Nobody likes to have an abortion, and nobody would like to have one even under the best of conditions. Things are much better now than they were in the dark days of back-alley butchers; and they could be made much better yet if it weren’t for miles of punitive regulations and red tape made with the explicit purpose of making abortions harder for legally vulnerable women to obtain. But even without the cultural bullies and screaming protestors, even without the government-imposed cartel costs and the intense curtailment of options for procedures, your choices would still in the end be between invasive surgery of some form or another or drugs that make you nauseous and bleeding over the course of a few days. Of course abortion is not the horrendous experience that anti-choicers repeatedly make it out to be; it is far safer and quicker and easier on both patient and provider than nearly every other kind of surgery that there is. It’s safer and less psychologically taxing than giving birth. (Somehow these comparisons don’t seem to get made very often by either the anti-choice leadership or their foot soldiers. How strange.) But root canals are very safe and relatively simple too; that doesn’t mean that anyone is excited to have one.

But so what? Nobody goes around talking about the terrible tragedy of root canals either, or about the need to reach across the divide to unite with the anti-root-canal community (I take it that there are some Christian Scientist types who oppose dental surgery out of deeply felt religious conviction) in order to prevent unwanted tooth decay. Nobody feels the need to prefix every remark about their support for the right to get a root canal with a half-hour of qualifications and apologies. Yet the Party Hack wing of the Democratic leadership seems to have decided, yet again, that this is just what they need. Here, for example, is how Hillary Rodham Clinton decided to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest political triumphs for women’s liberation in recent history:

In a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters near the New York State Capitol, Mrs. Clinton firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of legalized abortion and praising the influence of “religious and moral values” on delaying teenage girls from becoming sexually active.

There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate — we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished and loved, Mrs. Clinton said.

Her speech came on the same day as the annual anti-abortion rally in Washington marking the Roe v. Wade anniversary.

…

Mrs. Clinton, widely seen as a possible candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, appeared to be reaching out beyond traditional core Democrats who support abortion rights. She did so not by changing her political stands, but by underscoring her views in preventing unplanned pregnancies, promoting adoption, recognizing the influence of religion in abstinence and championing what she has long called teenage celibacy.

She called on abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion campaigners to form a broad alliance to support sexual education — including abstinence counseling — family planning, and morning-after emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault as ways to reduce unintended pregnancies.

We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women, Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Most of this is true enough, as far as it goes. Nobody wants abortion instead of widesperad contraception and responsible sexual education. Nobody likes to get an abortion. And in the present political and cultural climate, all too many women are made to feel far worse about their decision to have an abortion than should be. Fine. But the latter isn’t an unchangeable given; it’s a political fact that is enforced by a constant and intentional climate of harassment and intimidation. And the fact that we’d rather women were able to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place is no reason to spend hours hand-wringing over it and apologizing for it unless you already think that there’s something wrong with getting an abortion. But why should you think that?

Actually, there is one other reason that you might do all that hand-wringing. You might be cavilling in spite of your own beliefs because you think that kind of dissembling is politically useful. I hate to say it about Hillary — she gave such a great speech at the March and all — but it’s hard to know what else to conclude about this particular strategy:

Mrs. Clinton’s address came as the Democratic Party itself engages in its own re-examination of its handling of the issue in the wake of Senator John Kerry’s loss in the presidential race.

Democratic senators such as Harry Reid of Nevada and Dianne Feinstein of California have also pressed for a greater focus on reducing unintended pregnancies, and some Democratic consultants have urged that party leaders mint new language to reach voters who identified moral values as a top issue for them in last November’s election.

Jesus Christ people. Look. No. Just, no.

First, you’re not trying to mint new language. You’re repeating the same crap that you did for the past 12 years. Here, for example, is how Electable John Kerry answered questions on abortion during the second and third debates:

Mr. Schieffer Senator Kerry a new question for you. The New York Times reports that some Catholic archbishops are telling their church members that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate like you because you support a woman’s right to choose an abortion and unlimited stem call research. What is your reaction to that?

