Consubstantiation: Memes and Ideas
The Consubstantiation Principle of Memetic Evolution
Lloyd Bardell
The memetic process is one marked quintessentially by the union of disparate linguistic and epistemological substances in the evolution of an idea from a meme. In other words, there is a transitional or pubescent point at which some successful memes may take on the characteristics of an idea or an idea complex as the meme moves from an a-rationally based viral concept or pattern of thought to a rationally based idea or science. A good example of this might be the Nazi “Science” of Eugenics. Nazism’s rich, though evil, mixture of all of the major memetic complexes – religion, language or media, politics, and pre-science marked the puerile state of genetic science among other numerous studies.
In Nazi Eugenics, we have a consubstantiation of meme and idea that will eventually evolve into bioengineering in the late twentieth century. In the stage of consubstantiation, we have what equates to a viral soup of ideas – a kind of intellectual minestrone or gumbo. The two or more substances that exist in the memetic-consubstantiation share components – with one system reasoning meaning and the other declaring its own truth. Frequently, the successful emergence of a meme from the unreasoned state into a reason-based state is dependent upon the structure of the language in which it finds itself. Both the success of meme and success of an idea are frequently conditional to the linguistic structure of its hosts. It has been stated that language itself is a meme complex or memeplex - this is true only from the standpoint that it can be both. Whether language is meme or idea is dependent upon how the language is being used at any given time and perhaps upon who it is that is using the language. Language would more accurately be described as building material for both the meme and idea. And, in as much as both the meme and idea are made from the same substance, the word or communication is the basis for both. What we have here is a process that is similar to the workings of an atom in terms of its component parts – at the final reduction, there is no real difference in the materials that compose the different entities formed by those materials. The significant factor is the process of evolutionary differentiation and not primeval reduction – unless that reduction is being used to force another stage forward in the evolutionary process. Cloning or atomic power would be examples of evolutionary leaps forward with the potential of progressing mankind to a higher level of existence. It should be remembered however that devolution is just as real a possibility as is evolution in a possible scenario. This devolution or transference could be from idea to meme, meme to idea, or species to species in the concept of that which is fittest for a changed environment – Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens, for instance.
It should be clear now the memes rely upon epistemological opacity – were there a kind of checksum attached to a memetic frame – it would be obvious that the meme is not an idea of self-sustaining merit. Memetic frames are however successful broadcasters and do replicate and undergo mutation processes – making them difficult to pin down or to eradicate once they are rooted in an appropriate class of hosts. The opacity is a successful defense mechanism that relies upon obfuscation of thought for its defense.
Idea versus meme evokes the differentiation of Intuition-based Logic versus Classical Logic.
Intuitionistic logic substitutes justification for truth in its logical calculus. Instead of a deterministic, bivalent truth assignment scheme, it allows for a third, indeterminate truth value. A proposition may be provably justified, or provably not justified, or undetermined. The logical calculus preserves justification, rather than truth, across transformations yielding derived propositions.*
It is possible for an idea to retrograde back into a state of consubstantiation or to once again become a meme. An excellent example of this process is the “Intelligent Design” movement, which offers itself up as an alternative scientific approach to “Natural Selection.” In this movement we also have a theft of language of meaning – that is, the Intelligent Design movement seeks to cloak itself in scientific language and thereby gain acceptance and replicate as another scientific theory. With ID, either we have an apparent mutation of the old “Creationism” meme or a regression of the “Theory of Evolution” – there are probably actually of few flavors of each of these processes going on in the movement. The dialectic certainly resides in the conflict of meme with idea – the synthesis is the transitory wedding of idealism and materialism or a short-lived Weberian-Marxian activation of the ideal in history. This transitory state does not survive in the “real world” of continuous social mutation nor does its language remain fixed by its very proponents, Marx begat Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin and so on. Constant flux or the ephemeral state of the social dynamic is reminiscent of evolutionary adaptation like that of the finches in Darwin’s studies. Any particular ideology is most likely the regression of an idea into a state of consubstantiation or the evolutionary mutation of a meme into a memeplex. Not hoping to read too much into Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, the environment of a meme or an idea certainly affects its mutation process and outcome.
