Cultural Immune Systems

Warning: this is one of those “research strictly for me” type posts. I imagine it will bore the socks off of most and should just be browsed or skipped at your discretion… well, I guess that applies to my whole site, really. Oh well. You’ve been warned at least.

Was just thinking more about cultural immune systems, and decided I’d do a little digging on the topic online. There’s surprisingly little about it, although maybe I just need to find another way to phrase it. Anyway, let me start with a definition and link from yahoo’s health section on the immune system, and then from there launch straight into the quotes I found about “cultural immune systems”.

    The immune response is the way the body recognizes and defends itself against microorganisms, viruses, and substances recognized as foreign and potentially harmful to the body.

On to the other quotes. First up, a brief mention from an article called “Subtle Energies and the Uncharted Realms of Mind“:

    George discussed the way in which the media also functions like a cultural immune system, rejecting ideas that are threatening to the current belief system.

A quote by somebody named Robert Pirsig off some mailing list discussion (actually, it may have been originally from a book or something):

    “What it always means is that you have hit an invisible wall of prejudice.
    Nobody on the inside of that wall is ever going to listen to you; not
    because what you say isn’t true, but solely because you have been
    identified as outside that wall.”

From a blog called Ken Dow & the Tigers of Wrath:

    Over time, all organizations develop a cultural immune system that seeks, first and foremost, to protect the status quo. This immune system doesn’t take kindly to viruses of any kind, whether or not they might ultimately be beneficial.

From some other mailing-list dealy:

    1. Systems are in a state of dynamic equilibrium [stable].
    2. If we enter an interference to the system above, the system will try to
    eliminate the interference and return to its state of equilibrium.
    3. If the elimination of the interference is impossible, the system will
    create a new dynamic equilibrium containing the new interference.
    As we can clearly see [at least I can], this on the Biological level can be
    easily seen as the work of an efficient immune system. This goes for the cultural [intellectual] level as well, as cultural immune system.

Another site mentions somebody who says that for Islamic countries, jihad acts as an autoimmune response to protect the culture conceptually. Same could probably be argued for lots of other types of wars, I think. Actually, this other blog, by Robert Paterson seems to have the “money” quote on the subject so far:

    The other factor is the cultural immune system that all groups have. Every group has a set of reality norms and behaviours. These set up what can be ’seen’ and what the normal response will be.

    What is not in the norm can not usually even be recognized for what it may be and as there are no norms of response, there is no reaction except the traditional response of the norms.

    Even more challenging is that fact that when new information is presented in a new way, it will often be rejected and the messenger attacked. The immune response.

Ah, hmm… I just had the bright idea to alter my search to be for “memetic immune system” instead, and that produced some more results. I don’t particularly love everything about the idea of memes, but there are some people in that field with good ideas, I think. Let’s see what we have…

This page has a few different things on it. Here’s the two best paragraphs:

    One particularly good example of this is the idea that, as an adherent to
    Christian doctrine, any thoughts you may entertain which are contrary to
    established dogma (whether they manifest themselves internally as a result
    of individual experience, or are introduced from an external source such
    as argument or debate), are simply God (or the Devil) testing your faith.
    This approach is very effective since it uses one’s fear of damnation to
    simply exclude all incompatible ideas, reasonable or not. The addition of
    this idea to the core tenets of almost any religion built around a life-
    after-death theme, will serve to “inoculate” it against most concievable
    attacks.

    … As the neurochemical activity of the limbic system begins to revert
    to its norm, a meme-complex can be introduced (or repeated) wherein it acts
    as a sort of “mold”, allowing parts of the meme-sphere to “settle into the
    new shape” as ideas re-associate. The efficacy of the infection will depend
    to some extent on how closely it correlates with the rest of the meme-sphere.
    If the meme-complex is highly incompatible with other existing, unrelated
    beliefs, infection will be more difficult. The limbic disturbance can be short
    and extreme (Patty Hurst), or longer-term, repetitive and subtle (politics,
    marketing). The trick is understanding human nature in general, or an
    individual’s nature specifically, in order to know which buttons to push,
    how hard to push them, and how best to introduce the meme-complex.

And this one has a couple good points/language mixed in with some nonsense…

    So, with the above thoughts in mind, look at our reality today. Our interconnected society inundates us with a torrent of abstract concepts, many of which have little (if any) basis in fact. If a concept is packaged to appeal to our personal reality matrix, we might believe it without critical examination. Without a critical thinking ‘filter’, we can become infected with a meme (thought virus), and it may just alter our thinking to it’s own benefit! Because most people constantly engage in orgies of ‘unsafe-thinking’, we need an immune system for our minds… one that can filter out and destroy dangerous memes.

    …Most memes spread only when encountering little resistance. It doesn’t take much thinking to stop a meme if it disagrees’ with us, we reject it out of hand. Therefore, a memetic immune system needs to be based on either: (1) an arbitrary belief system (weak, dangerous, and all too common), or (2) logic and reason. The scientific method is the ultimate tool for finding truth via logic and reason, so it’s the ‘logical’ choice.

Like I said, some definite nonsense mixed in that quote, especially evident when they later have the daring lack of insight to say, “Our entire civilization was built with logic and deductive reasoning…” Shit! As if! Ha, as though a civilization founded on logic & reason alone would even be worth living in. It would fucking suck balls, is what it would do. Anyway, enough commentary, back to the digging.

From yet another online discussion on the matter. There seem to be very little websites about this, and mainly online discussions which very briefly mention it…

    Some see science as a highly developed memetic ‘immune system’, helping the
    mind distinguish between useful tools and mere parasites (Drexler).

Luckily, this guy does go on to say that science as a memetic immune system is only good when it is constantly evolving and adapting. At least I agree with that, sort of. Ah, here we go, somebody making some intelligent points in that same direction:

    It is simply in the nature of the establishment to form an inflexible belief system centered around the currently accepted model.

    This is a sort of congealing memetic immune system to maintain a social cohesiveness and positive image around the collection of theories. These unconscious psychological “belief” tendencies can tend to get “religiously” intense especially around metaphysically charged zones such as cosmology. The scientists tend to form a very inflexible social barrier that alternative models usually find extremely difficult to penetrate.

Uh, then there’s this article about like memes and advertising and things. There are some okay points, but nothing directly relevant to what I’m looking for at the moment. Plus it’s a little overly intellectualized, for my tastes, but still decent.

Alright alright okay. I think that’s enough of that for right now. But sometime in the near future, I might like to put together an article which details this sort of thinking in a bit broader friendlier way.


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This entry was written by Tim Boucher, posted on August 4, 2004 at 10:04 pm.

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