Memes, Avoidance, and Moral Progress



I think nearly any open atheist who doesn't live in a society of like-minded folks has dealt with awkward silences, and maybe even more so with the painfully obvious omissions in conversations that are like the proverbial elephant in the room.  It's not uncommon for my nonatheist friends and family to take measures by way of avoiding direct conversations about atheism in general and my atheism in particular.  Some even evince distress if they sense that a conversation might head in that direction; this happens, of course, on a scale much wider than my personal experience indicates.  I'm not so self-centered or narrow-minded that I think every conversation should turn on my convictions about the detriments of faith, and I hope most in my circle know that, but I am interested in exploring what seems to me to be a defensive posture that manifests itself chiefly through self-preservation by avoidance.  It is indisputable that people of differing religious beliefs almost never discuss the discrepancies between those beliefs with an eye towards establishing the truth or falsity of either.  In fact, it is normally considered rude for one to attempt initiating such a discussion; is is as if people feel there is something inherently wrong with questioning a particular class of one's beliefs.  The result of this pervasive attitude is that discussions about religious beliefs are limited to either "preaching to the choir" or to those whose agreement is highly probable.  Has anyone reading this ever experienced a preacher having to defend his sermon from an outspoken critic?

This posture strikes me as a little backwards and yet also oddly sensible for reasons that I'd like to explore by considering the topic of evangelism.

Backed up by ideas laid out in her 1999 book, The Meme Machine, Dr. Susan Blackmore has explored the conceptualization of religions and religious traditions as memeplexes, or systems of memes that function together as a social system in much the same way that genes work together in a biological system.  The term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, back in 1976, and refers to a unit of cultural transmission, directly analogous to a gene in a physical system.  The memes that comprise a religion would be things like a congregational prayer recited at every service, or the way that southerners gather outside a church after service to visit with each other, or communion in a Catholic mass.  Religious memes clearly reproduce by evangelism or proselytization, and this means of reproduction can be separated into two functional areas:  in-family and out-of-family. 

In-family is the most common and probably the most reliable - the best predictor of a person's religious preference, if they have one, is that of his or her parents.  In literally thousands of subtle ways the memes of the parents are encouraged to regenerate themselves in the children, including those memes associated with a religious tradition.  It is very rare for people to go across cultural boundaries to a completely foreign religion; it might be even rarer than people discarding religious trappings altogether.  The culture reinforces memes; I guess some would argue that culture itself is comprised of memes.  Parents often reinforce memetic reproduction in their children without even realizing what they are doing, although one would have to be blind to claim that parents neither desire nor intend for their children to assume the lion's share of their own memetic composition.  There are certainly any number of things that I know I have overtly tried to pass on to my kids, and most parents who are in any way serious about their religion take what are often extraordinary measures to ensure that their children adhere to that same religion.

Going beyond parent-child relationships, peer pressure becomes more important: brother-sister, aunt-niece, husband-wife, and all other combinations serve as pressure-points and reinforcements for memes to ensure their survival and reproduction.  Since families are social and cultural structures they are part of the memetic landscape.  Such reinforcement mechanisms are never more applicable than in the context of a particular religious faith.

Peer pressure is also the key element outside of the family.  Out-of-family incidences whereby memes ensure their reproduction would include situations like religious services themselves, where memes are repeated over and over very regularly, or books and magazines espousing a religious faith - some of the most disturbing (yet ridiculous) are those nasty little 4" booklets disguised as comics that one finds throughout the southern United States (I've picked them up in restaurants and even a Radio Shack store).  Other sources include WatchTower and Awake! magazines published by the Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic Digest, B'nai B'rith magazine, Hindusim Today magazine, and a nearly infinite selection of websites.  There are also legal strictures, such as the institution of Sharia in Saudi Arabia, or the barrage of challenges in the U.S. against the separation of church and state.  National religious holidays such as Christmas in the U.S. and many western countries, or Yom Kippur and Hanukkah in Israel, or the Jain holiday of Mahavir Jayanti in India also reinforce memetic reproduction.  Television shows such as The 700 Club here in the U.S. or the variety of Sunday morning church service telecasts serve this role as well.  The Call-To-Prayer in Muslim countries is powerfully inescapable. 

