The Meme Machine (36 page)

Even evil and cruelty can be redefined as good. The Koran states that it is good to give a hundred lashes to an adulteress and to have no pity on her. You might think that Muslim women can avoid this by not committing adultery, but Warraq (1995) explains in unpleasant detail what life can be like in countries that adhere strictly to Islamic law. Women may be powerless to resist sexual abuse, and afterwards must take the punishment while the men who abused them get off free. Since women are objects of disgust, a man is supposed not to touch a woman he does not have rights over. Women are routinely locked away and, if they are allowed out, must walk behind the man and be suitably covered -which in many countries means being covered head to toe in a smothering garment with just a tiny grille to look out of. Obeying such rules to the letter makes a Muslim ‘good’, regardless of the misery it creates.

Returning to more honest uses of goodness and altruism, Allison’s (1992) theory of ‘beneficent norms’ applies especially well to religions. One of his general rules is ‘Be good to your close cultural relatives’; the memetic equivalent of kin selection. But how do you know who they are? This rule tracks biological kinship in cultures with predominantly vertical transmission, since in these cultures you acquire most of your memes
from biological relatives, but with horizontal transmission other means of recognition are needed. One is ‘Be good to those who act like you’. It works like this. If you see someone else who acts the same way as you do, it is likely that you both have cultural ancestors in common. If you now help him you make it more likely that he will be successful, and hence that he will pass on his memes, including the rule ‘Be good to those who act like you’. Allison calls this a ‘marker scheme’. He gives the examples of wearing a turban or abstaining from certain foods, but we might add supporting Manchester United or listening to hip–hop, as well as genuflecting or wearing a little portrait of your guru round your neck. He adds that markers that are costly or difficult to learn can deter exploitation by outsiders. Apart from languages, a good example is religious rituals. Many of these require years to learn and others, such as ritual circumcision, are certainly costly for an adult.

The result of this kind of altruism is that people are kind and generous to the in–group and not to outsiders. This boosts the well–being of the group’s members and hence makes them more likely to be imitated, and so pass on the faith. This is exactly what we see in many of the world’s greatest religions. Although the instruction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself is commonly taken to mean ‘love everyone’, in the tribal context in which it was first written it may have been meant more literally – in other words love your own tribe, and your own family, but not everybody else (Hartung 1995). Even the admonition not to kill may originally have applied only to the in–group. Hartung points out that the rabbis of the Talmud used to hold an Israelite guilty of murder if he intentionally killed another Israelite, but killing other people did not count.

Some religions positively encourage murder and war against people of other faiths. Islam has fatwas and jihads to justify killing unbelievers, and especially those who harm or renounce the faith. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his famous fatwa on the author Salman Rushdie. This is a direct call to all Muslims to murder Rushdie for daring to blaspheme against the holy Koran in his book
Satanic Verses.
When the punishment for renouncing or criticising a religion is so severe, the memes are very ably protected.

Hindus, Muslims, and Christians alike have gone to war again and again in the name of God. When a few hundred Spaniards murdered thousands of Incas, leading to the destruction of an entire civilisation, they did it for the glory of God and the holy Catholic Faith. In a subtler way religious missionaries are still destroying ancient cultures even today. People have been tortured, burned alive, and shot because they believed the wrong thing. Religions teach that God wants you to spread his
True
understanding to all the world and it is therefore
good
to maim, rape, pillage, steal, and murder.

We saw how the conspiracy theory protects UFO memes; similar mechanisms protect religious memes. As Dawkins (1993) points out, good Catholics have faith; they do not need proof. Indeed, it is a measure of how spiritual and religious you are that you have faith enough to believe in completely impossible things without asking questions, such as that the wine is
really
turned into blood. This assertion cannot be tested because the liquid in the cup still tastes, looks and smells like wine – you must just have faith that it is
really
Christ’s blood. If you are tempted by doubt, you must resist. Not only is God invisible but he ‘moves in mysterious ways’. The mystery is part of the whole package and to be admired in its own right. This untestability protects the memes from rejection.

Religious memes are stored, and thus given improved longevity, in the great religious texts. The theologian Hugh Pyper (1998) describes the Bible as one of the most successful texts ever produced. ‘If “survival of the fittest” has any validity as a slogan, then the Bible seems a fair candidate for the accolade of the fittest of texts’ (p. 70). It has been translated into over two thousand languages, exists in many different versions within some of those languages, and even in a country like Japan, where only one or two per cent of the population are Christians, more than a quarter of all households possesses a copy. Pyper argues that Western culture is the Bible’s way of making more Bibles. And why is it so successful? Because it alters its environment in a way that increases the chances of its being copied. It does this, for example, by including within itself many instructions to pass it on, and by describing itself as indispensable to the people who read it. It is extremely adaptable, and since much of its content is self–contradictory it can be used to justify more or less any action or moral stance.

When we look at religions from a meme’s eye view we can understand why they have been so successful. These religious memes did not set out with an intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were copied from one person to another in the long history of human attempts to understand the world. They were successful because they happened to come together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly passed on to more. They evoked strong emotions and strange experiences. They provided myths to answer real questions and the myths were protected by untestability, threats, and promises. They created and then reduced fear to create
compliance, and they used the beauty, truth and altruism tricks to help their spread. That is why they are still with us, and why millions of people’s behaviour is routinely controlled by ideas that are either false or completely untestable.

