My metaphorical rock-stackers, symbol-makers, and drawers of arrows in the dirt,
I hope you are well. I’ll start with some personal news. A few days after I was hired at Venetia Valley Middle School in San Rafael a few weeks ago, I learned that the band director at San Rafael High School had tragically and unexpectedly died of an apparent heart attack. He was 43. High School has always been my favorite type of teaching, and much of my teaching experience has involved rebuilding programs that have encountered difficulties like broken feeder programs or a revolving door of band directors. I saw the opportunity to help out a program in a time of need, as well as a long-term position that meets my particular passions and talents. I interviewed for the position on Thursday, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable interview, as the panel included self-possessed and articulate students, several highly-invested parents, and staff and administration that obviously care deeply about the music program. I felt instant rapport with the community that was represented on the panel, and have had several encouraging follow-up conversations. I’m not blind to the challenges that face me this year, but I’m confident that this is a good long-term fit for me and I believe I can help the program continue to move forward through this tragedy.
On another note, last weekend Dustin, Justin and I (had anyone asked our names, I was fully prepared to introduce myself as Rustin) spent three days in the smoky Emigrant Wilderness, hiking, swimming, and exploring off-trail with lots of great conversation about parenthood, relationships, and anything and everything else. It struck me at one point that the timbre of our conversation about our wives was unusually warm. Not unusual for any of us individually, I’d imagine, but unusual in the group aspect—it seems, by my experience at least, that happily married men who hold their wives in high esteem are rare enough that I can’t remember another time when I found three of us together for any significant period of time. On our last night out, the smoke cleared and we lay on the granite edge of Long Lake watching satellites and the early streaks of the Perseid meteor shower while we had a Calvin-and-Hobbesian discussion about UFOs, lemurians, the enormity of the universe, and our ability to make change within such a vast expanse. It was a great weekend, and if we ever get to the end of the Giant Cultural Parasite series, you can expect to see a writeup in this newsletter. My backlog is getting long.
Unfortunately, I caught a bug of some sorts on our trip, a fever, cough, and substantial fatigue. Delta! I thought, despite my vaccine. I quarantined, but a test on Wednesday (by which time I was feeling better) determined that I am COVID-free.
So now you’re updated. A lot in one week. And now for part 10 of The Giant Cultural Parasite: A Stack of Rocks.
A Stack of Rocks
Part 10, The Giant Cultural Parasite
Rock Cairns are a simple means of transmitting information to a backcountry hiker. A simple stack of rocks is immediately distinguished from the surrounding landscape because of the simple fact that it must have been placed there as opposed to all of the naturally occurring phenomena around it. A rock cairn is intentional. It is a deliberate choice made by another human being, and we easily recognize it as having meaning.
A rock cairn is an example of external expression of a meme. It is easily replicable (fecund): nearly any human can stack one rock on top of another. It has longevity: a stable stack of rocks will stick around until something knocks it over. It has fidelity: although it may use different rocks, or a different number of rocks, the meme involves stacking one rock on top of another, not placing them side by side.
In the last section, we identified the brain structures that allow a meme to make a home in the host and eventually to convince the host to put a copy of the meme back into the world. This time we’re discussing the other side of that cycle—what happens when the meme is outside the host.
The rock cairn is an example of a physical structure that helps a meme to spread. Because of its longevity (a cairn can easily last several years if not interfered with), ease of replicability, and the fidelity of transmission (cairns are pretty much all the same, at least on that important axis of verticality), a hiker who sees a cairn can quickly recognize the opportunity (“go this way”) and may choose to offer similar help to other hikers by spreading cairns in the future.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
First of all, does a rock cairn really have Fidelity? “Every rock is different,” one might protest. “Some cairns are only two rocks high, others are giant piles of rocks held in place by chicken wire. How are these things the same?” We can take a cue here from language and translation. In every language, there is a word and a concept of self. The english “I” and “me”, the spanish “yo” and “mi”, the german “ich” and “mich”. The words are different, but the concepts are the same. Indeed, most languages differentiate the subtle distinction between the subject “I” and the object “me”, which distinguishes these as two related but distinct memes: self as subject (I) and self as object (me). There is fidelity in the underlying meme or concept, even if the word changes across languages. In the case of a rock cairn, the underlying meme might be summed up as “go this way,” and the specific language (3 rocks or 50?) is less important than the fidelity of the concept. So a cairn made for the personal challenge of balancing rocks in artistic ways is actually a different meme than a cairn made for navigation.
Second, the physical structure of a cairn gives it a certain longevity, depending on the stability of the rocks, the care with which they were placed, and the cairn’s exposure to animals, weather, or other hikers that could topple it. Some cairns might last decades, others mere days. Longevity gives it more chances to make an impression and reproduce.
