a whitaker research paper

7/31/2019 A Whitaker Research Paper

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Darin L. Hammond

Professor Whitaker

English 623

21 May 2012

Will, Memes, and Dreams: Viral Cultural Replication in Hamlet

Beethoven and Shakespeare share an uncanny distinction as gods of memes. While

hyperbolic, scholars and students of culture invoke this status as god frequently. In the industrialized

world, one would be hard-pressed to find a hearing human being who does not recognize the

melancholy, pensive opening to Beethovens Fifth Symphony, regardless of the instrument that sounds

them. Some might not be able to place it accurately, but most would recognize the percussive,

pensive first four notes. Probably in near equal numbers, people recognize Hamlets suicidal line

To be, or not to be (3.1.64)1. I doubt it coincidence that Beethovens phrase has four notes and

Shakespeares six syllablesboth short, memorable, viral.

Memes explain segments of culture that find a sticking place in the mind of evolving

humanity, according to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his first bookThe Selfish Gene

(1976)and more recently in The Extended Phenotype(1982)and The God Delusion(2006). Proponents of

memetics claim that the science not only accounts for replicating units of cultural inheritance but

for all things human aside from our genes, where memes can only be a potential selection force

(222).

I still find the theory persuasive, even more so when contextualized with other scholars from

fields as disparate as philosophy and neuroscience. Still, the evolution of culture is an academic

battlefield which causes opponents to resist collaboration despite the fact that their ideas are highly

1 This documentation follows theMLA Handbook 7th edition which recommends leaving out page numbers of whenworking with very famous plays (226-228). Since I only use Hamlet, I will not include the abbreviated title (Ham.).


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compatible. While my purpose here is not merely to review the literature, I will begin by presenting

discoveries I have made since writing Genes to Memes: Connecting Human and Cultural

Evolution (I do not include that paper here). In recent scholarship, I have found that there are

rigid margins that demarcate the boundaries of factions attempting to define the relationship

between cultural and genetic evolution. Given the nature of the topic, the ever-elusive next big idea

instigates a territorialism that prevents synthesis and integration. In certain respects, the divisions

are exciting and productive because hypotheses, testing, and research arise from disparate disciplines

with unique approaches with scholars searching for potential flaws in the positions of others. Most

of these infant sciences developed post-Cognitive Revolution2in the 1960s and have exponentially

increased what we now about ourselves and culture. In other respects, the proprietary nature of

these young disciplines on the cutting edge of scholarship prevents collaboration that might yield

powerful results. I synthesize the potentially symbiotic models of human-culture evolution,

searching for the causation that keeps Shakespeares mesmerizing memes in constant worldwide

circulation and replication. In particular I am in search of that which makes that profound existential

statement of despair from Hamlets soliloquyso unforgettable.

A Brief Critical HistoryShakespeare in Pop-culture and Memetics

Not surprisingly, there is a whole group of researchers that explore Shakespeares influence

historically and another concerned with his work as it bubbles up in contemporary culture. Harold

Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt are the best known scholars studying Shakespeares history, culture,

2This upheaval in the science of the mind began with Noam Chomskys Verbal Behavior, by B. F. Skinnerin 1959 whichthrashed the then definitive behaviorist conception of humans promoted by B. F. Skinner. This stunningly powerfulattack prompted scholars to notice Chomskys previously published Syntactic Structures(1957) which permanently alteredthe way scientists conceived the human mind. He replaced the obsolete model with the idea that infants are born withinnate structures in the brain which are preprogrammed to learn and produce grammatical language. The idea ofinnateness in the human mind started the revolutiona plethora of brand new disciplines springing out of nowhereto catch up with the power of Chomskys view into the brain (all disciplines with the prefixes/suffixes ofcognitive,evolutionary, and neuro as well as every discipline involving computers). See Stephen Pinkers The Language Instinct: Howthe Mind Creates Language(1994) and How the Mind Works(1997) for a detailed history connecting Chomsky to currentcognitive sciences.


