Crabgrass and Jihadism

by Richard Freedman

A meme is a set of ideas, ranging from a single concept to a whole collection of related concepts. The term seems to have been coined by Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene". He presented his concept, novel at the time, that genes compete for existence, fighting for the control of resources that allow them to express themselves in the biological world. He compared them to ideas, competing for support in the world of human opinions.

Just as the most successful genes have "survival traits" which may give them an edge in their competition, memes may include, in their sets of ideas, concepts which may make them more successful in winning over believers.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a "Scientific American" article in 1983 which brought the concept of memes to greater public attention. He pointed out that religions tended to include concepts which aided their survival value. For example, religions usually include the idea that believers will accrue some sort of benefit from their belief. Another concept which adds survival value to a set of ideas is that a believer will obtain some sort of further benefit for helping to spread the idea. A tangible promise of benefit would be too easy to disprove, leading to abandonment of the religion, so religions generally promise their benefit after death, thus placing it safely beyond the possibility of disproof.

In a mature ecosystem, genes have generally evolved to a form compatible with stability. For example, virulent diseases tend to become less lethal over time, as the variants that kill their hosts are unable to spread as effectively as the ones that merely make their hosts sick and contagious. But every now and then the equilibrium is disturbed when a new species is introduced. Typically, they occupied an ecological niche in an ecosystem in which competing genes or other forces such as resource limits held it in check. But they may massively disrupt a new ecosystem in which the former constraints no longer act on them. We call these "invasive species", and we have examples of purple loosestrife clogging the sides of our roads, replacing the cattails which were once an invasive species themselves. We have milfoil, clogging our lakes. We have killer bees, making their way north to challenge the habitats of honey bees. We have predatory northern snakeheads, the "walking fish" that can deplete a lake of its native fish in short time and cross land for short distances to the next lake.

And we have jihadism. A religion that seeks to dominate the world, and demands that all nonbelievers be killed, converted, or made subservient, has no part in our equilibrium. A religion that takes mortal offense at criticism, but constantly demeans others, is an invasive species. Our more familiar religions, each with its own history of violence, have evolved tolerance. Some may deny afterlife benefits to nonbelievers, and encourage believers to "save" nonbelievers by enlightening them to "truth". But even those western religions that once encouraged believers to spread the faith by any means necessary, including by force, have moderated their fervor. They do not seek to dominate the world, and they do not, for the most part, seek to force everyone to live according to their rules of what constitutes a proper life.

How do we fight an invasive species when it's an idea? Let's look at how we fight biological invasive species. We quarantine, as California and Florida have done, preventing the importation of plants that might harbor the Mediterranean Fruit Fly. We nurture species that can compete more successfully, as when we grafted European grapevines onto American rootstocks to avoid the phylloxera that devastated European vineyards in the mid-nineteenth century. And we eliminate habitat that supports the invader, for example by draining some lakes that had been choked by milfoil.

We can, and must, do the same things to fight jihadism. We must secure our borders, and not allow in those who seek to dominate by force, and who are not willing to embrace our tradition of tolerance. We must distinguish jihadism from moderate Islam, and we must help and encourage the moderate Islamic community to marginalize the extremists. And we can eliminate habitat by preventing the establishment of Wahhabi madrasses, those schools of intolerance, massively funded by Saudi money, that teach children to hate all who do not follow shari'a law.

There are surely other strategies that will be successful as well. Let us look to the methods that have proven successful against invasive species in the biological realm.

(I am indebted to Paul Cox, whose unfinished book Everybody Needs Something to Believe In saved me from having to research the origins of meme theory myself.)

Richard Freedman is a counter-terrorism analyst with Gerard Group International LLC.

Richard Freedman
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