Mr. Kerry I respect their views. I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views, but I disagree with them, as do many. I believe that I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice, a woman’s choice is between a woman, God and her doctor. And that’s why I support that. Now I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade. The president has never said whether or not he would do that. But we know from the people he’s tried to appoint to the court he wants to. I will not. I will defend the right of Roe v. Wade.

Now with respect to religion, you know, as I said I grew up a Catholic. I was an altar boy. I know that throughout my life this has made a difference to me. And as President Kennedy said when he ran for president, he said, I’m not running to be a Catholic president. I’m running to be a president who happens to be Catholic. Now my faith affects everything that I do and choose. There’s a great passage of the Bible that says What does it mean my brother to say you have faith if there are no deeds? Faith without works is dead. And I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people. That’s why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith. But I know this: that President Kennedy in his inaugural address told of us that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own. And that’s what we have to – I think that’s the test of public service.

And before that in the second debate:

DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?

KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

But I can counsel people. I can talk reasonably about life and about responsibility. I can talk to people, as my wife Teresa does, about making other choices, and about abstinence, and about all these other things that we ought to do as a responsible society.

But as a president, I have to represent all the people in the nation. And I have to make that judgment.

Now, I believe that you can take that position and not be pro-abortion, but you have to afford people their constitutional rights. And that means being smart about allowing people to be fully educated, to know what their options are in life, and making certain that you don’t deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can’t afford it otherwise.

That’s why I think it’s important. That’s why I think it’s important for the United States, for instance, not to have this rigid ideological restriction on helping families around the world to be able to make a smart decision about family planning.

You’ll help prevent AIDS.

You’ll help prevent unwanted children, unwanted pregnancies.

You’ll actually do a better job, I think, of passing on the moral responsibility that is expressed in your question. And I truly respect it.

Apparently the apparatchiks have decided that there isn’t enough hand-wringing and pandering to the sensibilities of the Religious Right there. I don’t know how you could add any more hand-wringing and searching for “common ground” with the Christian Right there without the references to a woman’s right to an abortion disappearing entirely, but there you have it.

Guess what? It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Why in the world do they think that it would? Are they trying to win votes from the Christian Right? Do they honestly think that moving the political debate over reproductive freedom back from abortion to the Sanger-era fights over birth control and sex education is going to improve the political climate in this country?

In other words: stop treating the right to abortion like you treat free speech rights for the Klan. If you don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion then quit hemming and hawing forever about how much you respect the position of people who do and how much you’d like to work with them on birth control. You’re wasting your time: a lot if not most ofthem also hate birth control and sex education anyway. And in the process of wasting your time you are also dissembling about your real motives and spitting on women’s struggle for freedom.

Incidentally, Rox, among the reasons I like Howard Dean as much as I do is that in the heat of an election, this is how he answers a question about abortion:

Diane Rehm: We have seen reports that builders across the country are refusing to participate in the construction of Planned Parenthood buildings. What would you do about the threats to freedom for a woman to choose?

Howard Dean: Well, I think that’s a very dangerous game those builders are playing, especially in the city of Austin, which is where it’s going on. Were I down there I would immediately refuse to do business with any of the contractors who were boycotting that. So all groups can play that game; you have the right-wingers playing the game today, but other groups who may disagree with that can also play that game. And I think that’s a mistake for them to do that.

I am pro-choice. I’m a doctor; I frankly believe that it’s none of the government’s business to interfere in a woman’s making decisions about her own healthcare. And I tend not to be very supportive of efforts to enforce political points of view on individuals’ healthcare, and that’s what’s going on in Austin, Texas.

— On the Diane Rehms show, WAMU, 2004-12-01 10:00am (they don’t seem to have a transcript; the question is around 45’45” on the audio version)

Elsewhere he’s also directly, and without apology or cavil, taken on both parental consent restrictions and late-term abortion bans, and pointedly insisted that on the issue of abortion, We can change our vocabulary but I don’t think we ought to change our principles..