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and criticism. Those who explore Shakespeares energy in contemporary culture are less familiar to

literary scholars and the public alike. A brief survey will illustrate the kinds of scholarship that

approach Shakespeare in action now. Elizabeth Able introduced a special edition ofCollege Literature

with her article Introduction: Whither Shakespop? Taking Stock of Shakespeare in Popular

Culture and in addition to introducing the coinages in her field such as Shakespop and

Schlockspeare, she states that Hamletis the most frequently quoted, appropriated, rewritten and

produced in popular culture (1, 2, 8). Writing in that same issue Donald Hedrick, the author of

Bard of Enron: From Shakespeare to Noir Humanism and Shakespeare without Class:

Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, explores both crass commercialism (a Shakespeare beer, a

Shakespeare credit card) and Shakespace which he describes as a lever for a different sort of

corporate creativity in large post-Enron companies (20-22). Kay Smith looks at modern and

postmodern sampling ofHamletin popular culture (94, 95); and Annalisa Castaldo writes an

engaging piece on the appropriation of Shakespeare in comic booksnot just in historical comics

that try to teach young people about the Bard but in clever alternative comics like Sandmanthat

appropriate Will as a periodic character, not just as Shakespeare the historical character, but a

contemporary character that is central to the plot (94-110). These scholars, among others, illustrate

how deeply Shakespeare is embedded in our culture and always has been according to Greenblatt

and Bloom.

In fact, a couple of recent articles have used memetics as an entry into Shakespeare studies.

Mike Inghams field is in performance, adaptation, and translation in drama, and in Following the

Dream/Passing the Meme: Shakespeare in Translation published in Studies in Theatre and

Performance,he uses Dawkins and memes to explore the viral nature of Shakespeares plays in their

recycling and adaptation (112-15). Similarly, C. B. Davis, also from theatre and drama, uses memes

to examine theatre performance more broadly rather than just Shakespeare. In Cultural Evolution


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and Performance Genres: Memetics in Theatre History and Performance Studies published in

Theatre Journal, Davis uses many of the same scholars as I do here, including Dawkins, Dennett, and

Aunger, to examine in an engaging way the unique topic of big cat exhibitions (595-96). He

clarifies that he is using the article as a case study to see how current Darwinian approaches might be

applied in performance arts.

A Model of Cultural Evolution

These recent approaches to Shakespeare and drama using memetics and evolutionary ideas

as the theoretical base is exciting to me as I did not really expect to find any. However, proliferation

of evolutionary theory and research reveals powerful responses to the most profound human

questions our millions of years of evolution have empowered us to ask. And, we must assume, until

proven otherwise, that we are the only sentient beings in the universe capable of contemplating

meta-organism-cognition. We are uniquely conscious of our existence, and as the perpetual

popularity ofHamletillustrates, we enjoy or obsess over these profound concerns. We recognize

ourselves in our evolutionary cousins the chimpanzee and bonobo.

We share over 98% of our DNA with them (chimps at least), which of course not everyone

sees as significant, or at least not as significant as what Roger Scruton refers to as the human spirit

when, in his recent The Meme Dream published in The American Spectator, he lambasts the 3Ds

Darwin, Dawkins, and Dennett (49). Still no one doubts, I think Scruton included, that small

changes can have big effects over timeespecially massive amounts of time (i.e. 168 million years

at least in evolutionary terms) (Pinker 40-41). However, Scruton sharply stops short in allowing this

of evolution or any of his perceived threats to religion and the human spirit (which our writers refer

to variously as the homunculus, the ghost in the machine, the philosophy of mind, or soul) that

many philosophers have denounced, not just the evil 3DsHobbes, Nietzsche, Sartre, etc.

Scrutons rhetoric is surprisingly aggressive, even cantankerous and angry. I digress here for a


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moment because I found this research gem so surprising in the context of our reading (though I

disliked Scrutons squishy philosophy from the beginning of our reading for class):

I have heard it argued that we must recognize the moral rights of chimpanzees, since they

share 98 percent of our DNA. And those who defend the Great Ape Project on these

grounds seem not to be perturbed by the fact that we share 50 percent of our DNA with

bananas. The concept of the meme belongs with other subversive conceptsMarx's "ideology," Freud's

unconscious, Foucault's "discourse"in being aimed at discrediting common prejudice. It seeks to

expose illusions, and to explain away our dreams. But it is itself a dream: a piece of ideology,

accepted not for its truth but for the illusory power that it confers on the one who conjures with it. It has

produced some striking argumentsnot least those given by Dan Dennett in Breaking the

Spell. But it possesses the very fault for which it purports to be a remedy: It is a spell, with

which the scientistic mind seeks to conjure awaythe things that pose a threat to it. For reasons best

known to himself, Dawkins regards religion as a threatnot this or that religion, but any

religion. But in waving the wand of memeticsin the face of this specter, he proves incapable of

charming it away. The intellectual landscape remains exactly as it was before the Darwinian

pilgrims set out to disenchant it. The question that remains for us is not whether religion, but

which. And this question, addressed to the rational mind, is a question that can be neither

answered by science, nor debunked by it. (Scruton 49-51) (italics added for emphasis)

