Memetic Hygiene, Contagious Hate, and Empathy
Not the infection you should be worrying about.
Legally, restaurants must provide three bathrooms: male, female, and employee. (Insert your own joke here about genderless worker drones.) Despite this, employees do use the customer bathrooms, so you’ve probably seen that small sign near the sink which reads: “Employees must wash hands before returning to work.”
There’s a bit of humor in the fact that only employees have to do this, but the topic of sanitation is not all that funny, especially if you’ve ever come down with food poisoning from a restaurant. Ask me how I know.
Still, while we all understand the need to prevent foodborne infection, it’s not the most dangerous kind. The most dangerous kind is mental. Contagious diseases of the mind—often, political diseases—are a far greater threat to our safety. I’ll explain.
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme by analogy to gene, as the unit of the transmission of ideas. The idea of wearing a baseball cap backwards is a meme that spreads mostly by observation and imitation. The idea of Christianity is a meme that spreads vertically by childhood indoctrination, horizontally by proselytization. The idea of a meme is itself a meme that spreads by books and by pedantic rants from online sandwich-makers and political pundits.
Just as a virus is a bundle of genes that spreads itself around, a bundle of memes can act as a mental virus. This cluster of memes—called a meme complex—can spread and become popular, not because it is true or even good for its hosts, but because it has attributes that make it good at spreading for its own sake or for the sake of non-believers who benefit from it.
This has been understood for some time now. Over two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote that: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” A belief can be completely false or even nonsensical, yet remain common because it serves the interests of those who don’t even hold it.
That is the chief insight of meme theory: something can be successful in the marketplace of ideas despite having no merit whatsoever. Even if it harms the host, or kills them—think of the Jonestown mass-suicide cult—it can still benefit itself by propagating faster than it dies out. Take that, sociological functionalism!
The virulent meme complex that has been the focus of much of my attention for a few years now is white supremacy, a constellation of self-serving bigotries against (obviously) those who cannot pass as white, but also women, gays, Muslims, Jews, Hispanics, and others who are not entitled to be on the top rung of society. It is, and has long been, the dominant form of bigotry in America.
Like infection with HIV, there is no broad, reliable cure for white supremacy, or even a vaccine for it, but there are effective treatments. I’d like to explore this analogy further.
With HIV, antiviral medications are used to prevent HIV-positive people from getting full-blown AIDS and also stop them from being contagious. The same drugs can be used for prophylaxis, which means HIV-negative people taking the medicines in advance so that they don’t become infected if exposed, protecting them much as immunization does. And, of course, there are barrier methods, such as condoms, dental dams, and gloves.
With white supremacy, the best we can do is the moral equivalent of antivirals; we can suppress the harm it causes and hinder its proliferation, so that it will diminish and perhaps eventually die out. Barrier methods play only a minor role here: we can lock up white supremacist terrorists, but we’re not monsters; we follow the Hippocratic oath’s admonition to “first, cause no harm”. So we’re not going to take a page from their playbook by separating children from adults, much less running concentration camps.
But it does start with children, because they aren’t born infected, so we can protect them by effectively immunizing them through a comprehensive, honest education. Schools have to inculcate critical thinking skills and the scientific method so that students can resist the indoctrination that we can’t block. Rather than vaccinating against specific diseases, we are strengthening their immune system against all of them.
An important part of this education is an anthropological survey of the cultures of the world, exposing them to the variety of beliefs that exist so as to curb unthinking ethnocentrism and provincialism. Schools also need to be desegregated, have federal-level financing and curricula, and teach the whole truth about the history of colonialism, slavery, and Jim Crow, as opposed to the whitewashing myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Even when we fail to prevent white supremacy from taking root, including in the adults who missed their chance, there is still much we can do. Without a cure, we can only treat and suppress: prevent their bigotry from being expressed through discriminatory action, biased social policy, and socially-acceptable hate speech. The goal is a societal version of herd immunity, where the infection is contained because enough people are resistant, even though not everyone is.
We can’t tell people whom to befriend, but we can and should criminalize discrimination in all but the most private matters. This means laws against bias in housing, jobs, schools, businesses, and so on. We can counter institutionalized discrimination and even counter its lingering historical effects through reparations.
In addition to laws, we can personally hold those who spread bigotry accountable for their hate speech by ensuring that they are shunned and perhaps even lose their jobs. To the extent that we can do so without undermining the necessity of free speech in a liberal democracy, we must work to deprive them of opportunities to proselytize. For example, when a business takes a stand in favor of bigotry, we should very pointedly spend our money elsewhere.
We need to understand that white supremacy isn’t merely an individual moral flaw, it’s a social disease. And like the smallpox blankets intentionally given to Native Americans in an early form of germ warfare to serve the interests of colonizers, the disease of hate is disseminated from above because it serves the interests of the very rich.
Bigotry separates poor whites from their natural allies: minorities who are impoverished by bias and lack of opportunity. It motivates whites to vote against their own interests by opposing progressive taxation and social programs that benefit everyone, because they may well benefit minorities more. Thanks to bigotry, they can be counted on to choose policies that harm themselves so long as they believe they harm minorities more. When they suffer, as they will, it is through their own malicious choice, but their suffering is nothing compared to the suffering they cause to those with less privilege.
There is much we can do, but none of it involves “empathizing” with bigots or otherwise coddling them. We know that the so-called “white working class” is not suffering from “economic anxiety“. Their anxiety is about losing some of their illegitimate lead over minorities. They’re not afraid of the increasing gap between rich and poor or the shrinkage of the middle class, they’re afraid of having to deal with an even playing field where being a mediocre white man might not be enough anymore to guarantee success.
Let’s be real: we’re not going to change minds and win hearts here. The way we stop the white supremacists is to politically crush them. We should therefore write them off entirely and not pander one bit towards them, even by omission. Instead of hoping to make our platform color-blind enough that perhaps some bigots will swing our way, we should focus on ensuring that all of our votes are counted. We cultural minorities hold a numerical majority, so we must turn it into a political majority by voting the bigots out of office.
Is this a purity test? Only if you think that opposition to white supremacy is an optional part of the liberal agenda, and I certainly don’t.