When regarded as non-conscious replicators (much like viruses),
individual memes generally lack moral goodness or badness. However, the
behaviors that memes generate in individuals and groups can have moral
implications. History furnishes many examples of the moral implications
of racist/ethnic/class memes when they interact with politics, such as
the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Racism provides an example of a common
meme: an ideology that has come to separate people, killing those who
are either the targets or practitioners of racism (the latter due to
backlash) and threatening the lives of those who do not believe in it.
Once introduced into a culture, memes evolve (antisemitism versus
xenophobia) and spread through society, sometimes becoming both harmful
and attractive so that they spread like a virus.(Ref.: 1994 G. Burchett)
In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that
memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of
ideological thought. His theory of “cultural software” maintained that
memes form narratives, networks of cultural associations, metaphoric
and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures.
Some of these structures can help generate racist and anti-Semitic
beliefs, by making this kind of belief spread fast and wide.
Conversely, some memes can have moral implications that most observers
might deem positive, such as the meme of anti-racism, which tends to
generate behaviors of tolerance.
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