Introduction - 12 Memes

In his instant classic, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future, Merlin Sheldrake describes how the mycelial networks of fungi form. The “body” of the fungi is the mycelium, which consists of microscopic threads called hyphae that join and tangle together to create a fibrous web. Mushrooms are the fruit of the fungi used for reproductive purposes. Sheldrake explains that mycelium growth is a process of branching (enzymes released from the hyphal tips of the mycelium digest their surroundings and then absorb the nutrients, extending the mycelium outward) and homing (finding other compatible hyphae to fuse with).

In this series of essays called The Way of Fungi, I will promote the advantages of following a fungi lifestyle - hopefully persuading you that the habits of mycelium provide a healthy and productive path for humans to follow. This commentary will fuse with concepts found in Entangled Life, branch them further, and home in on related topics. Sheldrake, who is both scientist and poet, covers a wide array of topics related to fungi, the delicate planet on which we reside, and a hopeful future that beckons if we can learn to partner with (and emulate) the fungi that is the basis for all life. 

This current work is based on an idea that arose while I foraged for mushrooms. As I crawled under a blue spruce, carefully avoiding sharp branches to reach a Shaggy Mane (Inky Cap) mushroom, I contemplated a random notion. I thought, “You know, living in harmony with the natural world is a great first step but a lousy last step.” 

Yes, we're instinctual creatures and are happiest when aligned with the natural environment...but we're something else too: self-aware, incorporeal beings trapped inside animal bodies. We both flow with nature and seem to have an uncontrollable desire to mess it up - a demonic compulsion that underlies Blaise Pascal’s famous complaint that, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” We simply can't stop fixing what ain't broke. We must keep moving, rearranging, reinterpreting, exploring, and exploiting. It is our greatest strength and biggest curse, leading to our most profound discoveries and putting us on the brink of ecological disaster and possible extinction. If our goal is to simply live in harmony with nature without also accommodating this weird quirk, we're probably doomed.

Looking to the natural world for inspiration is a healthy path forward, but we need to be careful. For instance, emulating cooperative relationships between organisms will benefit entire eco-systems, but misapplying concepts like natural selection in a way that heartlessly culls the so-called “unfit” will only benefit elites. That is the game plan of fascists everywhere who still advance the discredited notion of Social Darwinism and say things like, “Don’t put energy and money into the poor, sick, foreign, and strange. The world is better off without them. It’s just nature’s way of weeding out the stock.” But they conveniently omit the fact that without variation and diversity, systems stagnate and die. Rather, this group promotes a self-serving distortion of natural selection to protect their own positions of privilege. Therefore, if we want to live a healthy lifestyle in effective accord with nature, we must integrate conflicting human tendencies and dispositions. We need to balance our compulsion to morph and dominate nature with another uniquely human attribute: compassion. Adding "concern for all beings" into the matrix of our decision-making and activities would temper our more unsavory traits and protect us from falling down The Way of Fascists rabbit hole. The question then becomes: How do we live natural lives while 1) acknowledging our compulsion to reconfigure nature and 2) integrating the human trait of compassion into the mix?

From what we know about fungi, they have neither the need to mess up environments or a compassionate nature that seeks to be kind to the vulnerable. But there are many aspects of a fungi lifestyle that just might answer the question mentioned above. I believe the concepts found in Merlin Sheldrake’s book, Entangled Life, supply an effective starting point to explore this idea. Therefore, I will quote passages from the book and introduce commentary that shows how the Way of Fungi is a healthy resolution to a uniquely human problem. For instance, on page 9, Sheldrake writes:

Although fungi have long been lumped together with plants, they are actually more closely related to animals…At a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations. When we use drugs produced by fungi, we are often borrowing a fungal solution and rehousing it in our own bodies.  

This “borrowing” might be at the level of the gene (unit of biological heredity - e.g., penicillin’s effectiveness against bacteria) or the meme (unit of cultural, thematic inheritance - e.g., being influenced by fungi’s tendency toward non-binary behavior). The relationship between gene and meme is the brainchild of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who introduced the concept in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976 and returned to the idea in later books. Genes are segments of DNA that determine certain inherited features like hair color. If a particular trait provides an advantage and allows the individual to survive and reproduce, it is passed down to the next generation. 

On the other hand, the general meaning of meme is nicely summarized in a Wikipedia article: 

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. 

Genetic engineering is beyond the scope of this present work. Therefore, when I discuss “borrowing from” or “emulating” fungi, it will always be at the level of the meme. Simply, I propose that to 1) successfully direct our collective human future in a way that safely accommodates our need to transform environmental conditions and 2) integrates compassion into the mix, we should emulate traits found in a fungi lifestyle.  The following essays will highlight these traits and discuss how they might be incorporated into society through the cultural transmission of 12 fungal memes, which are:

1) Non-Binary

2) Holistic

3) Situational Awareness

4) Without Metaphor

5) Inside-Out Rather Than Outside-In

6) Processes, Not Things

7) Integration

8) Dreamtime

9) Symbiosis

10) Holobiont

11) Psychedelic

12) Radical Mycology

My hope is that an exploration into these 12 memes will redirect destructive habits by introducing new orientations.