Human Meme

Every oath, everywhere, started life as a conditional self-curse. And then, century by century, the curse got amputated. First the punisher went quiet. Then the punishment went silent. What stayed in the witness's mouth was the stump. But nothing that load-bearing just disappears. The punishment clause went looking for a new address. And the law, slowly, took the job over. In fifteen sixty-three, in the fifth year of Elizabeth, Parliament passed a statute whose title you can still read: An Act for the Punishment of such persons as shall procure or commit any willful Perjury. That's the birth of perjury as a crime.

In 2003, a laboratory asked the plainest question you can put to the night: when dreams draw on waking life, what do they take? Twenty-nine people kept logs for two weeks. The answer came back in two numbers. Two-thirds of everything these sleepers remembered dreaming drew identifiably on the days around it. And a whole day, replayed intact with its time and place still attached, showed up in one or two dreams in a hundred. The day gets in as parts. The day itself almost never arrives whole. And if you want the grimmest proof, it is on the record. After the eleventh of September, 2001, when the whole country watched the same footage on every screen, researchers went looking for the replay in the dream journals of forty-four Americans, eight hundred and eighty dreams across the date.

Here is a game. I am going to spend the next several minutes telling you about a book, and I will not say its name once. The name is four words. Two of them are the same word. If you follow the grammar, by the end of this episode you will say the name yourself, and you will know why it could not have been anything else. If you have listened to this show for a long time, you have heard the four words before: in 2020, and again last June. Today they get a whole episode, unsaid. The game starts on June eighth, 2016. At two thirty-seven that afternoon, a 723-word essay went up on my blog: an essay about Aristotelian politics in an age of unreason.

A friend of mine once cleared a bookshelf with one sentence. It took him a week to collect. I have spent twenty years understanding that afternoon, and the understanding became a book. Let me tell you the story first. The store was a Mormon bookstore, an independent, living on the trade of the wards around it. My friend belonged to that trade twice over, as a customer and as a lay officer of the church the store served. He worked in technology all week, and on Sundays he presided over a congregation. He was the bishop of his ward. That is an unpaid office, and a heavy one, and it mattered that day, because of the name it let him borrow. Understand what that borrowing did, because the whole book lives inside it. On his own name, my friend had an opinion about children's paperbacks, and the owner would have heard an opinion and sold the next copy.

Here is the shape of it. In 1955, American television had no memory. A play aired live, once, and it was gone: no rerun, no archive, no second pressing. Serling wrote a play called Patterns, and the country went so crazy for it that the critic at the New York Times closed his column with ten words that had no mechanism under them: "a repeat performance at an early date should be mandatory." There was no mandatory in 1955. So the network bought the play a second time and performed the identical play live again, because the only instrument the medium owned for showing a thing twice was human beings. That was the economy Serling worked in. And when he tried to tell the Emmett Till story in that economy, twice, in 1956 and 1958, the sponsors and the agencies and the network censors sanded his plays into other states, other decades, other people.