Viruses of the Mind
Richard Dawkins
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 their 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 down. 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 least 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, to 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 fell 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 Adam's 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 philosophy 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 11 February 1997 (thanks
to Mitch Porter, Steve Bliss and Richard Smith for typo warnings) [CRS]
|