I1 Christopher Coker,War Memes and Memeplexes

8/14/2019 I1 Christopher Coker,War Memes and Memeplexes

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War, memes and memeplexes

International Aairs84: 5 (2008) 903914 2008 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute o International Aairs

CHRISTOPHER COKER

Culture, memes and war

Scientists imagine that beore the universe came into being it existed in a state o

potentiality. Time and space were held in abeyance, in a og o possibility as onecommentator puts it, until the Big Bang.1 A similar process is probably true othe origins o war. We might like to imaginethose o us amiliar with StanleyKubricks lm, 2001: a space odysseythat rom killing baboons it was a small stepto killing a member o our own species, in one weapon-wielding moment. Butour biological essence would appear to be one o cooperation, not intra-speciesaggression. We probably began warring against each other only when we started toence in our land; in which case war is a product o (agri)culture, not the Hobbe-sian state o nature. In due course, when we started building cities and wallingourselves in we invented ritualized warare, with its own protocols, taboos and

restrictions. War has a historya very recent one, dating back 12,000 years to therst walled city, Jericho.

Whether war can be traced back to nature or nurture is not really the point. Thetruth probably is that the two are so closely intertwined that it is now impossibleto tell one rom the other. As biological creatures we are necessarily social animals.Culture is programmed into us as a species, and war is an especially interestingcultural product. The question is whether we have been brainwashed into war overthe millennia by a alse consciousness (most recently, nationalism), whether wehave been misled or centuries by our priests and politicians. But this is not in itsela Darwinian question. The Darwinian still wants to know why young men are sosusceptible to what the writer Luis Borges called the moral and ascetic charms o

war, and thereore open to exploitation by priests and politicians who still sendthem o to ght.2

It is easier to explain away the willingness to kill. Anthropologists can ndgood instrumental reasons or taking another persons lie, such as competitionor scarce resources or breeding stock. But the dying is dicult to explain away inDarwinian terms, or each o us is programmed to avoid pain and especially earlydeath (and war is usually a young mans calling). Natural selection tells us that an

1 Alberto Manguel,A reading diary: a year o avourite books (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005), p. xi.2 Manguel,A reading diary, p. 84.


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904International Aairs 84: 5, 2008 2008 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute o International Aairs

early death is something to be avoided. Those rare individuals, the warriors, whoinvite it do so because they believe that they owe their lie a good death, and thata good death makes lie meaningulbut meaning, too, o course, is a cultural

construction.Those who object to Darwinian explanations are oten deeply opposed to any

proposals to recast questions in the social sciences and humanities in terms ocultural evolution. But war does seem to have evolved in a way that Darwiniantheory would suggest. It has a wide appeal across the centuries and across cultures,which should prompt us to ask whether something corresponding to natural selec-tion is taking place. Are some ideas, such as war, more competitive than othersbecause o their intrinsic appeal or merit, or do they persist because they competewith other ideas (peace), survive the competition and spread? In her book Bloodrites, Barbara Ehrenreich reaches the conclusion that war is contagious. It spreadsrom one culture to the next. In some senses, she adds, it is useul to see it as a

sel-replicating pattern o behaviour. War, she suggests, should be seen as a looseassemblage o algorithms or programs (in the computer sense o the term) orcollective action. As a meme it is particularly tenacious. The idea that it is gloriousto die or ones country persisted or centuries. Culture in other words cannotalways be counted upon to be on our side. In so ar as it allows humans to escapethe imperatives o biology, it may do so only to entrap us in what are oten cruellerimperatives o its own.3

The word meme is an abbreviation o another, mimeme, which is derived romthe Greek mimesis (imitation). It has now entered the English language. It appearsin the most recent edition o the Oxord English Dictionary,where it is dened as an

element o culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means.A number o writers now employ the term mimeticsthe theory that much ohuman social evolution is based on the dierential spread o units o culture calledmemes (a notion originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book Theselfsh gene). Memes are said to resemble genes in that they produce cultural changethrough a process similar to natural selection: those memes that are passed on byimitation and learning tend to dominate social lie. The concept is catching onast. In a recent book James Bennett argues that over the centuries the English-speaking world has been inested by various mimetic viral plagues which havegained a oothold in the culture beore being expelled. They include continentaleudalism, revolutionary utopianism, French revolutionary idealism and, ocourse, Marxism. My avourite example is slaveism, which Bennett is keen toargue was primarily a Spanish/Portuguese phenomenon which the British eltcompelled to copy until realizing the error o their ways.4

