These two worldviews are not mutually contradictory, for they are worldviews of two different worlds. Yet, thanks to the interconnectedness of L-space, each world illuminates the other.
The strange duality between Roundworld and Discworld parallels another: the duality between Mind and Matter. When Mind came to Roundworld, a very remarkable change occurred. Narrative imperative appeared in Roundworld. Magic came into existence. And elves, and vampires, and myth, and gods. Characteristically, all of these things came into being in an indirect and offbeat way, like the relationship between rules and consequences. Things didn’t exactly happen because of the power of story. Instead, the power of story made minds try to make the things in the story happen. The attempts were not always successful, but even when they failed, Roundworld was usually changed.
Narrative imperative arrived on Roundworld like a small god, and grew in stature according to human belief. When a million human beings all believe the same story, and all try to make it come true, their combined weight can compensate for their individual ineffectiveness.
There is no science in Discworld, only magic and narrativium. So the wizards put science into Discworld in the form of the Roundworld Project, as detailed in The Science of Discworld. With elegant symmetry, there was no magic or narrativium in Roundworld, so humans put them there, in the form of story.
Before narrative imperative can exist, there has to be narrative, and that’s where Mind proved decisive. The imperative followed hard on the heels of the narrative, and the two complicitly co-evolved, for as soon as there was a story, there was someone who wanted to make it come true. Nonetheless, the story beat the compulsion by a nose.
What makes humans different from all other creatures on the planet is not language, or mathematics, or science. It is not religion, or art, or politics, either. All of those things are mere side effects of the invention of story. Now it might seem that without language there can be no stories, but that is an illusion, brought about by our current obsession with recording stories as words on paper. Before there was a word for ‘elephant’ it was possible to point at an elephant and make evocative gestures, to draw an elephant on the cave wall and add spears flying towards it, or to mould a model of an elephant from clay and act out a hunting scene. The story was as clear as day, and an elephant-hunt would follow hard on its heels.
We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.
Even today, five million years since we and the other two species of chimpanzee went our separate evolutionary ways, we still use stories to run our lives. Every morning we buy a newspaper to find out, so we tell ourselves, what is happening in the world. But most things that are happening in the world, even rather important ones, never make it into the papers. Why not? Because newspapers are written by journalists, and every journalist learned at their mother’s knee that what grabs newspaper readers is a story. Events with zero significance for the planet, such as a movie star’s broken marriage, are stories. Events that matter a great deal, such as the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol cans of shaving-cream, are not stories. Yes, they can become stories, and in this case do when we discover that those selfsame CFCs are destroying the ozone layer; we even have a title for the story, The Ozone Hole. But nobody knew or recognised there was a story when shops first started selling aerosol cans, even though that was the decisive event.
Religions have always recognised the power of a good story. Miracles run better at the box-office than mundane good actions. Helping an old lady across the road isn’t much of a story, but raising the dead most certainly is. Science is riddled with stories. In fact, if you can’t tell a convincing story about your research, nobody will let you publish it. And even if they did, nobody else would understand it. Newton’s laws of motion are simple little stories about what happens to lumps of matter when they are given a push – stories only a little more precise than ‘if you keep pushing, it will go faster and faster’. And ‘Everything moves in circles’, as Ponder would insist.
Why are we so wedded to stories? Our minds are too limited to grasp the universe for what it is. We’re very small creatures in a very big world, and there is no way that we could possibly represent that world in full, intricate detail inside our own heads. Instead, we operate with simplified representations of limited parts of the universe. We find simple models that correspond closely to reality extremely attractive. Their simplicity makes them easy to comprehend, but that’s not much use unless they also work. When we reduce a complex universe to a simple principle, be it The Will of God or Schrödinger’s Equation, we feel that we’ve really accomplished something. Our models are stories, and conversely, stories are models of a more complex reality. Our brains fill in the complexity automatically. The story says ‘dog’ and we immediately have a mental picture of the beast: a big, bumbling Labrador with a tail like a steam-hammer, tongue lolling, ears flopping.1 Just as our visual system fills in the blind spot.
We learn to appreciate stories as children. The child’s mind is quick and powerful, but uncontrolled and unsophisticated. Stories appeal to it, and adults rapidly discovered that a story can put an idea into a child’s head like nothing else can. Stories are easy to remember, both for teller and listener. As that child grows to adulthood, the love of stories remains. An adult has to be able to tell stories to the next generation of children, or the culture does not propagate. And an adult needs to be able to tell stories to other adults, such as their boss or their mate, because stories have a clarity of structure that does not exist in the messiness of the real world. Stories always make sense: that’s why Discworld is so much more convincing than Roundworld.
Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture’s Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one’s culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence.
Some stories are just entertainment, but even those usually have a hidden message on a deeper, possibly more earthy, level – as with Rumpelstiltskin. Some stories are Worlds of If, a way for minds to try out hypothetical choices and imagine their consequences. Word-play in the Nest of the Mind. And some of those stories have such a compelling logic that narrative imperative takes over, and they transmute into plans. A plan is a story together with the intention of making it come true.
