Memetic Index
Introduction
Religion is a weird thing. Sure, as macromemeticists, we would describe a religion as a megamemeplex, and it's clear that religions tend to have memetic inventories that implement their contagious (proselytory) natures, and immunomemetic inventories that defend them from heretical behavior on the part of adherents, and to a perhaps lesser extent, efforts from without to manipulate, control, circumvent, circumscribe, or otherwise disrupt or destroy the religion within the broader society.
This much is obvious. Religions are gigantic, stable, self-perpetuating ideological systems of human behavior, so they are "organic megamemeplexes." Great. But there are lots of them, some of which we call "Major Religions." So far this is a description, but religions are a weird phenomenon, so this is not so satisfying. Why do religions even exist? Do they have some function, solve some problem confronting humans individually and/or as a group?
What Do Religions Do For Us?
The macromemetic insight is that since religions are omnipresent and seem to crop up in all sorts of superficially different forms, it's tempting to posit that religions may be somehow "intrinsic" to the human experience. They exist and perpetuate their own existence, but they may actually fill some "need" that humans have. If we can identify that need, then we can start to identify how and how "well" religions fill that need.
Fear of Death and Public Speaking
The fact that humans fear the uncertainty of death is the common, often atheist, justification for religion, i.e., that people turn to religion because they are afraid of dying and want some sort of comforting message of resurrection or eternal paradise.
If we accept that we're all going to die, and there's nothing we can do about it, then no more need for religion and all the mumbo-jumbo and the bad stuff that does with it. Simple, right?
Maybe not so much. People supposedly fear public speaking more than they fear death. This almost sounds silly, but research apparently supports this and it is a very macromemetic insight. Hell is other people. We're more fearful and anxious about what large groups of other people think of us, what they will do to us, if they will exclude or alienate us, and what we should do or not do in order to influence what they do (to us). This is basic psychology and memetics.
We're not actually all that afraid of dying, unless it's by some scary or painful cause. We want to die painlessly, in our sleep, or riding an atomic bomb so it's instantaneous, or we even want to meet a "noble" or "hero's death" that saves or helps loved ones, or which will be remembered later. We don't want to die while naked in the performance of some intimate act, or be executed, or have our corpse be desecrated.
To say that a fear of death is the only, or even the primary justification or reason for religion is at best a gross oversimplification and perhaps even a complete red herring.
The Tyranny of The Big Other
I think of this loosely as "what other people think of me." I've discovered in my experiments and projects what I'm calling "The Effigy Effect," that is, the willingness to assume that actions and effects one observes, e.g., the result of a secret ballot vote, is in fact the result of the collection of the actions of others, when in fact this may not be true.
It's rather along the lines of the fear of public speaking.
The function of religion may be to "manage" the anxiety that all of us feel as social animals. Our brains work to try to figure out our relationships with others, but ultimately it is an imperfect task. Unless one is a sociopath who has limited ability to feel empathy or to care what others think of them, and even still, we all tend to feel this pressure, those with mental health issues especially so.
Religion tells us that if we perform these little rituals, take part in ceremonies, give money, give of our time, say this and that at such and such time, raise our families in certain ways, then we are free from the reproach of others. Not just "can be free" but "are free." God (6) says so. In macromemetic terms, others would be Bad People for reproaching us, for bullying those who adhere to the memetic profile of righteousness.
Macromemetics is Agnostic about Mysticism
Is there a God (6)? Do or did miracles happen? How did the Universe or even just the Earth, come to be? If I meditate enough, or preach to the infidel enough, or donate enough money, will I be able to levitate, or heal the sick, or walk on water? Has anybody ever done any of those things? Do people go to Heaven when they die? Do our pets go to Heaven when they die? Is it the same place? Are there angels? How can I make God like me?
This may be in the same vein as the Fear of Death. That is, metaphysics and mysticism may be something that gets rolled into the whole "religion bundle." There appear to be a number of other things that get rolled into that bundle, e.g., "morality" and "education" leap to mind. This poses the question as to whether such "good" features of religion are part and parcel, or whether they are somehow incidental or even "accidental" components, i.e., whether "a religion" can function, stripped down, as it were, without such trappings. This is a pertinent question to the creation of "synthetic religions" (1,5).
