Men in Zanzibar insist that, during times of turmoil, the Popobawa, a one-eyed bat-dwarf, comes round and sodomizes those who do not believe in him. Naturally terrified, some have taken to sleeping with interlocked arms outside their huts in hopes of avoiding the unwelcome tryst. Yet no one has acquired evidence proving the existence of Popobawa, and no one wants to seek any because that would betray skepticism, providing sufficient grounds for daemonic penetration.
Similarly, in the "enlightened" West, people like Mel Gibson believe that humans roast in hell for not believing in Christ and make grisly movies to emphasize their opinions.
Both parties suffer from the same error: falling under the control of "memes," which the Oxford Dictionary of English defines as "elements of culture passed on by non-genetic means, especially imitation." Memes in the world are legion, ranging from the benign to the lethal, from the amusing to the atrocious. Oxford professor Richard Dawkins aptly likens memes to the human version of computer viruses, implanting themselves in minds and replicating both longitudinally (passed on to children) and latitudinally (passed to one's peers) for the sole purpose of self-propagation. In his view, we err in supposing that the only replicator on the planet is the gene.
Turning to a human example, he considers the phenomenon of the "craze" among students, something with which we are all familiar. In Dawkins's time the "thing" was making origami boats, just as playing "pogs" dominated the generation raised in the '90s and just as wearing pointy shoes dominates the tastes of female undergraduates at Duke today.
For a more technical definition of the meme one can turn to Cambridge professor Robert Aunger who calls a meme: "...the state of a node in a neuronal network capable of generating a copy of itself in either the same or a different neuronal network, without being destroyed in the process." In the case of the pointy shoes, the meme spreading from female to female is the odd notion that this kind of footwear pleases the senses and conduces to elevated social standing, moving from host mind to host mind faster than the gastrointestinal virus presently ravaging the viscera of Craven Quad leaps from intestine to intestine.
But as Dawkins points out, all memes exist in Darwinian competition with other memes, with some winding up more successful than others for adaptive reasons. Since memes co-evolved with genes, there is a tight interplay here, and it follows that memes that help an individual survive and reproduce will be selected for, neatly explaining the origin and endurance of the major, monolithic memes of our time. In effect, our incorporation of memes results from imitation: we see that other people have "survival tricks" and copy them to maximize benefit for ourselves, thus spreading the trick.
This would all be tolerable if these survival tricks were true, but they are not. And, unfortunately, the major ones make claims that extend far beyond the realm of footwear, wandering into the wasteland of absolutes. Truth is not the standard by which memes succeed; memes prosper by finding ways to survive and spread regardless of method.
(Thus we observe the absurd case where large numbers of people believe in things that have no basis in reality, using them to justify wars or glorifying them by steering commercial aircraft into skyscrapers.) As you have surely guessed, religion is the alpha-meme, the penultimate "mind-virus," conferring survival benefits (e.g. sense of purpose, sense of meaning, social cooperation, motivation) to its practitioners at the expense of reality, though it remains a fascinating discipline for scholarly work, and is pursued at Duke by many exceptional scholars.
Reasonable people fear the return of the Dark Ages. For one unreason or another, religious fervor flows in cycles; and one such cycle overwhelmed the glory of the Greeks for two millennia. Today, as we teeter on the brink of another such fall--Dawkins points out the fact that we have a "born-again" president facing a religiously motivated foe--persons of reason must stand to negate the preachers of faith while offering humanity the only maxim, first principle and moral injunction worth mention: love truth or die of your lies.
Matthew Gillum is a Trinity junior. His column appears every other Tuesday.
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