Analysis of Memes: Cultural Technologies, How We All Say “Dude,” And Funerary Rites

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Dick Dawkins talks about memes in his book, The Selfish Gene. Essentially, memes are ideas, thoughts, or concepts that spread, evolve, and sometimes flourish, lasting for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Let’s take a simple example: “Sup?”

I’ll trace it back to “What is up,” meaning, essentially, “What is going on?”
“Sup” can say a lot of other things to, but we know that “Sup” is currently a flourishing meme in the United States, where those who speak colloquial United States English either understand or at least get the gist of it.

Just as “Hi” is probably about one hundred or so years, old, “Sup” is probably about 15 years old, or so, and may eventually be replaced with “Suh”. As in:

“Hey. Suh?”

This is how language evolves. And within the technology of language there is an evolution of that technology. Not all phrases start off simply. For instance. Before “Hi” there was “Hello.” Before “Mac” or “PC” there was “personal computer,” or “computing device.”

Each of these longer, more cumbersome words ‘stood for’ a physical object. These objects withstood the test of time, and just as these devices have flourished in the cultural market, the names we’ve given them have evolved into simpler, colloquial terms that we’ve come to agree on. These words are memes within the larger meme of language. Each word or phrase is a little piece of manmade technology that has evolved, changing to support the time, fitting into the neuro-linguistic programming as it corresponds to the ebbs and flows of cultural evolution. This is never a perfect process. Sometimes these little pieces of technology die out. (For instance, saying “Word up” is going into that good night, and “Cool beans” seemed dead in the water from the start; beans having never been especially cool in any way we think of the word. “Dead in the water,” however, sticks around like a stick in the mud. “Sticking around” is probably only about fifty years old, however.)

Sometimes we create phrases that do not “catch.” They sound strange in the mouth, or they activate feelings of unease. Still, through cultural marketing, certain things have been inorganically forced into our modes of speech. This is done through liminal and subliminal propagandization by private and public parties, some with an agenda, some without. I never thought I would be caught dead saying, “Dude.” I took it on ironically at first. There were just too many people out there saying “Dude” in films and commercials and on the street not to appropriate it into my personal lexicon. Eventually, the irony of “dude” drained away. And now I say it, like, uncontrollably. I also never thought I’d have the popular summer song “Umbrella” stuck in my head. But if you play any song enough in the Crunch Gym on 12^th street, it’ll eventually infect me, even though I use a portable music player. Whether I chose to play it at a party, thus exposing others to the meme (virus, if you will), is another story.

None of this stuff is new. Philosophy, cultural anthropology, etymology, Dawkins-ology names and explains a lot of these naturally occurring phenomena. If Dawkins were sitting with me tonight, he would probably say that we are genetically prone to be infected by mass exposure to memes, for better or worse. Wait, is it for better or for worse that we tend to soak up and mimic things. Well, on the one hand it is probably better in terms of the reproduction factor. Cultural consistency means cultural acceptance. Perhaps we are predisposed to want to “fit in.” No matter how hard we try, we never feel like we totally fit in. Even if we do feel that way, the feeling is fleeting. We say “word up.” We wear baggy jeans. We get thin. We get muscled- all of this so as to conform. In conformity we overcome an obstacle detailed in Helen Fisher’s book, The Anatomy of Love- appearing of similar income, education, and attraction level to members of the opposite sex. Fisher’s research tells her that people are usually attracted to people of similar value, or better value. Substitute “value” for whatever you wish- money, looks, social status (money and looks certainly informing the last).

In Brooklyn, everyone wears tight jeans and white v-neck t-shirts. No, it’s not like everyone between 20 and 35 decided one day to start wearing tight jeans and white v-neck t-shirts. Rather, this is a fashion technology that started somewhere and worked its way up. It proved useful to us to wear v-necks many years ago. The “V”-shap accentuates the chests of men and women alike, whilst literally pointing to the genitalia. No, I’m not making this shit up. We recognize the arrow as a simple piece of language, and the arrow is not pointing to those beautiful eyes of yours.