So, evangelism and proselytization can be seen as forms of reproduction, extending the memeplex of religion beyond its current boundaries and ensuring the survival of its constituent memes.  What strikes me as backwards about this posture of self-preservation by avoidance is that it seems to hinge on the minimal awareness of the meme-carrier as to what is actually transpiring.  Vectors avoid directly defending or even deeply comprehending what they are carrying, while a critical and necessary feature of that system is evangelism itself, which naturally entails providing some rationale for others to convert.  Vehicles for the memeplex are in the strange situation of promoting something that they are in so many ways pressured to avoid understanding.  This contrasts with any number of real-life situations:  when we think of preserving or extending, for example, the life of our car's engine, we don't avoid knowing anything about how to accomplish that.  We read the owner's manual in order to understand how often the oil needs to be changed.  If the engine runs poorly then we seek help to deepen our perception of the system.  If I want my 401K retirement fund to grow (or at least be preserved), I take a look at the prospectus the fund manager sends me and adjust my investments accordingly - it would be foolhardy of me to just sit around and remain ignorant of any effect I might have on its performance.  If my health seems to be deteriorating, my best bet is to go and see a doctor to help me understand and stop or reverse the decline. 

Many atheists in a confrontational mood will point out that a thorough reading of the holy texts is what motivated their atheism; the discussion above might explain why this remark offends the sensibilities of the religious so deeply, since those rejecting their memeplex claim to understand it to a greater degree than those who are part of it.  It also illuminates why the machinery and progress of science, as humankind's most reliable and successful means for uncovering fact and truth, are so antithetical to religious systems.

If we think about how our own genes work, though, we realize that we operate with little to no concern for the individual genes themselves, but instead with concern for the entirety of the being that carries and reproduces them; this seems to be the emergent "master-plan" of our genes.   Memetically speaking, then, the entirety of the religious body is operating without overt regard to any of its constituent memes.  This could explain the technique of avoidance - it is similar to the flight response in an animal that is experiencing a threat for which it has no countermeasure, where that response has been reinforced through the evolutionary refinement of the genes that tend to promote such behavior.  It would seem in fact that the memeplex of religion has, as part of its own master-plan, developed the emergent property of selective non-engagement.  I would venture a little further than this and say that the emergent property is more accurately termed as avoidance of critical self evaluation - that is, the body itself (religion) avoids any critical examination or reflection of itself.  In the health example above, I deliberately avoided saying that I would go to a doctor, for we all know of cases (perhaps involving ourselves) where an adverse health effect is ignored or denied, sometimes until it is too late to halt its effects.  One suspects this is due to fear of learning the truth about what may turn out to be a life-altering or life-ending condition; some folks do this with their cars as well (if I ignore that odd rattling sound coming from under the hood, perhaps it will just go away...).

The reticence of nonatheists to engage opponents head on is still intellectually troubling, though, for if an essential condition underlying the survival of a religion is its ability to procreate, then it seems as if direct action and a spirited defense would be among the first orders of business.  Although I have participated in a number of discussions with those of opposing mind, and have also read and watched many other exchanges, I have yet to see direct engagement on any particular element upon which the religion seems to turn.  The discussions invariably slide into tangential matters and avoid the deep questions, such as those regarding the precise nature of god, or the obvious factual and logical contradictions in every holy text, or the very nature of truth and what is knowable.  Instead we hear long digressions about all the charitable good that religious institutions do or about how they offer people solace and comfort in times of trouble.  Whether a religion is useful or good has no bearing on the truth of any of its claims, but this is the misdirection that is most often attempted in lieu of an actual rebuttal.  This seems to be the case whether it is a casual conversation with an acquaintance or a friend, or whether it is a more formally structured debate.  I have become convinced that this avoidance is not intentional at the level of the individual, and probably not even at the level of the institution; I think that instead of intention we can infer the emergence of a behavior that has resulted in the highest likelihood of the memeplex's survival through the unintentional and largely unknown process of cultural evolution.

This doesn't mean that we should accept any position of non-defense; quite the contrary: just as the intentional advancements of medical science and the conscious improvements in our sense of ethical responsibility to one another have interrupted the blind processes of evolution, so too should the development of our intellectual faculties and increasing understanding of the causal mechanisms underlying our behavior interrupt and give new guidance to shaping our cultural and social institutions.  All of these things taken together are what inform true moral progress; if we instead accede our social and cultural development simply to the self-serving machinations of memes and memeplexes then we are just shuffling along a path beyond our understanding and outside our scope of influence.

And that's not progress - just mere survival.

No comments:

Post a Comment