Inside Roundworld, as it sits in its glass globe within the confining walls of the library of Unseen University, our story is coming to its climax. Will Shakespeare has written a play (it is, of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream), a play that the elves believe will consolidate their power over human minds. The narrative of this play has collided with Rincewind’s mental model of what he wants to do, and the flying sparks have ignited a plot. How will it all end? That is one of the compulsive aspects of a story. You’ll just have to wait and see.
We have seen how history unfolds an emergent dynamic, so that even though everything is following rigid rules, even history itself has to wait and see how it all turned out. Yes, everything is following the rules, but there is no short cut that will take you to the destination before the rules themselves get there. History is not a story that exists in a book, the fatalistic ‘it is written’. It is a story that makes itself up as it goes along, like a story that someone is reading and you are listening to. It is being written …
Philosophically, there ought to be a big difference between a story that is already written, and one
that is being created word by word as you read it. The one is a story whose every sentence is predetermined; not only can there be only one possible outcome, but the outcome is already ‘known’. The other is a story whose next sentence does not yet exist, whose ending in unknown even to the storyteller. You are reading the first kind of story, but while we were writing it, it was the second kind of story. In fact, it started out as a totally different story, but we never wrote that one at all. The philosophers realised long ago that it is no easy matter to determine which kind of story fits our world. If we had the ability to run the world again, we might discover that it does different things on the second occasion, and if so, the history of the universe would be a story that unfolds as it goes, not one already committed to paper.
But this doesn’t look like a feasible experiment.
Our fascination with stories lays us open to a variety of errors in our relationship with the outside world. The rapid spread of rumours, for instance, is a tribute to how our love of a juicy story overcomes our critical faculties. The mechanism is precisely the one that the scientific method tries very hard to protect us against: believing something because you want it to be true. Or, for some rumours, because you fear it could be true. A rumour is one example of a more general concept, introduced in 1976 by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He came up with this notion in order to be able to discuss an evolutionary system that was different from the Darwinian evolution of organisms. It is the meme. The associated subject of ‘memetics’ is science’s attempt to comprehend the power of story.
The word ‘meme’ was coined by deliberate analogy with ‘gene’, and ‘memetics’ with ‘genetics’. Genes are passed from one generation of organisms to the next; memes are passed from one human mind to another human mind. A meme is an idea that is so attractive to human minds that they want to pass it on to others. The song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is a highly successful meme; so, for a long time, was Communism, though that was a complicated system of ideas, a memeplex. Ideas exist as some cryptic pattern of activity in brains, so brains, and their associated minds, provide an environment in which memes can exist and propagate. Indeed, replicate, for when you teach a child to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’, you don’t forget the song yourself. The Hedgehog Song is an equally successful Discworld meme.
As the home computer spread across the globe, and became inextricably wired into the Internet’s extelligence, an environment was created that gave birth to an insidious silicon-based form of meme: the computer virus. All viruses so far seem to have been written deliberately by humans, although at least one turned out to be a far more successful replicator than its designer had intended, thanks to a programming error. ‘Artificial life’ simulations using evolving computer programs are often run inside a ‘shell’ that isolates them from the outside world, because of the unlikely but possible evolution of a really nasty computer virus. The world’s computer network is certainly complex enough to evolve its own viruses, given enough time.
Memes are mind-viruses.
In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore says that ‘Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us.’ The song ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is mostly harmless, although it is just about possible to see it as an insidious piece of propaganda for global commerce if you’re that way inclined. Advertising is a conscious attempt to unleash memes; a successful advertising campaign starts to build its own momentum as it spreads by word of mouth as well as overt TV or newspaper ads. Some advertising is beneficial (Oxfam, say) and some is manifestly harmful (tobacco). In fact, many memes are harmful, but still propagate very effectively: among them are the chain-letter and its financial analogue, pyramid selling. Just as DNA propagates without having any conscious intentions of its own, so memes replicate without having conscious objectives. The people who set the memes loose may have had overt intentions, but the memes themselves don’t. Those that perform well, leading human minds to pass them on in quantity, thrive; those that do not, die out, or at best live on as small, isolated pockets of infection. The spread of a meme is much like the spread of a disease. And just as you can protect yourself against some diseases, by taking the right precautions, you can also protect yourself against becoming infected with a meme. The ability to think critically, and to question statements that rest on authority instead of evidence, are quite effective defences.
This is our message to you. You need not be a victim of the power of story, like Vorbis the Quisitor, smitten by an earthbound tortoise, the Wrath of Om. You can be a Granny Weatherwax, sailing through story-space like a master navigator, attuned to every breath of narrative wind (and a lot of it is, mark you), tacking against the gale like a maverick, avoiding the Shoals of Dogma and the Scylla and Charybdis of Indecision …
Sorry, we got carried away. What we mean is: if you understand the power of story, and learn to detect abuses of it, you might actually deserve the appellation Homo sapiens.
