Poverty and the Memes of Privilege
There's an interesting discussion at Marginal Revolution asking "How Deserving are the Poor?" [1] I won't answer that question directly here, but I'd like to add to the conversation my slightly different take on the nature of the question, and how we might effect change with new insight.
I view child rearing as a sort of memetic recombination of minds, built atop the genetic recombination of mitosis. A meme is simply an idea--or a pattern of thought and action combined--that gets passed around from one person's mind to the next. When a child is raised in a home with reasonably responsible and capable parents, many of the helpful (and some not so helpful) memes from the parents' families of origin are 'inherited' by years of living in a mostly closed memetic petri dish called 'home'. In the absence of responsible and caring parents, children scrounge their environment--whether in school, on the street, or among friends--for whatever memes they can find. They will hang on to anything that they believe may be useful to them for survival, coping, growth, and happiness. I think we are only in the very earliest stages of understanding the significance of memes and their interactions in human development. Although we can break ideas/memes apart for the sake of a discussion like this one, they are actually extremely complex in the ways that they interact with one another--they are essentially pieces of software running on the hardware of our minds, and they interact in ways that are difficult to tease apart cause and effect. As an example: little Jimmy, Donna and Sam might all have been raised in the same home with the same idea that "you get what you deserve." Jimmy and Sam realized that they could start a snow plowing business and they felt proud and reaped the reward for it. But Donna had an uncle who touched her inappropriately and suddenly "you get what you deserve" reacted terribly with "I got touched." We currently view free will as a sort of mystical thing, something that must certainly exist because we see Candidate A who has lived in a terrible home, and Candidate B who grew up in a pretty great neighborhood, and miraculously A and B both make it to MIT. Isn't that amazing, we think, that A had the fortitude and desire to get in to such a great school despite his background? But this view of things, in my opinion, is just about as superstitious as the idea that Mercury affects who you will fall in love with. Don't get me wrong--I actually, paradoxically, believe in free will, and in the importance of believing in free will [2]--but free will as a model of explaining things is awfully lacking. And without a good explanation [3], it's hard to make any progress at all. So I think the question, "How deserving are the poor?" would be enhanced by asking another question: "What are the memes of privilege?" In other words, what are the sets of co-arising memes that have a tendency to ensure inter-generational socioeconomic status? Studies of social mobility tend to focus on how likely a person within a population is to move up or down the socioeconomic ladder. But I'm not aware of any studies that map memetic cause to privileged effect. Whatever the "booting up" memes of the software layer of the mind are that yield fruitful attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and social interactions, they need to be understood better (by society, if not by psychologists) so that 'intervention' is more than just a code word for 'taken away from a really messed up family'. If we could understand and diagnose which memes had been passed on--or which had been scrounged from the shallow memetic 'cesspool' of memes not grounded in inter-generational wisdom--we would then be able, like a doctor, to treat the underprivileged. Part of the problem with identifying memes is that it requires a sophisticated level of pattern matching. When compared to memes, genes are actually fairly easy to identify and map--the specific sequence of nucleic acids in the double helix of a DNA strand has a specific, discrete (i.e. digital) pattern. It's difficult to determine where a gene starts and ends (and sometimes parts start and end in multiple places) but at least it has a clear encoding. On the other hand, memes passed on within the home and throughout a child's upbringing need to be identified over time using either trained professionals or (probably soon) sophisticated video and sound analysis by computer programs [4]. If the analogy proves useful, then there are a number of questions that come to mind that deserve further analysis. For example, can we measure memetic diversity in the home? Are there advantages associated with greater diversity, or are there a limited number of 'essential memes', like essential amino acids, that create healthy and 'privileged' adult characteristics? Is there a difference between the types of memes that can be transferred laterally vs. vertically? e.g. if a toddler does not experience secure attachment with a primary caregiver, is the opportunity for some memes to be transferred lost? Are there supermemes that can be distilled from a wide variety of smaller memes? e.g. forgiveness, introspection, tolerance, work ethic, etc. that lead to resilience? And since memes co-evolved with genes, can this explain some of the disparity in ethnic differences, e.g. those people that were ripped from their cultures and transplanted, then forced to adopt new memes, are they at a disadvantage? [1] http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/how-deserving-are-the-poor.html[2] http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/01/do-you-believe-in-free-will.php (Research suggests that believing in free will is itself a socially important meme, and I agree--and I'm sure there's more to the story which we will discover in time)
[3] http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation.html (An incredible 17 minute presentation on the difference between a good explanation and a bad one)
[4] http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html (Deb Roy records the entire first year of his son's life and analyzes the data using computer vision and sound technology to discover how speech is learned.)