I realize that I quote extensively, but I only do so because it would have been impossible for me to

believe unless I could see Scruton , in one broad sweep, dismiss Foucault, Freud, Marx (which after

Wilson and Pinker I could handle) and modern science in general. This is the type of dogmatic

resistance that the scholars we have read this semester (other than Scruton) face daily and that others

in our class often bought into as if to prove the point. I think that the passionate and sometimes

condescending tone of real thinkers and scientistssuch as Wilson, Pinker, and especially Daniel


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Dennett and Richard Dawkinsis many times justified, though perhaps embracing the polemic

rhetoric of the opposition (the radical Christian Rightand Scruton) is not the best approach.

, and this informs my reading of Hamlets melancholy and insanity in the context of cultural

energy and power.

According to this model, Shakespeare, and his playHamletwhen first performed, entered a

world already overrun with memes, bits of information that, when spread through the population

influenced were embodied by the human minds of Elizabethan England. But if the nature of a

culture tends toward rapid spurts of evolutionary change, Shakespeares latent memes had the

potential to propagate in the culture via the audience.

Stephen Greenblatt describes Shakespeares entrance into this culture with elegance and

mystery in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare:

A young man from a small provincial towna man without independent wealth, without

powerful family connections, and without a university educationmoves to London in the

late 1580s and, in a remarkably short time, becomes the greatest playwright not of his age

alone but of all time. His works appeal to the learned and the unlettered, to urban

sophisticates and provincial first-time theatergoers. He makes his audiences laugh and cry; he

turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety.

He grasps with equal penetration the intimate lives of kings and of beggars; he seems at one

moment to have studied law, at another theology, at another ancient history, while at the

same time he effortlessly mimes the accents of country bumpkins and takes delight in old

wives tales. How is an achievement of this magnitude to be explained? How did

Shakespeare become Shakespeare? (Greenblatt 11)

These last questions that Greenblatt asks are at the heart of the work taking place in evolutionary

anthropology. Shakespeare, as well as everyone around him, grew up in a near identical


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environment, and according to the Boyd, Richerson cultural model, his brain was teaming with bits

of information and social learning, but there was something unique to Shakespeare. Somehow, as

Greenblatt states, he has the near miraculous power to replicate culture in the form of drama,

depicting characters on the stage as if they were real people. Since the postmodernists were so

convincingly discredited by the authors we read in class (Wilson, Pinker, Dutton, etc.), I think I can

safely invoke the reality of Shakespeares culture. Greenblatt describes the playwrights universal

appeal, capturing the attention of the lay and educated audience (11-13). His potent, viral influence

on the culture is significant, but in memetic theory, the longevity of memes is the keyendurance of

memes necessarily entails replication and cultural evolution. Greenblatt does not use the

terminology, but Shakespeare became Shakespeare because he created, copied, and propagated

powerful memeplexes.

Susan Blackmore makes this point in her prolific writing on memetics, and other scholars,

agree that differences between the Boyd and Richerson model of cultural adaptation and memetics

are reconcilable. In reviewing their 2005 publication ofNot by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed

Human Evolution, Blackmore notices that the Boyd Richerson model sounds like a memetic

argument. So why don't Richerson and Boyd think of it that way? In fact, they do discuss memes,

and they even use the phrase "selfish memes" a few times, but in the end they reject memetics (75).

The two theories should inform one another, but Boyd and Richerson, with their most recent book,

have fallen prey to understandable urge to turn territorial. As Blackmore states, this does not seem

necessary or helpful. Boyd and Richerson almost seem to be describing memes when they try to

clarify their ambiguous use of the terms, information and variant, saying that these open-ended

terms refer to any kind of mental state, conscious or not where a human being receives bits of

social learning and has a change of behavior as a result (5). They emphasize that the cultural

adaptation occurs within the brains of humans and that the information resides there, but this too


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is compatible with most approaches to memetics. Dawkins and Blackmore give more freedom to the

information as far as where it can reside (see Dawkins The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and

The God Delusionand Blackmores The Meme Machine) , but the only significant difference here is that

memetics refers to the smallest units of information as memes. However, this sort of parallel

research and scholarship probably produces positive results, evoking a bit of healthy competition

and hypothesis testing.

