The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is
itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make
it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified
to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that
enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ
dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate
minds. What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an
incalculable store of advantages --- with some Trojan horses thrown in for good
measure. . .
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
1 Duplication Fodder
A beautiful child close to me, six and the apple of her father's eye, believes
that Thomas the Tank Engine really exists. She believes in Father Christmas, and
when she grows up her ambition is to be a tooth fairy. She and her
school-friends believe the solemn word of respected adults that tooth fairies
and Father Christmas really exist. This little girl is of an age to believe
whatever you tell her. If you tell her about witches changing princes into frogs
she will believe you. If you tell her that bad children roast forever in hell
she will have nightmares. I have just discovered that without her father's
consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly
instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?
A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. Most
obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. A
large dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak
about, complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all
transferred from older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult
size. When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate,
it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With
so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it
is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion,
vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like
immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that
adults might brush off without effort.
DNA, too, includes parasitic code. Cellular machinery is extremely good at
copying DNA. Where DNA is concerned, it seems to have an eagerness to copy,
seems eager to be copied. The cell nucleus is a paradise for DNA, humming with
sophisticated, fast, and accurate duplicating machinery.
Cellular machinery is so friendly towards DNA duplication that it is small
wonder cells play host to DNA parasites --- viruses, viroids, plasmids and a
riff-raff of other genetic fellow travelers. Parasitic DNA even gets itself
spliced seamlessly into the chromosomes themselves. ``Jumping genes'' and
stretches of ``selfish DNA'' cut or copy themselves out of chromosomes and paste
themselves in elsewhere. Deadly oncogenes are almost impossible to distinguish
from the legitimate genes between which they are spliced. In evolutionary time,
there is probably a continual traffic from ``straight'' genes to ``outlaw,'' and
back again (Dawkins, 1982). DNA is just DNA. The only thing that distinguishes
viral DNA from host DNA is its expected method of passing into future
generations. ``Legitimate'' host DNA is just DNA that aspires to pass into the
next generation via the orthodox route of sperm or egg. ``Outlaw'' or parasitic
DNA is just DNA that looks to a quicker, less cooperative route to the future,
via a squeezed droplet or a smear of blood, rather than via a sperm or egg.
For data on a floppy disc, a computer is a humming paradise just as cell nuclei
hum with eagerness to duplicate DNA. Computers and their associated disc and
tape readers are designed with high fidelity in mind. As with DNA molecules,
magnetized bytes don't literally ``want'' to be faithfully copied. Nevertheless,
you can write a computer program that takes steps to duplicate itself. Not just
duplicate itself within one computer but spread itself to other computers.
Computers are so good at copying bytes, and so good at faithfully obeying the
instructions contained in those bytes, that they are sitting ducks to
self-replicating programs: wide open to subversion by software parasites. Any
cynic familiar with the theory of selfish genes and memes would have known that
modern personal computers, with their promiscuous traffic of floppy discs and
e-mail links, were just asking for trouble. The only surprising thing about the
current epidemic of computer viruses is that it has been so long in coming.
2 Computer Viruses: a Model for an Informational Epidemiology
Computer viruses are pieces of code that graft themselves into existing,
legitimate programs and subvert the normal actions of those programs. They may
travel on exchanged floppy disks, or over networks. They are technically
distinguished from ``worms'' which are whole programs in their own right,
usually traveling over networks. Rather different are ``Trojan horses,'' a third
category of destructive programs, which are not in themselves self-replicating
but rely on humans to replicate them because of their pornographic or otherwise
appealing content. Both viruses and worms are programs that actually say, in
computer language, ``Duplicate me.'' Both may do other things that make their
presence felt and perhaps satisfy the hole-in-corner vanity of their authors.
These side-effects may be ``humorous'' (like the virus that makes the
Macintosh's built-in loudspeaker enunciate the words ``Don't panic,'' with
predictably opposite effect); malicious (like the numerous IBM viruses that
erase the hard disk after a sniggering screen-announcement of the impending
disaster); political (like the Spanish Telecom and Beijing viruses that protest
about telephone costs and massacred students respectively); or simply
inadvertent (the programmer is incompetent to handle the low-level system calls
required to write an effective virus or worm). The famous Internet Worm, which
paralyzed much of the computing power of the United States on November 2, 1988,
was not intended (very) maliciously but got out of control and, within 24 hours,
had clogged around 6,000 computer memories with exponentially multiplying copies
of itself.
``Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at
rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison.