Which brings us to the third, most important feature of replicators: fecundity.
What is it that makes a rock cairn meme Fecund, or likely to replicate often? To begin, it uses resources that are easily available—rocks. It can also make an impression on many different hikers, depending on the area it has been placed (high vs. low traffic), and each hiker is a potential host that might later create their own rock cairn.
In order to close the circle of the meme cycle and replicate, the external expression of a meme needs to find a way to make it back into the mind of a host and trigger the different internal resources that will lead back to expression. Each of the internal resources has its corollaries in external resources. Let’s take them each in turn.
Filtering—the brain filters out noise in the environment. In the case of our cairn, the vertical structure sets it apart from the natural world that surrounds it, and we recognize it as “unnatural”. If we’re walking along a paved path we might see the cairn and quickly dismiss it, but if we’re trying to navigate a difficult off-trail route, we might recognize the cairn as something placed by others who have come this way and recognize an opportunity (“save energy”) or the avoidance of a threat (“don’t get lost”).
Encoding—the first time we saw a cairn, it might have simply struck us as something constructed by a whim. On repeated viewings, we might have flagged it in our brain as something with potential meaning. After a number of hikes, we finally began to associate it with wayfinding. Physical expressions of memes give us the benefit of repeated exposure, which allow us to encode them with meaning (using myelin) and makes it more likely that it will break through our filters as a potential opportunity or threat in the future.
Retrieval—Repeated exposure to a meme in the physical world helps us to create myelin pathways in the brain, which not only allow us to link memes with opportunities and threats, but also allows us to retrieve them. So if we wanted to help other hikers find their way through a tricky area, we might retrieve possible ideas from our memories: Draw an arrow in the dirt? Create a wall to block them from the wrong way? Or how about a cairn?
Choosing—Our executive function then chooses from these options. It discards the arrow idea as too difficult to see and too easy to destroy. It discards the wall idea as taking too much time and energy. The cairn, which is easy to build and stable enough to last, is chosen as the best option. We build a cairn, and the meme is ready to spread into more hosts.
We’ve used the cairn as an example of a physical object that helps memes spread, but we should note that there are other occurrences of memes in the external world. A cairn is a symbol that represents a specific idea: “go this way”. It also has a specific context in the wilderness. A cairn in a city park, for example, is unlikely to lead me anywhere interesting, and probably doesn’t have the same meaning as one I might find on a steep mountainside. In the city park, we might use a different symbol to alert someone to an interesting path, such as a sign that says “scenic overlook.” Or a paved pathway might lead us there. Or perhaps a guide might lead a tour. Or a friend or guidebook might use their words to tell us about the place. All of these are different examples of how we encode meaning into the real world and help ideas to spread, and different meme expressions have different levels of effectiveness and spread in different ways. As I’m sure you can already see, memes create an interlocking web of great complexity and nuance, much like genes create interlocking webs of life that we call ecosystems. The web of memes is what we call culture.
Next time, we’ll begin to talk about how culture is organized in a network of interrelated parts. We’ll work our way towards a discussion of how individual memes learn to co-adapt into meme structures, much like genes eventually co-evolved into the gene machines that we call organisms, and how those meme structures eventually resulted in the culture that we know today, with all of its opportunities and threats. And eventually we’ll get to how those large meme structures affect our choices as individuals and as societies, incentivizing and punishing us into paths that might not be in our species’ best interests.
Articles
The IPCC Report is Clear: Nothing Short of Transforming Society Will Avert Catastrophe
Unless you live under a rock (or a stack of rocks?), you’ve heard about this already, but this was a particular take on it that I thought was important to share.
Scientists Spot Warning Signs of Gulf Stream Collapse
The Gulf Stream is just one of many systems that creates a feedback loop on weather and climate. Here’s what it could mean: entire ecosystems could suddenly change their weather pattern, from wet to dry or vice versa, leading to a complete collapse of the organisms that have adapted for a particular climate. This applies not only to the natural world, but also to the crop systems that we humans depend upon. Severe food shortages are almost certainly in our near future even without a gulf stream collapse—think wars and massive refugee emigrations. If the gulf stream collapses, we’re looking at those same effects, but at orders of magnitude larger.
But despite the challenges against us, we still have the capacity for action.
Quote
“Ecosystems are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. It can be difficult to predict how this kind of thing plays out. Things like tipping points and feedback loops make everything much riskier than it otherwise might be. This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning.”
—Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment or a like if you enjoyed this, and please share with someone if you think they’d enjoy it.
Nick