Thoughts on “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth: The Selfish Meme

If you have any positive feelings about what you read here on Behind the Hedge, you might be interested in some of the more serious things I’ve written, which can be found by clicking on these three words.

Here in these “pages” almost ten years ago I wrote about eugenics while reviewing a revival of the play Jennie’s Story by Betty Lambert. Ten years ago I wrote:

In these days of fairly routine genetic testing, of early diagnosis of susceptibility to genetically based diseases, in these times of new reproductive technologies, in these years so removed from the eugenics movements of the last century which culminated most darkly in the Final Solution, today, when a generation or two has grown up with no memory of the Alberta Sexual Sterilization Act. . . .

These days a little touch of eugenics, a little improvement of the breed, might seem attractive. Maybe people with heritable genetic disorders should be encouraged to remain childless. Maybe, to improve the gene pool . . . .

But any attractiveness which may rise up today, if it is based on science at all, is based, like the earlier eugenics movements, on the science of stock breeding, which has created a gene pool so limited in many species that extinction could come from a minor illness. True genetic strength in a population comes from variety, from the mess that is natural selecion. A four person panel sterilizing a scatter of people based on brief interviews will do far less for the strength of the breed than will education, diet, public health, and the genetic roll of the dice that is human courtship behaviour.

We know all this – or should – by this point in our scientific investigation of the universe. And yet, we remain faced with new challenges because we can know so much about our children before they are born or even before they are conceived. It is indeed a Brave New World in the dark Huxlean sense of Miranda’s phrase. . . .

Back in 1951, when memories of Hitler’s eugenics and “Final Solution” must have been in memory yet green, and more than twenty years (!) before Alberta’s 1928 Sexual Sterilization act was repealed (in 1972), American author Cyril M. Kornbluth published his classic science fiction story “The Marching Morons.” Kornbluth’s story is a satire on the advertising industry and, perhaps, a shot at the eugenics movement. In brief, “The Marching Morons” is framed in the Rip Van Winkle tradition, with a fairly clear nod to Edward Bellamy’s wonderful 1888 novel Looking Backward in the mechanism of the man of the past awaking in the far future. Advertising man John Barlow, put into suspended animation in 1988 by a chance dentistry accident, finds himself awakened unspecified centuries later in a world defined by the simple demographic fact that, in somewhat offensive terms appropriate to the story, stupid people have more children than smart people. It is, of course, statistically true that family size across societies has dropped as educational level, most particularly the educational level of women, has risen. But, as we all must admit, educational level does not equal intelligence, and smart people don’t necessarily spawn smart children, and dunces may beget geniuses. . .

Yes, the genetic underpinnings of Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons are simplistic and inaccurate, and the whole thing is grounded in distasteful and largely racist eugenics (which Kornbluth may well have been pillorying). But I would argue that there is in the story an undiscussed memetic thread which should cause us to worry that the morons are in fact marching in our day. The term “meme” was, of course, coined by Richard Dawkins back in the 1970s in his book The Selfish Gene. A term encapsulating a useful concept which had been articulated for a century or more before Dawkins described it concisely as “a unit of cultural transmission”, it has now been reduced to Grumpy Cat pictures, Star Trek Jokes, and finally, AI generated nightmares.

It would seem that when left to roam and replicate in the wild, governed only by the “algorithms” (which examine what we show an interest in) decide what will appear in our “feed”, stupid memes multiply more easily than challenging, intellectually difficult, or emotionally painful memes: it’s easier to accept the idea that some dark group is conspiring to keep your life boring than it is to accept that you are responsible for your own lamentable situation; it is easier to believe that the earth is flat than it is to believe that you aren’t smart enough to know everything; it is easier to believe that Kubrick faked the moon landings than to believe that American technocracy can do such things; it’s easier to believe that a hundreds of thousands of white men conspired to demolish the Twin Towers or that Space Aliens built the Pyramids than it is to believe that brown people could ever have done such things. The stupid (and racist, which is the same thing) multiplies through the minds of the masses and very rapidly stupidity comes to dominate the world.

There is no need for Kornbluth’s idea of stupid people begetting stupid children: stupid people are begotten by the easy transmission of ideas, most of which (ideas) are stupid.  Every innovation of communication technology has increased the ease of transmission of ideas and was expected to revolutionize education, yet all those innovations  have done is increase the obtuseness of the masses, and dangerously increase the masses’ conviction that they, not the educated,  are enlightened!

In Kornbluth’s story, in a vignette, Mrs. Garvey is presented as one of the Morons. Mrs. Garvey is an ordinary woman. She is not stupid. She is not a moron, however intelligent or unintelligent her parents might have been. It is in Mrs. Garvey that Kornbluth slides a stileto into the very idea of eugenics. Mrs. Garvey has an historical sensibility, critical faculties, and a still, small spark of intellect desperately wanting to grow. But society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron.  Society feeds Mrs. Garvey an algorithmic pap.  And society sees Mrs. Garvey as a Moron with a neurosis. Her “neurosis” is that she remembers the moon rocket — she has an understanding of history, if only the history she remembers herself; and she questions the whole Venus marketing campaign that Barlow — the ancient advertising man — has devised to eliminate the Moronic “burden” on society. But, crucially, and tragically, she gives in to Barlow’s marketing, to the algorithm, to the memes, and buries her memories and her intelligence and her critical faculties with them.

As part of Barlow’s final solution, Mrs. Garvey “goes to Venus”.

Mrs. Garvey and Jennie, the protagonist of the play I reviewed some ten years ago, are two peas in a pod. Jennie was sterilized by order of the Alberta Government. Mrs. Garvey was murdered by her government. Both because they were “different”, and different was understood not only as a genetic thing, but as a genetic failing.

Eugenics is frightening, and I hope that the memory of Hitler’s Final Solution and of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (and similar laws, past and present) will forever make Eugenics a non-starter for humanity . . .

But then . . .

I look around at the dumbing down of it all. I look at the doom-scrolling, the Instaface videos about ancient aliens and ghosts and flat earth and . . .

And . . . .

I look at the amazing Alexandrian Libraries of knowledge and wisdom available on the internet, at the miraculous etymological resource that Wiktionary is, at the educational revolution that the internet must inevitably spark . . .

But then . . .

memes on a spectrum from cute kittens to praise for genocide, with nothing much that actually might improve the human condition doing anything like trending . . .

It isn’t the genes that have started the Morons Marching.

It’s all in the memes.

I don’t expect this post will go viral.