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We have ideas, many of them, every day. We have them, but we don’t often reflect on them. Mostly they just come and go. How many ideas did you have today? What was their character? Some you might describe as big or small, simple or complex. Is it possible to gain a better understanding of ideas, their types and value to us? Is it possible to establish a taxonomy of ideas?

I’d like to try. I want to propose a taxonomy of ideas that invokes a three-way division: memes, dreams and themes.

Let’s start with a basic fact: It is characteristic of ideas to be shared by many minds. Why is this?

One reason is that ideas spread from one mind to another. Here, the concept of a meme comes in: A meme spreads like a virus from one mind to another, duplicating itself, colonizing new minds.

Once inside our heads, memes can vary from mild mental nuisance to dangerous ideology.

In modern life, we are immersed in memes — jingles, catchphrases, fads, fashions, crazes, religions, ideologies, mannerisms and accents. They spread by imitation and natural credulity, exploiting the receptivity of the human mind to new information and influence, forged in childhood. Uncritical copying is favored. People just can’t help picking stuff up, willy-nilly. Memes may also mutate and be subject to natural selection, sometimes proliferating wildly, before possibly going extinct. Thus ideas (in a broad sense) exist in many minds because they are memes: They have arrived there from somewhere else by means of meme transfer.

Memes are like computer viruses — they trade on the architecture of the system to insert themselves into the software. Once inside they can vary from mild mental nuisance to dangerous ideology. In some respects they work like a drug: They trigger reactions in our brains that take over our minds. That annoying jingle in your head is a meme playing with your brain chemistry. (Here I have paraphrased a concept originated by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme.”)



The concept of the meme can be taken more or less widely. Some people take it to provide a general theory of human culture and idea transmission. I want to distinguish the meme from two other sorts of idea that are importantly different from it.

First, dreams. Dream ideas, like memes, are widely shared, with the same kinds of dream cropping up in widely different communities and cultures. And as with memes, these dream contents often seem arbitrary and pointless — despite being widely shared. Though the variety of dreams is essentially unlimited, there are types of dreams that most of us have regularly: dreams of falling, flying, being pursued, being embarrassed, missing trains or buses, being inadequately prepared, being incapacitated and finding an extra room in the house. (The last item is particularly peculiar: Why should so many people dream of that?) Dream ideas are not shared because they are transmitted like memes. They don’t spread like a virus from one mind to another; they are not the result of automatic imitation.

No one knows for sure why people dream as they do, though theories abound. But one thing is clear: It is not by means of imitation. Dreamers do not transmit their dreams to others by recounting them or otherwise making them public (say, by making a film embodying the dream). You cannot plant a dream in the mind of another. Yet people still tend to spontaneously have the same sorts of dream.

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It’s possible that dream life can be influenced to some degree by shared culture in memelike fashion, but that does not explain shared dream content. Dreams seem to grow from within, like bits of anatomy. Memes are externally formed; dreams are internally formed. So dreams are not memes. They don’t spread from mind to mind by imitation or manipulation.

I call the third category themes — mainly for the sake of the rhyme, but also because it has a breadth that I want to emphasize. One of the salient features of memes is that they do not spread by rational persuasion — they spread by nonrational or irrational manipulation. But the spread of scientific ideas, to take the most obvious example, is not like that: They spread because they have been found to be true, or at least empirically confirmed. Thus Darwinism is accepted because of the overwhelming evidence in its support. There is no psychological exploitation at work here. The explanation for the spread of scientific ideas is simply the power of scientific method.

I hope what I have just said is completely uncontroversial, because now I want to court controversy. It would surely be wrong to restrict the nonmeme type of idea transmission to science: Many other disciplines involve shared beliefs, where these beliefs are shared for good rational reasons. Thus, history, geography, literature, philosophy, mathematics, music theory, engineering and cookery.

There is a large range of human cognitive activities in which ideas are shared by something other than meme propagation — not all of them counting as “science.” We clearly need to expand the notion of rationality so as to incorporate these areas. And there is no difficulty in doing so: There are standards of evidence and argument and intellectual rigor that characterize all these areas — it isn’t all jingles and ideology (despite what post-modernists may claim).

There is a difference between an annoying jingle and the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

But, as always, matters get a bit more interesting when it comes to morals and aesthetics. Moral ideas spread, as do aesthetic ideas — is this kind of spread more like meme transmission or scientific communication? Compare an advertising jingle to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. Both may lodge in the mind against one’s will, there to repeat themselves endlessly; and they may be transmitted to others, for example by whistling. Are they both therefore memes? I would say not. There is a different explanation of the musical spread in each case: In the jingle case we have a meme, a worthless cultural trope that insidiously takes over the mind; but in the Beethoven’s Fifth case we have an aesthetically appealing and valuable musical theme. In the case of morals, one might cite the difference between the proclamation of universal human rights, a theme, and the spread by propaganda of racist ideology, a meme — one rational, the other irrational. And that is why I call my third category “themes”: Themes are cultural units with intrinsic value, which deserve to be spread and replicated. The reason they spread is that they are inherently good — meritorious, worthwhile — and are generally recognized to be so.

Notice here that we can distinguish themes from memes only by employing evaluative language, and by assuming that values play a role in cultural transmission. Themes spread because they have value (notably truth or rational justification), while memes spread despite having no value. It is the same with other aesthetic products, like art and literature. Famous lines from Shakespeare don’t spread because they are memes — worthless cultural viruses — but because they are judged to be aesthetically valuable, and rightly so judged. Nor is this a matter of high culture versus low culture: A good Beatles song is a completely different animal from a commercial jingle. The point is that the mechanism of transmission is quite different in the two cases, being more like science in the theme case, in contrast to your typical meme.

None of this is to say that memes and dreams cannot get mixed up in practice, or that it is always easy to tell the difference. There can be fads and fashions in science — memes masquerading as themes (the idea of a “paradigm shift” comes to mind); and not all art that is popular is good art (popularity as measured by the number of reproductions of a given picture adorning the walls of suburban homes). But there is a deep difference of principle here — there are two very different kinds of idea transmission.

Memes may disguise themselves as themes in order to gain a stronger hold, as with certain “scientific” ideologies, or kitsch art. The difference lies in the psychological means of transmission. Themes may spread from mind to mind in an epidemiological manner, even mutating as they spread, but the reason for their exponential spread is not the same as for memes. In the latter case it is brute susceptibility, but in the former case it is appreciation of merit. This is why we don’t resent the transmission of themes into our minds, while we do resent the insertion of memes. Theme transmission is genuine learning or improvement, but meme transmission involves no learning or improvement, merely mental infection.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

One of the central questions of civilized life is which of one’s existing ideas are memes and which are themes: Which are absorbed because of mental manipulation, usually conformity and imitation, and which represent genuine value — scientific, moral, or aesthetic? That is, does one accept certain ideas for the right reasons? Does one’s personal culture consist of memes or themes? Is it merit or manipulation that explains the contents of one’s mind? That vital question is possible only if we refuse to extend the meme concept beyond its legitimate domain.

Colin McGinn has taught at various universities in England and the United States. His most recent book is “Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity.”