They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and
are proving to be virtually unquarantinable'' (Dennett 1990, p.131). Viruses
aren't limited to electronic media such as disks and data lines. On its way from
one computer to another, a virus may pass through printing ink, light rays in a
human lens, optic nerve impulses and finger muscle contractions. A computer
fanciers' magazine that printed the text of a virus program for the interest of
its readers has been widely condemned. Indeed, such is the appeal of the virus
idea to a certain kind of puerile mentality (the masculine gender is used
advisedly), that publication of any kind of ``how to'' information on designing
virus programs is rightly seen as an irresponsible act.
I am not going to publish any virus code. But there are certain tricks of
effective virus design that are sufficiently well known, even obvious, that it
will do no harm to mention them, as I need to do to develop my theme. They all
stem from the virus's need to evade detection while it is spreading.
A virus that clones itself too prolifically within one computer will soon be
detected because the symptoms of clogging will become too obvious to ignore. For
this reason many virus programs check, before infecting a system, to make sure
that they are not already on that system. Incidentally, this opens the way for a
defense against viruses that is analogous to immunization. In the days before a
specific anti-virus program was available, I myself responded to an early
infection of my own hard disk by means of a crude ``vaccination.'' Instead of
deleting the virus that I had detected, I simply disabled its coded instructions,
leaving the ``shell'' of the virus with its characteristic external
``signature'' intact. In theory, subsequent members of the same virus species
that arrived in my system should have recognized the signature of their own kind
and refrained from trying to double-infect. I don't know whether this
immunization really worked, but in those days it probably was worth while
``gutting'' a virus and leaving a shell like this, rather than simply removing
it lock, stock and barrel. Nowadays it is better to hand the problem over to one
of the professionally written anti-virus programs.
A virus that is too virulent will be rapidly detected and scotched. A virus that
instantly and catastrophically sabotages every computer in which it finds itself
will not find itself in many computers. It may have a most amusing effect on one
computer ---- erase an entire doctoral thesis or something equally
side-splitting --- but it won't spread as an epidemic.
Some viruses, therefore, are designed to have an effect that is small enough to
be difficult to detect, but which may nevertheless be extremely damaging. There
is one type, which, instead of erasing disk sectors wholesale, attacks only
spreadsheets, making a few random changes in the (usually financial) quantities
entered in the rows and columns. Other viruses evade detection by being
triggered probabilistically, for example erasing only one in 16 of the hard
disks infected. Yet other viruses employ the time-bomb principle. Most modern
computers are ``aware'' of the date, and viruses have been triggered to manifest
themselves all around the world, on a particular date such as Friday 13th or
April Fool's Day. From the parasitic point of view, it doesn't matter how
catastrophic the eventual attack is, provided the virus has had plenty of
opportunity to spread first (a disturbing analogy to the Medawar/Williams theory
of ageing: we are the victims of lethal and sub-lethal genes that mature only
after we have had plenty of time to reproduce (Williams, 1957)). In defense,
some large companies go so far as to set aside one ``miner's canary'' among
their fleet of computers, and advance its internal calendar a week so that any
time-bomb viruses will reveal themselves prematurely before the big day.
Again predictably, the epidemic of computer viruses has triggered an arms race.
Anti-viral software is doing a roaring trade. These antidote programs --
``Interferon,'' ``Vaccine,'' ``Gatekeeper'' and others --- employ a diverse
armory of tricks. Some are written with specific, known and named viruses in
mind. Others intercept any attempt to meddle with sensitive system areas of
memory and warn the user.
The virus principle could, in theory, be used for non-malicious, even beneficial
purposes. Thimbleby (1991) coins the phrase ``liveware'' for his
already-implemented use of the infection principle for keeping multiple copies
of databases up to date. Every time a disk containing the database is plugged
into a computer, it looks to see whether there is already another copy present
on the local hard disk. If there is, each copy is updated in the light of the
other. So, with a bit of luck, it doesn't matter which member of a circle of
colleagues enters, say, a new bibliographical citation on his personal disk. His
newly entered information will readily infect the disks of his colleagues (because
the colleagues promiscuously insert their disks into one another's computers)
and will spread like an epidemic around the circle. Thimbleby's liveware is not
entirely virus-like: it could not spread to just anybody's computer and do
damage. It spreads data only to already-existing copies of its own database; and
you will not be infected by liveware unless you positively opt for infection.