Macromemetics "cares" about supernatural and superstitious memes and mysticism and metaphysics much more than say, other sciences might, since they are, after all, memes themselves. So while macromemetics does not concern itself with the "truthiness" of the superstitious "beliefs" held by religions, the memes themselves and their interrelationships and their deployment patters by inured adherents may be of great interest.
In other words, macromemetics is a science, and like any other science, is only interested in what may be measured and tested, so to speak. The debatable "reality" of metaphysical phenomena, however closely or widely held though they may be, are beyond the bailiwick of macromemetics.
Dogmatic Overhead
One thing that may prove to be relevant is what I'm thinking of calling "metaphysical overloading" or "metaphysical intrusion" or "metaphysical efficiency" or "dogmatic efficiency" or even what my dad used to call, "the shit-to-worth ratio." (2) Since we tend to assume that dogma is non-factual, non-evidence-based, and as such it is a "cost" rather than a "benefit" in terms of the religion gathering and fortifying adherents, gathering resources, accumulating power, and ensuring its own survival, among other things. The work of a memeplex is to survive, gather minds (agents), infect as many people as possible, their minds as deeply as possible, to the exclusion of alien memes.
In this sense, and depending on the case in question, dogma could potentially act as a packing of the meme space (4). But mightn't a memeplex that evolved over thousands of years, become more efficient somehow? Actually, no, that's not a thing in memetic evolution. Memes accumulate, and their combining (which happens all the time) does not make some of them go away--if anything it produces more.
One question we might ask is whether religions have more of these "ligative" or "junk" memes than other memeplexes, other ideological constellations? Memes that serve only to trigger other memes, or which perform communications between agents for their own sakes are common, even necessary, to even the most simple, even engineered memeplexes. We could speak of the "memetic efficiency" or any memeplex, not just religions. "Dogmatic efficiency" might still be an apt general term. How much of a memeplex actually gets things done, in a material sense, gets "work" done, as opposed to how many memes, how much activity, is devoted to other things--many of which may be thought of as serving only the internal functioning and coherency of the memeplex itself, but perhaps many are "junk memes." It's an interesting question for future work to distinguish whether such a distinction between "ligative" or "lubricative" memes and "junk" memes (if indeed there is such a thing).
But, as with viruses everywhere, or genetic material in bacteria, or programs running on a computer, there is a limit to how much may be packed into the limited available space, how many memes an agent can regularly enact, and even that they may be able to learn, memorize, internalize, and be able to react to, resonate with. Is it theoretically possible to have a religion that is so complex that no one person can internalize all of its memes? It may be that all major religions are like that. Do different populations indoctrinated of the same major religion express it differently, preferentially enacting different memes than others? This is almost certainly true. What can it mean? What do we see in real life that illustrates this?
Of course, one major dogmatic feature common to most religions is proselytization. Religions that don't spread themselves somehow tend to disappear. This is almost like a submemeplex of the immunomemeplex inherent in any stable megamemeplex, that is, self-defense by systematic self-replication, as opposed to mere passive viral dissemination. However, is it more rooted in dogma? One could well ask the question whether all megaimmunomemeplexes are highly steeped in dogma, and moreso than the rest of the memeplex. This may be a topic for future inquiry.
Religious dogma (3) or mumbo-jumbo seems to be a waste of resources, but does it help the religious megememeplex to function? How does this relate to other non-religious megamemeplexes which might lean less heavily on obvious superstition? Does dogma serve to "grease the wheels" of the megamemeplex of religion but also to hold things together? Can we look at things like companies and governments which have a lot of dogmatic memes to see if they have less on average when compared to religions, and whether said memes are more rooted in reality. It might be interesting to compare the whimsical and superstitious and downright wrong dogma memes of the capitalist mythology (perfect information, supply and demand curves, inflexible demand, maximization of utility, etc.) with those of a religion that traffics in things like angels, a God that is both loving and merciful as well as vengeful, the concept of the immortal soul, Heaven and Hell (and Purgatory and Limbo), and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and compare how they are wired together.
More research required here, m'thinks.
Religions Also Do Good Stuff!
