by Zeev Nitsan
Eugenics is the betterment of genes by selective hybridization. We must apply memetic eugenics (“betterment of the genes” of the memetic ideas stored in our brains, and in the brains of all human beings that share the human race, which might be defined as “eumetics”) so that a destructive memetic phenotype (such as war) will disappear from the stage of our life.
If we do not succeed in annihilating a memetic genotype that preaches violence and injustice toward others, we can at least dull its sharp points by attempting to decrease its penetration and, thus, its expression in our world as a memetic phenotype.
The spiritual value of human beings should be determined according to the “quality of memes” that reside in their brain and in their actions. The brain is, in the wider sense, a creature of our experiences, the culture we live in, and the memes we are exposed to. It resembles an agricultural cycle of seeding, sprouting, growing, and reaping. The seeds of the memes that are seeded in young brains sprout and grow inside these brains and become core insights that constitute an infrastructure for their mental life.
The Tabula Rasa of the Brain—Morally Agnostic?
The spouting source of the ethical codes that guide our behavior and our attitude toward life has been controversial for many years.
There are contradicting views. One claims that morality is a strict language based on universal internal grammar, while according to the opposite view, the language of morality is encoded in an open code that constantly changes in accordance with the circumstances. The first view is called the deontological approach, and the other is the teleological approach.
According to the deontological approach, certain moralistic positions have positive or negative ethical value that does not depend on the circumstances or the results of moral choice. Kant’s categorical imperative is an example of a deontological perception of morality. On the other hand, there is the teleological view of morality, which considers the results of the moral decisions and the circumstantial context in which they are made as the fundamental element.
Another aspect of the controversy is reflected in the ancient question, is man’s heart good or evil from his youth? It seems that, even in the shadows of these controversies, there is a consensus, according to which culture and the moral load it pours into our brain in the form of memes has a central role—some might even claim an exclusive role—with regard to shaping our core moral values. The brain of a newborn is a “natural nihilist,” in the sense that it lacks beliefs and values—these will be poured into it by the memes he will be exposed to at a later stage.
Thus we see the importance of education and exposure to the “right memes,” which will instill the appropriate significance to values such as humanism, human dignity, compassion toward animals, ecological awareness, and so on, at a young age, before memes with different contents have a chance to shape the “moral personality.”
Initiated annihilation (delearning) of a pattern of behavior, in the form of a habit or a core thought, by the dismantling of neural networks that constitute the basis of a certain behavioral habit is more difficult than establishing an infrastructure of neural networking for the representation of a new acquired skill (learning). The more senior skill enjoys a competitive advantage in controlling brain resources that the new skill is still “trying hard” to acquire.
For these reasons, instilling memes is easier at a young age and more difficult at an older age; thus, extreme ideological movements that are aware of this fact choose to focus on the younger generation, knowing that it is easier to influence it ideologically. Extreme ideological movements prefer to hunt for their prey among youngsters, who are like “captivated babies.” A young brain is an ideal seedbed for the purpose of planting an idea that will strike deep roots.
This is why it is extremely important to transfer “good, moral core values” to the young generation that will constitute the basis of its future world of thought. Faulty habits and false beliefs (“bad memes”) that conquer representation territory, before the brain has a chance to be exposed to the “good memes,” will enjoy a competitive advantage that might help the bad memes strike deeper roots.
Representation of an idea in the brain at the structural level is the neural networking pattern that encodes the meme.
Ideological exposure that is not selective might network, in young brains, unessential maps that will get priority over maps that are more essential and important to their future as individuals and the future of all humanity.
The senior memes we have stored in our brain become the reference point for all the memes that come afterward—thus the great importance of early exposure to positive “supermemes”—basic insights that will serve as the foundations for all the structures of ideas that will be built afterward. The conceptual, moral world of a person is likely to be based on these super-memes that will constitute the moral core.
The ideas that become core ideas (super-memes) and that shape our attitude in life leave their sign, to a great extent, on the nature of our experience throughout our life on the face of Earth. These super-memes become the historians of our past, the spokesmen of our present, and, to a great extent, the prophets of our future.
Memetics and Meme Ethics
Just as the development of genetic engineering requires ethical consideration (the gen-ethics of genetics), the accelerated development of memetics (the means of transferring information among humans’ brains) requires such consideration as well.
The memes acquired from our life environment constitute, along innate tendencies, the moral menu our brain is fed on; according to it our moral view is formed and our behavior is shaped. There is an Indian fable in which a father tells his son that in every person’s soul there is a struggle between the dark wolf, who is fed on hatred, rage, intolerance, and other dark sides of human personality, and the illuminated wolf, who is fed on compassion, kindliness, tolerance, and all other positive aspects of human personality. When the son asks, worriedly, which wolf will win the struggle within his soul, the father says, “The one you feed more…”—and, in a broader context, most of the times-it’s the one that your environment guides you to feed more.
