If life on Earth was wiped out and we were left with just rats, nettles and cockroaches, it would take less than 10m years for a new ecosystem as rich and complex as our current one to evolve. Throughout the tropics, rats the size of orangutans would swing from the branches of nettles the size of banyans. Polar rats in their thick white fur would hunt giant, scuttling, antifreeze-filled cockroaches across the pack ice.
But if our culture was wiped out, leaving only the opinions of Jeremy Clarkson, Germaine Greer, and Osama bin Laden, a new one, just as rich, would evolve within a single human lifetime.
Readers will no doubt be familiar with the concept of the meme: a unit of culture, analogous to a gene in biology. Memes obey the three necessary and sufficient conditions for Darwinian evolution: they differ, they reproduce, and they are selected for.
An opinion is best considered as a strong and vibrant form of meme. Opinion columns are a particularly successful new species of meme, having displaced many existing memeforms (what did magazines and newspapers contain before the opinion column? It's hard to remember now. Opera reviews? Cribbage tips?)
As the theorist of consciousness Susan Blackmore says: "Language is a parasite." But what kind of parasite? Our opinion of Jade Goody is a virus: fleeting, changing by the week. We once thought she was an amusing buffoon. Then a racist moron.
Now a brave victim. It's like catching three different colds in a row.
Fungi are a better metaphor for many memes, particularly in politics or religion, where our opinions can lie dormant for years, occasionally flaring up like athlete's foot or thrush. On websites, hundreds of opinions hang as comments beneath each post or article, like ticks on the belly of a hedgehog. On news sites, commentators suck in objectivity and shit out subjectivity until the original truth, poisoned, dies. Memes, and in particular opinions, have become the dominant form of life. But memes cannot reproduce on their own and so we spend more and more of our lives helping them do so, while we reproduce less and less ourselves.
The writer Julie Myerson has managed to combine the two. She has been publishing her opinions of her three children for years. She wrote about them in her anonymous Guardian column, Living with Teenagers, and in her new book, The Lost Child (Bloomsbury), narrowed the focus to her teenage son Jake. They are her children, they take up most of her consciousness, and she is a writer so she must write. Which is to say, she is compelled to produce memes and send them out into the air, just as someone with TB is compelled to cough and spread the disease.
Myerson recently sent to her publisher a single copy of the complex megameme that is a new book. Its reproductive success was pretty much out of her hands after that. It could have sold a few hundred copies and vanished. But she got lucky. She had produced a strong, virulent meme: teenagers are frightening and dangerous. (When Lionel Shriver produced that meme as fiction in We Need to Talk About Kevin, it sold hundreds of times more copies than any of her previous half-dozen books.) It is a powerful meme because it contains an element of truth. Germany, where I live, is currently a howling storm of opinions about the Winnenden teenager who returned to his old school and expressed his opinion of women, modern Germany and life with his father's Beretta pistol. A meme he'd probably caught the day before, from the reports of a mass shooting in Alabama.
Myerson could not have predicted the success of her meme, and it is amusing to see her attacked, on the grounds that she has destroyed her child's right to privacy, by the very newspapers, television programmes and blogs that are spreading the meme far beyond the natural territory of the average book. Watching her get smacked around by Jeremy Paxman, the Daily Mail and the blogosphere is oddly medieval, like watching a woman get hung from a tree because she brought leprosy to a village.
As for opinion columnists, we are full of opinions in the same way that some species of caterpillar are full of wasps' eggs. We are eaten up from the inside by our ravenous opinions, until they burst out of us and cross the room and upload to the internet and cover the pages of newspapers and magazines and enter the helpless unguarded ears and eyes of more people, where they lay their eggs, and so it goes, and isn't Jade Goody brave/stupid/terrible/wonderful we say, and given that we've never met her, where did that come from?
The universe doesn't have opinions, it just is. If a writer wants to be accurate in describing the universe, that writer should have no opinions. And so I shall not mention that I thought Living with Teenagers was the most revolting newspaper column I had ever read, a moral catastrophe that could only end very badly, and that by reading it I felt as if I was colluding in a crime.
No, I said nothing. And yet… why do I feel like a rat that has eaten a cockroach?