••••••

No one designed these great faiths with all their clever tricks. Rather, they evolved gradually by memetic selection. But nowadays people deliberately use memetic tricks to spread religions and make money. Their techniques of memetic engineering are derived from long experience and research, and are similar to those used in propaganda and marketing; with radio, television and the Internet, their memes can spread far further and faster than ever before. Billy Graham’s style of tele–evangelism is a good example. He starts by evoking fear, reminding people of all the terrible things happening in the world and of their own impotence and mortality. He presents science as having no answers and as a cause of the world’s ills, and then persuades people to surrender to the all–powerful God who is their only hope of salvation. The experience of surrender raises powerful emotions and people turn to God in huge numbers.

Other evangelists use healing to spread the Word. We have seen how perfectly normal psychological processes can make people feel better, even when they are not actually cured, and this is a powerful incentive to take on the God memes that often accompany the healing. The trip to Lourdes is expensive and difficult. Expectations are high. Spiritualist healers are kind and plausible, and really do seem to care about your troubles.

Some use fake healing. In the 1980s, Peter Popoff and his wife Elizabeth brought millions of Americans to God, and millions of dollars to the Popoffs, through their healing missions. Their vast audiences sang and prayed, and watched seriously ill people stagger onto the stage, raising powerful emotions as the Popoffs appealed for donations. As Peter correctly diagnosed illnesses and announced the sufferers cured, people forgot that an hour before Elizabeth had wandered through the audience collecting prayer cards on which people wrote their names, addresses, ailments and other crucial facts. She took these to the computer database backstage and beamed the information to a receiver behind Peter’s left ear (Stein 1996).

Miracles of all kinds have been used to convert unbelievers. Jesus walked on water and brought a dead man back to life, nineteenth–century spiritualist mediums created spirit forms made of ‘ectoplasm’, and the advanced practitioners of transcendental meditation claim to levitate.

Some people effectively combine special powers with the altruism trick, such as England’s much–loved grandmotherly medium Doris Stokes who packed her audiences with clients whom she already knew, and fooled millions (I. Wilson 1987). Many of those clients were recently bereaved wives, husbands or parents who gained comfort from Stokes’s messages but who might have coped better with their grief if they had been helped to accept the reality of death.

I do not mean to imply, from all I have said, that there are no true ideas anywhere in any religion. The memetic mechanisms I have described would allow religions to flourish that were based on complete falsehoods and nothing else, but there may be true ideas embedded in them as well. Just as some alternative therapies thrive by including a few treatments that work, so religions may include valid insights as well as misleading myths.

At the heart of many religions lie the mystical traditions, like that found in the fourteenth–century
Cloud of Unknowing
or the teachings of Julian of Norwich in Christianity; the Sufi teachings of Islam; or the stories of enlightenment in Buddhism. These traditions emphasise direct spiritual experience which is often ineffable and therefore hard to pass on. In spontaneous mystical experiences people typically feel they have been given a glimpse of the world as it really is. They feel that self and other have become one, the entire universe is as it is, or that everything is oneness and light. These may indeed be valid insights (I believe they are), but on their own they are not very successful as memes, and rapidly get overtaken by all the more powerful religious ideas I have described above.

Buddhism provides a good example. If the stories are to be believed, the Buddha sat under a tree, with a fervent desire to understand, until finally he became enlightened. He then taught what he had seen, that everything is empty of self–nature, that life is unsatisfactory, that suffering comes about through craving or attachment, and that the cessation of craving leads to freedom from suffering. He laid down an ethical code of behaviour and taught his disciples to work out their own salvation with diligence, by calming the mind and practising attention in every moment. None of this is very comforting. Basically, it means you are on your own in a fundamentally unsatisfactory world with no one to help you. If you look to anything at all to try to make it better then you are caught up in craving and hence suffering. Enlightenment is not something to be attained; it is simply the giving up of – well everything really. As one of my students put it ‘I couldn’t bear not to want chocolate. I couldn’t even imagine not craving chocolate, let alone not craving anything.’

So what happens to difficult ideas like these? Perhaps surprisingly they
can and do survive, often by being passed in an unbroken chain from inspiring and enlightened teachers to hard–working pupils. Zen Buddhism sticks quite closely to the simplest teachings and includes no deities or hidden powers; no altruism nor beauty tricks. One is told to find out the truth for oneself and trained simply to sit and watch the mind until it becomes clear. These difficult ideas have survived almost dying out in the East and are now spreading widely in the West (Batchelor 1994). However, other forms of Buddhism are much more popular all over the world, such as Tibetan Buddhism, with its numerous powerful deities, beautiful buildings and paintings, stories of marvellous deeds, reciting of sutras, chants, and liturgies. Whether or not there are true insights at the heart of any religion, the fact is that clever memes will tend to beat them in the battle for replication.

We can now see how and why religions have the power and persistence they do. I want now to consider two further questions. First, have they played any part in meme–gene coevolution? And second, how are religions changing now that memes are being spread by modern technology?

The coevolution of religions and genes

The coevolutionary question is this. Have the religious memes that thrived in the past had any effect on which genes were successful? If so, this would be another example of memetic driving. I shall speculate here and hope that some of the questions I raise may be answered by future research.

We know little of the earliest religions. There is evidence of burial of the dead from the Neanderthals who lived from 130000 to 40000 years ago, but it is likely that they were not our ancestors. About 50000 years ago came what is sometimes called the ‘Great Leap Forward’, characterised by improvements in toolmaking, the beginnings of art, and the creation of jewellery which was sometimes buried with the dead. We can only guess at religious beliefs but burial rites at least suggest some idea of an afterlife. Modern hunter–gatherer societies have varied religious beliefs, including ancestor worship, special powers attributed to the priest or shaman, and belief in an afterlife. So we might guess that early human religions were something like this.