Incidentally, Thimbleby, who is much concerned with the virus menace, points out
that you can gain some protection by using computer systems that other people
don't use. The usual justification for purchasing today's numerically dominant
computer is simply and solely that it is numerically dominant. Almost every
knowledgeable person agrees that, in terms of quality and especially
user-friendliness, the rival, minority system is superior. Nevertheless,
ubiquity is held to be good in itself, sufficient to outweigh sheer quality. Buy
the same (albeit inferior) computer as your colleagues, the argument goes, and
you'll be able to benefit from shared software, and from a generally large
circulation of available software. The irony is that, with the advent of the
virus plague, ``benefit'' is not all that you are likely to get. Not only should
we all be very hesitant before we accept a disk from a colleague. We should also
be aware that, if we join a large community of users of a particular make of
computer, we are also joining a large community of viruses --- even, it turns
out, disproportionately larger.
Returning to possible uses of viruses for positive purposes, there are proposals
to exploit the ``poacher turned gamekeeper'' principle, and ``set a thief to
catch a thief.'' A simple way would be to take any of the existing anti-viral
programs and load it, as a ``warhead,'' into a harmless self-replicating virus.
From a ``public health'' point of view, a spreading epidemic of anti-viral
software could be especially beneficial because the computers most vulnerable to
malicious viruses --- those whose owners are promiscuous in the exchange of
pirated programs --- will also be most vulnerable to infection by the healing
anti-virus. A more penetrating anti-virus might --- as in the immune system ---
``learn'' or ``evolve'' an improved capacity to attack whatever viruses it
encountered.
I can imagine other uses of the computer virus principle which, if not exactly
altruistic, are at least constructive enough to escape the charge of pure
vandalism. A computer company might wish to do market research on the habits of
its customers, with a view to improving the design of future products. Do users
like to choose files by pictorial icon, or do they opt to display them by
textual name only? How deeply do people nest folders (directories) within one
another? Do people settle down for a long session with only one program, say a
word processors, or are they constantly switching back and forth, say between
writing and drawing programs? Do people succeed in moving the mouse pointer
straight to the target, or do they meander around in time-wasting hunting
movements that could be rectified by a change in design?
The company could send out a questionnaire asking all these questions, but the
customers that replied would be a biased sample and, in any case, their own
assessment of their computer-using behavior might be inaccurate. A better
solution would be a market-research computer program. Customers would be asked
to load this program into their system where it would unobtrusively sit, quietly
monitoring and tallying key-presses and mouse movements. At the end of a year,
the customer would be asked to send in the disk file containing all the
tallyings of the market-research program. But again, most people would not
bother to cooperate and some might see it as an invasion of privacy and of their
disk space.
The perfect solution, from the company's point of view, would be a virus. Like
any other virus, it would be self-replicating and secretive. But it would not be
destructive or facetious like an ordinary virus. Along with its self-replicating
booster it would contain a market-research warhead. The virus would be released
surreptitiously into the community of computer users. Just like an ordinary
virus it would spread around, as people passed floppy disks and e-mail around
the community. As the virus spread from computer to computer, it would build up
statistics on users behavior, monitored secretly from deep within a succession
of systems. Every now and again, a copy of the viruses would happen to find its
way, by normal epidemic traffic, back into one of the company's own computers.
There it would be debriefed and its data collated with data from other copies of
the virus that had come ``home.''
Looking into the future, it is not fanciful to imagine a time when viruses, both
bad and good, have become so ubiquitous that we could speak of an ecological
community of viruses and legitimate programs coexisting in the silicosphere. At
present, software is advertised as, say, ``Compatible with System 7.'' In the
future, products may be advertised as ``Compatible with all viruses registered
in the 1998 World Virus Census; immune to all listed virulent viruses; takes
full advantage of the facilities offered by the following benign viruses if
present...'' Word-processing software, say, may hand over particular functions,
such as word-counting and string-searches, to friendly viruses burrowing
autonomously through the text.
Looking even further into the future, whole integrated software systems might
grow, not by design, but by something like the growth of an ecological community
such as a tropical rain-forest. Gangs of mutually compatible viruses might grow
up, in the same way as genomes can be regarded as gangs of mutually compatible
genes (Dawkins, 1982). Indeed, I have even suggested that our genomes should be
regarded as gigantic colonies of viruses (Dawkins, 1976). Genes cooperate with
one another in genomes because natural selection has favored those genes that
prosper in the presence of the other genes that happen to be common in the gene
pool. Different gene pools may evolve towards different combinations of mutually
compatible genes. I envisage a time when, in the same kind of way, computer
viruses may evolve towards compatibility with other viruses, to form communities
or gangs. But then again, perhaps not! At any rate, I find the speculation more
alarming than exciting.
