How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [51]
Dawkins did not develop the concept much further and there it lay dormant until mathematician Richard Brodie pushed the meme as a “virus of the mind” in 1996, physicist Aaron Lynch took it in the direction of a “thought contagion” in 1996, and cognitive psychologist Susan Blackmore developed it into a “meme machine” in 1997 and 1999. In countless lectures for the past two decades since his creation of the concept, Dawkins has strongly suggested that God is a meme and religion is a virus, and all of these authors have followed his lead by devoting entire chapters to the subject. Lynch, for example, suggests that the commandment to “honor thy father and mother” is a meme for children to imitate their parents (including their religious beliefs), and that dietary laws and holy days are memes to encourage commitment to one’s religion, to spread other memes within that particular faith, and to protect one faith’s memes against another faith’s memes: “‘I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no false gods before me’ supremely realizes this competition-supressing advantage. Thus arises the archetype of modern monotheism, right at the top of the Ten Commandments.” Blackmore argues that religious memes are like computer viruses that contain a “copy me” program not unlike those irritating chain letters and computer virus “warnings” that command you to “copy and distribute” the document—if you do, happiness and success will be abundant; if you do not, misery and failure will be your fate: “From an early age children are brought up by their Catholic parents to believe that if they break certain rules they will burn in hell forever after death. The children cannot easily test this since neither hell nor God can be seen, although He can see everything they do. So they must simply live in life-long fear until death, when they will find out for sure, or not. The idea of hell is thus a self-perpetuating meme.”
There may be something to this “God as meme” argument in the sense that all religions employ techniques to increase their membership, to compete against other religions, and to perpetuate themselves into future generations. Of course, all organizations do this—if not, they would quickly go the way of the Neanderthals and eight-track tapes. And it might even be possible to test meme theory through comparing and examining the exceptions. Judaism, for example, has a rather weak “copy me” program: Members are not encouraged to proselytize and recruit new members; converting to Judaism requires considerable time, energy, and commitment; interfaith marriages (where the non-Jewish spouse may or may not convert) are discouraged; and an aura of exclusivity (instead of the usual inclusivity found in most religions) surrounds the faith. As a consequence, the number of Jews worldwide for the past half century (after the Holocaust decimated their numbers) has hovered around thirteen million. By contrast, Catholicism, with one of the most effective “copy-me” memes ever created, boasts of a membership roll in excess of one billion souls. No corporate marketing and advertising program has even come close to the Catholic church’s nearly two-millennium-long campaign of recruitment and conversion.
This meme’s-eye view is intriguing, but there are a number of logical and scientific problems outlined by cognitive psychologist James Polichak, including not providing a clear operational definition of a meme, not presenting a testable model for how memes influence culture and why standard selection models are not adequate, ignoring the sophisticated social science models of information transfer already in place, and circularity in the explanatory power of memes. Blackmore has addressed these and other criticisms in her 1999 book.