Variations On a Meme

The best and worst thoughts are ancient, self-replicating and probably impossible to eradicate. Hitler was novel only in the degree to which he successfully implemented old ideas. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wishes he were Hitler, and in this desire he is derivative, ridiculous and dangerous. To ignore his blather – his “meme,” in fashionable parlance -- because it is odious and irrational is to risk collusion with murder.

Fortunately, worthy thoughts also spawn offspring. It’s possible to trace variations in human insight across history, benign alleles of the intellect that help us understand our incomplete understanding of the truth. Our capacity for self-delusion, for instance, remains bottomless. It’s not language or the opposable thumb that distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species but our bottomless capacity for lying to ourselves. Here are some variations of that meme:

On Feb. 16, 1751, in The Rambler, No. 96, Samuel Johnson wrote:

"Truth is, indeed, not often welcome for its own sake; it is generally unpleasing, because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice; and, as our attention naturally follows our interest, we hear unwillingly what we are afraid to know, and soon forget what we have no inclination to impress upon our memories."

On Sept. 6, 1955, Flannery O’Connor wrote to “A” (Elizabeth Hester):

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

And Theodore Dalrymple wrote in “Discovering LaRochefoucauld” (The New Criterion, April 2001):

“When you have seen and heard, as I have on many occasions, a man in the last stages cirrhosis of the liver, with a bottle of and a glass in his hand, strenuously deny—as he has denied for twenty years past—that a drop of the stuff has ever passed his lips, with all appearances of meaning what he says and innocence and outraged honor when disbelieved, you do not lightly underestimate the powers of human self-deception.”