At present, computer viruses don't strictly evolve. They are invented by human
programmers, and if they evolve they do so in the same weak sense as cars or
aeroplanes evolve. Designers derive this year's car as a slight modification of
last year's car, and then may, more or less consciously, continue a trend of the
last few years --- further flattening of the radiator grill or whatever it may
be. Computer virus designers dream up ever more devious tricks for outwitting
the programmers of anti-virus software. But computer viruses don't --- so far
--- mutate and evolve by true natural selection. They may do so in the future.
Whether they evolve by natural selection, or whether their evolution is steered
by human designers, may not make much difference to their eventual performance.
By either kind of evolution, we expect them to become better at concealment, and
we expect them to become subtly compatible with other viruses that are at the
same time prospering in the computer community.
DNA viruses and computer viruses spread for the same reason: an environment
exists in which there is machinery well set up to duplicate and spread them
around and to obey the instructions that the viruses embody. These two
environments are, respectively, the environment of cellular physiology and the
environment provided by a large community of computers and data-handling
machinery. Are there any other environments like these, any other humming
paradises of replication?
3 The Infected Mind
I have already alluded to the programmed-in gullibility of a child, so useful
for learning language and traditional wisdom, and so easily subverted by nuns,
Moonies and their ilk. More generally, we all exchange information with one
another. We don't exactly plug floppy disks into slots in one another's skulls,
but we exchange sentences, both through our ears and through our eyes. We notice
each other's styles of moving and dressing and are influenced. We take in
advertising jingles, and are presumably persuaded by them, otherwise hard-headed
businessmen would not spend so much money polluting the air with them.
Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator,
demands of a friendly medium,. the two qualities that make cellular machinery so
friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards
computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate
information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently
reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded
in the information so replicated.
Cellular machinery and electronic computers excel in both these virus-friendly
qualities. How do human brains match up? As faithful duplicators, they are
certainly less perfect than either cells or electronic computers. Nevertheless,
they are still pretty good, perhaps about as faithful as an RNA virus, though
not as good as DNA with all its elaborate proofreading measures against textual
degradation. Evidence of the fidelity of brains, especially child brains, as
data duplicators is provided by language itself. Shaw's Professor Higgins was
able by ear alone to place Londoners in the street where they grew up. Fiction
is not evidence for anything, but everyone knows that Higgins's fictional skill
is only an exaggeration of something we can all do. Any American can tell Deep
South from Mid West, New England from Hillbilly. Any New Yorker can tell Bronx
from Brooklyn. Equivalent claims could be substantiated for any country. What
this phenomenon means is that human brains are capable of pretty accurate
copying (otherwise the accents of, say, Newcastle would not be stable enough to
be recognized) but with some mistakes (otherwise pronunciation would not evolve,
and all speakers of a language would inherit identically the same accents from
their remote ancestors). Language evolves, because it has both the great
stability and the slight changeability that are prerequisites for any evolving
system.
The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment --- that it should obey a
program of coded instructions --- is again only quantitatively less true for
brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another,
but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world
over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather
than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow
towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a
maniac, to ``speak in tongues'' --- the list of such arbitrary and pointless
motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive --- are obeyed, if not
slavishly, at leasst with some reasonably high statistical probability.
Less portentously, and again especially prominent in children, the ``craze'' is
a striking example of behavior that owes more to epidemiology than to rational
choice. Yo-yos, hula hoops and pogo sticks, with their associated behavioral
fixed actions, sweep through schools, and more sporadically leap from school to
school, in patterns that differ from a measles epidemic in no serious
particular. Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through
the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the
reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of
geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology
is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it. We don't
have to get into arguments about ``determinism''; we don't have to claim that
children are compelled to imitate their fellows' hat fashions. It is enough that
their hat-wearing behavior, as a matter of fact, is statistically affected by
the hat-wearing behavior of their fellows.
Trivial though they are, crazes provide us with yet more circumstantial evidence
that human minds, especially perhaps juvenile ones, have the qualities that we
have singled out as desirable for an informational parasite. At the very least
the mind is a plausible candidate for infection by something like a computer
virus, even if it is not quite such a parasite's dream-environment as a cell
nucleus or an electronic computer.
It is intriguing to wonder what it might feel like, from the inside, if one's
mind were the victim of a ``virus.'' This might be a deliberately designed
parasite, like a present-day computer virus. Or it might be an inadvertently
mutated and unconsciously evolved parasite. Either way, especially if the
evolved parasite was the memic descendant of a long line of successful ancestors,
we are entitled to expect the typical ``mind virus'' to be pretty good at its
job of getting itself successfully replicated.
Progressive evolution of more effective mind-parasites will have two aspects.