Some conusion has arisen over the denition o the word meme, and indeedin The selfsh gene Dawkins unconsciously misled his readers by claiming that justas genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping rom body to body via

3 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood rites: origins and history o the passions o war (London: Virago, 1997), p. 235.4 James C. Bennett, The Anglosphere challenge: why English-speaking nations will lead the way in the twenty-frst century

(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 2006), p. 5.


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905International Aairs 84:5, 2008 2008 The Author(s). Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute o International Aairs

sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping rombrain to brain by a process which, in the broad sense o the term, can be calledimitation.5 The problem with this account is that it is the gene that is the unit o

selection, even though it is the phenotype which is actually subject to the processo selection. The gene is the replicator, or set o instructions; the phenotype isthe physical maniestation o the organism, the behaviour resulting rom the seto instructions. Dawkins later corrected himsel with the ollowing denition:A meme should be regarded as a unit o inormation residing in a brain. It has adenite structure realised in whatever medium the brain uses or storing inorma-tion . . . This is to distinguish it rom phenotypic eects which are its consequencesin the outside world.6 In other words, a meme is merely a set o instructions, theblueprint, not the product. Yet at the popular level memes still continue to bediscussed in terms o his 1976 denition.

A ar more serious objection to memes is that it is dicult to demonstrate

experimentally that they actually exist. Biologically, a gene is a distinct part o thechromosome. Chemically it consists o DNA. Physically it consists o a doublehelix. As Dawkins himsel acknowledges, memes have not yet ound their Watsonor Crick. Memeswe have to presumeare to be ound in brains, where they arelargely invisible to observation.7 Memes are hypothetical constructs inerred romobservation o behaviour rather than observed in themselves. Does this make themuseless at the explanatory level, as Dawkinss critics suggest?8

Nothing would please meme supporters more than to present the world with alist o detailed, experimentally testable examples. Unortunately, there is no way toestablish experientially whether memes exist. But then it is dicult to prove much

o quantum physics through experimentation. We know, or example, at the veryleast, that we can divide matter into atoms, that those atoms can be divided in turninto the subatomic particleselectrons, protons and neutronsand possibly thatthese particles can themselves be divided into quarks. I say possibly because quarkshave never been observed. It is not entirely unwarranted to argue, as some scien-tists do, that physicists have no business wasting their time on another hypothesis,string theory, which postulates a new eature o nature some 100 million billiontimes smaller than anything we can directly probe through our senses, enhancedor otherwise. The debate is inormed only, in part, by physics. It also involvesdistinct philosophies about how physics should be done. The traditionalists wanttheoretical work to be closely tied to experimental observation. Others think weare ready to tackle questions that are beyond our present technological ability totest empirically.9

The same could be said o memes. In the end, it is a matter o aith that they willone day be demonstrated to exist. What we can say is that the world is beginning

5 Richard Dawkins, The selfsh gene (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1976), p. 192.6 Richard Dawkins, The extended phenotype, quoted in Alister McGrath, Dawkins God: genes, memes and the mean-

ing o lie (Oxord: Blackwell, 2005), p. 123.7 Susan Blackmore, The meme machine (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 1999), p. 5.8 McGrath, Dawkins God, p. 129.9 Brian Greene, The elegant universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions and the quest or the ultimate theory (London:

Vintage, 2000), p. 231.


