Of Memes, Clockwork Oranges and the coming Hi-Tech Dark Age

For years – decades, really – I’ve been boring friend and foe alike with my notion that we are headed toward a “high-tech Dark Age,” in which dumbed-down human beings will enjoy the physical advantages of technology but be at the mercy of that same technology to feed them “culture” and ideas: a well-fed world without a soul, i.e., Hell.

Now comes British scholar Susan Blackmore to confirm my prognostications. Blackmore sees a future in which humans are overrun by memes – infectious fed to them by machines that create all the ideas, the art and the music.

And, guess what? It’s a good thing!

In a story at Wired (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/ted_blackmore) Blackmore posits as “inevitable” the rise of silicon-based machines that will rule the culture by inventing and passing on memes through various cultural objects. A meme is defined in the story as “ an idea or thing that is passed from person to person and is either adopted for its usefulness or other purpose -- in some cases becoming a wildly popular idea that can't be stopped -- or abandoned to die a quick and ignoble death. A meme can be a song or snippet of a song, a dance, an urban legend, an expression or behavior, a product brand or even a religion.”

Until now, human beings have created and controlled the memes. But soon, Blackmore avers, “there's going to be evolution of memes out there that is totally out of our control.”

We now software that “mixes up ideas and produces an essay” and “neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting.” Soon, Blackmore believes, machines will do all the creating and all the selecting of cultural objects and the memes they convey “because evolution by natural selection is inevitable.” Wired asked her what such a society would look like. She responded:

“Well, it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines. We are so ego-centric. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We need to do a flip and see us as a player in a vast evolutionary process, which we're not in control of.”

Human beings are jus machines themselves, Blackmore says. Free will and even consciousness itself are “illusions.” Therefore, when one machine (humans) stops making and selecting the memes – stops making and selecting the culture – and another machine (the silicon-based kind) starts making them, this will simply be a blip on the old inevitable evolutionary journey to God Knows – excuse me – Evolution Knows Where.

Big deal. Get used to it.

I call Dr. Blackmore’s attention to A Clockwork Orange, a novel by her countryman Anthony Burgess. (The movie doesn’t count; Kubrick changed the ending.) The book is structured in Sonatina form. (Burgess was a composer as well as an author.) Sonatina is a musical form in which themes are presented that begin in one key – C major, say – and end halfway in another key (G major, for instance). Then the entire set of themes is presented again, starting in the new key, but with the important difference that, in their progress, they alter slightly so as to conclude the second half, and the entire piece, in the home key (C major in our example). In A Clockwork Orange, the hero Alex undergoes a series of experiences in the first half, which are repeated in the second half, but with important differences that shift the action and the underlying humanistic theme of Burgess’ novel. In both halves, Alex encounters an old man, comes to a certain wealthy man’s home, fights with his friends, etc., but the first-half and second-half actions differ in the details and, more importantly, in how Alex, who has undergone massive internal change, engages with the others and how he reacts to his environment.

What happens midway in the novel, of course, is Alex’s reprogramming. A mere machine with only the appearance of being organism – “Am I nothing more than a clockwork orange?” he protests – Alex is subjected to what amounts to repair by the State. He is programmed to hate violence and love passivity, with the result that he abandons the gang mentality of his first-half actions, but also loses the creative urges and love of beauty (“Ludwig van” Beethoven is his musical god) that make him a human. The initial “key center” is announced in Alex’s first words, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” The question is a statement of choice, of free will. This is lost halfway through, as the “key” changes to the mechanistic manipulations of Alex’s torturers. In other words, the key of free will that begins the book arrives halfway at the new key of physical determinism. Then the events start all over again, but from the new perspective -- in the new “key” -- of Alex having been programmed. As the second-half events proceed, they slowly find their way back to the home key, as free will is once more asserted.

Now, what’s the point here? I can’t prove to someone like Blackmore that freewill or even consciousness exists. She is clearly sold on what Alex might call the “old Marx-like determinism bit.” Historical determinism is a matter of faith. There is no science to back it up; in fact, contemporary physics, which gives us such insights as the apparent existence of matter we can’t see ("dark matter") could probably form the solid foundation of a case for free will, or at least the impossibility of anything being “inevitable.”

But I can say that, just because we seem to be machines – clockwork oranges – doesn’t mean we ought to behave as if we are, or be treated as if we are. Blackmore and all determinists dismiss the normative – the realm of value – while accepting by default the value given by their own faith-based presuppositions. In other words, to assert that we are machines is one thing. But to accept that whatever happens to us as a result of being machines as “inevitable” is to assert a value judgment clothed in the pseudo-science of historical determinism. It’s a thinly veiled hypocrisy in which the hypocrite accepts asserts a normative position while denying – since value judgments must come from free will – the existence of the normative. “We are so ego-centric,” Blackmore sniffs. What is that but a value judgment?

This is the true “culture war”: A fight between the mechanists who view humans as clockwork oranges without need of human/spiritual input, and those who know better.

We'll make and select our own memes, thank you very much.

- Kenneth LaFave