This article is inspired by Brian Moon's article The Poverty of Memes (2025) (read on Medium or as a PDF). Moon's article criticizes David Deutsch's meme theory (found in The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) (2011)) for being refuted in advance by Karl Popper's critiques in The Poverty of Historicism (PoH) (1944).
Due to Moon's article, I've reviewed PoH and compared it with BoI.
Moon has also criticized Deutsch's meme theory for closely following ideas from Jewish mysticism. That could make Deutsch's claims more mystical or religious and less secular, scientific or rational than Deutsch claimed. It could also make them less original than he presented them as. I don't know enough about Jewish mysticism to evaluate that critique. I thought it was worth mentioning because the same person, Moon, had some good points regarding PoH.
Deutsch's Historicism
BoI 15 (numbers indicate BoI chapters or PoH sections):
I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.
BoI 1:
But, on the timescale of individual lifetimes, they [our ancestors for most of human history] almost never made any [progress].
BoI 1:
Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods.
PoH 33 (my bold):
Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the ‘static’ thinking of all previous generations, they [modern historicists] believe that their own advance has been made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’ which has so much accelerated the speed of our development that social change can be now directly experienced within a single lifetime.
Deutsch is the type of historicist that Popper criticized. Deutsch talked repeatedly, without citing Popper, about progress being rare enough that it was rare on the timescale of one lifetime, so most people didn't directly experience progress.
The revolution Deutsch thinks we're living in is the "scientific revolution" (BoI introduction, BoI 1) which Deutsch says is "part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment" (BoI 1). Deutsch emphasizes that he considers the Enlightenment a revolution: "Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge" (BoI 1).
As to static and dynamic thinking, BoI 15 has "Static Societies" and "Dynamic Societies" as section headings. They're major themes. Deutsch thinks most humans were static thinkers, while he and some other recent thinkers are dynamic thinkers who live in a period of highly accelerated progress due to a revolution.
Deutsch presented these ideas as original. He didn't tell his readers that Popper wrote about static and dynamic societies and about experiencing progress within a single lifetime. I thought those were Deutsch's original ideas and was surprised to find them in PoH (where Popper presents many of the ideas, including the static and dynamic terminology, as restating what historicists have said, not as original). PoH also connects evolution to societies, just as Deutsch's meme theory does.
PoH 22:
Two characteristic representatives of this alliance [between historicism and utopianism] are Plato and Marx. Plato, a pessimist, believed that all change—or almost all change—is decay; this was his law of historical development. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint aims at arresting all change;[24] it is what would nowadays be called ‘static’. Marx, on the other hand, was an optimist, and possibly (like Spencer) an adherent of a historicist moral theory. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint was one of a developing or ‘dynamic’ rather than of an arrested society.
Here we see again that Deutsch's static and dynamic society concepts and terminology are unoriginal.
PoH 27:
Professor Toynbee ... expresses ... ‘Civilizations are not static conditions of society but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind. They not only cannot stand still, but they cannot reverse their direction without breaking down their own law of motion … ‘.[11] Here we have nearly all the elements usually found in statements of position (b) [being able to discern tendencies or directions in evolutionary processes]: the idea of social dynamics (as opposed to social statics); of evolutionary movements of societies (under the influence of social forces);
Here we see talk of static and dynamic conditions of societies and evolution of societies. Keep in mind that whenever Deutsch talks about memes, he's talking about evolution.
It's interesting Deutsch used ideas from PoH that Popper was criticizing, not agreeing with. Deutsch didn't explain why he disagrees with Popper or provide a critique of PoH, though.
Laws of History
PoH Introduction:
This approach which I propose first to explain, and only later to criticize, I call ‘historicism’. It is often encountered in discussions on the method of the social sciences; and it is often used without critical reflection, or even taken for granted. What I mean by ‘historicism’ will be explained at length in this study. It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. Since I am convinced that such historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences (other than economic theory), my presentation of these doctrines is certainly not unbiased. But I have tried hard to make a case in favour of historicism in order to give point to my subsequent criticism.
In basic summary, the main point of PoH is to criticize the idea of laws of history, which would be like laws of physics which history has to follow. Laws of history would control issues like how societies develop and change or stay the same.
BoI 15:
For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo.
Deutsch says all static societies enforce taboos, customs and laws, make members enact memes without variation, and suppress criticism of the status quo. And Deutsch claims there are only two possible types of society, with static societies being the much more common type in human history, so he's making claims here about most human societies that have ever existed. This is talking about laws of history that most societies have to follow. It's historicism.
BoI 15 (my bold):
That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
This is another law of history: a grand speculation about what most humans have done throughout history along with claims that history couldn't happen any other way. Deutsch says "always" and "can only be" – he emphasizes that he's saying no alternatives are possible.
Laws of physics say what must happen with no alternative (gravity isn't optional). "Law" is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present" (New Oxford American Dictionary). Deutsch is saying the same things always occur in human societies if certain conditions are present (the conditions are a static society, not a dynamic society). This is an example of what Popper criticized as historicism.
Context
I helped Deutsch with BoI by discussing the issues with him for years and writing around 200 pages of comments on drafts. I read PoH many years ago. I failed to recognize how much PoH criticized BoI's ideas. I also failed to recognize that some of Deutsch's ideas and terminology, which I thought were original, were actually in PoH (though often being criticized by Popper, not advocated). Deutsch had completed an article on meme theory in 1994, years before I met him, which wasn't published, but I have it and it makes similar claims to BoI. I played no role in Deutsch originally coming up with his meme theory.
For more details, see Moon's article, read PoH to see Popper's criticisms of historicism, and/or read BoI (especially 1, 15, 16) to see what Deutsch said. PoH is 149 pages long, so it's a short, quick read compared to most of Popper's books.
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