Country Corner
by Steve Fairchild
Afflicted by the meme
As herd animals, we approach the cliff together
At least two Audrain County farmers tell me this column sends them to the dictionary. And, writing experts tell me that is a sin for columnists. So, to begin, a definition is in order. A meme is an idea, concept or belief that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action. The word’s origins came from scientists and science writers trying to describe self-replicating or learned human behavior. Meme (rhymes with gene) was coined as a way to explain human behavior as a sort of cultural genetics. We learn to do certain things in certain circumstances by watching what others do. Like genetics, there is a selection process by which some of our behaviors win out over others.
Blaming high food costs on farmers comes to mind. Asking someone else to worry about our financial missteps does, too. In fact, riding an economy over the cliff is probably one of the most time-honored memes of modern history. We’ve learned to speculate to the brink, and then just a little further.
In the mid-1800s, Charles Mackay, a Scot author, wrote a book about the Dutch tulip mania of a couple hundred years earlier. According to Mackay, during this tulip market run up, one tulip bulb fetched payment of 12 acres of land. Then, of course, the bubble popped, and the regional economy was wrecked. These days, economists bicker over Mackay’s accuracy in calling that tulip market a bubble. Regardless of his economic acumen, however, he got at least one thing right, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!” wrote Mackay.
That’s a quote for the information age. We should remember it when the world begins to ignore the fundamental reasons of any phenomena. Those high food prices of last summer didn’t come round because of biofuel. They were a result of fundamentals in the energy market and good old unpredictable weather. Yet, the meme blackened the whole food chain as corrupted by greed for petro dollars.
Global warming—no, sorry, global climate change—is something of such an epoch time scale and complex fundamentals that we don’t really understand it. And yet, forests are being felled to produce the reams of paper we’ll need to codify carbon emissions. Activism bubble, anyone?
Right now we join in a mob to throw rocks at bankers, legislators and anyone else that might have something to do with casting half of our savings to the wind. It’s a learned behavior, a meme. We did it last crash, too, and during the one before that. I bet a few Dutchmen with a worthless pile of once-precious bulbs wanted the tulip barons to hang. The memes of the day truly are cultural genetics. We can’t help ourselves. But, like some genetic dead ends, memes aren’t always helpful in the long run. Sometimes they’re useless cultural tonsils. In our information-saturated world, the media play a part in this. The 24/7 news cycle, that incubus on our shoulder, whispers in our ear, “Times are bad,” and we listen. Then we join the herd speeding toward the cliff. Fundamentals and reason be damned.
I’ve read several articles lately in which the author believes, but can’t prove, that the new depths to which media is penetrating our lives deepens a recession and slows recovery. One even said we should plan stimuli measures secretly so the public won’t hear news about how bad things are or how much help they might get. That approach, by the way, is born of the same folly that willfully ignores or purposefully toys with the facts of a situation in order to steer public perception. Remember, it was greedy farmers who were to blame for higher food prices.
Meanwhile, we can hope for change in the fundamentals of markets, biology or physics, but they grind on unaffected by the spawning meme. They are, after all, fundamentals. We should remember these same fundamentals are the underpinning for prosperity as much as the doldrums we drift in now.
That’s why my favorite meme is that palpable and unabashed optimism farmers have learned to carry with them to spring. It honors the most basic fundamentals. The idea may get abused later in the season, but every year begins the same. Seeds will emerge. Suckling animals will grow. What a tonic this attitude is compared to what they’re peddling on the news.
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