The Meme Machine

RELIGIONS AS MEMEPLEXES 201
religious experiences, enjoying ritual and worship, or believing in life after
death. This process could even have acted to favour genes that would otherwise
be detrimental to fitness, or to wipe out genes that would otherwise have been
fitness-enhancing. So some aspects of human nature could have been
determined not for the sake of the genes but for the sake of the memes. Our
beliefs could have moulded the way genetic selection took place. If this has
happened it means that human beings might now be naturally religious creatures
because of our long memetic history.
Religions have held enormous power for millennia, but times are changing
and religions with them. One obvious change is that vertical transmission is
giving way to the faster horizontal transmission (p. 132). As people are
increasingly exposed to new ideas from television, radio, newspapers and the
Internet, they begin to make comparisons and ask difficult questions. So it is,
sadly, not surprising to learn that Afghanistan’s Taliban Islamic movement has
forbidden televisions and radios, and has set about destroying any they find, and
punishing their owners. Meanwhile, in countries with thriving communications,
some of the tricks the old religions use may not work so well any more. When
people can see films, go to art galleries, and listen to any music they like, the
beauty trick is less effective, when we are subjected on television to the
gruesome results of religious wars, the altruism trick wears thin. When
Christian leaders argue over whether homosexuality is really a sin, the truth trick
begins to weaken its grip.
In the past, religions that promoted large families were successful because
they created more people to adopt the faith from their parents. Lynch (1996) has
given many examples of religions, from the ancient Islam to the relatively new
and thriving Mormonism, that spread by increasing the number of their
offspring, but he does not clearly differentiate the effects of vertical and
horizontal transmission. With modern horizontal transmission people are less
bound by their parents’ beliefs; as memes spread faster and faster the birth rate
becomes less and less significant. ‘We should therefore expect proselytic
religions to do better in technologically advanced societies. We may expect new
religions of this kind, and also that old faiths which can adapt their memes to
changing times may survive while others will become extinct.
I doubt that human beings will ever be entirely free of religion. If the
arguments above are right then religions have two very strong forces going for
them. First, human minds and brains have been moulded to be especially
receptive to religious ideas, and second, religious memes can use all the best
meme tricks in the book to ensure their own survival and reproduction. This