New ``mutants'' (either random or designed by humans) that are better at
spreading will become more numerous. And there will be a ganging up of ideas
that flourish in one another's presence, ideas that mutually support one another
just as genes do and as I have speculated computer viruses may one day do. We
expect that replicators will go around together from brain to brain in mutually
compatible gangs. These gangs will come to constitute a package, which may be
sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism or
Voodoo. It doesn't too much matter whether we analogize the whole package to a
single virus, or each one of the component parts to a single virus. The analogy
is not that precise anyway, just as the distinction between a computer virus and
a computer worm is nothing to get worked up about. What matters is that minds
are friendly environments to parasitic, self-replicating ideas or information,
and that minds are typically massively infected.
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).
1. The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as ``faith.''
2. Patients typically make a positive virtue of faith's
being strong and unshakable, in spite of not being based
upon evidence. Indeed, they may feel that the less evidence
there is, the more virtuous the belief (see below).
This paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive
virtue where faith is concerned has something of the quality
of a program that is self-sustaining, because it is
self-referential (see the chapter ``On Viral Sentences and
Self-Replicating Structures'' in Hofstadter, 1985). Once the
proposition is believed, it automatically undermines
opposition to itself. The ``lack of evidence is a virtue''
idea could be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith
itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral programs.
3. A related symptom, which a
faith-sufferer may also present, is the conviction that
``mystery,'' per se, is a good thing. It is not a virtue to
solve mysteries. Rather we should enjoy them, even revel in
their insolubility.
Any impulse to solve mysteries could be serious inimical to
the spread of a mind virus. It would not, therefore, be
surprising if the idea that ``mysteries are better not
solved'' was a favored member of a mutually supporting gang
of viruses. Take the ``Mystery of Transubstantiation.'' It
is easy and non-mysterious to believe that in some symbolic
or metaphorical sense the eucharistic wine turns into the
blood of Christ. The Roman Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation, however, claims far more. The ``whole
substance'' of the wine is converted into the blood of
Christ; the appearance of wine that remains is ``merely
accidental,'' ``inhering in no substance'' (Kenny, 1986, p.
72). Transubstantiation is colloquially taught as meaning
that the wine ``literally'' turns into the blood of Christ.
Whether in its obfuscatory Aristotelian or its franker
colloquial form, the claim of transubstantiation can be made
only if we do serious violence to the normal meanings of
words like ``substance'' and ``literally.'' Redefining words
is not a sin, but, if we use words like ``whole substance''
and ``literally'' for this case, what word are we going to
use when we really and truly want to say that something did
actually happen? As Anthony Kenny observed of his own
puzzlement as a young seminarian, ``For all I could tell, my
typewriter might be Benjamin Disraeli transubstantiated....''
Roman Catholics, whose belief in infallible authority
compels them to accept that wine becomes physically
transformed into blood despite all appearances, refer to the
``mystery'' of transubstantiation. Calling it a mystery
makes everything OK, you see. At least, it works for a mind
well prepared by background infection. Exactly the same
trick is performed in the ``mystery'' of the Trinity.
Mysteries are not meant to be solved, they are meant to
strike awe. The ``mystery is a virtue'' idea comes to the
aid of the Catholic, who would otherwise find intolerable
the obligation to believe the obvious nonsense of the
transubstantiation and the ``three-in-one.'' Again, the
belief that ``mystery is a virtue'' has a self-referential
ring. As Hofstadter might put it, the very mysteriousness of
the belief moves the believer to perpetuate the mystery.
An extreme symptom of ``mystery is a virtue'' infection is
Tertullian's ``Certum est quia impossibile est'' (It is
certain because it is impossible''). That way madness lies.
One is tempted to quote Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who, in
response to Alice's ``One can't believe impossible things''
retorted ``I daresay you haven't had much practice... When I
was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why,
sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things
before breakfast.'' Or Douglas Adams' Electric Monk, a
labor-saving device programmed to do your believing for you,
which was capable of ``believing things they'd have
difficulty believing in Salt Lake City'' and which, at the
moment of being introduced to the reader, believed, contrary
to all the evidence, that everything in the world was a
uniform shade of pink. But White Queens and Electric Monks
become less funny when you realize that these virtuoso
believers are indistinguishable from revered theologians in
real life. ``It is by all means to be believed, because it
is absurd'' (Tertullian again). Sir Thomas Browne (1635)
quotes Tertullian with approval, and goes further:
``Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion
for an active faith.'' And ``I desire to exercise my faith
in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and
visible objects is not faith, but perswasion [sic].''