Boyd and Richersons description of culture leaves room for memes and for the evolutionary

model defined by Mesoudi et al. in a consilient effort to unify the field . They claim that Cultural

evolution is characterized as a Darwinian process comprising the selective retention of favorable

culturally transmitted variants, as well as a variety of non-selective processes, such as drift (331).

Culture evolves because of the transmission, analogous to reproduction, of variants, analogous to

genes. Selective retention resembles natural selection, and is the foundation of cultural change.

Again, this seems distinct from memes only in that they refer to the units as variants (I am assuming

here that Mesoudi et al. do not distinguish between information and variants, but they do not

address this explicitly).

Shakespeare has the creative spark to create memes more than any other writer. Greenblatt

suggests that part of his gift was to lift plot lines and characters from plays already in existence

(probably two in the case ofHamlet). He rarely started writing on an empty sheet of paper, but

invoked materials that had already been in circulation and infused them with his supreme creative

energies (13). Greenblatts conception of Shakespeare exemplifies memetic theory with his energies

improving the fitness of the memes that he re-circulated. The art of his language and character

development are among the traits that breathe new life into old memes, adding his unique touch of

the real (13) to characters like Hamlet.While To be, or not to be is the most reproduced of

Shakespeares memes, it is embedded in the play that explores the existential crises of Hamlet, a


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theme that resonates with human beings. In his soliloquies, he longs for death and wishes that he

could end his existence:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world! (1.2.135-141)

Hamlet asks because of the relatively new gift, or burden, of human evolutionconsciousnessIs

life really worth living? If Hamlet is conscious of his own existence, and life is not fulfilling, or

worse if its tragic, suicide is enticing. Now that Shakespeare is long ago gone the way of Yorick,

says Greenblatt, all that is left are words on a page, but even before a gifted actor makes

Shakespeares words come alive, those words contain the vivid presence of actual, lived experience

( 13).

Greenblatt, as one of the most prominent scholars of Shakespeare, has a remarkable grasp of

the playwrights culture, in memetics, Robert Aunger, as an evolutionary anthropologist from

UCLA, studies culture in an attempt to pin down the causation of powerful memes and

memeplexes3, such as Shakespeare in human neurophysiology. In The Electric Meme: A New Theory of

How We Think,Aunger is polemic, positioning himself opposite Dawkins, Dennett, and Blackmore

(DDB hereafter), who to a large extent agree on issues of memes. There are several problems with

his position that may, in the end, be unavoidable. He rejects these pioneers in the field of memetics

in order to make a place for himself, and replaces their ideas with an incredibly complex hypothesis

that flies in the face of Occams Razor and simplicity. This very dense description of cultural

3 The term memeplex is now used by most scholars in memetic studies, referring to collections or groups of these unitsof culture that are closely related to one another.


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evolution may be necessary to describe the most complex system in the universehumans and the

cultures they create. If thats the case, Aunger may be on the cutting edge of the field, pressing

forward in the thick of complexity rather than waiting for others to catch up. In fact, both Dawkins

and Dennett praise Aungers work and give him credit for putting memetics decisively on the

intellectual map (Aunger Cover).

Aunger differs from DDB in that his background is primarily in anthropology and evolution,

and the rigor he brings to cultural evolution shows, in particular his ability to penetrate the

complexity of culture with his anthropological skills. The result is a resoundingly more scientific,

empirical, and field researched theory of memetics. Also, Aunger emphasizes that memes have to

have a physical substrate in the human brain, meaning that the memes have to reside in the

neurophysiology of the nervous system which makes them closely connected with memory, both

short and long term. Neurons and neural and synaptic networks, he claims, must somehow store

the information in a physical wayprobably involving electrical and chemical processes. In contrast

to DDB, Aunger pursues the neuroscientific explanation of how these physical processes might

occur, suggesting that this far more important than artifacts or other media that might convey

memes. In the end, he says, memes must exist physically in human brains for them to be

propagated, and in our evolutionary history, Aunger says that this is responsible for the unusually

large human brain. He claims that because the quantity of neurons in the brain greatly exceeded

the number of ones on the surface, those connected to the outside world (assuming sensory

receptors are also limited to the surface of the body) It seems almost inevitable, then, that a big

brain will turn inward on itself (187).This nails Hamlets character exactly: providing a partial

explanation of whytime is out of joint for him (1.5.215), and why he is so depressed and inwardly

drawn. He cannot escape the obligation for revenge nor the moral crisis that tortures him. Killing

on the field of battle, defense of self, community, and kin, is far in a whole different realm than


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exacting vengeance on his uncle and king, especially when the cause is a vacuous ghost which he

does not trust. Turning inward on himself means insanity and torture in his conscious mind:

O, vengeance!

