What Does It All Meme?
Internet memes are ubiquitously popular online and in social media today. Almost everyone is familiar with them — images or bits of video with words superimposed on them, usually for the purpose of making a point in the form of a joke. Often the same image or video clip is employed millions of times over by different people who use different words or alter the visual content in different ways to make their various jokes and statements. The familiarity of the image or video clip being used is part of the attraction and helps convey the desired information. This sort of activity is what most people think of and refer to when the subject of memes is discussed.
Memes in their full meaning are something much more complex and thought provoking, however. The term "meme" was first coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins created the term by shortening the Greek word "mimema", which means "imitated", and did so partly because he liked the way meme echoed the term gene. Dawkins theorized that just as biological genes are the basis of all life on earth, memes perform the same function for what we think of as culture. Memes are units of cultural information that are spread by imitation. In this way of thinking, language, writing, reading, art, music, dance, sports and exercise are all memes, as are literally countless other human activities not having to do with biological survival. Eating is not a meme, but farming, cooking and using utensils all are. If it has to do with culture, not biology, it's made of memes.
The critical shared trait between memes and genes, in Dawkins' theory, is that they are both self-replicating. Genes replicate themselves biologically through the sexual and asexual reproduction of all living things on earth — animals, birds, insects, plants, fungi and bacteria. In effect, all living entities are vehicles used by genes for propagation purposes. Memes replicate themselves in human minds. Humans transmit memes to other humans, who in turn carry the memes further afield and transmit them to even more people. During all this moving around and being replicated, memes naturally evolve. They are subject to random mutation and the process of natural selection, just as genes are. Some memes are popular for a period of time and then gradually die out. Others spread so profoundly they eventually find their way all around the world and continue to exist, spread and evolve as they are transmitted from one mind to another for millennia on end.
The field of study that grew out of Dawkins' theory is called memetics. Some memetic researchers have proposed that memes work on the viral principle; that is, memes invade human minds like a contagion and use those infected minds to reproduce themselves. It would therefore be a mistake to think of all memes as beneficial or benign. Some memes can be harmful or even fatal to their hosts or to people around the hosts. The concept of freedom is a meme, but so is the practice of slavery.
If you are still reading at this point, you may well be wondering why you should be encountering meme theory in a bonsai blog. The reason is simple — if memes exist, then bonsai itself must be a meme, and may be judged a fairly successful meme at that.
You don't have to have any belief in the theory of memes to consider the following, yet it adds an interesting wrinkle to the tale:
Long ago some unknown person had the idea of digging up a dwarfed, unusually shaped old tree found growing in a difficult environment and planting the collected tree in a pot. This person then managed to keep the tree alive and enjoyed owning it, looking at it and taking care of it. For whatever reason this may have happened, something new had cropped up in the world. Another person then saw this gnarly old miniature tree in a pot and thought, "that looks good". At this very point, the appeal of having a miniature tree growing in a pot transferred from one person's mind to another's. The idea spread outward from there in an exponential chain of transference from one mind to the next.
It went like this: A certain percentage of people who liked the look of little trees in pots went on to try their hand at finding and collecting some for themselves in hopes of replicating the achievement, and a certain percentage of those people succeeded. The more little trees in pots that came into existence, the greater the number of people who came into contact with little trees in pots. A certain number of people who saw the little trees liked their look, and so on. A key dynamic of this process is that the number of people involved keeps increasing. Not everyone who comes into contact with little trees in pots finds them fascinating, and not all who try to cultivate them are successful. Enough people were interested and enough successful, however, that the practice continued to grow. If that hadn't been the case, if over time fewer people were interested and successful, the practice of cultivating little trees in pots would have eventually died out.
History suggests it was most likely a person in China who first came up with the idea of keeping a little collected tree in a pot. China at this time (first millennium CE) was one of the most powerful political entities on earth. Importantly, the Eastern and Western cultures of the world were mostly unknown to each other then and no similar development occurred in the West. China's position as a geopolitical force facilitated the spread of the little tree in a pot idea, but the spread was limited to the Eastern world that was under China's influence.
Japan was one of the countries to receive the imported idea, and for whatever reason circumstances there allowed the idea to flourish. As the practice of cultivating collected, naturally dwarfed old trees in containers grew in popularity in Japan, alterations and refinements to the original idea began to appear. In the development of culture, this is always how it goes. Ideas are passed along and they change as people experiment with them, adding and subtracting from the original version, creating new versions that are better adapted for new circumstances. When this sort of evolution fails to happen, cultural ideas stagnate and begin to lose potency. One great development Japan contributed to the small tree in a pot idea was the practice of producing cultivated versions of those gnarly old trees collected from difficult environments. That is to say, they figured out how to produce little trees as a crop. This made the horticultural pastime more accessible, which made it even more popular.
The cultural idea of little trees in pots eventually lost momentum in China, largely due to political upheaval that precipitated a long, slow decline in power and influence for that country. Concurrently, Japan's autonomy and cultural independence increased. Ultimately it would be Japan that introduced the Western world to the practice of cultivating little trees in pots, which is how the Japanese term bonsai came to be the name by which the practice became known. The Japanese bonsai industry was organized and smart and did something with bonsai that was very much like what might today be termed branding. They made their version of the little trees in pots idea into the official version, as if the idea had been perfected and any further change would require approval.
At first Westerners were very strict in adherence to the Japanese ways of bonsai, and still today many are. However, a cultural idea that survives for a long time while spreading itself all around the world cannot be the property of any one culture. It also cannot remain fixed and unchanging while continuing to exist in the field of time. Cultural ideas are malleable — they are subject to influence by a multitude of forces, and the longer an idea remains in play and the further it travels the more likely it is to evolve. This is not bad news.
According to memetics, it's exactly the way such things work.
