The Meme Machine

190 THE MEME MACHINE
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 sanctified by the Catholic Church. She is many people’s idea of the
truly gentlest 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 antiabortion
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.
Even evil and cruelty can be redefined as good. The Koran states that it is
good to give a hundred lashes to an adulteress and to have no pity on her. You
might think that Muslim women can avoid this by not committing adultery, but
Warraq (1995) explains in unpleasant detail what life can be like in countries
that adhere strictly to Islamic law. Women may be powerless to resist sexual
abuse, and afterwards must take the punishment while the men who abused them
get off free. Since women are objects of disgust, a man is supposed not to touch
a woman he does not have rights over. Women are routinely locked away and,
if they are allowed out, must walk behind the man and be suitably covered –
which in many countries means being covered head to toe in a smothering
garment with just a tiny grille to look out of. Obeying such rules to the letter
makes a Muslim ‘good’, regardless of the misery it creates.
Returning to more honest uses of goodness and altruism, Allison’s (1992)
theory of ‘beneficent norms’ applies especially well to religions. One of his
general rules is ‘Be good to your close cultural relatives’; the memetic
equivalent of kin selection. But how do you know who they are? This rule
tracks biological kinship in cultures with predominantly vertical transmission,
since in these cultures you acquire most of your memes from biological