Theology and Evolutionary Psychology, Interlude (Yeah, another one): Memes and Theological Immune Systems

The Thinking Blogger meme got me thinking, well, about memes.

The idea of a meme was proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene, one of the founding books in the sociobiology movement which later morphed into evolutionary psychology (which this series is about).

Dawkins invented the idea of a meme to draw a parallel between cultural evolution and evolution based on natural selection. The Selfish Gene is notorious for its reductionistic "gene's eye view" of biological evolution. In a similar way, Dawkins was looking for an analogous "unit of selection" for cultural evolution. Given that genes are units of information that replicate with high fidelity, is there something similar going on with cultural evolution? Is there a pool of competing, self-replicating, cultural "genes" that are evolving over time?

Enter the meme. Dawkins proposed in The Selfish Gene that little nuggets of cultural information might be considered the cultural equivalent of the gene. Dawkins called this unit of cultural evolution a "meme." He chose the word "meme" for two reasons. First, "meme" looks similar to "gene." Second, "meme" has its linguistic roots in the Greek word meaning "to imitate." Imitation was important for Dawkins as it functions as the means of mimetic "reproduction," the way a meme could make copies of itself and spread through a population.

Here is Dawkins' original description of the meme:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothing fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation…When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of the host cell.”

In this quote we see Dawkins deploy two different metaphors, each now common in the subsequent literature:

Meme as gene.

Meme as virus.

With these two metaphors, we can unpack a bit of the meme idea. I've made the following chart for use in my classes to draw out aspects of the metaphors (you may need to click on it to enlarge it in order to read it):



I'd like to make two observations, relevant to theology, about memes.

First, why do memes propagate? We know that someone has to imitate the meme, to repeat it behaviorally or verbally. So the question is, why do people latch on to particular memes?

Think of theological memes. Why do some theological ideas "catch" and take hold in a population? This is an important issue in that some very poor theological memes have indeed taken hold. Consider this blog post from the Faith and Theology concerning Worst Theological Innovations. If you read through the comments to that post, you'll see some pretty bad theology memes. My question, as a psychologist, is why did these memes spread in the first place? What was so attractive about them?

I think there are many reasons. A full scholarly analysis is yet to be done, but I think such a project would be worth pursuing. Why? If we knew why poor memes prove so popular, we might defend ourselves against them. It would be the theological equivalent of washing your hands after you go to the bathroom. A theological prophylactic action. A theological vaccination. If we could eradicate smallpox, could we not work on eradicating bad theology?

And this goes to my second observation. If a theology meme is like a virus the meme/virus competes against the host's defenses. For viruses this is our immune system. But what constitutes a theological immune system?

Because, in my opinion, it looks like lots of people in the churches I attend have compromised theological immune systems. Any theological meme, no matter how poor, weird, or dubious, can get adopted and propagated within a church via the disease vectors of small groups and adult bible classes. Soon we have this bad theology mimetic outbreak. And you almost feel the need to quarantine your children against the epidemic ("Sally, I know your Sunday School teacher told you X, but that's not right.").

So, how do protect ourselves? How do we help improve theological immune systems? How do we help provide theological vaccinations?

Because bad theology is at epidemic proportions in America.