Second, even if this were a new tack, and even if there were any reason to believe that it would get anything worth accomplishing accomplished, why would you think that women’s control over their own bodies is an acceptable bargaining chip? Women are not pawns to be sacrificed for better board position. Lots of Democrats bolted the party in the late 1960s to become Republicans because the national leadership would no longer keep silent about Jim Crow and the efforts of efforts such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally broke the Eastland-Wallace white supremacist stranglehold on the Southern state parties. That lost the Democrats a lot of voters. The difference even lost them several elections. So what? Does anyone think that it would be a good idea to endlessly fret about how to reach out across the divide and find common ground to bring the Klan vote back into the party?

To hell with that. If you’re going to get hung up on winning political office, this is not how you should be trying to do it. Falling back on the apparatchiks and electable candidates using electably mealy-mouthed rhetoric doesn’t work and it wouldn’t have gained anything worth winning even if it did. Meanwhile, the other side won’t believe it, your side won’t pull out the stops for you, and the people in the middle won’t know where the hell you actually stand.

If Democrats are looking for new language with which to frame the abortion debate, I’d like to suggest a good old standard: ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY.

My Monday posts are, first and foremost, about historical memory. I conceived of them originally as an opportunity to knock knuckle-headed mythistory in a way that would be useful for the web community, because part of bringing our shared history into our living memory is a struggle against forgetting, especially in the form of covering over memory with comfortable falsehoods. Last week, though, I took a bit of a break in order to say some things about Martin Luther King Jr. and a history that most of us do know, even if only through a glass, darkly. This week, too, I’m changing the plan a bit; not to say anything, but to commemorate something that I have nothing to say about, because there are are no words.

This week, January 27, will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.

I’ve mentioned before how much I love the Internet’s resources for cheap political mockery, and I thought that I had Dick Hordak Cheney all figured out. But the following amazing snapshot, nabbed from Rox’s Write Your Own Caption #79, makes me think I had it all wrong. Yes, it’s hard to avoid the resemblence between ol’ Dick and the ruthless leader of the Evil Horde, but in light of the recent photographic evidence, there is one undeniable question that must be asked:

Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?

Today marks the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, a limited and limiting bit of jurisprudence, yes, but also the Supreme Court’s landmark recognition–even if in a partial and problematic way–that women have a human right to control their own internal organs, including the reproductive ones. It’s sometimes frustrating that Roe is the ruling that we’re stuck having to defend, but January 22 is the jubilee day in which most abortion was decriminalized in every state in the U.S., and it is a good day to celebrate the remarkable story of the radical feminist movement. (You do know that it was radical feminists who organized the first abortion speak-outs and who drove the movement for abortion law repeal rather than weak health-of-the-mother reform, don’t you?) Roe was the capstone victory in a remarkable struggle that exploded, seemingly out of nowhere, with the first abortion speak-out in 1969, and transformed the lives of millions of women for the better over the course of 4 years. And if that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

In honor of the occasion:

• Most of what I want to say today are things that I’ve already said, in Happy Roe v. Wade Day!, April March, Why We Marched, and Pro-Choice on Everything, Part I.

• Digging even deeper into the archives, I can’t encourage you enough to give a read to Lucinda Cisler’s Abortion law repeal (sort of). It’s a remarkable, sometimes depressingly prescient, essay written four years before Roe, on the opportunities and dangers that lay ahead, and on the need to be consistent and completely unapologetic about abortion rights. It’s a woman’s right to control her body that’s at stake here, and there’s no excuse for letting anti-choicers Mau-Mau us into acting as if they had some kind of monopoly on moral discourse.

  The most important thing feminists have done and have to keep doing is to insist that the basic reason for repealing the laws and making abortions available is justice: women’s right to abortion.