One hears the quasi-argument that religions are "valuable" because they promote, teach, instill, uphold, whatever, things like morality, or even carry out education in general, care for the poor, negotiate and promote peace, etc.
I'm not saying this isn't true.
The question is whether this is baked into religion. Is it an accident that religions try to do good things, stuff that might be described as "altruistic" since they don't directly benefit the religion itself or its adherents? Red flags go up when we talk about "accidental" or "incidental" properties. We would like to see a reason, and an explanation, otherwise we wonder whether macromemetics is failing to describe a phenomenon which is readily observable in the environment.
Is altruism intrinsic to the functioning of a religion? Does it support the functioning of the rest of the memeplex, does it serve an immunomemetic function, e.g., repelling attacks by pointed to its own good works and garnering sympathy thereby, or does it somehow attract more followers with it?
One thing that was pointed out to me is that televangelical religions, that is, those where a preacher preaches over the television (or equivalent) and makes millions doing so because people send in money might be an example of a "pure religion" in that they do not perform any temporal works in the community. Indeed, such "spritual movements" or religions have no community, they are almost perfectly separate and divorced from any concrete group of otherwise memetically interconnected people. The cohort only exists in terms of all watching the same show together, being subscribers to the same memetic nexus (or hub). In practice, none of them may actually have memetic interactions with each other, although they may have interactions with other believers (usually Christians) that are bolstered or informed by their subscription to a given televangelical nexus. More research required here as to whether this happens, i.e., whether televangelical subscribers are more memetically connected to their local religious communities by virtue of said subscription.
The upshot may be that religions that only perform spiritual and not temporal acts do in fact exist. We might term these "pure religions" (5). The question is whether this is true, and whether they fully perform the hypothetical function of a religion, i.e., limiting by quantifying the innate effect of The Big Other for adherents. If this is so, must it be in the context of said adherents living, being memetically connected with, a cohort of "memetically related" "real religions"? If I'm a "virtual Christian" in an Islamic or Buddhist environment, does it still work, and why or why not?
Education, perhaps particularly of the young, even if only via Sunday School, seems to offer a fairly obvious bang for the buck. Indoctrination leads to followers, lather rinse, repeat.
Again, more research required here. Do religions perform altruism because it somehow serves their other functions, because it's an immunomeme (possibly a vital one), because it attracts followers or mollifies opponents in ways otherwise impossible, or is it some kind of "accident?" Could it be that religions take on these functions because they must be done and there's nobody else to do them (8)? If that makes sense, then why?
Religious Altruism Downsides & Crime
It was suggested me that "pure religions" may be better than "natural religions" (5), and that the altruism that natual religions often undertake as part of their missions may actually be a bad thing for a number of reasons. First is that if a religion offers free services and resources to anybody who meets their definition of "poor" or "a wretched sinner" then there is automatically a motivation for people to conform to this image in order to get the goodies.
As Jesus put it in Matthew 26:11, "The poor ye have always with ye," and this is as macromemetics would predict. Because a memeplex has a clearly marked role, and a set of memes associated with reacting to that role, there will always be people to conform to that role, or the associated memes shall atrophy. In practice, a natural memeplex contains immunomemes that prevent memes from atrophying. So religions that focus on educating the ignorant, helping the poor, healing the sick, and so on, actually tend to perpetuate those situations, i.e., ignorance, poverty, and sickness. This idea even extends to things like crime and war.
Ironically, this is similar to the problem of crime and policing. Crimes must be defined, and police must be authorized to prosecute them, in order for some crimes to exist. You could argue that some crimes such as murder just happen, they are bad and must be prosecuted by the police and courts regardless, and it's silly to imagine that the behavior of the police and courts influences their provenance.
This may be fairly easily shown to be wrong, even for murder. During a period in England, robbery and murder were all given a sentence of death, and this had the effect of highway robbers simply killing everyone they robbed, with even the slightest provocation, since if caught, the sentence they would receive would be the same. So the main object was to avoid getting caught, regardless of the human carnage produced. In this case, the law and policing practices led to more murders.
This is the bit that so-called atheists may be keen on.
It's not so much that religion is "necessary" as such, but that it will evolve spontaneously in any human society. So the question rises: what is the minimum collection of properties, of memetic inventory, which we can imagine, that will function as a religion?
