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E arth's eastern side. Columbus's optimism was based on a portrait of
an underbelly of the planet that Europeans had never beheld, an image
of the invisible.71
Genes are the form of replicator that dominated the evolutionary
marathon for nearly three billion years. But in the latest blink of
geological time these strands of nucleotides have been outpaced by the
matterless organizers called memes. Among the most potent memes
are visions of things unseen. Like genes, memes do not operate in solo,
but interlock in the mosaics that form Weltanschauungs, worldviews.
A culture's view of its world is generally a vast grid of metaphors
starting with the creation of the universe and designed to answer every
mystery in life. That diagram of the cosmos is a tool with which we
pry open our environment, a tool which creates strange by-products. It
offers an illusion of control--the illusion that turns on our immune
system and our minds. The worldview also confers power on those
who claim to be its guardians--sorcerers, doctors, scientists and priests.
It helps the powerful pull a social organism together. On occasion, as
in the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it even impels that
social creature's members to lash out and kill.
Yet a culture's picture of the invisible universe, its unifying
cluster of memes, accomplishes something more. Though it may be
riddled with bizarre errors and ludicrous imagery, a vision of the
unseeable produces some small fragment of real mastery. Pictures of
the invisible world helped Columbus cross the ocean, the Eskimo tame
his winters, and the citizen of Bali regulate his irrigation. Someday they
may even help us moderns conquer the medical problems that doctors
still insist do not exist.
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