  …

  There are many reasons why a woman might seek a late abortion, and she should be able to find one legally if she wants it. She may suddenly discover that she had German measles in early pregnancy and that her fetus is deformed; she may have had a sudden mental breakdown; or some calamity may have changed the circumstances of her life: whatever her reasons, she belongs to herself and not to the state.

• Lauryn at Feministing exhorts:

  Hopefully you have some kickass events planned for the day, however, if Thursday’s festivities left you feeling like you have little left to celebrate, then take a moment to reflect on what you’re willing to do to for the reproductive rights movement.

  Whether it’s a commitment to start escorting at your local abortion clinic, writing a quick email to Congress, taking a pro-choice picture, making a donation, or posting on BushvChoice–just get busy.

  Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, encourages that: “We need to talk to neighbors around the kitchen table about the values of freedom and privacy; we don’t run away from the arguments. Our movement is on stronger ground when we take seriously the moral dimensions of the issue.”

• Of course Keenan is absolutely right that there is a moral principle here, and it’s one worth being unapologetic over. The Well-Timed Period makes that especially clear by offering us a harrowing history lesson. Criminalizing abortion is State violence against women. We must never go back.

• BlackFeminism.org marks the occasion by reminding that for all too many communities, Roe is only a slip of paper, since abortion providers have been run out by the bullies, the thugs, and the constant daily assault from reactionary state governments. Today is a day to celebrate what we’ve won; but it’s also a day to commit ourselves to a struggle that is far from over.

• And finally, L. reminds us of just how far we have come, and how important that struggle has been:

  So just do me a favor and thank dumb luck or the deity of your choice that you were born in an age of reasonably effective birth control and open, legal abortion Better yet, thank your mothers and your grandmothers, for what they forced into being and what they lived through, and admire their strength without being nostalgic for its necessity. You don’t have to wallow in any grim hypothetical details, though there are plenty to be had. Just pause for a few seconds and consider that, yeah, ok, it really is better this way.

In the course of repeating a game the other day, I mentioned that I don’t like meme-talk, and pointed to an older post that, among other things, gives a short version of my reasons for saying that there are no such things as memes. Thing is, in that post I said I was giving the argument short shrift, and said I’d probably come back to it later–and then I never did. Since (1) I had cause to mention it lately, (2) a commentator recently prodded me on my abbreviated version of the argument, and (3) in memoriam of Rox’s last Random Ten–a fun weblog game unfortunately mislabeled a meme–I’d like to make good on that at last. Consider this the Friday Anti-Meme, if you will. Rox may not be continuing to spread a fun idea for talking about music anymore, but by God you will get a cranky philosophical disquisition that spends too much time talking about how we talk about silly web games. (It’s not that I have anything against people who use the word meme to describe the ideas for posts that they spread. At worst it’s a bit of an offense against my prose aesthetic. But I do have reasons for hoping that the word will meet a swift and ignominious demise; and if this contributes to it, well, so much the better.)

So what’s all the fuss about, anyway? Well, we’re not just talking about weblog posting games where you encourage others to join, of course. What is all is the notion of a meme supposed to encompass? Here’s how Susan Blackmore, quoting and explicating from Richard Dawkins’ original discussion in The Selfish Gene (1976), puts it:

At the very end of the book he asked an obvious, if provocative, question. Are there any other replicators [besides DNA-based genes] on our planet? The answer, he claimed, is Yes. Staring us in the face, though still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup of culture, is another replicator — a unit of imitation.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

(I, for one, won’t forgive such a clunker of an attempt at cutesy neologism. But let’s move on.)

As examples he suggested tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. He mentioned scientific ideas that catch on and propagate themselves around the world by jumping from brain to brain. He wrote about religions as groups of memes with a high survival value, infecting whole societies with belief in a God or an afterlife. He talked about fashions in dress or diet, and about ceremonies, customs and technologies — all of which are spread by one person copying another. Memes are stored in human brains (or books or inventions) and passed on by imitation.

