The Concept of Meme (Memetics) and the Primary Mechanisms of Socio-cultural Evolution of Law
Abstract
New technologies and change of technological order associated with their spread affect the change of value orientations and attitudes of the individual, society and nation, determine the dynamics of the legal behavior of individuals and collectives. The Russian legal culture is facing previously unknown challenges caused by the new cultural dominant of a high-tech society, determined by the technological imperative. Postmodernism is losing its relevance and “dying” is being replaced by digimodernism, automodernism and cyberculturalism, leading to a significant shift in the cultural paradigm and its redefinition. The tasks of ensuring the preservation of its essential characteristics and modernization of basic parameters on the basis of project forecasting, combining the project and forecast into a single whole are being updated. The objectives of the study are to determine, by analogy with genetics, the evolutionary algorithm, strategy, programming of the transformation of legal culture and to identify the primary mechanisms of its formation, reproduction and development in the light of legal memetics and coding of relevant information in legal memes. The research is based on legal forecasting and modeling, postclassical methodology of law, cultural approach, the principles of constructivism and anthropocentrism. Based on the appeal to a new and developing interdisciplinary field — memetics, that explains cultural evolution through the concept of memes (conditional units of transmission of cultural heritage), the importance of legal memetics and legal memes in the mechanism of formation and development of legal culture is analyzed. The key memes of law-making, factors, ways and means of their variations and selection, which may contribute to the development or restriction of legal norms and practices are identified. The models of managing of memes and of ensuring of their functioning within the framework of the legal system are determined. It is concluded that the primary mechanism of the reproduction of memes in law is law-making, and legal memetics allows us to study the dynamics of changes in legal culture and law-making culture in the context of the formation and change of legal systems, to solve problems of maintaining the stability of legal regulators and giving them the necessary degree of adaptability, to determine national legal identity.
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