Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene has given the name “meme” to “units of cultural transmission.” To be more specific: “a word coined by Dawkins to describe images, phrases, references, pieces of music, that are themselves replicated and then spread virally throughout the world’s cultural consciousness. The meme is at best, I think, a metaphorically baggy analogue to the gene, but it serves the purpose of emphasizing the recursiveness and interrelatedness of our experience of the world.”[i] Memes are cultural morphic fields.
Daniel Menaker’s description of Dawkin’s meme in his review of Dawkin’s book, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, makes the insightful connection between Oneness or the “interrelatedness” of all elements in the world of form (including ideas as “form”) and the P-B worldview, the world’s “cultural consciousness.” Memes are not in and of themselves in any way problematic unless we react to them rather than respond by embracing the details of the wonderful richness of life.
[i] Menaker, Daniel. “In His Genes.” The New York Times Book Review. November 29, 2015, p. 8.