In a few pages he laid the foundations for understanding the evolution of memes. He discussed their propagation by jumping from brain to brain, likened them to parasites infecting a host, treated them as physically realised living structures, and showed how mutually assisting memes will gang together in groups just as genes do. Most important, he treated the meme as a replicator in its own right. He complained that many of his colleagues seemed unable to accept the idea that memes would spread for their own benefit, independently of any benefit to the genes. In the last analysis they wish always to go back to biological advantage to answer questions about human behaviour. Yes, he agreed, we got our brains for biological (genetic) reasons but now we have them a new replicator has been unleashed. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old (Dawkins, 1976, 193-4). In other words, memetic evolution can now take off without regard to its effects on the genes.

Well, Dawkins and Blackmore are certainly right to knock their colleagues’ heads together if they insist on trying to find some way to tie every widespread cultural phenomenon to some sort of adaptation for genetic fitness (except in the very broad sense that human intelligence, as such, allows for such phenomena through its extreme versatility, and human intelligence is itself adaptive). Good for them. Unfortunately, the alternative they offer is on no better grounds. What they are claiming to do is to introduce a new technical term and a new theoretical framework that will give us interesting, useful, and accurate accounts of a huge array of cultural phenomena. Let’s keep in mind just how various the facts they’re claiming to explain are; they explicitly include:

1. the popularity of tunes and catch-phrases
2. fashions in dress
3. cuisine
4. the inculcation (and adaptation) of customs and etiquette
5. styles of art and architecture
6. the spread of ideas and beliefs
7. religious belief, evangelism and conversion
8. the rise and fall of scientific theories
9. the adoption of technologies and useful inventions
10. the preservation of key elements of (1)-(9) in the form of literature, story-telling, articles, blueprints, recipes, etc.
11. the adaptation, modification, and sometimes disappearance of (1)-(10) over time

If you really could come up with a unified science to take all of these phenomena into account, then it truly would be a discovery of Newtonian (or Darwinian) proportions. Dawkins and Blackmore think they have got it: the concept of self-replicating information patterns, and a research programme based on investigating the selective pressures at work on the replicators. Just as research into the selective pressures on genes can do the heavy lifting to explain the vast biodiversity of our world, the idea goes, research into the selective pressures on bits of culture can offer the basis for a Grand Unified Theory of cultural development and human diversity.

If the parallel between selfish genes and bits of culture can be drawn, that is. But that’s easier said than done. For that parallel to hold, and for memetic accounts to do any explanatory work from it, we’ll need to say something about what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to be fit, and what the selective pressures on them in a given environment are. In order to draw a good parallel, we need to cash out fitness like we do in evolutionary biology–in terms of reproductive success, i.e., the replicator’s shot at making copies of itself. The whole research programme, then, depends on an account of what it means for tunes, catch-phrases, superstitions, religious beliefs, scientific theories, poems, weblog games, customs, and more to replicate themselves. So what is the account? Well, Dawkins says, it’s jumping from brain to brain; memes replicate when they spread to another person. Or, to be more precise, when one person spreads them to another.

And that’s the problem. To talk about how bits of culture replicate, you need to talk about the reasons people have for spreading, or for taking up, an idea, belief, device, etc.