In order to choose a moral path for our life we need a compass that outlines a reliable, replicable directionality and not a compass-rose that changes its direction according to each trendy gust of wind, i.e. we need a preserved representation at the ideological level as well.
Feeding a brain on ideological memes is a vision we should aspire to while keeping in mind that defining an ideological meme is not that simple and will probably raise controversy. On the other hand, it might be that through defining by means of contradiction—i.e., by stating the things that are not moral in the universal sense—such as violence and racist hatred—we will be able to move forward and overcome these obstacles.
The pyramid of human knowledge becomes higher in an exponential pattern. Some claim it will reach a hyperexponential singular point where knowledge crosses a certain critical threshold. On the other hand, our life expectancy and the processing capabilities of our brain do not develop at a synchronized matching rate. Thus, we might anticipate an “information crisis” that requires overselectivity with respect to the core information we wish to assimilate in the brains of young people in an attempt to better their life and their understanding.
The brain, especially a young one, is hungry for guiding insights (show me the way!). In the absence of independent navigating attempts, man is carried on the waves of the ideas of people who are braver than him.
Emanuel Kant provided a definition for enlightenment when he wrote:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man’s inability to make use of his intellect without guidance from another. Have courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of enlightenment.”
Kant—one of the most disciplined soldiers in the army of the intellect—took his courage into both hands, as he previously recommended, and forced upo
n himself a daily dose of strict “contemplation discipline,” which yielded an impressive intellectual yield.
In praise of the originality regarding our mental products, it was said, “You are born an original, don’t die a copy” (attributed to John Mason).
Our brains make us unique, and we should express this uniqueness for good by actions that contribute to a better world. No other brain’s owner can give our special contribution, and vice versa.
We are in charge of shaping such a moral core that, when the owners of the young brains mature and reach their personal enlightenment stage, their brains will provide them with moral guidelines for respecting the other and humanism:
Always be generous toward those who “walk in the dark with us” (the rest of human beings), remembering that many of our weaknesses are universal, in the sense that they are written in the source code of the “being human” software. Judge people according to merciful justice rather than just justice, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi’s saying “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” These are values that will contribute to the shaping of a better “brave new world.”
Thus, it seems that, in the near future, we will need to determine essential, universal core memes and expose our children’s brain to them, in a selective manner, by means of universal core studies, which will be taught to all children of the world.
The Offspring of Thought and Flesh
We tend to get emotionally attached to ideas that we have nurtured by dedicating time and thought resources to them, as we do with our biological offspring, in whom we invest our best efforts. We wish to see the fruit of our investment in the generations to come.
In the codex of parenthood, the definition of “meme” must include instilling memes for life—memes whose usage will improve the offspring’s success in the world and also meet the criteria of bettering the status of the people around us.
Reading and writing are young skills in terms of evolution, and, as such, they have not yet been granted brain areas that are committed to the processing of these skills from birth. In other words, it seems that there is not any brain area that is designated by a genetic dictate to serve reading and writing skills, as there is for the skill of speech.
A child who learns how to read goes through a shorter version of the process that human culture has gone through since the development of literacy. This is a central role of transferring core memes: shortcuts that will facilitate life’s basic training for every young human being and instill life skills that match the era they live in in an enjoyable, fascinating, and effective way.
Words and memes have a chemical manifestation. They change the brain in the structural and functional sense.
Fervently, we might claim that every lesson at school is a minor brain surgery for the pupil’s brain. It changes pupils’ brain in the structural and functional (biochemical) sense. Thus, we should be very cautious when instilling worthy memes in young brains. For instance, the idea of solving disputes through violence requires initiated, constant extinction from young brains in order to end up with a young generation that is more tolerant and generous compared to former generations.
The neuroplasticity of the human brain, especially a young brain, enables continuous adaptability to changing circumstances. When used intelligently, it can be used for instilling memes that will better the life of individuals, the life of the society this individual belongs to, and the life of all humanity. Cynical use of its features, however, might create an epidemic of defective memes, such as coercion and violence.
A conceptual vaccine against distorted ideas is mandatory with respect to educating the young generation, and, similar to ordinary vaccines against infectious diseases, it requires a “booster” from time to time that will renew its vaccination-conceptual potency.
