The Science of Discworld II

religion, or any ideology, is too complex to be propagated by a single meme, just as an organism is too complex to be propagated by a single gene. Dawkins recognised this, too, and came up with a concept that he called ‘coadapted meme complexes’. These are systems of memes that replicate collectively. The meme ‘If you wish to avoid the everlasting fires, you must believe this , and pass it on to your children’ is too simple to get very far, but if it is allied to other memes like ‘The way to avoid the everlasting firescan be found in the Holy Book’ and ‘You must read the Holy Book or face eternal damnation’, then the whole collection of memes forms a network that replicates far more effectively.
    A complexity theorist would call such a collection of memes an ‘autocatalytic set’: each meme is catalysed, its replication is assisted, by some or all of the others. In 1995 Hans-Cees Speel coined the term ‘memeplex’. Blackmore has a whole chapter on ‘Religions as memeplexes’. If this line of argument bothers you, hang on a minute. Are you saying that religion is not a collection of beliefs and instructions that can be passed very successfully from one person to another? That’s what ‘memeplex’ means. Anyway, replace ‘religion’ by ‘political party’ if you want to – not the one you support, naturally. Those other idiots who advocate/despise (delete whichever is inapplicable) free market economics, state pensions, public ownership of industry, private ownership of public services … And bear in mind that while the secret of the spread of your own religion may be that it is The Truth, that can’t possibly be the secret of the spread of all those other false religions in the world. Why the devil do sensible people believe that kind of rubbish?
    Because it is a successful memeplex.
    The evidence for memetic transmission of ideologies is extensive. For example, every one of the world’s religions (barring ancient ones whose origins are lost in the mists of time) seems to have started with a very small group of believers and a charismatic leader. They are specific to particular cultural backgrounds; the meme needs a fertile substrate on which to grow. Many cherished beliefs of Christianity, for example, seem absurd to anyone not brought up in the Christian tradition. Virgin birth? (Well, that one was actually an inspired mistranslation of the Hebrew for ‘young woman’, but no matter.) Restored the dead to life? Communion wine becomes blood? Communion wafers are the body of Christ – and you eat them? Really? To believers, of course, all this makes perfect sense, but to outsiders, uninfected by the meme, it’s laughable. 3
    Blackmore points out that when it comes to a choice between doing good and spreading the meme, religious people tend to go for the meme. To most Catholics, and many other people, Mother Teresa was a saint (and she looks well set to become one in the fullness of time). Her work in the slums of Calcutta was selfless and altruistic. She did a lot of good, no question. But some Calcuttans feel that she diverted attention away from the real problems, and helped only those who accepted the teachings of her faith. For example, she was staunchly against birth control, the one practical thing that would have done the most good for the young women who needed her help. But the Catholic memeplex forbids birth control, and in a crunch, the meme wins. Blackmore sums up her analysis like this:
    These religious memes did not set out with an intention to succeed. They were just behaviours, ideas and stories that were copied from one person to another … They were successful because they happened to come together into mutually supportive gangs that included all the right tricks to keep them safely stored in millions of brains, books and buildings, and repeatedly passed on to more.
    In Shakespeare, memes become art. And now we move up another conceptual level. In drama, genes and memes cooperate to produce a temporary construct on a stage, for other extelligences to view. Shakespeare’s plays give them pleasure, and change their minds. They, and works like them, redirect human culture by attacking our own mental elvishness.
    The power of story. Don’t leave home without it. And never, never, never underestimate it.
    1 It then comes as quite a jolt when we discover that the animal is