The idea here is that if you don't engineer a religion, you will theoretically end up with one anyway, or some kind of possibly atheist ideology that serves the same purpose that a religion serves. We may not know whether we'll have a better "new religion" than the old one in terms of horror and damage or just drain on our society (7). So the objective is to understand what religions actually do, what their essential elements are, and implement those elements in a way that works.
It's unclear at this point what any of this might look like. Future research is to identify the things that religions do, and then possibly conduct experiments.
One big question is whether a religion has to have the God Meme or the Absolute Truth Meme or whatever, that is, some kind of mystic, superstitious immunomeme to somehow anchor it.
Summary & Conclusions
Religions appear to exist in order help people collectively deal with the anxiety to do with The Big Other. Religion offers a set of memes which may be deployed in order to avoid the immunomemes, aka, the slings and arrows, of other people's disapproval. The trick is that everybody else is also a member of the local religion, so they are trained to immunomemetically bully anybody who bullies you, assuming that you are doing everything right, i.e., you are acting like an upstanding religious person, i.e., deploying all the right memes at the right times. You are, in other words, safe.
More research required on how dogma functions in a religion, and whether it's different from other megamemeplexes. More research required on why religions seem to get associated with things like altruism (educating the young, running orphanages helping the poor, fighting for peace, etc.).
Religions defend themselves, and propagate themselves in an often highly dogmatic way. One could ask whether most of the dogmatic memes of a religion tend to concentrate in the immunomemetic systems of the megamemeplex, or are they fairly evenly distributed? One could in turn ask if the immunomemetic systems of any memeplex tend to be proportionally more dogmatic, as opposed to more pragmatic, i.e., obviously more productive.
Does a "pure religion" exist? A religion without extra stuff like altruism? Or even monuments? One issue is that "altruistic" behavior on the part of religions may actually perpetuate the suffering they ostensibly seek to alleviate.
The fact that real major religions seem to have a ridiculous amount of complexity may actually be a feature rather than a bug. Does this make proselytizing easier? Do they need the God concept, the divine, the supernatural, in order to work? More research required here.
Another future research topic is the idea of "junk" memes, as opposed to purely "ligative" or "lubricative" memes, which do not do ostensible work, but which somehow serve the operation of the memeplex. Do "junk memes" even exist?
What might a minimal religion, or a synthetic religion (5) look like? What sorts of properties would it need to have in order to function? More research needed here, and perhaps work towards experiments in creating synthetic religions.
In a similar vein, what are the effects of the forceful extirpation of a religion (7) and a replacement with a synthetic one or a "vacuum-filling" religion? There are many historical examples, and these could inform further research into what a minimal religion might look like and how to successfully inject one into a population.
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(1) I think of a "synthetic religion" as one designed specifically with the principles of Macromemetics in mind to perform the functions of an organically evolved religion, assuming those functions may be clearly understood. The worship of Henry Ford in Brave New World might be an example, though this was adapted from bits of Christianity converted to "The year of our Ford" and chopping the tops off of crucifixes to make letter Ts as in Model-T.
