Memes and the celebration of life

Mom displaying the genes (but not the memes!) of her first born, Howard C.


24July2010
Death is really just like a candle coming to the end of its wick. The flame gets weaker and weaker till finally, poof, it disappears, leaving behind something new, the smoke of the extinguished flame.

When my mom died, she too left a cloud of smoke. Some of this smoke is made up of “memes.”

A meme is kind of like a gene. It is a cultural memory. Language is a repository of memes. The old memes are just the language, the new memes are slang.

Any “culturally transmitted” behavior is a meme. For example, sometime after the milk deliverers in England figured out how to put aluminum-foil lids on the milk they delivered, small birds (blue tits) figured out how to pull off the lids. Each tit didn’t employ his/her own trial and error process to learn how to remove the lid. Rather, he/she watched other birds successfully get the tops off, and then imitated them. Behavioural ecologists tracked the spread of this cool meme from its source, all over England. This is a classic meme. It is a culturally transmitted idea that works.

We all leave meme’s behind when we die. One of my favorites from Mom is what she says when things are getting intense: “Oh, gosh”.

But at Mom’s “celebration of life” (this term is a classic meme that tons of individuals picked up on and re-used) I was amazed at the richness of the meme’s attributed to her.

For example, people were uniformly impressed by Mom’s frankness. This honesty sometimes hurt, but ultimately, it gave comfort because it meant Mom wasn’t hiding anything (this is the extreme version of that meme). I kind of expected this one, and it was widely expressed by her near and dear.

But what surprised me was the apparent strength of Mom’s memes. Women referred to Mom as a role model! Really? My Mom? Mother of 3 boys? A role model for young women? Yes, indeed! Lots of women (young and old) told their stories of how Mom was their role model. You could see other women in the room involuntarily nodding their heads. Everyone saw the nodding, thereby strengthening the meme even further.

I had NO IDEA that Mom’s memes would be so strong. Pretty cool, really. From that extinguished flame came some meme smoke hardly visible (at least to me) while the flame survived.

It is kind of sad, but true, that most memes, like most genes, eventually go extinct. Virtually all memes that do survive lose the connection of the meme to its originator. Exceptions include, e.g., Caesar: “Et tu, Brute?”; Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living”; Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.” Yet, some memes survive for a very long time. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to understand what I am writing.

But the fact remains that most of us will die without leaving many memes behind. Most of our memes will be unrecognizably swallowed up by the culture we live in, or perhaps just go extinct on their own.

Oh, gosh.

I don’t know how long Mom’s memes will survive. But, there are at least some of us living today, that won’t forget her crazy notions.