I have the feeling that something more interesting is going
on here than just plain insanity or surrealist nonsense,
something akin to the admiration we feel when we watch a
ten-ball juggler on a tightrope. It is as though the
faithful gain prestige through managing to believe even more
impossible things than their rivals succeed in believing.
Are these people testing --- exercising --- their believing
muscles, training themselves to believe impossible things so
that they can take in their stride the merely improbable
things that they are ordinarily called upon to believe?
While I was writing this, the Guardian (July 29, 1991)
fortuitously carried a beautiful example. It came in an
interview with a rabbi undertaking the bizarre task of
vetting the kosher-purity of food products right back to the
ultimate origins of their minutest ingredients. He was
currently agonizing over whether to go all the way to China
to scrutinize the menthol that goes into cough sweets.
``Have you ever tried checking Chinese menthol... it was
extremely difficult, especially since the first letter we
sent received the reply in best Chinese English, `The
product contains no kosher'... China has only recently
started opening up to kosher investigators. The menthol
should be OK, but you can never be absolutely sure unless
you visit.'' These kosher investigators run a telephone
hot-line on which up-to-the-minute red-alerts of suspicion
are recorded against chocolate bars and cod-liver oil. The
rabbi sighs that the green-inspired trend away from
artificial colors and flavors ``makes life miserable in the
kosher field because you have to follow all these things
back.'' When the interviewer asks him why he bothers with
this obviously pointless exercise, he makes it very clear
that the point is precisely that there is no point:
That most of the Kashrut laws are divine ordinances without
reason given is 100 per cent the point. It is very easy not
to murder people. Very easy. It is a little bit harder not
to steal because one is tempted occasionally. So that is no
great proof that I believe in God or am fulfilling His will.
But, if He tells me not to have a cup of coffee with milk in
it with my mincemeat and peaces at lunchtime, that is a test.
The only reason I am doing that is because I have been told
to so do. It is something difficult.
Helena Cronin has suggested to me that there may be an
analogy here to Zahavi's handicap theory of sexual selection
and the evolution of signals (Zahavi, 1975). Long
unfashionable, even ridiculed (Dawkins, 1976), Zahavi's
theory has recently been cleverly rehabilitated (Grafen,
1990 a, b) and is now taken seriously by evolutionary
biologists (Dawkins, 1989). Zahavi suggests that peacocks,
for instance, evolve their absurdly burdensome fans with
their ridiculously conspicuous (to predators) colors,
precisely because they are burdensome and dangerous, and
therefore impressive to females. The peacock is, in effect,
saying: ``Look how fit and strong I must be, since I can
afford to carry around this preposterous tail.''
To avoid misunderstanding of the subjective language in
which Zahavi likes to make his points, I should add that the
biologist's convention of personifying the unconscious
actions of natural selection is taken for granted here.
Grafen has translated the argument into an orthodox
Darwinian mathematical model, and it works. No claim is here
being made about the intentionality or awareness of peacocks
and peahens. They can be as sphexish or as intentional as
you please (Dennett, 1983, 1984). Moreover, Zahavi's theory
is general enough not to depend upon a Darwinian
underpinning. A flower advertising its nectar to a
``skeptical'' bee could benefit from the Zahavi principle.
But so could a human salesman seeking to impress a client.
The premise of Zahavi's idea is that natural selection will
favor skepticism among females (or among recipients of
advertising messages generally). The only way for a male (or
any advertiser) to authenticate his boast of strength (quality,
or whatever is is) is to prove that it is true by
shouldering a truly costly handicap --- a handicap that only
a genuinely strong (high quality, etc.) male could bear. It
may be called the principle of costly authentication. And
now to the point. Is it possible that some religious
doctrines are favored not in spite of being ridiculous but
precisely because they are ridiculous? Any wimp in religion
could believe that bread symbolically represents the body of
Christ, but it takes a real, red-blooded Catholic to believe
something as daft as the transubstantiation. If you believe
that you can believe anything, and (witness the story of
Doubting Thomas) these people are trained to see that as a
virtue.
Let us return to our list of symptoms that someone afflicted
with the mental virus of faith, and its accompanying gang of
secondary infections, may expect to experience.
4. The sufferer may find himself behaving intolerantly
towards vectors of rival faiths, in extreme cases even
killing them or advocating their deaths. He may be similarly
violent in his disposition towards apostates (people who
once held the faith but have renounced it); or towards
heretics (people who espouse a different --- often, perhaps
significantly, only very slightly different --- version of
the faith). He may also feel hostile towards other modes of
thought that are potentially inimical to his faith, such as
the method of scientific reason which may function rather
like a piece of anti-viral software.