(2) Religions tend to have mythologies, superstitions, supernatural stories, metaphysical concepts. These are often used to anchor, or justify, rituals, or even whole systems of behaviors, ranging from economics, family values, the relationships between the young and old and the genders. One hopes that the amount of energy and activity devoted to things that don't actually exist in objective reality or which waste time and resources or hurt people is minimal. The point of understanding what religions actually do is to be able to say whether they are doing it efficiently. Effort spent in the service of the purely spiritual as opposed to effort which serves both the spiritual and the temporal, and when possible, mainly the latter., so to speak Religions which demand the construction of huge, expensive buildings, or enormous sacrifices, or a lot of devotion from followers, or the support of a large priestly class none of whose effort serves the general population could be said to have a "low metaphysical efficiency." The term "dogmatic efficiency" is fun because it suggests that a church has dogma (3), which is a negative, entropic, unproductive quality, but that it tries to get as much mileage as possible in terms of power, cohesion, etc. from that dogma, and that the ratio of unproductive, pseudo-spiritual dogma to
(3) Dogma can be negative in a number of ways. For example, unproductive diversion of resources into things which serve no temporal purpose, e.g., construction of expensive buildings and monuments, devotion of the time and resources of adherents to non-temporal pursuits, the creation of a remunerated rabbinical/priestly class devoted to only non-temporal activities, and so on. Another example is the creation of systems of laws, rules, strictures, codes of conduct, etc., which prevent adherents from engaging in productive temporal activities, or lead them into destructive ones. This sort of thing may or may not involve a caste or class system. In other words, if a religion causes people to do things which are destructive or wasteful purely based upon the strictures of the dogma, then the dogma may be seen as having an opportunity cost. If the religion could somehow change the dogma, then it could recoup said opportunity cost. At this point we can start to think about ideas like "dogmatic inflexibility" or "dogmatic rigidity" or "dogmatic brittleness" or "dogmatic lability" to reflect the notion that a religion (or an ideology generally) may have an easier or harder time to shift and change dogma that causes problems for the religion to adapt to reality while in competition with other ideologies. One can go further to posit notions such as "dogmatic investment" or "dogmatic enracination" which might describe the degree to which (some) adherents are committed to given dogmatic memes, or more to the point, the degree to said memes are "rooted" (hence "racines") to the fabric of other memes, and thus difficult to "root out."
(4) Packing the meme space is a memetic design and injection technique wherein memes are created which serve no useful purpose in terms of spreading the memeplex, defending it, or performing the ostensible "work" that the memeplex is purported to do (make widgets, educate the young, produce and deliver food, etc.). Things like images and sayings on T-shirts and ballcaps, perfunctory greetings or chants, jokes, stories, spoken, performed, on media, etc., are examples of packing of the meme space--with memes that support the given megamemeplex, e.g., since they have to wear T-shirts, ties, caps, and sing songs anyway, they might as well sing company songs and wear company schwag. Otherwise, alien memes could invade the inured agents' minds through these unsecured vectors.
(5) I like the idea of the term "pure religion" as one that satisfies the imperative of managing The Big Other, and as little else as possible. Pure religions may not actually exist. A "natural religion" might be a good term for a religion that forms naturally and may include altruistic features. Finally "synthetic religions" may be a good term for religions created from whole cloth. A "minimal religion" is a theoretical type of synthetic religion which has all of the necessary elements to function as a brake on the effects of The Big Other, and no more.
(6) The question of whether a religion needs a God Concept or a God Meme in order to function is an interesting one. The answer is probably "yes," perhaps a qualified "yes," but more research required.
(7) This is an interesting question however, i.e., if a "new religion" or a "vacuum-filling religion" is always going to be worse than what it replaces. Many would agree that Stalinism was "worse" than Orthodox Christianity under the Tsar, for example in terms of human suffering, the number of political murders, lack of freedom, and so on. Was this just chance, or when you extirpate one religion and either let the chips fall where they may or make up something new and shoehorn it in are you always guaranteed that it will be worse? Can we engineer something better? That's one of our big questions here. And is it possible to inject the new religion, getting rid of the old, in such a way that it's worth it, that there is little or no destruction and suffering? A final obvious question is if you create a "vacuum-filling religion," even an artificial one, e.g., Stalinism, is there any guarantee at all that it will fill the basic requirement of any religion, i.e., satisfying the Big Other Problem? If not, what is the result? Collapse? The return of the old religion? Vulnerability to external proselytizers? Evolution, possibly rapid, possibly painful, of the new religion until it does satisfy the Big Other anxiety effect? All or none of the above?
(8) In France under Louis XVI, for instance, the church handled registration of births, deaths, marriages, among other things. In other words, functions we'd today regard as squarely in the purview of government was effectively shuffled off to the church. The more accurate description is probably that the church always did it and the government took it over as the society became more secular and government more powerful and centralized. Herein lies the point: if religion handled a social function, like keeping census data, or collecting taxes, or whatever, shall we say, primordially, does that make it an inherent function of religion, do details vary from society to society, religion to religion, and so on? Or could it be that religion existed a priori, and had some higher level of organization than any other group, and so was an organization capable of taking on whichever given important social function? And is that in itself just another argument for the primordiality of certain functions being, at least initially, performed by religions?
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