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to make money out o taking them seriously. In 2004 a group in Caliornia carriedout an experiment in meme production by launching on the market (or the memepool) a new memethe term bright as a popular word or an atheist, in the

attempt to replicate the way in which, or example, the word gay has comealmost exclusively to mean homosexual. (So ar they have not had much success.)The evolutionary psychologist Paul Marsden has even launched a company calledBrand Genetics to help rms identiy and clone strong memes in the marketplace.10Whether or not memes exist, or the idea o them will catch on, I would contendthat meme theory provides a ascinating insight into the origins and evolution owar through the centuries. And, at the very least, it provides a uniying rameworkor thinking about the dierent style o war in the present age.

In all cases, including war, we have to know how a meme replicates itsel. Onesuggestion is the idea o intelligent designin the case o war, through manipu-lation by states or political leaders. War has always, in part at least, been intel-

ligently designed. The best example o this is militarism, a nineteenth-centuryideology that reinorced another, ascism. Another intelligently designed meme,class war, never really took o as Marx and Engels expected because it was hijackedby nationalism, in one particular case by Stalins commitment to socialism in onecountry.

A more compelling explanation or the appeal o war is that memes are passedon rom one generation to the next rather like viruses: they inect a host. William

James wrote that the spreading o religion, which he believed was also transmittedculturally, was due to what he called a mystical germand it was, he wrote, avery common germ or it had created the rank and le o believers.11 Religion

appeals to many because it creates a sense o belonging. Jamess mystical germ wasnot a gene, it was a germ, and germs are caught by inection. So, in that sense, wemay say that war replicates itsel contagiously.

Another explanation, which I nd much more convincing, is Ehrenreichs:that war persists because o its capacity to compete successully with other memes.Assuming memes exist, it is possible to maintain that the survival value o anycultural instructor is the same as its unction: the survival and replication o itsel.A meme, writes Daniel Dennett, is an inormation packet with attitudea recipeor instruction manual or doing something cultural.12 Memes can be translatedinto any language, whether that used by hunter-gatherer societies or that o risksocieties today. They persist because they can be transmitted or copied, and it istheir persistence which is most remarkable. They persist because they are so adapt-able, which is what Clausewitz meant when he wrote that every era ghts wardierently; in every age war has its own distinctive cultural grammar.

And the most convincing explanation or the persistence o war is that thememes that survive interact competitively and combine with others. Those thatsurvive have a transcultural appeal, or fourish in the presence o other memes

10 Oona Strathern,A brie history o the uture (London: Robinson, 2007), p. 301.11 Martin E. Marty, ed., Introduction to William James:the varieties o religious experience, in Daniel Dennett, Break-

ing the spell: religion as a natural phenomenon (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 84.12 Dennett, Breaking the spell, p. 350.


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(such as religion) and thus give rise to what Dawkins calls meme complexes. In theearliest days, simple memes survived by virtue o their universal appeal to humanpsychology. When war became more organized and structured, as society became

more complex, we reached the memeplex stage.

Memeplexes

O course, meme theory has its critics. People dislike the idea that war is a virusthat inects its host, because it is deemed to attack the principle o ree will. ThusDawkins writes that when you plant a meme in a mind you literally parasitize abrain, turning it into a vehicle or the memes propagation in just the way that avirus may parasitize a genetic mechanism o a host cell.13 Dawkins takes religionas a key example. Many religions teach the objectively implausible but subjectivelyappealing doctrine that the soul survives death.14 The idea o immortality has itsel

survived and spread because it caters to wishul thinking, and wishul thinkingcounts because human psychology has a near-universal tendency to let belie becoloured by desire. It is the idea that the soul persists ater death that animated theCrusaders, and that animates suicide bombers in todays Middle East.

Daniel Dennett preers a dierent metaphor: symbiosis. A meme can be symbi-otic in that it encourages sacrice and altruism, attributes without which we wouldnot, as humans, have achieved so much. Dennett is aware that claiming that memesare interested only in their own tness (i.e. their own reproduction) is an argumentagainst human agency, but he reminds us that there are three kinds o meme. Thereare parasites, whose presence lowers the tness o their hosts; commensals, whose

presence is neutral in eect; and mutualists, whose presence enhances the tness oboth the host and the guest.15 We should expect memes to come in all three shapes.Some enhance our tness (childrearing, ood preparation); some are neutral butare important or us in other respects (music, literacy); and some may be positivelyharmul (war). But when we look at the history o war in detail we nd that it ullsall three unctions at the same time. It has made many societies more competitive;it has inspired great art, and enhanced the richness o lie; it has inspired othersto great deeds, not always on the battleeld. As Robert Wright reminds us, untilvery recently war has rarely been zero-sum. Only in the twentieth century didit become so harmul that it threatened at one point to destroy western society,which had mastered and perected it more than any other.16

