Alleles/Memes

 I was thinking back today to a post I wrote on this blog years ago. It doesn't matter which one now. The point is just—it reminded me: some of the stuff I write here is actually pretty good. Quite good, even. I'm the equal of Ezra Klein or whoever the writer-hero of the moment may be. All those other diligent bloggers who started out spewing their thoughts into the void somewhere and were, for some reason, plucked from obscurity—I'm just as good as them. So why has the hand of fate not chosen me to be elevated as well? 

It could be that the stuff I write is not actually as good as I think. And indeed, a lot of the stuff on this blog is indefensible. A lot of it is just an excuse to string together quotes from various things I've read. But—don't people see the gems poking through? Can't they see through the accumulated dross? I know some people do. The handful of people who've read the blog at any length have all—at one time or another—found something here that spoke to them. They've read a post that touched them or a sentence that seemed to them to have been phrased just right. I too have penned my contribution to the lip-smacking mot juste. 

So why have I never been noticed? Maybe because that's simply the more statistically likely outcome. Think of evolutionary biology. I was reminded recently that Richard Dawkins, when he developed the concepts of "memes," meant to imply quite literally that cultural artifacts behave like alleles. And the thing with genetic mutations is that even the most adaptive new allele that emerges is unlikely to ever come to predominate in the population. You could have the best allele for your environment ever, and still that allele is more likely to die out than ever to reach fixation, simply because the laws of chance and numerosity are against it. 

And strangely, I take a certain comfort from this fact. This means that for every Ezra Klein, there are innumerable other Ezra Kleins out there that will never be read. The explanation does not necessarily lie in their relative lack of talent. It could simply be that they had worse luck. For every adaptive new allele that reaches fixation in a population, there may have been a thousand similar adaptations that didn't last; the same exact mutation may even have occurred endless times before—but it always died out simply because a mutation—no matter how adaptive—is always more likely to perish than to survive. 

And so, there is no mystery to be solved. Most new cultural ideas, most memes—like most mutations—will never make it. They simply don't take. They are destined to perish in obscurity, no matter how beautiful. "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen"—as Thomas Gray wrote, in his famous "Elegy"—"And waste its sweetness on the desert air." A meme or an allele is "born in a night to perish in a night" (Blake). And there is a kind of beauty in this. 

I used to rest my hopes on the idea that future generations would somehow discover what I'd written here. With AI spawning endless stochastic content that will bury us all in words, that now seems less likely—

But perhaps there is a beauty simply in having been. Perhaps I can take pride in blushing unseen—in the sweetness the blog exhales, even if it is wasted on the desert air. After all, immortality is not everything. We won't be around to enjoy it, if it comes. If future generations recover my work, I'll be none the wiser. And, in the meantime, it is something simply to have created. "They also live," as Archibald MacLeish wrote, "who swerve and vanish in the river."