How noiseless is thought . . . it will not rule over, but in all heads, and with . . . solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas bend the world to its will.
Thomas Carlyle
Let’s return for a moment to Richard Dawkins’s concept of the replicator. Dawkins’s proposal squares brilliantly with the reality of upwardly spiraling life, but the eminent zoologist’s individual selectionist contention that self-reproducers operate on their own, as I’ve mentioned before, fails to fit the facts. Despite the high degree of competition between individuals in evolving systems, every form of replicator is nestled in a team. Genes that fail to work effectively with their partners on the chromosomal string are doomed. The self-replicating wonder we are about to meet is also forced to fit into a constellation of its fellows, or it, too, disappears.
What is this relative newcomer in the field of autoduplication? It has no physical substance, and cannot be studied under a microscope or kept in a jar. The new replicator, like its predecessor the gene, is capable of assembling vast amounts of matter. Like genes it can pull together products the earth has never seen, but unlike genes it can manufacture forms of order that mere genetic stuff could never dream of.
Pinpointing the date of the new device’s birth is difficult. Its primitive precursors may have begun to wriggle across the planetary face roughly twenty-two million years ago with the emergence of protochim-panzees, whose modern bands devise widely varying dialects, ways of using tools, and methods of cooperative hunting.175 Yet its first fully identifiable forms may not have gone to work swallowing substances and churning out copies of themselves until the last thirty-five thousand years. Dawkins calls these new replicators memes.
Genes, says Dawkins, swam through the protoplasmic soup of the early earth, nourishing themselves on organic sludge. Memes float through another kind of sea—a sea of human brains. Memes are ideas, the snatches of nothingness that leap from mi ad to mind. A melody wells up in the reveries of a solitary songwriter. It seizes the brain of a singer. Then it infects the consciousness of millions. That melody is a meme. A scientific concept starts as a vague glimmer ii one researcher’s thoughts. It ends up with whole schools of adherents. That concept is a meme. Each flips from the puddle of one brain to another, crazily copying itself in the new environment. But the memes that count the most are the ones that assemble vast arrays of resources in startling new forms. They are the memes that construct social superorganisms.
Genes sit at the center of each cellular blob, dictating the construction of a multibillion-celled body like yours and mine. As genes are to the organism, so memes are to the superorganism, pulling together millions of individuals into a collective creature of awesome size. Memes stretch their tendrils through the fabric of each hi man brain, driving us to coagulate in the cooperative masses of family, tribe, and nation. And memes—working together in theories, worldviews, or cultures—can make a superorganism very hungry.
From 1852 to 1864, Karl Marx sat alone nearly every day in a corner of the library of the British Museum, going through books and assembling his theories.176 Little did he realize it, but the bearded writer was simply the tool of fragmentary memes. Those ideas had been floating in the zeitgeist, waiting for a receptive human mind to come along and function as an enzyme functions in human metabolism—splicing together molecules destined for each other. Marx pasted together the ideas of his time and came up with the ideology named after him.
At its birth, the new ideological meme was vulnerable and powerless. The only small batch of matter over which it had any control was the body and mind of Karl Marx, a hundred and fifty pounds of isolated humanity.177 Marx was not a promising person in which an idea would wish to start its life. Though he occasionally made money as a newspaper correspondent, Marx’s work was definitely not in demand. He was so foul tempered, so cantankerous, so subject to turning even the tiniest discussion into a quarrel that he had few friends and almost no followers. One of his college professors said young Marx was always waving his fists in the air in a fury, “as if a thousand devils gripped his hair.” And one of the many would-be friends Marx alienated recalled that “the sarcasms with which he assailed his adversaries had the cold penetration of the executioner’s axe.”178
It’s little wonder that for the next fifty years, the meme that had assembled itself in Marx’s brain barely stayed alive. The conceptual tangle leaped tenuously from one mind to another, constantly searching for the opportunity to expand its power. Marx muttered his ideas to his acquaintances, a few of whom passed them on to others, and he preserved them in his book, Das Kapital (1867). But that book, too, seemed like a poor vessel in which to keep the struggling meme alive. Russian censors found the volume utterly incomprehensible. As a consequence, these normally repressive servants of czarist autocracy blithely allowed the importation of the murky work into their land.179 Most Russians had the same difficulty understanding the new ideas that the censors had. The result: though Das Kapital was occasionally passed from hand to hand, Marx’s meme still barely clung to life.