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,

That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,

Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,

Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,

And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,

A scullion!

Fie upon't! foh! (2.2.589-596)

It would be hard to find a more complex moral dilemma than what Hamlet faces here. He self flagellates

through his words, revealing his conflicting innate drivesexhibit bravery in defending kin and tribe, obey

and protect elders (especially mother and father); defend country, tribe, and kin; punish cheaters; act with

reciprocal altruism toward tribe and kin; etc.with, if Freud can be trusted here, the intense inner conflict,

perhaps unconscious in Hamlet, of the sexual forces and jealousy in his current situation that clash with his

innate horror of the incest taboo. With these inherently contradictory evolutionary instincts, Shakespeare

taps into the most complex innate drives in Hamlet, with the oldest and most complex memeplexes

surrounding them. The Prince becomes the most powerfully developed character in literature because

Shakespeare is able to be in touch with the innate human drives and conflicts that have been with us since the

savannas of Africa, intensifying even more as culture evolved.

Many of Aungers ideas as an evolutionary anthropologist shed light on Hamlets inner

conflicts, but informs even more the perpetual popularity of the memeplexes of Shakespeare and

Hamlet.

Hamlets logical, though equally frustrating and maddening response is hesitation and doubt:

What if the ghost was lying or if he is evil? What if I was dreaming or if I imagined it because Im


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depressed? What if my friends have plotted against me and tricked me? He ponders these

reasonable doubts, obsesses over them, and then punishes himself for doing so:

The spirit that I have seen

May be the devil: and the devil hath power

To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps

Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

As he is very potent with such spirits,

Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds

More relative than this: the play 's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. (2.2.555-613)

Procrastination and alternate routes provide him with a temporary justification, but they only delay

the problem and cause more self flagellation (for not living up to what a mans innate role is in life),

self-hatred which leads to suicidal thoughts:

How all occasions do inform against me,

And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. ( I cite the soliloquy at the end below)

Hamlet feels himself devolving to something less than man, to a beast, and even though he does not

understand this from a Darwinian perspective, Hamlet and Shakespeare are so intelligent and authentic that

they sense the primal in order to speak to the audience in powerful memes that will stick, especially because

of the beautiful artistry of the masterful monologue. He continues:

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason

To rust in us unused. Now, whether it be

Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple


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Of thinking too precisely on the event,

A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward, I do not know

Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'

Sith I have cause and will and strength and means

To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:

He here admits passionately that the causes and proofs are indeed powerful enough to act, even demand

action, but Hamlet hates himself for not following through:

Witness this army of such mass and charge

Led by a delicate and tender prince,

Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd

Makes mouths at the invisible event,

Exposing what is mortal and unsure

To all that fortune, death and danger dare,

Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,

That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,

Excitements of my reason and my blood,

And let all sleep? (4.4.34-58)

Armies fight for much less cause and with great honor and bravery, and Hamlet has in the past as well. He is

a great soldier and prince. However, with the most motivation he has ever felt, he cannot muster the

ambition to override his innate human nature and violate it at the same time. These scenes, while so intensely

potent in themselves, also provide the impetus and motivation, the causality that pushes the Shakespearean

memeplexes to such an elevated level in our culture still. They draw even more attention to that one six


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syllable line that so many people no, that has become a symbol in itselfshort words working as one word

almost, that capture Shakespeare, consciousness, existence, sanity, philosophy and death.

The most powerful memes in literature (in language perhaps) are connected to Shakespeare,

in a giant conglomeration of memeplexes, and reiterating Blackmore, Dennett, and Aungerin a

kind of ironic wayHarold Bloom (the Bloom memeplex) probably the most well known and

influential literary critic alive and author ofThe Invention of the Human. His title is revealing, as he

contends that Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet, literally created or recreated (he uses both terms

and the terms invented and reinvented) the human being as we know ourselves now. His contention

fits remarkably well with memes and cultural evolution, and one can see this in the language he uses.

He praises Shakespeare for creating not just characters but human beings who are more real to us

than most real people we know:

In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they

reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves

talking , whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to

individuation and so no other writer before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well

the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than

one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor

personages.(xvii)

Bloom comes near to invoking the supernatural when he speaks of this power of creation and

Shakespeares mastery of it. He suggests that the proper response to a Shakespeare play is awe

Bardoloatry, the worship of Shakespeare, ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is

(Bloom xvii-xviii). At several points he describes Shakespeare in a godlike sense, the Bard as deity of

a religion or cult following. He does seem to intend this as literal, not figurative and claims that The

plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways


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morally, even spiritually. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us (xvii-

xviii).