Whatever argument we preer, writes Mary Midgley, meme theory is stillrather bleak because it suggests that our thoughts tend to aim at their own advan-tage rather than ours. We are let with the prospect that some memes, like war,discourage the exercise o judgement through which we might decide that peace isactually better or us, just as aith (the meme or religionis God just a computervirus, asks Dawkins?) disadvantagesso some claimthe exercise o the sort o

13 Dawkins, The selfsh gene, p. 207.14 Richard Dawkins, The God delusion (London: Bantam, 2006), p. 190.15 Daniel Dennett, Darwins dangerous idea (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 340.16 Robert Wright, Non-zero: the logic o human destiny (London: Vintage, 2001).


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critical judgement by which we might decide that religion too is dangerous or ourhealth. It produces, ater all, inquisitions, witchcrat trials and religious wars.

Midgley voices a second objection which I think is likely to resonate even more

with some critics. I we can explain any war by reerence to a meme that success-ully invades a population that has no immunity to it (the metaphor is telling),then do we not excuse ourselves rom having to understand human psychologypeoples intentions, nightmares and dreams? Do we not, however, need on thecontrary to look into their hearts?17 But is this a valid point? All memes evolve inhuman consciousness. Being involved in thinking, writes Dennett, is a memesway o being tested by natural selection. It tries to have broad appeal.18 War has hadan enormous appeal over the centuries, but its appeal is clearly diminishing, evenin terms o those aspects that or the philosopher and psychologist William Jamesgave it its moral orce, or its romance.

War appealed to so many or so long because it was considered heroic. Today we

seem to have turned our back on heroism. It is not so much that we do not wantour heroes to be what they seem; it is that circumstances seem to prevent themrom being what they wish to become. Nowhere is this more true than in the caseo the word glory, a word which makes many o us distinctly uncomortable.It will be a hopeless ght, wrote the Austrian chie o sta in his diary shortlybeore the First World War. Nevertheless it must be waged, since an old monarchyand a glorious army must not perish without glory.19 Churchill was to invokeglory again in 1940 in encouraging the British people not to surrender. There wasa crucial dierence, o course: he wanted them to ght on, not to go down glori-ously in deeatthough I have little doubt that i that had been the nal outcome

Churchill himsel would have considered it a tting end to the national story.As the historian A. J. P. Taylor once amously remarked (not entirely ironically),Churchill was the price the British people paid or reading history.20

For glory to be part o the script, there had to be a narrative structure. Likeany story, the history o a nation had to have a beginning, a middle and evenan end. Today, war still persists, but it has now been recast as risk management.And it is still oten ought or gloryexcept that the concept has been instrumen-talized. Glory can mean dierent things: honour, worth, price or estimate.Like individuals, nations are still concerned with worth because value is intimatelylinked to authority, especially the authority o the state. I we take glory to meaname or renown, then it may indeed appear applicable only to the premodernera. I we understand it to mean deerence, just due or prestige, then it is stillan important motive or going to war. For most o history war has been one o theprincipal instruments through which reputations have been won.

States may no longer ght to win status, but they do so to retain it. For withit goes something else which is central to power: honour. In our world honour

17 Mary Midgley, The myths we live by (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 70.18 Dennett, Breaking the spell, p. 78.19 Hew Strachan, The First World War(London: Pocket Books, 2006), p. 10.20 A. J. P. Taylor, in The statesman, A. J. P. Taylor, ed., Churchill: our aces and the man (London: Allen Lane,

1969), p. 56.


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means credibility (a word which was introduced into common parlance duringthe Cold War). I war has become risk management, what we are especially anxiousto manage is anything that puts our credibility at risk.