The threat to kill the distinguished novelist Salman Rushdie
is only the latest in a long line of sad examples. On the
very day that I wrote this, the Japanese translator of The
Satanic Verses was found murdered, a week after a near-fatal
attack on the Italian translator of the same book. By the
way, the apparently opposite symptom of ``sympathy'' for
Muslim ``hurt,'' voiced by the Archbishop of Canterbury and
other Christian leaders (verging, in the case of the Vatican,
on outright criminal complicity) is, of course, a
manifestation of the symptom we discussed earlier: the
delusion that faith, however obnoxious its results, has to
be respected simply because it is faith.
Murder is an extreme, of course. But there is an even more
extreme symptom, and that is suicide in the militant service
of a faith. Like a soldier ant programmed to sacrifice her
life for germ-line copies of the genes that did the
programming, a young Arab or Japanese [??!] is taught that
to die in a holy war is the quickest way to heaven. Whether
the leaders who exploit him really believe this does not
diminish the brutal power that the ``suicide mission virus''
wields on behalf of the faith. Of course suicide, like
murder, is a mixed blessing: would-be converts may be
repelled, or may treat with contempt a faith that is
perceived as insecure enough to need such tactics.
More obviously, if too many individuals sacrifice themselves
the supply of believers could run low. This was true of a
notorious example of faith-inspired suicide, though in this
case it was not ``kamikaze'' death in battle. The Peoples'
Temple sect became extinct when its leader, the Reverend Jim
Jones, led the bulk of his followers from the United States
to the Promised Land of ``Jonestown'' in the Guyanan jungle
where he persuaded more than 900 of them, children first, to
drink cyanide. The macabre affair was fully investigated by
a team from the San Francisco Chronicle (Kilduff and Javers,
1978).
Jones, ``the Father,'' had called his flock together and
told them it was time to depart for heaven.
``We're going to meet,'' he promised, ``in another place.''
The words kept coming over the camp's loudspeakers.
``There is great dignity in dying. It is a great
demonstration for everyone to die.''
Incidentally, it does not escape the trained mind of the
alert sociobiologist that Jones, within his sect in earlier
days, ``proclaimed himself the only person permitted to have
sex'' (presumably his partners were also permitted). ``A
secretary would arrange for Jones's liaisons. She would call
up and say, `Father hates to do this, but he has this
tremendous urge and could you please...?' '' His victims
were not only female. One 17-year-old male follower, from
the days when Jones's community was still in San Francisco,
told how he was taken for dirty weekends to a hotel where
Jones received a ``minister's discount for Rev. Jim Jones
and son.'' The same boy said: ``I was really in awe of him.
He was more than a father. I would have killed my parents
for him.'' What is remarkable about the Reverend Jim Jones
is not his own self-serving behavior but the almost
superhuman gullibility of his followers. Given such
prodigious credulity, can anyone doubt that human minds are
ripe for malignant infection?
Admittedly, the Reverend Jones conned only a few thousand
people. But his case is an extreme, the tip of an iceberg.
The same eagerness to be conned by religious leaders is
widespread. Most of us would have been prepared to bet that
nobody could get away with going on television and saying,
in all but so many words, ``Send me your money, so that I
can use it to persuade other suckers to send me their money
too.'' Yet today, in every major conurbation in the United
States, you can find at least one television evangelist
channel entirely devoted to this transparent confidence
trick. And they get away with it in sackfuls. Faced with
suckerdom on this awesome scale, it is hard not to feel a
grudging sympathy with the shiny-suited conmen. Until you
realize that not all the suckers are rich, and that it is
often widows' mites on which the evangelists are growing fat.
I have even heard one of them explicitly invoking the
principle that I now identify with Zahavi's principle of
costly authentication. God really appreciates a donation, he
said with passionate sincerity, only when that donation is
so large that it hurts. Elderly paupers were wheeled on to
testify how much happier they felt since they had made over
their little all to the Reverend whoever it was.
5. The patient may notice that the particular convictions
that he holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, do
seem to owe a great deal to epidemiology. Why, he may wonder,
do I hold this set of convictions rather than that set? Is
it because I surveyed all the world's faiths and chose the
one whose claims seemed most convincing? Almost certainly
not. If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly
likely that it is the same faith as your parents and
grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring
music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far
the most important variable determining your religion is the
accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately
believe would have been a completely different, and largely
contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened
to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.
6. If the patient is one of the rare exceptions who follows
a different religion from his parents, the explanation may
still be epidemiological. To be sure, it is possible that he
dispassionately surveyed the world's faiths and chose the
most convincing one. But it is statistically more probable
that he has been exposed to a particularly potent infective
agent --- a John Wesley, a Jim Jones or a St. Paul. Here we
are talking about horizontal transmission, as in measles.