Just as it’s appropriate to be concerned about the quality of our atmosphere, it’s appropriate, also, to be concerned about, and act accordingly toward, the betterment, and the prevention of deterioration, of the internal atmosphere in the brains of the people who reside on our planet. As aforementioned, it is advisable that an organization, such as the UN, be in charge of selecting a “universal core of memes” based on respect toward human beings, animals, and the environment in a humanistic spirit, and that it also enforce its implementation. The internal climate in people’s brains will determine the fate of our planet, no less (and perhaps even more) the environmental climate and the atmosphere. A society that brainwashes its youngsters with destructive memes, such as xenophobia based on background, nationality, religion, race, etc., must be forced to stop instilling these memes and start instilling humanistic, universal core memes, even if the only way to do it is by means of sanctions, since poisonous memes in the brains of youngsters will poison the general brain atmosphere in the only world we have.
The Ethics of the Heart
Emotions have a major role in making our ethical decisions, and their contribution often surpasses the contribution of logic.
Plato’s utopian heart’s desire was a world ruled by logic and, at its summit, a regime, motivated by pure wisdom, under whose wing the subjects would enjoy prosperity and justice.
Emanuel Kant coined the term “the categorical imperative,” which refers to a moral decision as a natural inference of rational thinking.[43] It seems, however, that emotions, most of which exist in the unconscious processing layer, are the ones that guide most of the decisions that relate to morality, and the rational brain produces reasoning in retrospect for a decision that was made without its involvement, or only with a minor contribution on its part.
Various studies have shown that in scenarios in which participants are presented with the option of saving several people at the expense of the life of a single person, an interesting discovery is made. Most of the participants (in a cross-cultural pattern) prefer to save as many people as possible when they are able to act according to a pattern of non action or indirect action in order to promote such an outcome. In a scenario in which they are required to directly cause, with their own hands, the death of the person in order to save others, however, many of them will withdraw from their previous preference.[44] In brain-imaging studies that allow us to trace the level of activity in various brain areas at a given moment, it was found that the brain areas whose level of activity was in strong correlation with outlining a moral decision were the brain areas that are in charge of the production of emotions. In the first scenario, the areas in charge of emotions were moderately active and employed “cold,” rationalistic considerations to determine the action approach. On the other hand, when the option of direct killing was raised, the emotional flame became very intense, which resulted in avoiding taking any direct action toward killing the person, even when the other people were about to pay the price for it.
It seems that once the moral conflict is resolved, an a priori coercion takes place within us; the lower path of the emotional brain makes the decisions and dresses them up in the festive attire of rationalistic explanations in retrospect.
Memes generate and regulate emotions, which constitutes another impact pattern of them on ethical decisions.
Ideas’ Engineering
We all have core ideas that modularly compose the towers of our thoughts. The core ideas are the mental building blocks from which the tower of thoughts is built. Thus, it is highly important that we own the blocks that will enable us to modularly assemble a “good” tower of thought, as it is of the utmost importance that the right memes are instilled and that the mental environment delegates these memes. The implications are especially crucial with respect to children, who are in the midst of the process in which core ideas about the world are formed. By instilling an appropriate conceptual arsenal in them, we enable them to become better-ideas engineers. People who instilled in us memes that affected our insights are like living scaffolding in the construction of tower of our thoughts.
All of our brains serve as cement and building blocks in the hum
an tower of insights.
The death of any person resembles a fire in a library—a library of ideas, which is unique and irreplaceable in this sense—thus the importance of transferring our selected insights to other brains, especially young ones, that will walk the paths of life after we are gone.
Memes’ Arithmetic
The main part of our role is to instill in the next generations memes that constitute core memes—a concentrated summary of insights (experts’ insights) that will make their “basic training” in life easier.
The fate of humanity will be determined by key vectors of the memetic universal parallelogram of forces—i.e., the total of all the memes that reside in the brains of living people at a given time and the direction of development they outline.
The Destructive Power of Morally Distorted Memes
Just as encephalitis (brain infection) might infect others and cause the death of the person who suffers from it, a morally distorted idea with a “dark spell,” such as the concept of violent racism, might affect other brains and cause suffering and destruction to the people who adapted the idea and to the people around them (and, metaphorically speaking, cause “memetic encephalitis”).
We must beware of being infected with memes that will turn us into “useful idiots” in the service of a “great ideology” based on distorted values.
Auschwitz existed in spite of Goethe, Leibniz, and Kant… Even a cultural climate that has been flourishing for many years is not immune to a cultural “ice age” that freezes basic moral values to death.
Ideas such as extreme nationalism or hatred based on race or religion are memes that induce apoptosis (planned death) of the entire human race, and we must create an effective immune system that will prevent “memetic apoptosis” and neutralize the effect of these toxic memes.