberation of women seems to be profoundly effective at spreading this meme. Acting on an even broader scale is the power of the West's propaganda department... which some call Hollywood.

Still... the other memes are much older. And they seem to resonate with people at a deeper level, echoing their fears, their lusts, and their ancient dreams of achieving order by following strong chiefs. Insecurity seems to be their best ally.

This may be why feudal fantasy novels and films about kings and wizards are still popular even in the modern West, a society who's greatest accomplishment was to smash the steep hierarchies that monarchs and magicians used to erect in order to oppress us, for thousands of years.

The jury is still out whether the tolerance meme -- or other-fetishism -- is really any saner than older, paranoiac ways. No tribe ever before had the guts to make tolerance and individualism paramount themes, especially in the messages they feed the young and poor and powerless. Traditionally, the aristocracy would rally those below by pointing to some outside threat, thus making conformity a principal virtue. The whole existence of many tribes was based upon "It's them against us, and us should win."

No guarantees.

And yet, I know where I stand. My preference cannot help coming out in my writing. Not just a shaman or an entertainer, I'm also a propagandist in this war. I'd like to think that people come away from my books feeling just a little more tolerant than before, or a little more eager for change and diversity in the future of this world.

In fact, I think that we should go forth and crush every other worldview that doesn't promote tolerance!

All right. That remark was intended to be ironic and I'm certainly glad most of you in the audience laughed just now! I would have felt a shiver if you hadn't!

Let's check though... how many of you, despite your laughter, agree at least in part with what I just said?

As I expected. You are intolerant of intolerance... and at the same time amused by the paradox this puts you in!

Well, I'm not surprised. The fact that you are capable of laughing at yourself means, by my reckoning, that you are members of a worldview that says "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Yet another emblematic trait of this new meme.

Before, fathers, mothers and teachers used to say, "I shall keep all alien notions and foreign ideas away from my children, in order to protect them." None of those ancestors would have felt uncomfortable, as so many of you out there are feeling right now, with the very notion of winning and losing. They simply took it for granted.

Now, though, for the first time, we have a cultural mind-set that has parents saying to their kids -- "I've taught you basic values. Therefore, I don't care what ideas you play with, because I know you'll be a decent person, whatever notions you're exposed to."

If this worldview wins, naturally there will be Kabuki theater and Bantu dancers and Sufi dervishes and all manner of diverse cultural treasures preserved from the past and around the world. Being of a mind to romanticize anything that is different, children of the west will rebel against the very thought of such things ever going extinct. They'll be trained from birth to hunger for diversity.

Perhaps this is nothing other than the development of the wold's first multicellular meme. The first in which exclusion has turned into inclusion. If so, we are, indeed, in for interesting times.