The Meme Machine (35 page)

I have deliberately chosen to tackle what some people might consider to be the most trivial memeplexes first. They may be trivial but they exert phenomenal power in modern society and are responsible for the movements of vast amounts of money. They shape the way we think about ourselves and, perhaps most importantly, they cause many people to believe things that are demonstrably false. Anything that can do all this deserves to be understood. The stakes are even greater when it comes to alternative medicine and the sale of ineffective therapies.

The sale of health

One survey estimated that every year Americans make 425 million visits to providers of unconventional therapy, spending over 13 billion dollars, and that 50 per cent of Americans use such therapies (Eisenberg
et al.
1993). When alternative or complementary medicine is more narrowly
defined, lower estimates (as low as 10 per cent) have been obtained, and it is claimed that the boom may now be over in Britain (Ernst 1998). Nevertheless, big money is at stake.

Some therapies may be effective in appropriate circumstances, such as relaxation, hypnosis, aromatherapy (massage with scented oils), and some kinds of herbal medicine. Others may work but not for the reasons usually given. For example, acupuncture works as an analgesic but the effect is now explained in terms of endorphins (the brain’s own morphine–like chemicals) rather than the traditional Chinese theory of
ch’i
energy (Ulett 1992; Ulett
et al.
1998). Chiropractic includes effective manipulations, although its traditional theory is false and it can sometimes be dangerous, and many other therapies use mixtures of the effective and ineffective. However, there are many therapies that are widely used and known to be completely useless or even harmful to health (Barrett and Jarvis 1993).

From a memetic point of view we need not ask why people are so stupid as to pay good money for demonstrably useless treatments, nor how intelligent people can be fooled by charlatans so easily, nor even how supposedly caring therapists can be so wicked as to promote false beliefs in vulnerable patients. Instead, we should look at what meme tricks these therapies are using. Then we can understand why they spread so quickly and get such a powerful grip on our society, when far more effective therapies do not. We do not even need to ask precisely which treatments work and which do not (though we should certainly do so when we are ill!). The validity of therapeutic claims is only one criterion for the success of memes, and there are many others. Once we start thinking this way the familiar signs are easy to see.

Alternative medicine preys on fear; fear of pain, fear of disease, and fear of death. It uses a natural human experience that (for most people) has no satisfactory explanation; that is, the experience of going to a therapist and feeling better. There is no doubt that people do generally feel better after a visit to an acupuncturist, herbalist, chiropractor, or homeopath. They have usually invested quite a lot of money in the visit or in the ‘treatments’ prescribed, and this is particularly effective in a country like England where conventional medicine is free on the National Health Service. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ theory explains why this is important -anyone who pays fifty pounds for a treatment that does not work will suffer the dissonance of concluding that they must be daft or have wasted good money – so an obvious way to reduce the dissonance is to convince yourself that you feel better (and note that the bigger the fee the better you must feel). The ‘illusion of control’ reduces stress, and hence some
symptoms, because at least you are doing something about your health. Social pressures kick in when the therapist asks whether last week’s treatment worked and you feel an obligation to say yes, or at least something encouraging. And once you say yes, the desire for consistency inclines you to convince yourself. The placebo effect is notoriously powerful and is increased when the therapist appears authoritative, and uses powerful sounding techniques, and impressive, if incomprehensible, explanations.

The explanations use a mixture of scientific–sounding terms and mysterious ones. Powerful beings and unseen forces are liberally invoked, including God and the spirits who act through the hands of the spiritual healer. The most commonly used word in alternative medicine is probably ‘energy’ – but the energy cannot be seen or tested. The
ch’i
of acupuncture and the ‘innate intelligence’ of chiropractic are so subtle that they cannot be investigated by any technique currently known to science, which neatly protects the memes from disproof. Finally, the altruism trick is liberally used, as when ‘the power of love’ is invoked. Alternative therapists are often genuinely caring people who really do want to help, and believe they are helping. Their patients tell them they feel better and so the therapists naturally (if falsely) conclude that their healing theory was right. Otherwise they may simply
appear
to be genuinely caring. Either way, the patient is more likely to take on their memes – false memes as well as true ones. All this amounts to a powerful formula for persistent and moneymaking memeplexes. No wonder there are so many of them around.

CHAPTER 15

Religions as memeplexes

Like it or not, we are surrounded by religions. The ‘Great Faiths’ of the world have lasted thousands of years and affect our calendars and holidays, our education and upbringing, our beliefs and our morality. All over the world people spend vast amounts of time and money worshipping their gods and building glorious monuments in which to do it. We cannot get away from religions, but using memetics we can understand how and why they have such power.

All the great religions of the world began as small–scale cults, usually with a charismatic leader, and over the years a few of them spread to take in billions of people all across the planet. Imagine just how many small cults there must have been in the history of the world. The question is why did these few survive to become the great faiths, while the vast majority simply died out with the death of their leader or the dispersal of their few adherents?

Dawkins was the first to give memetic answers (Dawkins 1986, 1993, 1996b), although his ideas on religion have frequently been criticised (Bowker 1995; Gatherer 1998). He took Roman Catholicism as an example. The memes of Catholicism include the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, risen from the dead after his crucifixion and now (and for ever) able to hear our prayers. In addition, Catholics believe that their priests can absolve them from sins after confession, the Pope literally speaks the word of God, and when priests administer the mass, the bread and wine literally change into the flesh and blood of Christ.

To anyone uninfected with any Christian memes these ideas must seem bizarre in the extreme. How can an invisible God be both omnipotent and omniscient? Why should we believe a two–thousand-year–old story that a virgin gave birth? What could it possibly mean to say that the wine ‘literally’ becomes the blood of Christ? How could someone have died for our sins when we were not even born? How could he rise from the dead, and where is he now? How could a prayer, said silently to yourself, really work?