In many ways, Bloom invokes the ideas that we have studied this semester (he bashes

postmodernists repeatedly for example), invoking the idea that Shakespeare taught to understand

human nature (2).While his statement may not be referring to evolution and innateness (I dont

know), it certainly in line with what we have read, and he even criticizes the idea of the blank slate at

one point. He also invokes a universalism in Shakespeare that echoes Duttons description and

maybe Pinkers as well:

Only the Bible has a circumference that is everywhere, like Shakespeares[.] I myself

suspect that the common element is onlya universalism, global and multiculturalism. Yet

I hardly see how one can begin to consider Shakespeare without finding some way to

account for his pervasive presence in the most unlikely contexts: here, there, and everywhere

at once. (3)

The universalism results in the fact that we see Shakespeare everywhere in our culture, even in

somewhat strange contexts such as the Shakespop, Shakespace, and Shlokspeare referred to by

those cultural studies scholars. Bloom is describing a powerful memeplex, or probably even

broadera sort of meme pool that has become universalso viral that, like religion, it will probably

never diean optimal meme so to speak.

Daniel Dennett in thinking about these powerful memes puzzles over the connections

among the physical brain and nervous system, thought, consciousness, and culture. He suggests that

languages, for example, are gigantic conglomerations of memeplexes residing in the brain ready to

be replicated and dispersed through speech and writing, the brain ready to both processes and

produce, imitate and communicate via an infinite number of combinations of finite memes. Notice

that these memetecists tread upon the turf of our linguist friends a bit which probably raises the


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hackles of Stephen Pinker. Dennett concludes that memes and human consciousness are closely

related, perhaps inseparable and that they empower the human mind (345-50). Blackmore agrees,

saying that memes have become the tools with which we think (15).

As I studied E. O. Wilson previously, I will touch upon his work only lightly here, not

because his gene-culture co-evolution lacks merit, but in order to pursue memetics more deeply. In

fact, Boyd and Richerson were noticeably influenced by Wilson, and I see both views of culture

embracing memetics. These scholars would likely disagree. Wilsons delineation of epigenetic rules

leave traces in Boyd and Richersons detailed description of cultural dynamics, influencing and

influenced by genes. This places boundaries and restrictions on the power of memes which

Blackmore resists because memetic cultural evolution has a complex, fluid, and messy nature

not all evolution is clean, tidy, and gene-like (366). Wilson admires the complexity in simplicity of

Darwins natural selection and leashes the influence ofmemes (Blackmore 33) . Wilson restrains

the power of the memes to propagate and evolve, and he disagrees with Blackmore and Dennett

who suggest that memes overtake our minds and influences our consciousness.

Wilson certainly flinches at the thought that the individual mind (148) is not our own, but

our memes. The genes, he clarifies, help to create a particular environment in which they will

find greater expression than would otherwise occur (158), with the genes, via the phenotype, in

humans influencing the environment and the culture, in turn pushing, back and affecting the

semantic memory, the culture within the human mind (171). I admire the elegance and clarity of

Wilsons epigenetic rules and gene-culture co-evolution, but Dennett and Blackmore complicate this

simplicity with the chaotic quality of culture. This is why I see Wilson being parallel with Boyd and

Richerson in establishing the all encompassing principles while memetics pursues the fine details.

So when Hamlet suffers, we suffer as well, and that combined with the stunning beauty of

his language and characters make Shakespeare so great. He created us, as Bloom says, but in the


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sense that he evolved us to a new level of humanity and consciousness, and he is a part of us now.

The six syllables do not stand alone either; the whole play, as I hope I have shown build up to them

through Hamlets agony. While it is not at the moment of most intense anguish, at rises above all

else for its beauty and simplicity in capturing both Hamlet and the human condition in so few

words:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep. (3.1.64)

The vast tendrils of Shakespeares memes reside in the minds of humans globally, not only because

of their beauty, the power of the language, the living people on the page, but even more,

Shakespeare and his creations reside in the neurons and neural pathways of humanity, lifting us

culturally to a new level of consciousness, reinventing and recreating us with a cultural power, with

memes that are so fit for survival in memetic selection that they are eternal and will never die.


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---. The Extended Phenotype : The Gene as the Unit of Selection. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.

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