Source: "Viruses of the Mind", Richard Dawkins (1991),
in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind , Bo Dalhbom, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993)
[...] 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).
- 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".
- 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.
- 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 it 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. |
