Individual Entry: Of Myths, Memes, and the Modern
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August 09, 2005

Thoughts : Of Myths, Memes, and the Modern

Back in the days of oral tradition, a young man or woman might here a multitude of stories told as they were growing up, and were likely to even here the same story told many times. When such a child grew up to become a storyteller themselves (as parent, shaman, bard, whatever), they would tend to repeat the stories which most impressed them in their youth. The version they would tell would tend to be some amalgamation of the best parts of the various versions they had previously heard; together, perhaps, with a few embellishments of their own. Their embellishments to the story would be repeated if they impressed other story tellers, and would be forgotten if not. The result is good stories were repeated more often and tended to improve with age, becoming more suited to their audience with each cycle.

One could view this process as evolution – it has all of the elements: selection, mutation, even combination to speed the process. Thus you can view myths and folktales as highly evolved stories – ones well suited to the society (the "ecological niche") in which they grew. Just as you can look at an animal and discern some thing about the environment in which it lived (webbed feet might indicate that it spent significant time in water); you can also look at the stories that are successful in a society and ask question like: why were they successful? What does the fact of their success tell us about the society in which they grew?

By the way - this concept of "idea as evolving organism" has been given the term "meme" (a combination of memory and gene). Of course, the idea of a "meme" is itself a meme which I have now spread to you all, so it clearly is a successful one as it has managed to propagate itself to me and now to you.

Back to stories – if you accept the idea that myths and folktales are highly evolved stories for the culture in which they thrived, then you might ask – what stories are evolving for our present society? And therein lay the rub. The problem is that starting with Gutenberg, the nature of technology has tended to slow down the evolution of stories by freezing them in place. A story, once captured in a book, does not lend itself to modification. Consider urban legends. Once they were repeated verbally and therefore were subject to selection, modification, etc. and thereby tended to evolve. However with the internet, passing on such a story is merely a matter of a few clicks. Few people would even think to modify the story before forwarding it on; and because the process of forwarding it is so easy, much less selection occurs as to what is worthwhile.

And despite this, I claim that that certain myths have begun to evolve in the modern age. Each story may itself be frozen; but the idea of the story – the core meme – is available to be retold in a new story in a new way. So one can ask, what story ideas are often repeated in our society? And what do they tell us about our society.

As an example, consider the plot line: a scientist in search of knowledge to benefit people creates some new thing which the scientist then loses control of and instead of helping people is does them harm, usually killing the scientist in the end. This is the "Frankenstein myth"; but one which has been told many times in many ways (Michael Crichton has built a career of writing variation of this myth – Prey, Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, etc). An interesting side note is to consider – if you could only present one version of the Frankenstein myth to someone, which version do you think best captures the essence of the myth?

Another I have identified is the reluctant hero – someone is given extraordinary abilities; but all they want is to live a normal life. Yet "with great power come great responsibility", and the story is about that struggle between responsibility and normalcy. Obviously I put Spider Man into this camp (along with a few other comic book heroes), as well as Buffy and "The Greatest American Hero" on TV. I find this particular one interesting because it is so clearly modern. No story with such reluctant heroes would have ever been deemed fit enough to survive in ancient cultures – individuals with power did not shirk from using them (counterexamples are welcome). So why do stories with reluctant heroes resonate enough now that they have been told many times?

Posted by Steven at August 9, 2005 08:34 AM

Comments

Posted by: Roland at August 22, 2005 03:07 PM

Posted by: Steven at August 22, 2005 09:50 PM

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