What is important about credibility is that, like honour, it requires the recogni-tion o others. Hobbes told us this three centuries ago: we want to be respectedbecause respect is the currency o power. In the words o Pierre Bourdieu, anindividual who sees himsel through the eyes o others, has need o others orhis existence, because the image he has o himsel is indistinguishable rom thatpresented to him by other people.21 In 1914, Russias honour required it to backSerbia; Austrias required it to issue its ultimatum to the Serbian government. Therest, as they say, is history. In 1939, Britains honour required it to guarantee theborders o Poland even though it was in no position to deend them. Even in theCold War, the credibility o the United States required that a decent intervalshould ollow the deeat o US orces in Vietnam. In pursuit o that end Nixon

and Kissinger prolonged the war until they achieved peace with honour in 1973,though the interval between deeat and South Vietnams eventual all did not lastlong.

Credibility is now the risk ages word o choice. Elsewhere, more old-ashionedhonour oten requires that men infict pain on others. Honour, in that sense, is asocial bond, and winning it back a social obligation. In much o the world, moreover,the deence o honour is not conned to the present. It is shared with the ancestorswith whom it is important to keep aith. Cultures o honour, adds Steven Pinker,spring up because they ampliy human emotions like pride, anger and revenge,and because they reinorce solidarity, the clanship links or gang membership rom

which their members derive saety. They are oten a sensible response to localconditions, whether in LA Central or Aghanistan. Honour represents a kind osocial reality. It exists because everybody agrees it exists, and it must be constantlydeended on a hair-trigger response because it is dangerous not to. To be risk-averse is to invite dishonour, which can be dangerousas Hobbes tells us. On thestreets o our own inner cities the commission o a homicide in revenge or a slightmay even be an obligatory rite o passage into an adult world. To turn the othercheek is not saintly, but stupid, or contemptibly weak.22

In other words, two memeshonour and wareed o what or Hobbes wasone o the chie characteristics o the human race: its need or sel-esteem. Warwill endwhich is to say, we will have an immunity to itonly when we doindeed look into our hearts and discover that we no longer need to take revenge, oreven to seek the esteem o others, at least on the terms only o our own choosing.One o the rst writers to appreciate this was one o the great Scottish Enlighten-ment thinkers (albeit now a largely orgotten one), Lord Kames, or whom revengewas the darling principle o human nature. For him the power o retributionwas the motivating orce o history, and the civilizing principle was its transer

21 Pierre Bourdieu, The sentiment o honour in Kabayle society, quoted in J. G. Priestiany, ed., Honour andshame: the values o Mediterranean society (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), p. 211, in Richard Sennett,Respect: the ormation o character in an age o inequality (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 55.

22 Steven Pinker, The blank slate: the modern denial o human nature (London: Allen Lane, 2002), p. 327.


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rom private to public hands. Gradually, the law had become the only legitimateavenger. There perhaps never was in government, a revolution o greater impor-tance than this. For, once they surrendered personal recourse to the lex talionis

(the law o retaliation), people became aware or the rst time not only o stateauthority but also o civil society. They becamesocialbeings as well as law-abidingones. With all the condence o an Enlightenment thinker, Kames even oresaw atime when civil society would polish its members to the point where no one wouldwant to avenge themselves on those who had wronged them.23

Unortunately, we are a long way rom that noble vision. Revenge is one othe principal themes o terrorism. People still wish to be avenged or slights (otenless real than they imagine) and or humiliations to which they eel they havebeen subjected (including insults to the ancestors, or the contract with the dead isoten stronger than that with the living). Dishonour is deeply elt. Whatever elsedistinguishes us as a species, sel-loathing must be high on the list. Degradation

matters. We are what Nietzsche called the beast with red cheeks, the only animalon the planet that can blush when it sees itsel in the mirror. As Lichtenberg putit pithily, when looking into a mirror an ape should not expect to see an apostlestaring back. That is why humiliation matters. Degradation is especially elt whenit involves the body being subjected to pain: to constant bodily searches at Israelisecurity checkpoints on the West Bank or physical violations in Abu Ghraib. Itis the potential to imagine our bodies transgured in the next world into purespirit, and yet disgured in this, that makes us human. Our sense o indignity isthe essence o dignity.