Yet memetics can’t get us one step closer to understanding these reasons. The whole point of memetics, as a science of culture, is supposed to be that it can give us accurate and interesting explanations of cultural phenomena from the standpoint of selection of the fittest. But there’s an important disanalogy here between evolutionary biology and the study of culture: organisms can, and the astronomically large majority of organisms do, replicate their genes blindly. That is to say, they can replicate their genes without intending or desiring to do so; since of all the species in the known Universe only one understands how babies are made (let alone population genetics), most genes are replicated this way. There is usually a causal link between an organism’s interests or desires or choices and the replication of the genes that may determine or influence them, but there’s no conceptual link; you can spell out what makes for the replication of a gene, and what makes a gene fit, without any essential reference to the interests or desires or choices of its vehicle. Not so for memes; the link between the fitness of a idea, belief, device, game, etc. and the reasons a person does or doesn’t have for passing it on or taking it up is not just causal, but logical. Those reasons may be very simple: you hum a song you heard on the radio because the melody is nice; you tell your child not to bite you because it hurts. Or they may be very complex: scientists begin to adopt the Alvarez theory of the K-T extinction because several complex geological findings tend to support it over other plausible candidates; Dada Anti-Art flourishes in the world of visual art and art criticism because of an intricate knot of political, aesthetic, and philosophical influences including the devastation of the Great War, a perception that the possibilities for modern painting had been exhausted, and the modernist ethic of rebellion against stale convention. But whatever the reasons are, it is essential that there are some reasons; otherwise what we are discussing is not a part of culture, but rather some kind of acquired tic or reflex.

That leaves memetics in a nasty bind. Since there is no way to give an account of the replication or fitness of spreading bits of culture independent of facts about their hosts’ reasons for spreading them, memetic explanations of cultural diversity don’t have the explanatory ground to stand on that genetic explanations of biodiversity do, and must fall into one of two degenerate patterns:

1. They could fall back on some understanding of people and their reasons for accepting and spreading ideas–making the account accurate but completely vacuous. The explanation here depends on the selection of fit over unfit ideas, but the criteria for determining whether an idea is fit or not depends on entirely on understanding acts such as giving evidence, drawing conclusions or committing fallacies, weighing alternatives, informing or deceiving, manipulating, explicating, misdirecting, ignoring, revealing, confusing, and all the other things that people do when they talk with one another. But that just means that the memetic explanation is entirely parasitic on explanations drawn from other disciplines–logic, for example, or rhetoric, or psychology. If those other explanations are good ones, then you may really get an explanation of why an idea has spread so well; but in that explanation memetics will be contributing nothing more than argot. The notions of memes and selective fitness and the rest will just be along for the ride, as terminological placeholders for the non-memetic analytical categories that are doing the real explanatory work.

2. If, on the other hand, they try to offer an explanation that doesn’t refer, either overtly or covertly, to people’s reasons for accepting and spreading ideas, then the meme-terminology will indeed do some special explanatory work of its own; the problem is that it must issue in conclusions that are obviously false. In order to do real explanatory work a memetic account would have to spell out some factor that makes an idea, belief, etc. fit in terms that are independent of facts about hosts (that is, us) and the reasons that we have for adopting or rejecting it. But you can’t do it, and if you tried to, the degree to which your explanation invoked terms that have nothing to do with the person’s reasons would be the degree to which you were treating the object of your study as something other than a cultural product. (If your explanation for a person falling to her knees five times a day has nothing to do with her reasons for accepting and acting on the idea that she ought to, then you’re not explaining a ritual; you’re explaining a repeated fit.) Any non-vacuous memetic account has to be false, because it attempts to explain by irrelevancies.