Before, the epidemiology was that of vertical transmission,
as in Huntington's Chorea.
7. The internal sensations of the patient may be startlingly
reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual
love. This is an extremely potent force in the brain, and it
is not surprising that some viruses have evolved to exploit
it. St. Teresa of Avila's famously orgasmic vision is too
notorious to need quoting again. More seriously, and on a
less crudely sensual plane, the philosopher Anthony Kenny
provides moving testimony to the pure delight that awaits
those that manage to believe in the mystery of
transubstantiation. After describing his ordination as a
Roman Catholic priest, empowered by laying on of hands to
celebrate Mass, he goes on that he vividly recalls
the exaltation of the first months during which I had the
power to say Mass. Normally a slow and sluggish riser, I
would leap early out of bed, fully awake and full of
excitement at the thought of the momentous act I was
privileged to perform. I rarely said the public Community
Mass: most days I celebrated alone at a side altar with a
junior member of the College to serve as acolyte and
congregation. But that made no difference to the solemnity
of the sacrifice or the validity of the consecration.
It was touching the body of Christ, the closeness of the
priest to Jesus, which most enthralled me. I would gaze on
the Host after the words of consecration, soft-eyed like a
lover looking into the eyes of his beloved... Those early
days as a priest remain in my memory as days of fulfilment
and tremulous happiness; something precious, and yet too
fragile to last, like a romantic love-affair brought up
short by the reality of an ill-assorted marriage. (Kenny,
1986, pp. 101-2)
Dr. Kenny is affectingly believable that it felt to him, as
a young priest, as though he was in love with the
consecrated host. What a brilliantly successful virus! On
the same page, incidentally, Kenny also shows us that the
virus is transmitted contagiously --- if not literally then
at least in some sense --- from the palm of the infecting
bishop's hand through the top of the new priest's head:
If Catholic doctrine is true, every priest validly ordained
derives his orders in an unbroken line of laying on of hands,
through the bishop who ordains him, back to one of the
twelve Apostles... there must be centuries-long, recorded
chains of layings on of hands. It surprises me that priests
never seem to trouble to trace their spiritual ancestry in
this way, finding out who ordained their bishop, and who
ordained him, and so on to Julius II or Celestine V or
Hildebrand, or Gregory the Great, perhaps. (Kenny, 1986, p.
101)
It surprises me, too.
4 Is Science a Virus
No. Not unless all computer programs are viruses. Good,
useful programs spread because people evaluate them,
recommend them and pass them on. Computer viruses spread
solely because they embody the coded instructions: ``Spread
me.'' Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a
kind of natural selection, and this might look superficially
virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize
scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious. They are
exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless
self-serving behavior. They favor all the virtues laid out
in textbooks of standard methodology: testability,
evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency,
intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality,
progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu, and so on.
Faith spreads despite a total lack of every single one of
these virtues.
You may find elements of epidemiology in the spread of
scientific ideas, but it will be largely descriptive
epidemiology. The rapid spread of a good idea through the
scientific community may even look like a description of a
measles epidemic. But when you examine the underlying
reasons you find that they are good ones, satisfying the
demanding standards of scientific method. In the history of
the spread of faith you will find little else but
epidemiology, and causal epidemiology at that. The reason
why person A believes one thing and B believes another is
simply and solely that A was born on one continent and B on
another. Testability, evidential support and the rest aren't
even remotely considered. For scientific belief,
epidemiology merely comes along afterwards and describes the
history of its acceptance. For religious belief,
epidemiology is the root cause.
5 Epilogue
Happily, viruses don't win every time. Many children emerge
unscathed from the worst that nuns and mullahs can throw at
them. Anthony Kenny's own story has a happy ending. He
eventually renounced his orders because he could no longer
tolerate the obvious contradictions within Catholic belief,
and he is now a highly respected scholar. But one cannot
help remarking that it must be a powerful infection indeed
that took a man of his wisdom and intelligence --- President
of the British Academy, no less --- three decades to fight
off. Am I unduly alarmist to fear for the soul of my
six-year-old innocent?
Acknowledgement
With thanks to Helena Cronin for detailed suggestion on
content and style on every page.
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Text taken from Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind,
ed. Bo Dalhbom (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993).
Typed 9 March 1995 | Last changed 2 September 2001 (thanks
to Mitch Porter, Steve Bliss, Richard Smith, Brendan Lalor
and Eric Meyer for typo warnings) [CRS]
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