There are many claims for the efficacy of prayer in healing the sick, and even a little experimental evidence (Benor 1994; Dossey 1993), but few of
the experiments have controlled adequately for placebo effects, expectation, and spontaneous recovery, and some have shown that people with the strongest religious faith were
less
likely to recover from acute illness (King
et al.
1994). Against the claims are hundreds of years of people praying for the health of their royal families or heads of state with no apparent effect, and the inability of modern–day religious healers to make any obvious difference in hospitals. Then there are all those countless wars in which both sides routinely pray for God to help their side and kill the enemy. Yet millions of people all over the world profess themselves Catholics and pray to Jesus, his mother Mary, and God the Father. They spend vast amounts of their valuable time and money supporting and spreading the faith to others, and the Catholic Church is among the richest institutions in the world. Dawkins (1993) explains how religious memes, even if they are not true, can be successful.

The Catholic God is watching at all times and will punish people who disobey His commandments with most terrible punishments – burning forever in hell, for example. These threats cannot easily be tested because God and hell are invisible, and the fear is inculcated from early childhood. A friend of mine showed me a book he once treasured as a child. It had pictures of a little good boy and a little bad boy. You could open up the flaps of their blazers and inside the good boy find a white and shining heart, while the bad boy had a black spot for every sin he had committed. Imagine the power of that image when you cannot see inside your own body and must only imagine the little black spots piling up and piling up – when you talk in class or cheat in a test, when you take your sister’s toy or steal a chocolate biscuit, when you think a bad thought, or doubt God’s truth and goodness … every one a black spot.

Having raised the fear, Catholicism reduces it again. If you turn to Christ you will be forgiven. If you honestly repent of your sins, bring up your children as Catholics, and go regularly to mass, then, even though you are unworthy and sinful, God will forgive you. God’s love is always available but at a price, and that price is often overlooked completely because it is paid so willingly. It is the price of investing massive amounts of time, energy and money in your religion – in other words, working for the memes. As Dawkins pointed out, Catholics work hard to spread their Catholicism.

I previously described several meme tricks that New Age memeplexes use. All these can be found in religions too. First, like alien abduction and near–death experience memes, religions serve a real function. They supply answers to all sorts of age–old human questions such as: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die? Why is the
world full of suffering? The religious answers may be false but at least they are answers. Religious commitment may give people a sense of belonging, and has been shown to improve social integration in the elderly (Johnson 1995). Religions may also incorporate useful rules for living, such as the dietary laws of Judaism or rules about cleanliness and hygiene which may once have protected people from disease. These useful functions help carry other memes along.

The truth trick is liberally used. In many religions, God and Truth are virtually synonymous. Rejecting the faith means turning away from Truth; converting others means giving them the gift of the true faith. This may seem odd when so many religious claims are clearly false, but there are many reasons why it works. For example, people who have a profound experience in a religious context are inclined to take on the memes of that religion; people who like or admire someone may believe their truth claims without question. At the extreme, people will even tell lies for God and manage to convince themselves and others that they do so in the name of truth – as when ‘Creation Scientists’ proclaim ‘The Truth’ that the earth is only six thousand years old, and back it up with denials of the fossil record, or claims that the speed of light has slowed since the creation so as to give the illusion of a vast universe and an ancient planet (Plimer 1994).

Beauty inspires the faithful and brings them closer to God. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world have been constructed in the name of Buddha, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed. Then there are the beautiful statues and alluring stories in Hinduism; stained glass, inspiring paintings, and illustrated manuscripts; uplifting music sung by tremulous choir boys and vast choirs, or played on great organs. Deep emotions are inspired to the point of religious ecstasy or rapture which then cries out for – and receives – an explanation. The ecstasy is real enough, but from the memes’ point of view, beauty is another trick to help them reproduce.

The altruism trick permeates religious teachings. Many believers are truly good people. In the name of their faith they help their neighbours, give money to the poor, and try to live honest and moral lives. If they are successful then generally people come to like and admire them and so are more inclined to imitate them. In this way not only does good and honest behaviour spread, but the religious memes that were linked to that behaviour spread too. Alongside this comes merely the semblance of good behaviour. Hypocrisy can flourish when goodness is defined not only as kind and altruistic behaviour, but as sticking to the rules and obligations of the faith. Much of the money donated to churches, temples, or synagogues is not used for the poor or needy, but to
perpetuate the religion’s memes by erecting beautiful buildings or paying for clergy. Activities that spread memes are also defined as ‘good’ even though their benefit is questionable, such as saying prayers at specified times, saying grace at every meal, and keeping one day of the week as a day of worship. In this way huge chunks of every believer’s time are willingly devoted to maintaining and spreading the faith.

Many people think of Mother Teresa as a saint. Indeed, she may soon be officially canonized by the Catholic Church. She is many people’s idea of the truly selfless and altruistic heroine. But what did she actually do? Some of the inhabitants of Calcutta accuse her of diverting attention from the real needs of the city’s poor, of giving Calcutta a bad name and of helping only those who were prepared to take on Catholic teachings. Certainly, she was fiercely anti–abortion and anti–birth-control. Many of the people she helped were young women with no access to contraceptives, little ability to avoid being raped, and almost no access to health care if they became pregnant. Yet she steadfastly maintained her Catholic opposition to the one thing that would have helped them most of all -control over their own reproductive lives. Whatever we may think about how much she really helped the starving people of Calcutta there is no doubt that her behaviour effectively spread Catholic memes by using the altruism trick.