A would-be memeticist might try to avoid the dilemma by claiming that my second horn depends on an overly rosy view of the average human being’s rationality. Is it really wrong to say that a lot of customs, slogans, etc. aren’t the products of reason? But that would just be a cheat: there’s a difference between explaining a cultural product by reference to bad reasons people have for adopting it, and explaining it without reference to any reasons people have for adopting it. Among the things I said you have to understand in order to understand how some beliefs and ideas spread are things like deceiving and confusing and misdirecting. It’s certainly true that there are some beliefs–superstitions, for example–that persist because people adopt them for bad reasons. But a memetic account that refers only to the bad reasons that a person might have for adopting a belief is no less vacuous than a memetic account that refers to all the reasons they might have had; it’s still entirely parasitic on our understanding of people’s reasons for spreading certain beliefs. The only difference is that it is also less charitable, and so more likely to be false. In fact, this precise confusion seems to be at the root of many if not most memetic accounts: since you can’t intelligibly give an account of cultural practices under option (2), but the memeticist wants to avoid explanations that are obviously entirely parasitic on an understanding of logic and psychology, they try to cheat their way into (2) by restricting the range of reasons that they’ll consider to the bad ones. I think this goes a long way toward explaining, for example, the common memetic explanation for widespread norms for altruism by appeal to the likelihood that people who get the meal will listen to the sermon, or that mutual back-scratching will benefit the scratchers. It’s certainly true that these may be part of the reason why people exhort others to be nice, and listen to others who so exhort them. But why not also explain the widespread norms by reference to, say, the notion that humans can see it’s true that they have a duty to be generous and not cruel? The past century of psychoanalysis and secularism notwithstanding, the fact that an explanation of human behavior is ennobling isn’t always a good reason to regard it as false.

This may also help to explain why memetics talk rarely progresses beyond some appeals to elementary folk psychology concealed under cutesy pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. Smuggling in the folk psychology keeps the account from being false or simply unintelligible–as in (2)–and imposing the flashy argot in between the real (logical, rhetorical, psychological) explanations and the audience directs their attention away from the degree to which–as in (1)–the account is, where it gets something right, entirely parasitic on some non-memetic explanation of human behavior.

Omar K. Ravenhurst argued, in reply to my previous post, that the dependence of memetic accounts on other disciplines might not pose any problem for memetics as a science. Thus:

I don’t know if I follow you here. Physics can theoretically explain the whole of biology. Even if we could do this in practice, it wouldn’t destroy the usefulness of biology as shorthand.

Actually, I’m not at all sure that it’s true that biology is reducible to a complete physics. But if it is, that certainly doesn’t mean that biology is useless. Fair enough, but that doesn’t help memetics. If memetics is entirely reducible to the other human sciences, then it is failed at what it set out to do. It’s not at all clear to me that memetics could do what it is supposed to for the other human sciences (that is, provide an over-arching theoretical framework that will do what evolutionary biology has done for the study of paleontology and ecology) if it is merely a shorthand for them, but even if it could, why bother? If biology is merely shorthand for a complete chemistry and physics, it is still useful because the chemical and physical processes involved in a single organism are orders of magnitude more complex than anything a human being could comprehend in one survey. But are facts such as People often pick up catchy tunes they hear on the street or Scientists tend to pick up on scientific theories that elegantly explain recent findings and solve outstanding problems in the field or Sometimes human beings believe things without enough evidence if it makes them feel better about the future complex facts that need a shorthand? If not, then why bother making up a distracting shorthand–much less a shorthand based on a systematic attempt to turn attention away from the very facts about people and their reasons for doing what they do that you ultimately need to refer to to make sense of the account?

It seems, in all cases, that memetics is nothing more than pseudoscientific mummery; the notions of memes and memetic fitness, and any research based on these notions, depend on a conceptual misdirection. We are told that we’re going to find out something about how ideas or beliefs spread, but the memetic terminology is supposed to turn your intellectual attention away from the very facts about meme hosts (viz., us) that actually explain why we do or do not accept ideas, and why we do or do not pass them to other people. But that’s nothing more than a conjuring trick, and a pernicious one at that. The reasons that we have for picking up or putting down ideas, beliefs, theories, bits of culture, etc. are what make us who we are: rational animals who relate to one another in an intelligent community. Memetic explanations are so often uncharitable because they insist on trying to explain facts about human actions, human ideas, and human communities in a literally dehumanized way. The sooner we stop that, the better.

As far as the weblog games go: if the word meme deserves to die, then what should they be called? Well, what about the good old word idea? As in: Here’s an idea that I got from Rox Populi. I’m passing it on here because [I think it’s fun / I’m hard up for material / I want to start a discussion / I want to rant about memetics / etc. etc. etc.]

Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind! Écrasez la niaserie!