Today war has readapted again. Revenge is one o the most potent memes o

all (keeping aith with the ancestors, with the community, with the aith). Thecheap bombthe suicide bomberhas lodged itsel in our collective conscious-ness as one o the key tropes in the war on terror. Perhaps in the suicide bomberwe see someone who lives more intensely, who overcomes the oblivion o deathbecause it is only through killing that sel-respect can be won back. It is throughthe measure o his sacrice that the suicide bomber wins the respect o amilyand community. Then again, the motives may be more personal. Some suicidebombers are prepared to engage in the ekstatis o killing. We imagine that at thepoint o extinction others may experience a superabundance o lie that fares upmagnicently into a contempt o death. Ideologically, at least, suicide bombingis one way by which respect can be won back.In the western world this too islittle recognizedbut it should be, because it is a particularly tenacious meme: itencourages imitation; it is highly mimetic.

The conficts o the uture may arise between those who have ound war tobe zero-sum because o its risks and those who are willing to take risks to asserttheir identity, or earn a living. As Daniel Dennett writes, in the new world thatColumbus opened up to European expansion it was European germs that broughtto the brink o extinction local populations that had no immunity against them.

23 Quoted in J. M. Opal, Vengeance and civility: a new look at early American statecrat,Journal o the HistoricalSociety 8: 1, March 2008, pp. 612.


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As a result they were almost entirely wiped out in the space o two generations.In the twenty-rst century, it is memes, not genes, that may threaten the rest ous. Indeed, toxic memes are everywhere in the orm o xenophobia, undamen-

talism and religious anaticism. In our own day alse prophets and Messiahs stillabound.24

States, too, want to take their own revenges; and the United States justhappens to be strong enough to seek revenge in the most ruthless manner. Theoriginal Enlightenment sponsors o Americas bid or independence were inspiredby Kamess story; they too believed revenge might one day wither. By the time oAndrew Jackson, the vision had largely vanished. Walter Russell Mead identiesassertive nationalism as the Jacksonian tradition in American politics, and it hascertainly been a prominent eature o the Bush years. It was Jackson, too, who wasthe rst president to encourage Americans to turn to pistols, dirks and cane-swordsto avenge insults themselves, and not to rely on the state. It was the 1820s genera-

tion that talked o the vindictive wrath o a justly deended and law-renewingcommunity.25 Americans soon orgot the wise words o John Adams that theyshouldnt think they were more virtuous than other people. Power always thinksit has great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension o the weak (MadeleineAlbright: We are the indispensable nation); and that it is doing Gods servicewhen it is violating all His laws (Albright: Multilateral i we can, unilateral inecessary).26 My own concern is that recent practices, including extraordinaryrendition and the immunity granted to private security companies in Iraq, suggestthat western market states may be increasingly willing to contract out theirrevenge to others.27

Reconceptualizing war

Meme theory is still in its inancy. I suspect it is unlikely to be widely acceptedas demonstrably true. But then, does that really matter? Memes are useul not ortheir scientic merit alone but also or moral reasons: they encourage us to thinkin new ways. At one point Dawkins himsel speaks o them simply as an analogy.Dennett, while making stronger claims or their scientic status, also adds thatwhether or not the meme perspective can be turned into science, in its philo-sophical guise it has already done much more good than harm.28 What good has itdone? Let me make three claims.

First, it reminds us that our humanity is shared. Not only do we all eel pain, weall eel shame; war is a product o nature and nurture, and the enemy is not somealien other that it is impossible to comprehend, let alone talk to. Memeplexes arepolitical realms. Whatever theory we come up with to explain the motivations

24 Dennett, Breaking the spell, p. 304.25 Opal, Vengeance and civility, p. 84.26 Quoted in Andrew J. Bacevich, Illusions o managing history: the enduring relevance o Reinhold Niebuhr,

Historically Speaking 10: 3, Jan.Feb. 2008, p. 26.27 On the market states, see Philip Bobbitt, Terror and consent (London: Allen Lane, 2008).28 Midgley, The myths we live by, p. 68.