Blackmore’s book argues that many aspects of human nature are explained much better by memetics, the mechanisms whereby memes exist and propagate, than by any existing rival theory. In our terminology, memetics illuminates the complicity between intelligence and extelligence, between the individual mind and the culture of which it is but one tiny part. Some critics counter that the memeticists can’t even say what the basic unit of a meme is. For example, are the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (dah-dah-da DUM) a meme, or is the meme really the whole symphony? Both replicate successfully: the second in the minds of music-lovers, the first in a weird variety of minds.
However, this kind of criticism never carries much weight when a new theory is being developed. Not that this stops the critics, of course. By the time a scientific theory can ‘define’ its concepts with complete precision, it’s dead. Very few concepts can actually be defined completely: not even something like ‘alive’. What, precisely, does ‘tall’ mean? ‘Rich’? ‘Wet’? ‘Convincing’? Let alone ‘slood’. If it comes to the crunch, the basic unit of genetics has not been defined in any convincing way, either. Is it a DNA base? A DNA sequence that codes for proteins, a ‘gene’ in the most limited sense? A DNA sequence with a known function – a ‘gene’ in its broadest sense? A chromosome? An entire genome? Does it have to exist inside an organism? Most DNA in the world contributes nothing genetic to the future: there’s DNA in dead skin flakes, falling leaves, rotting logs …
Dawkins’s famous phrase ‘It is raining DNA outside’, applied to downy seeds of the willow tree at the start of chapter 5 of The Blind Watchmaker, is poetic. But very little of that DNA leads anywhere; it’s just another molecule to be broken down as the falling seeds rot. A few seeds survive to germinate; fewer still produce plants; and most of those die or are eaten before they grow into a willow tree and produce the next rainfall of seeds. DNA has to be in the right place (in sexual species, eggs or sperm) at the right time (fertilisation) before it propagates itself in any genetic sense. None of this stops genetics being a real science, and a very exciting and important one. So the fuzziness of definitions is not a good stick with which to beat the memetic dog, or indeed any dog that has anything going for it.
In his original discussion, almost as an aside, Dawkins suggested that religion is a meme, which goes something like ‘If you wish to avoid the everlasting fires, you must believe this, and pass it on to your children’.2 The popularity of religion is no doubt more complicated than that; nevertheless, there is the germ of an idea here, because that sentence does correspond rather closely to the central message of many – not all – religions. The theologian John Bowker was sufficiently disturbed by this suggestion that he wrote Is God a Virus? to shoot it down. The fact that he bothered shows that he saw it as an important (and from his viewpoint dangerous) question.
Blackmore recognises that a religion, or any ideology, is too complex to be propagated by a single meme, just as an organism is too complex to be propagated by
a single gene. Dawkins recognised this, too, and came up with a concept that he called ‘coadapted meme complexes’. These are systems of memes that replicate collectively. The meme ‘If you wish to avoid the everlasting fires, you must believe this, and pass it on to your children’ is too simple to get very far, but if it is allied to other memes like ‘The way to avoid the everlasting fires can be found in the Holy Book’ and ‘You must read the Holy Book or face eternal damnation’, then the whole collection of memes forms a network that replicates far more effectively.
A complexity theorist would call such a collection of memes an ‘autocatalytic set’: each meme is catalysed, its replication is assisted, by some or all of the others. In 1995 Hans-Cees Speel coined the term ‘memeplex’. Blackmore has a whole chapter on ‘Religions as memeplexes’. If this line of argument bothers you, hang on a minute. Are you saying that religion is not a collection of beliefs and instructions that can be passed very successfully from one person to another? That’s what ‘memeplex’ means. Anyway, replace ‘religion’ by ‘political party’ if you want to – not the one you support, naturally. Those other idiots who advocate/despise (delete whichever is inapplicable) free market economics, state pensions, public ownership of industry, private ownership of public services … And bear in mind that while the secret of the spread of your own religion may be that it is The Truth, that can’t possibly be the secret of the spread of all those other false religions in the world. Why the devil do sensible people believe that kind of rubbish?
Because it is a successful memeplex.
The evidence for memetic transmission of ideologies is extensive. For example, every one of the world’s religions (barring ancient ones whose origins are lost in the mists of time) seems to have started with a very small group of believers and a charismatic leader. They are specific to particular cultural backgrounds; the meme needs a fertile substrate on which to grow. Many cherished beliefs of Christianity, for example, seem absurd to anyone not brought up in the Christian tradition. Virgin birth? (Well, that one was actually an inspired mistranslation of the Hebrew for ‘young woman’, but no matter.) Restored the dead to life? Communion wine becomes blood? Communion wafers are the body of Christ – and you eat them? Really? To believers, of course, all this makes perfect sense, but to outsiders, uninfected by the meme, it’s laughable.3
The Science of Discworld II Page 36