‘Freemasonry is a meme’

     

Being a middle-aged crank, I am alternately revolted and dismayed by the emergence of a vocabulary that eludes me. From the jargon born of evolving technologies to the Scrabble cheating of sexual politics to the slang of subliterate youth, I repeatedly find myself googling foreign idioms that seem to have no etymologies. But I was wrong about this one.

“Meme,” from the first time I saw it, is something I took to be newly coined for the purpose of describing the early twenty-first century’s hieroglyphic communication on social media platforms. In reality, “meme” has roots in the 1970s—like most of our problems today. It seems if you splice “mime” and “gene,” you produce “meme.”

So, how is Freemasonry a meme? Well, the word’s primary definition, according to Oxford, is:

An idea that is passed from one member of society to another, not in the genes but often by people copying it.

(Secondarily comes the popular understanding of meme being the visual message, usually humorous, quickly disseminated online.)

When we, as Free and Accepted Masons, impart the tokens, tenets, teachings, etc. to all who have come in the same way and manner before, I think we have a meme. Quod erat demonstrandum.