For emecists  Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and others, memes are real. They exist as “units of culture” which pass from one mind to another and from one culture to another.  According  to psychologist Ira Hyman, “memes are ideas that infect minds. They develop by spreading from one person to another, like a transmittable disease."

 

Like genes, memes are replicable from one generation to the next; thus, according to the emecists, they contribute to the cultural diversity that we see around us.  For example, the idea that cousins could be "brothers" and "sisters" would represent an idea that has passed from one society to another living on the Great Plains.  Cultural anthropologists would disagree. Cultural change is not that simple.

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“Computionalist” Steven Pinker would agree. “This is not how cultural change works”.  For Pinker, memes are not real.  For me, a theist, they are.   Let me explain.

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What memes  transmit are misrepresentations of meanings which are fixed and constant. When it comes to kinship, memes are created by merging mutually exclusive status positions like father and father's brother and mother and mother's sister as illustrated in the Cheyenne Kinship Chart above.  By replacing Divine Meanings attached to cultural forms or "units of culture" common to all with meanings which "belong to the people,"  a society is capable  of creating a meme or misrepresentation of the Divine Meaning which is fixed and constant.

 

This capacity for a society to replace a Divine Meaning which is fixed and constant with a meaning which "belongs to the people" reveals that man has the freedom to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness" (Romans 1:18) and attach new meanings to universal forms like God, family, marriage, husband, wife, and father and mother.

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But this suppression of the "truth" which contributes to the creation of new meanings or memes is not absolute.  While man and society have the capacity to suppress a Divine Meaning from being triggered and brought to consciousness, they cannot delete from the unconscious mind the Universal Lexicon that exists as part of BEING.  In other words, BEING or ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE. 

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Once a society has created a misrepresentation of a meaning which is fixed and constant and the meme has become a part of one's language and way of life, it has sinned by "suppressing the truth in unrighteousness" (Romans 1:18).  This divergence from meanings which are fixed and constant are manifested phenomenally in two ways societies have classified family and kin.

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In this regard, anthropologists recognize there exists two kinds of kinship systems, the Classificatory, as illustrated by the Cheyenne kinship system, and the Biblical. The Biblical Kinship System consists of status positions whose meanings are fixed and constant.  The Classificatory Kinship System is composes of memes, that  is, new ideas as to what constitutes a status position. They are variable.   Memes, in this case, are created whenever a society merges two mutually exclusive status positions.

 

For example,  whenever cousins are classified as "siblings," uncles as "fathers,"  aunts as "mothers,"  nephews as "sons," and nieces as "sisters," a new meme has been created.  And what particular status positions are merged and replicated depends entirely on contextual pressures; not on Natural Selection.

 

The Chácobo who lived in the Amazon Rainforest, classified  parallel cousins as  “siblings." In so doing they created a new kind of family, a misrepresentation of the Ideal Family whose membership is absolutely restricted to the parents and their offspring in the first degree.

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On the other hand, when tribes from the East entered the Great Plains to hunt the buffalo, they merged all collateral relatives with ego’s descent group, thereby creating another type of "family," a meme which destroyed the nuclear family by replacing it with a new type of family structure which anthropologists call a “BAND.” 

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What was transmitted and replicated from one generation to the next throughout the Great Plains was the idea that the nuclear family was irrelevant.  Instead of the nuclear family, “kinship is[became] the idiom [or meme] in which political interests are advanced and economic goals are maximized.”  The idea or meme that was transmitted from one tribe living on the Great Plains to the next was: The larger one’s 'family,' the easier it will be to hunt the buffalo. 

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But because every cultural meme represents a DIVERGENCE from the IDEAL structure of reality, it has a downside. For the Kiowa-Apache and the Cheyenne who lived on the Great Plains, the downside was the loss of nuclear family intimacy.

 

For example, their rejection of the "one-flesh" principle of husband-wife promoted in a Biblical Kinship System and stated In Genesis 2:24, for the Kiowa-Apache meant a life-way in which a man never used his wife's name and she never used his. It led to the Kiowa-Apache meme that  "Life would be short if I called my wife by her name."

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For the Cheyenne, adapting to life on the Great Plains meant making the mother-daughter dyad the dominant dyad of the nuclear family, thereby creating a new family type, a family type which  pitted the mother-daughter dyad against that of husband-wife. Thus, "In order for the affairs of the camp may run smoothly, the son-in-law and mother-in-law avoid each other completely”.

 

In addition, the “super-families” the Kiowa-Apache and Cheyenne constructed represented a 400% increase in rights, duties, and obligations all which were ascribed. But it was also followed by a  complementary decrease in voluntary action, creativity, and the freedom to have an intimate relationship with one's spouse.

 

Convictions

1. If the creation of menacing memes or ideas are to be suppressed, then “Nature must be dominated so that its deleterious effects upon social relationships may be nullified”

2. A rejection of the Biblical Kinship System and the "one flesh" principle of husband-wife  demands that society be “organized on mechanistic principles ...[in which] every part must be made to function smoothly within the totalitarian whole.”  Whatever that ascribed function is, it represents a particular kind of meme. 

3. Whenever man and society replace an omniscient God as Provider in order to relieve their anxieties over existence, they must also replace God’s internal design for the nuclear family with a man-made design shaped by biology and the environmental pressures of the environment. 

4. The need to merge mutually exclusive status positions becomes an absolute necessity for societies anxious about how their needs are to be satisfied apart from God. The merging of status positions and the restructuring of the nuclear family is the only way a society has for creating a larger family.  But it is also a primary means for maiming each member of society. 

5. Sadly, the creation of a life-way tethered to a super-family and the merging of mutually exclusive concepts and status positions will impede, frustrate, and thwart economic development, creativity, freedom, and all attempts by missionaries to evangelize and plant a self-propagating church. 

6. For contextualizing missiologists who believe "meanings belong to the people," there are no "menacing memes" that negatively affect how a society structures itself.