The new science of memetics takes that observation a step farther. Ideas, according to this model, are a lot like viruses. They thrive as long as they’re jumping efficiently from one host to another, and they die out when the chain of transmission is broken. Under the right conditions, even a highly noxious notion can sweep the population like a flu bug. Medical epidemiologists can sometimes predict the scope and course of a disease outbreak just by analyzing the structure ‘of a virus. Memetics hasn’t achieved such precision, but that is its mission: to explain how beliefs gain currency, and to predict their ebb and flow.
The quest for an “epidemiology of ideas” dates from the late 1970s. In his seminal book “The Selfish Gene,” the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins proposed thinking of culture as a Darwinian struggle among “memes,” or mind viruses, but he left others to work out the details. Aaron Lynch, a Chicago-based engineering physicist, recently published the most ambitious attempt yet. In a book titled “Thought Contagion” (192 pages. Basic Books. $24), Lynch serves up numerous examples of how ideas “program for their own retransmission.” Suppose a taboo against birth control or farm machines prompts its carriers to have more kids than they would otherwise. That alone can ensure the taboo’s survival-for it generates an ever-larger pool of likely adherents. By the same token, memes that cause anxiety (“My country is dangerously low on weapons”) have an inherent advantage over competing memes-simply because their carriers are more motivated to proselytize.
That’s not to say a meme’s success is ever guaranteed. By Lynch’s account, the fate of a thought contagion depends on several factors, including how fast it spreads, how much fervor it inspires, how long each host stays infected and how much resistance it encounters in the population. Mainstream ideas can survive a lack of fervor, he says, because they meet little resistance. But unorthodox belief systems have to adapt to hostile conditions. One common strategy is to deem the outside world hopelessly corrupt and withdraw from its influence. Another is to declare that heaven is reserved for believers. That meme not only fosters devotion, Lynch observes, but “motivates adherents to spread the word to anyone they care about.” Doomsday forecasts–complete with such “signs” such as an approaching comet or millennium-provide an added sense of urgency. Unfortunately, as the Heaven’s Gate tragedy reminds us, hosts who swallow both the heaven-is-ours and the end-is-near memes may conclude the end is theirs to hasten- and hasten it.
But a virus that kills its host doesn’t always kill itself. If the fluids flowing from a dying Ebola-virus victim infect a half-dozen nurses, the bug still comes out ahead. Likewise, if even a small minority of the TV viewers now following the Heaven’s Gate story responded to the cult’s message, the message might survive. “Let’s say 100 million people were exposed to the Heaven’s Gate meme as a result of the $9 suicides,” Lynch says. “If one in a million of those people contracted the meme, the suicides would have yielded 100 new infections.” Even if Heaven’s Gate has died forever, the millennialism that inspired it will surely find other outlets. Just look at the calendar.