Similarly, I would say that as humans we are pre-disposed to ritualistic behavior. Ritual is a technology that I will assume is as old as we (homo sapiens) are, or at least close to it, and perhaps older. Ceremonial burial is counted as one of our older technologies. No, burying our dead (or even leaving our dead with flowers, food, or tools), does not prove useful in the way that, for instance, fashioning a wedge from stone for forage did, but still, we selected for millions of years and continued to deal ritualistically with our dead. Ceremonial burial is a ritual, a meme, that has evolved over the millions of years that we have done it. Whether it be cremation or mummification (we still mummify the bodies we bury, just not with the exact same chemicals, or the exact same methods) death ritual has not only survived but flourished among humans.

Let me offer a reason why. I have already said that it is not so much physically useful to, say enshroud our dead. In Islamic doctrine a coffin is not supposed to be used, only a shroud, and in most Semitic burials the family and friends are meant to do the burying, not hired attendants. (Sometimes a few handfuls of earth are dropped over the coffin by the family, symbolically representing the above- another evolution of the technology, despite the slight bending of the dogmatic rule.) Why do they do this? Is it an utterly supernatural thing? Here is the thing: the meaning of the ritual gets lost in the doctrine. In the most simplistic, face-value understanding of the performance, we have the burial itself. Then, if we go into the spirituality of it, we see that it is symbolic of a change in the position of the dead. The dead move from above ground to below ground physically- not such a big deal. But to an extent it is a way of moving on, and solidifying our memory as if placing a time capsule some place safe. This will be here. This is a memorial I am making. I am a dog burying a bone. This person will always be here and I am making sure of that. Others think that if it were done any other way, the person may not be admitted to some other supernatural land.

It is not for the doctrine that we must look, anymore. We did not use to bury our dead to please supernatural beings. We did it to please ourselves, to create more permanent, physical realms for our dead, so that they would not be carried off. Why? Let me posit that, our memories were more lasting than our own lives, and that this informed the future. Just as others came, reproduced, flourished before us- we, too, could do the same. Forgive me if this reasoning isn’t perfect. I don’t know why early homo sapiens buried their dead. I am sure, for one, that they did not have solid mythos regarding gods, and that they did not have dogma (technology that has been unnaturally removed from evolution in order to advance the agenda of a select few). They had ideas, and they had stories, and when those stories changed, so, too, did their death rites change.

We can re-imagine our ritual technologies just as we can revise our personal computers, and no one can stop us from doing that. Why can’t we, a culture supposedly far advanced technologically and culturally from our early ancestors, not change these few things? There are a lot of reasons. But I just want to make clear that when we remember our dead; when we bury (or cremate, or plant) our dead, and when we stop to be thankful, we can do it in so many thousands of ways. Why does it seem that there are only two or three that we can chose from without seeming like quacks?

I, for one, don’t really care if everyone in the world chooses to look to the White Christian God for help on a test. I will still take time to breath in, breath out, and say to myself: “Just do the best that you can. That’s all that you can control.” That’s ritualistic, too. Stopping and saying that. I live a super-ritualistic life, in other words. It is not so much spiritual as it is, essentially, full of little magic technologies that have no meaning to anyone but me, and yet still serve greater purposes. I was struck by an article in The Onion. To paraphrase, it said something like, “Coping with shitty nights, depressed single has sad methods of cheering up.” It was hilarious because it was true. We all have our little things that we do to feel better. Sad, maybe, but as long as they hurt no one else and help us, then I see no reason not to do them. And by “them” I mean personal rituals. The question is, why do we keep counting on non-evolving, millennia-old dogma-technologies for spiritual and psychological guidance when we have newer, better memes to rely on? Is it because of the constant exposure? Or is it some genetic predisposition to looking to tradition to finding the answers?

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Filed under Dawkins, Islam, Linguistic Study, Religious doctrine, Richard Dawkins, Ritual, cultural technologies, etymology, language, memes, neuro-linguistics