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o terrorists, they will have to be engaged politically. We and they are not twodierent species inhabiting the same planet. Risk management may not be heroicbut it is sensible; it allows us to buy time until some o the most intractable actors

can be olded back into the political process.For what a truly depoliticizeddiscourse might look likethat is, one in which

common humanity cannot be assumedwe must turn to science ction. Letme cite an episode rom Star Trek: the next generation, in which the captain o theEnterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, debates his ate with the Borg Collective. The Borgis a collective entity in which all individuality has been repressed and everybodyworks or the good o the whole. It represents everything humanity is not. It is theultimate alien, writes Adam Roberts, the true other, because it is not even worthconsidering what makes or its otherness.

The Federation which Picard represents is centred on one planetthe Earth(Sector 001 in the series). It is also metaphorically centred on core human values

and belies which are still at the heart o our concept o sel. The Borg, by contrast,have no centre, no purpose or sense o meaning. They have neither honour norcourage, complains the Klingon warrior Wor. They are a meme-less just as theyare a gene-less community, as Picard nds out or himsel ater he is captured.

Picard: I will resist you to my last ounce o strength.Borg: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is utileyour culture will adapt to serve

as ours.Picard: Impossible! My culture is based on reedom and sel-determination.Borg: Freedom is irrelevant. Sel-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.

Picard: We would rather die.Borg: Death is irrelevant.

The text is pretty banalespecially when it appears on the printed pagebutthe importance o the exchange lies in the total otherness o the enemy. For theBorg do not claim that they are stronger than the Federation. They simply say,Strength is irrelevant. They do not have dierent values; they have no valuesthat we would recognize as human. They do not say, Your strength is insucient,which would actually mean, by implication, We value our superior strength.Instead, they insist that strength does not gure or compute. And they do notvalue lie because they cannot imagine the concept o sacrice, which is why orthem death really is irrelevant. It doesnt compute. Picard, concludes Roberts,cannot enter imaginatively into their world any more than they can enter into his.There can be no exchange and no negotiation.29

It is impossible to imagine such a dialogue between a hostage and a hostage-taker in Beirut in 1983, still less between a suicide bomber and his intended targetin Israel today, should the ormer survive to be interrogated. Todays world sees aclash o wills involving dierent understandings o sacrice, dierent meanings odeath, as well as dierent concepts o honour, both o them refecting the meme

29 Adam Roberts, Science fction (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1667.


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o revenge. We live in a dangerous and deeply divided world, but it is still onethat is recognizably human. What makes it a human world is that it is mimeticimitation (in particular the reciprocal imitation o desire), not originality, is the

denitive mark o our species. Recent scientic exploration o imitation (suchas the research o Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolati on mirror neurons)suggests that imitative behaviour is about to become a new paradigm in the behav-ioural sciences.30 And never beore has imitation been encouraged so much, andso quickly, as it has been through new technologies such as the internet, televisionand cellphone cameras. Ours is a deeply imitative age.

Second, meme theory encourages us to remember that war has its own logic.Clausewitz described war as a chameleon which incessantly adapts itsel to existingconditions. One o the memes explored by Susan Blackmore in her book Thememe machine is very specic to our post-modern times: abduction by aliens. Itused to be highly competitive in the meme poolby the end o the 1990s 3.7

million Americans claimed to have been abducted. A mimetic approach, she insists,provides the most likely explanation or the phenomenon. Many people suerwithout knowing it rom sleep paralysis. Some wake up, apparently, convincedthat they have been abducted. X-Files conspiracy theories have made this memeespecially tenacious. It was dicult to challenge because the aliens were consid-ered skilled in inducing amnesia and leaving behind ew, i any, physical traces otheir presence. And governments, i they knew about it, were not telling. It was aparticularly successul meme because it provided an explanation or an unpleasantphysical experience. It had great appeal, especially in Middle America, which hadlong been seized by conspiracy theories, beginning with another insidious threat,

communism, in the 1950s.31

But every conspiracy theory burns itsel out in the end. Over time it becomesless contagious. In the wake o 9/11 it seems to have been replaced by a dierentear, that o terrorism. Indeed, alien abduction stories ceased to hit the news virtu-ally overnight. UFO magazines have gone out o circulation. Aliens have disap-peared rom the collective imagination, as have the websites devoted to monitoringthem. More immediate threats are now at hand.

