The Electric Meme: A new theory of how we think by Robert Aunger, The Free Press, $27, ISBN 0743201507
AS HE observed the rich patterning of human society, the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes entertained the idea that people and their artefacts constituted the flesh of a diffuse organism. Hobbes gave his culture-creature a name: Leviathan.
Today’s cultural theorists are no less fond of biological metaphor, but they are generally less ambitious than Hobbes. They don’t talk of bodies, but of diseases.
“Language is a virus,” sang the American artist and performer Laurie Anderson, quoting American literary legend William S. Burroughs. So too, according to the proto-science…
