What can we learn from contagion statistics and why should we care?
My interest in that question began at the age of 9 years. My folks traveled each year to their parents’ homes, 530 miles away. There were few Interstates back then, so the drive took 13 hours. No matter how many games like “I see something that sees me” my mother started, there were many boring hours. During one of these I discovered the maps in the car’s compartment. They not only indexed the towns we traveled through, they also provided populations. I tried to imagine what a town would look like from its population and map characteristics.
The next year, I got an almanac for my birthday. Like other boys my age learned baseball statistics, I started learning the populations and areas of cities I had never seen. A few years later, the new census came out and all the populations changed. Far from discouraging my interest, the changes taught me about growth and decline. In fact, the major discovery in my half century of research into human development had to do with the growth and decline of human practices that people learn from each other.
I have never been to Wuhan China nor known anyone who has. But a few folks from Wuhan China changed the lives of everyone in our hometown—not intentionally, of course, but nevertheless powerfully. Their virus is now our virus and it gives a horrifyingly concrete representation of a phenomenon that I have studied and published research articles on, called memetics.
People think of memes as cute little sayings or marketing ploys. They are much more than that. To understand how much more, we need to know what they are, how complex they are, and how fast they spread.
Any practice that spreads from one person to another in a contagious manner is a meme. You may have watched in our Art Center how a standing ovation spreads in the auditorium. That is a meme. You may have noticed in our supermarkets how some people load toilet paper, hand wipes, or eggs into their carts. Those are memes.
Just like the volume of a flu virus can be a thousand times larger than that of a polio virus, memes range greatly in complexity. We build them up, from drawing a bow over a string to playing a violin concerto.
The COVID-19 virus spread across the world from Wuhan in just a matter of months. If each person with COVID-19 infected 2 or 3 others (as a British study found to be typical), it would take a sequence 15 or 20 people long to reach all the people already infected in the world (adding just another series 10-people-long would reach everyone in the world). Since it took six months to spread this far, each month there must have had a sequence of 3 persons, one infecting the next, to create the havoc we see today. Unless we slow it down, it will only take a few more months to infect everyone in the world.
So now that we have this horrible concrete model of the spread
of a virus, what does it teach us about the spread of memes? Some simple memes will spread faster than a virus. Seeing someone hoard toilet paper doesn’t require several days to infect others, and probably infects more than 2 or 3 others. Seeing people stand more than six feet from each other with face masks on, will take a little longer. Seeing someone plant a garden, learn a new musical piece, make a piece of furniture, clean up their desk, write a journal, or take up learning a foreign language will all take even longer to infect anyone and will infect fewer people. A few hundred human viruses have been identified and there are at least 30,000 species of bacteria, but the number of different memes is at least millions of billions.
With so many memes around us all the time, why should we care about infecting others with them or others infecting us? The hobbies we learn from others inform us that some memes are helpful. Others like drug, alcohol, and spousal abuse are as horrible as COVID-19. Scientists promise that we will have a vaccine against COVID-19 in a year or so. But behavior is different from microbiology. People have tried for millennia with much less success than vaccination to prevent the spread of destructive memes. If you would like to read an enduring example, try the Bible’s book of Proverbs.
As the enormous quantity of different memes shows, they are everywhere. Some are more infectious than others, but they all spread. Though we’re glad to be infected by memes that are good for us, we have no vaccination against the destructive ones. Fortunately, we do have a powerful weapon against destructive memes that is not available on the microbiology level. We call it “choice.”
Memes compete with each other. Running competes with smoking. Warm conversations compete with arguments. Generosity competes with hoarding. None of us can avoid the ocean of destructive memes that surrounds us. But it helps to look for their competitors. Awareness is as necessary for choice as a path is for wisdom. Becoming aware of how much of our behavior we pick up from others and how much we spread to them is the path to wisdom. We only reach that destination by spreading memes that are good both for ourselves and for others.
We don’t need an almanac of meme statistics to know which ones are destructive and spreading fast around us. Hoarding is an obvious example. Defying the social-distancing counsel of experts is another. Making angry outbursts for little reason is a third. We all know these and many more. Competitor memes are our closest parallels to vaccines. We could even call them “vaccine memes.” Vaccines against the examples above could be making masks for others, meeting through video conferencing, doing small acts of kindness without expecting return. Each diminishes the competing destructive memes. Every time someone sees any of us doing one of these vaccine memes, the vaccine meme itself becomes a little stronger.
When you make a vaccine meme stronger, more strength to you; you have done a holy deed.