But we should be in no doubt that the strongest memes survive or a reason:they appeal to the imagination. Writing our years beore 9/11, Bryan Appleyardexplained the ubiquity o the abduction meme in the conclusion to a book,Aliens:why they are here.Aliens were here, he maintained, whether real or demonic, orboth at the same time. He conessed that in the course o writing the book hehad moved rom scepticism to belie and nally to acceptance. He had come toaccept belie in alien abduction or what it wasan essential expression o ourcontinued longing or metaphysical meaning, even though we live in risk-averse,

30 Rene Girard, Evolution and conversion: dialogues o the origins o culture (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 4. ThomasKuhn makes the same point about science when he says that we have overvalued originality here too. Kuhngives the name normal science to the limited work which proceeds according to pre-set plans without rais-ing new questions. In Kuhns thinking, original thinking is an abnormal activity or scientists. It is not whatscience is about.

31 Blackmore, The meme machine, pp. 1768.


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post-heroic times. It was ultimately a maniestation o our need or monstersand, o course, saviours waiting in the wings. His cultural explanation may ringtrue or those outside looking in at the western obsession with terrorism. For it,

too, at times seems to express a yearning or a metaphysical reality, as well as totap into an obsession with conspiracies, and to capture a proound concern aboutthe vulnerability o the societies we have become.32 Terrorism, o course, is realthere is nothing more real than getting blown upbut it is also subjective. For wesee terrorism as a scourge, a plague, an exogenous or endogenous reality. Somepreer to treat it as a orce o nature.

All our popular obsessions, writes Harold Bloom, including alien abductionand near-death experience, testiy to our expectation o release rom the burdenso a society that is weary with its sense o belatedness or ateringthe ear thatwe have somehow arrived ater the main event.33 Perhaps our own age is one thatwe nd so boring that many o us aspire unconsciously to transcend itin deance

o the old Chinese curse about living in interesting times. Our deep ears andneuroses may even be the collectively unwilled expression o a generalized condi-tion, the maniestation o an unexpressed yearning to move beyond an age o riskinto something more heroic. The war on terror is merely the latest maniestationo a human needto be earul o something that transcends the everyday.

Finally, meme theory is useul in illustrating one other reality. There are noKantian solutions (democratic peace theory) or magic bullets that will bring warto an end. For war must not be seen in isolation. Hence the importance o thememeplex. Midgley hersel makes this point when discussing genes. We cannoteliminate war through genetic means by targeting, or example, the gene or

aggression. That such a gene exists, she has no doubt. There is good evidence,ater all, that there is a centre o the brain specically concerned with it. But a geneshould never be seen in isolation. Our capacity or anger is deeply interwoven withour capacity or ear, love, respect and contempt. The clue to ending aggressionis not genetic engineering; it is to extend the sympathies we eel to a circle widerthan our immediate amily, our tribe, our community or even our nation. It is tobe less earul o the other; more charitable to strangers, more respectul o otherpeoples customs, and less contemptuous o the mores o tribes other than ourown.34

War, in the end, is only a means, it is not an end in itsel. Most states nowpractise it in the name o peace; many non-state actors pursue it as a way to revengethemselves on others. For many terrorists, it is the means that count most (whichmakes it an end in itsel, a atal contradiction in terms). This is why all conven-tions to ban war are useless in the absence o any wider civilizing process at workwhich might predispose us not to harm the people who harm us, or to insist ondeending our own honour come what may. I this is not a very optimistic noteon which to conclude, so be it.

32 Bryan Appleyard,Aliens: why they are here (London: Scribner, 2005).33 Appleyard, Aliens, p. 295.34 Mary Midgley, Evolution as a religion: strange hopes and even stranger ears (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 61.

I1 Christopher Coker,War Memes and Memeplexes

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