1.1. Cliological Orientation

There are some basic principles an assumptions for those new to Cliology (and it is safe to assume that means just about everyone). These are some orientation notes that summarise the points in the main pages.

• Cliology is about the willful design and spread of ideas for the betterment of society.
• Cliology is about practical “engineering” for eusocial intent; it is not the purely scientific study or description in itself, although it relies on those sciences.
  • Cliology is derived from memetics, which in turn considers culture from an evolutionary science perspective of biological evolution.
  • Its focus is on practicality not on cleaver intellectual criticism (which has produced more hot gas than solid groundwork and has resulted in a paradoxical impasse in empirical study), the many objections Tim Tyler defends against. The proof of the pudding here is in the eating.
  • Cliology is hyper-niche yet highly eclectic. It is practice drawn from a wide array of science and philosophy and while, for the sake of clarity, it takes eschews a scholarly tone, it is supported by a large academic literature.
• Cliology (memetic engineering or whatever you want to call it) it is intended to provide a systematic means of specifying and assembling novel memes that promote a cultural shift among a target population.
  • There are significant commercial, political and educational applications to disseminating information that influences groups.
    
    
  • Countless idealogues have argued for widespread change and practical consideration has been given to how such may be achieved.
  • Cliology has the possibility of an “extended family therapy”. Rather than acting on an interpersonal and individual level of interaction and change, it focusses on the populational levels, those of group, organisation, society and global communities of interest. Remedial and generative therapeutic principles can be extended to the cultural level of intervention by combining change methods emerging from the behavioural sciences with replication and dispersal techniques learned from biology.
  • Computational methods have become prevalent in both social and biological science. Similarly, for cliology, software is envisaged that can enable: network analysis, information synthesis, simulation, forecasting, monitoring, data management etc.
• Cliology is an ethically neutral instrument. It is down to the tool’s user to impose their ethics, although I would prefer and encourage it as a ploughshare rather than a sword (but that’s my view). Having said that, as a serving suggestion, it could well be applied to eusocial changes of cultural practice.
  • Cliology, in considering the dynamic and mechanisms of social “progress”, enables forecasting. Furthermore, the critical factors to be identified and used in steering future directions.
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Cliology may appeal to the communities that it draws from CBS, CES, NLP etc. Those who want to do stuff rather than just waffle about why it can’t be done, hopefully, contribute to such interest groups in surprising ways.

Cliology centres around memes. Memes do not need to be considered as “real” in order to gain the practical benefit of this view. They are employed as a suitable working metaphor, one that enables us to apprehend the encoding of replication of cultural traits. Arguing whether they truly exist or not is meaningless in this context, and a distraction from obtaining the social benefits of this perspective.

• For engineering, the utility of the metaphor surmounts the current state of empirical work in this field.
  
• Memes are taken as the analogue of genes whereby culture is their expression.
• Culture evolves on the substrate of memes that undergo [blind-]variation-and-selective-retention.
  
• Memes are contagious ideas. A virulent meme that spreads through a population will have an influence on their culture.
• Some bits of culture are beneficial and other bits are maladaptive (“good” and “bad” – use your own judgement here)
• Spreading good memes would be good for culture, as would be discouraging bad memes.

In adopting the “virus of the mind” metaphor of memetics, cliology contends that social problems are contagious diseases.

•  In disease control, two of the important aspects are: the basic reproductive rate (R₀) and the case fatality rate (CFR).
• Social problems, viewed from a disease model perspective, sees them as cultural maladaptations. Disbiotic memes can be examined for their R₀ and CFR and, using Compartmental Epidemiological Models, network analysis and other translations of biological methods, the cultural impact of a target meme might be forecasted.

The Recombinant Memetic Engineering (RME) aspect, as a tool of cliology, is the analogue of Genetic Modification using analogical techniques such as cleaving, splicing and recombining the encoded meme sequences that are expressed as cultural traits.

• Genes can be selectively bread and now engineered (cf CRISPR). GM can confer medical benefits: probiotic strains with a “negative” CFR, that can fight disorders or inoculate against contagious pathogens. On the other hand, a worrying prospect for CRISPR synthesised disease is given by Rob Reid where a GM pathogen has the R₀ of measles, the CFR of Ebola, and a long incubation time that delays its detection.
• Memes as contagious pathogens also suggest disease control interventions at a population level for alleviating cultural maladaptations. Parallels to containment, inoculation and prevention can be envisaged by designing and spreading probiotic memes across social networks. For example, the spread of anti-vaxxing mind virus could be curbed by spreading a kind of psychological vaccination. Health awareness campaigns themselves would be made contagious (high R₀ and negative CFR) thereby outpacing and blocking actual biological infection. Similarly, a “cultural vectorology” could augment interventions that target other big problems at a population level: global warming, inequality, prejudice, terrorism, gun crime, substance abuse and so on.
• RME is the cultural equivalent of attempting to go from Crick-Watson to CRISPR technologically.  However, as much work has been done on the genetics side of the equation, the task becomes mainly that of figuring out the translation so and therefore is much accelerated.

• Cliology is not a “thing”; it refers to processes or a set of instruments. Jargon has been made-up mainly to alleviate present terminological confusions in memetics. This particular lexicon is simply for convenience and is of least concern in comparison to practical intent.
• It is ok to do this as we are all cultural contributors who meddle with metahistory anyway; why not gain the benefit of doing it in a more carefully intended and scientifically informed way?