Then, Marx’s mental progeny had a modest stroke of luck. It found its way into the cerebral substance of a few men capable of something Marx hadn’t been—organization and the recruitment of followers. These were Lenin, Stalin, and their friends,180 but even they, at first, seemed wretched prospects for the multiplication of a meme. Lenin, like Marx, spent seventeen years sitting in libraries, poring over the records of the Paris Commune and researching the techniques of street fighting. He too was an exile from his mother country, forced to while away the hours between articles and books with a handful of other radical Russians whose extremist views had also gotten them tossed out of the land of their birth.
Lenin frequently took time out from his research and writing to lecture at European meetings and issue orders to underground cells back in the motherland; but even these efforts, ironically, underscored his isolation. At times, Lenin’s communication with his co-conspirators back home was so tenuous that, as Harrison Salisbury puts it, “he was almost completely cut off from Russia.”181 Lenir attempted to spread the idea of which he was the incubator through a series of newspapers—one of those singularly useful devices with which a meme reaches out and acquires power over new minds—but circulation was abysmal. For example, during the First World War, Lenin put out Sotsial-Demokrat. Only five or six copies of the debut issue straggled into Russia. Later, distribution improved, and Lenin managed to have twenty copies smuggled in a pair of shoes.182
A curious accident occurred in 1905. Czar Nicholas went to war with Japan—a nation that had just climbed out of feudal backwardness and built its first modern military machine. Astonishing as it seems, the czar lost nearly his entire Baltic fleet to the postfeudal upstarts.183 A moment of defeat is a great time for an ambitious idea to seize minds that are fleeing from the precepts of a luckless leader. The result was a revolution. Angry crowds rampaged in the streets of Saint Petersburg calling for the czar’s befuddled head.
But Marx’s fragile idea was trapped, unable to seize the opportunity, because Lenin and his friends were too busy squabbling to join the revolution, much less lead it. Fortunately for the meme lodged in their minds, fate would give the quarrelers a second chance. After the revolution of 1905, the czar regained control over the country, but in 1917, Nicholas was losing once again. This time the occasion was the First World War. Millions of Russians died on the eastern front. Soldiers struggled through the snow without ammunition, winter clothing, or food. Back home, the railway system broke down. Grain and meat could not reach the towns. Men and women of modest means starved in the boulevards of the Russian empire’s most magnificent cities.
After a new revolution had spontaneously begun to heave through the streets of Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg) and Moscow, Lenin finally got his act together. He took a train from Zurich to the Russian capital. The minute he arrived at the Petrograd railroad station, the bearded book-lover began haranguing the crowds with slogans, and the meme that had first been born in the mind of Karl Marx finally fell like a scrap of wandering bacteria into nutritive jelly, spreading with explosive force.
By the mid-eighties, the ideas brought together by one man’s brain in the corner of a lonely library, ideas that looked from year to year as if their disappearance from the planet was all but inevitable, had gone from controlling one 150-pound man to mastering millions of tons of this planet’s matter. These memes were alive in the minds and the social mechanisms of over 1.8 billion human beings, spreading their influence over the lands, the minerals, the machines, and the domesticated animals that those human beings controlled.184 The new replicator took up even less space and mass than the tangle of atoms required for a strand of DNA. That replicator—like the ones incubated by Jefferson and Madison, and Saint Paul—had assembled under its rule more of the planet Earth than any gene had ever brought together, any gene, that is, save one: the human gene.
The new replicator, the meme, is a vast upward step on the ladder of creation. The old genetic system could take ten thousand years to effect a product improvement in a large and complex beast,185 but memes can rearrange sprawling networks of outrageously intricate creatures in only a few centuries or less. The meme of Christianity restructured the Roman Empire a mere three hundred years after Jesus completed his Sermon on the Mount. Similarly, Marxism radically altered the shape of Russian society a startling sixty years after Karl the cantankerous ambled out of the British Museum’s library with the final manuscript of Das Kapital tucked tightly under his arm.
The meme has done its work by assembling massive social systems, the new rulers of this earth. Together, the meme and the human superorganism have become the universe’s latest device for creating fresh forms of order. They are the newest innovation in a climb toward complexity that started with the big bang.