Essay on the origin of the God concept.
“If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” Lenny Bruce
Richard Dawkins first coined the word “meme” in his award winning book, The Selfish Gene (1976). Meme is a shortened version of the Greek word mimema, “that which is imitated”. A meme is a unit of culture that is passed on from one individual to another by non-genetic means such as imitation. Similar to genes, those biological units of heredity that are made up of nucleotides on a chromosome, memes require three qualities to be successful: 1- Fidelity: The more accurate the copy, the more a meme will resemble the original after several rounds of copying. Take Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Now here’s a meme that has existed in the form of musical notation since 1824. Since then, it has been passed on with little or no alteration in the arrangement of the musical notes that make it up, i.e. it has been copied or imitated with a high degree of fidelity. 2-Fecundity: The faster a meme can be replicated, the faster it will spread. The 9th did not spread by word of mouth but rather by means of the printing press thus allowing more and more musicians to play the piece, and more and more listeners to know and love it. 3-Longevity: Compare Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 to, say, "Blame It On The Rain” by Milli Vanilli (late ‘80s). The former has longevity and is thriving whereas the latter has nearly disappeared. Think of memes as the cultural equivalents of genes except that we pass them on to future generations by the process of imitation, not heredity. Meme…sounds like gene.
Our lives as creatures with big brains are inextricably linked to memes….millions and millions of them, every day. Some go in one ear and out the other. Others, however, are so powerful that they change our lives. They affect what and how we do things. Some memes are so successful that they become memory engrams in our brains…actual neuro-chemical patterns that we have acquired that have become permanent fixtures of our brains. For example, start singing Happy Birthday to You. You can sing this tune without thinking, hitting all the right notes and crooning all the lyrics without hesitation. Yet, it was first transmitted to you as a meme and now it is part of your brain! Furthermore, it is likely that you have already transmitted this meme to your children, not by the process of heredity but rather by imitation. Adoptive parents, unable as they are to pass on their genetic traits to their children find joy in the fact that the can and do pass on their memes. Our brains are meme machines (The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore)!
Just as genes can change by random mutation, memes can change over time. A simple example: The cliché “I could care less” is entrenched in American vernacular. It is used to mean, “I don’t care at all”. Literally, however, it expresses the following: “I do care somewhat (since it would be possible for me to care a little less)”. The original and correct expression is “I couldn’t care less”. However, the prevalence of the incorrect version proves that even ugly memes can have longevity. A particularly ugly meme resides in George W. Bush’s little brain and it appears it’s there to stay. Dubya says “nucular” instead of “nuclear”. Then again, never attribute malice to that which can simply be explained by stupidity.
So what do memes have to do with God? Well, I (and many others) happen to believe that the concept we know as God, an omnipotent and omniscient being, is simply a very successful meme. It is probably a meme that has arisen in one form or another thousands of times in the history of mankind. Certain versions of the God meme have survived and thrived. Most, however, have likely fallen by the wayside. The most successful God memes have coalesced with other memes to form “memeplexes” known as religions. Some of these memeplexes have become human culture’s poster-boys of fidelity, fecundity and longevity: think Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism.
Why did a God meme come about in the first place and why has it been so successful? Well, first of all, although the human brain is not the only meme machine to have arisen on this planet (Many other mammalian and non-mammalian creatures transmit memes to other members of their species, e.g. bird songs are memes that are transmitted from one bird to the other by means of imitation.), it is certainly and by far the most powerful. Humans developed huge brains; the human brain contains 100 billion neurons! That’s a lot of computing power. So, even early on in the evolution of our species, survival depended a lot on using our big brains. And, a big brain gets you thinking…quite literally. Until very recently in our history, we have lived largely in fear and nearly complete ignorance about the world around us. Where did we come from? Why did my children die? Why did my crops fail? These and many more were questions that would not be fully answered until we developed the scientific method. And, we’ve always struggled with the most important and scary of life’s certainties: death.
Like the wheel and fire, the God meme came about because it served a very important survival function for humankind. Despair, fear and anxiety were not conducive to success for a species. With no other way to answer the deep and disturbing puzzles of life, the God meme went a long way towards calming these harrowing fears. The God meme provided emotional comfort, a safety net, a reassurance that someone was watching and that in the end there lay waiting not darkness but something kinder and more welcoming that would counterbalance the painful travails of worldly existence. Indeed, we find a God meme in all human cultures on the globe.
I’m not so sure, however, that a God meme in isolation would have been so successful. Rather, the key to its success was the formation of memeplexes. Indeed, the God meme existing as it does in close cooperation with carrot-and-stick memes such as prayer, sin, heaven, hell, 70 virgins after martyrdom etc. becomes very powerful indeed. Religion in one form or another holds sway over the vast majority of the world’s population, and this in spite of the fact that many of our most pressing questions about the world around us have been adequately answered by science. Ah…but then again there’s the death thing that still hangs over us. Moreover, no memeplex has ever arisen that is better suited to mass behavior manipulation than religion. Indeed, the vast majority of the unwashed masses as well as a good proportion of the penny loafer crowd live their lives according to the dictates of one religion or another. Christianity, arguably the most successful of them all, is so powerful that it continues to hold its own against such scientific certainties such as evolution and the geological age of the earth. Sadly, most of the world’s wars throughout history have been prosecuted under the banner of one God meme or another. One memeplex, to pick on Christianity again, is today condemning millions of its followers to exposure to HIV/AIDS and its devastating socio-economic consequences by forbidding the use of condoms.
How much life does the God meme have left in it? Probably quite a bit. In fact it surprises me very much (and it shouldn’t I know) how viable the God meme is in this, the 21st century. Carl Sagan put it this way: “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]
Joseph Froncioni
Somehow I didn't read this posting before. I'm familiar with the idea of memes but had forgotten how they might relate to my work with socio-cultural aspects of learning. Thanks for brining me back to this idea. I'll let you know how I use it to help explain the collaborative learning environments I've been examining.
Posted by: liz charles | January 02, 2007 at 01:11 PM