The Moral Limitations of Memes

If you check Facebook as regularly as I do, particularly if you have a substantial number of Facebook friends from high school, you're probably familiar with the following scenario: one of your not-especially-educated Facebook friends has posted something suspiciously well-written appealing to some non-controversial virtue (motherhood, the plight of wounded warriors, or fighting breast cancer). And then comes the hook: "If you agree that motherhood is an awesome responsibility/that we need to pray for our wounded warriors/that we need to get the word out that October is breast cancer awareness month, then copy this text and post it as your status. If you don't care about motherhood/wounded warriors/breast cancer, then do nothing." I don't know about you, but whatever moral value this post may have is compromised somewhat by its delivery system, the often somewhat-menacing text at the end that compelled my semi-literate Facebook friend to make it her Facebook status. But without that text, perhaps the idea of making someone else's words into her own would never have occurred to her, and the meme would never have reached me. In essence, then, the propagation of the meme requires that second, off-putting part.

This Facebook example is a trivial manifestation of a limitation tainting the moral content of many memes, particularly those with the largest moral payloads. We'll get to that in a moment.

But for now, perhaps I should clear up what I mean by the term "meme." "Meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene, and in his original use, it referred to human-created ideas that spread and compete for attention in societies. Dawkin's "meme" referred to languages, books, jokes, poetry, art, music, religions, ethics, styles, political frameworks, and knowledge generally. Memes are the human-created counterpart to genes, biological information allowing organisms to interact with their environments. Dawkins coined the term "meme" in an era before the widespread use of computers and did not anticipate the kinds of memes that can spread on computer networks either through explicit human action (Facebook memes) or entirely on their own (computer viruses and worms).

While Dawkins' "memes" were supposed to be the cultural counterpart for biological genes, because there is no general term for information that competes with other information while spreading through an informational environment, a more generalized "meme" could take on this role. It could also serve to describe informational units that compete for existence at all hierarchies. For example, the generalized term "meme" could apply to a human gene, a human genome, a book, a language, a joke, a society, or, in an interplanetary context, an entire planetary biota.

As alluded to in the Facebook example, a meme can often contain information critical to its propagation within itself. This is particularly true of complicated memes engaged in cutthroat competition (such as religions), but it's also essential to self-replicating code such as computer viruses. Since, at least in the modern context, religions are mostly (though not entirely) frameworks for morality, it's interesting to see which of their tenets are primarily about furthering the meme and do not concern the kind of morality that makes a difference in a human society. This distinction was drawn into glaring relief on May 29th, 2013, when Pope Francis issued the following statement:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! 'Father, the atheists?' Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class. We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all.

This statement is, at its heart, the essence of modern Unitarian Universalism, a belief that there is one divinity and many possible ways to reach it. The problem with modern Unitarian Universalism (at least from the standpoint of maintaining itself as a religion with adherents) is that it is possible to gain all the benefits of it without being a member. No Unitarian Universalist would condemn someone to eternal hellfire for not belonging. So why bother belonging? It makes more sense to belong to a religion that promises damnation to non-believers, a religion like traditional Roman Catholicism. But with this statement, it seemed as if the new pope was defanging one of its most attractive reasons for belonging. Understandably, one could expect outrage from the many Catholics who had put in many hours of their lives on the understanding that this was necessary for long-term sustenance of their eternal souls. Stephen Colbert provided an insightful parody of this reaction in his May 24th broadcast. Complained Colbert,

"Was all that time on my knees as an altar boy for nothing? All the standing and sitting and kneeling every Sunday? … After busting my apse in the vineyard of the Lord, some godless good guy can just swoop in at the eleventh hour and get redeemed? I want a refund!"

So it wasn't a big surprise when the Roman Catholic Church quickly walked back what would have been a radical new Catholic doctrine. Ultimately the Catholic Church cannot afford to go the way of Unitarian Universalism. It has a huge global bureaucracy to maintain. To keep its flock engaged sufficiently to continue as an ongoing concern, it must tell them they are members of an exclusive club and only through Catholicism can their eternal souls be saved. Indeed, the walkback from the Pope's initial inclusive remarks took the church back to a decidedly pre-Second-Vatican view, one that implied that the souls of non-Catholic Christians were as doomed as those of atheists. According to Vatican spokesman Rev. Thomas Rosica:

"All salvation comes from Christ, the Head, through the Church which is his body. Hence they cannot be saved who, knowing the Church as founded by Christ and necessary for salvation, would refuse to enter her or remain in her."

In nutshell, then, it is still the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church that the holy crime committed by the atheist (or even the Protestant) in not being a member of the Catholic Church is at least equal to that of the unrepentant murderer. And here we see yet again the moral compromise inherent in a competitive morality meme. It's not enough for it to provide the morality; it must also provide the delivery system. And in this case, acceptance of the delivery system is as important as the moral payload it contains.

Obviously, it's not an easy task to judge the relative merits of moral tenets. But a disinterested viewer examining the moral tenets of the Roman Catholic Church couldn't help but think something was amiss by the moral equation of murder and not belonging to that specific religion. Indeed, since there are hundreds of religions, many of them making exclusivity claims for just their adherents while equating the sins of apostates and heretics with universally-acknowledged sins such as murder, it would seem that the morality of murder and other familiar crimes would develop ambiguities they might not otherwise have.

One could expand this idea of the moral ambiguity of memes to species and societies. Regardless of their internal moralities, it's often the case that the species and societies displacing other species and societies are the ones whose "container moralities" are the most ruthless and are, from an objective standpoint, least moral. Take, for example, the first contact of Spaniards with Native Americans in Central and South America. Spaniards can be thought of as a meme (in the general sense defined earlier) with its own internal moral system, one based largely on Inquisition-era Roman Catholicism. Much like the Incas and the Aztecs, they loved their kids, raised their crops, fished their seas, punished their murderers and thieves, and tortured their heretics. They also spoke Spanish, worshipped a Middle Eastern god via a Southern European bureaucracy, and used technologies developed over thousands of years across the wide expanse of three continents. When the Spanish displaced Native Americans, they also destroyed their culture at all levels. They melted down their jewelry and sculptures, burned their codices, forced them to adopt Roman Catholicism, and obliterated some (though not all) of their languages. To have demonstrated more tolerance would have been to dilute Spanish influence in the New World. In essence, for Spanish culture to prevail in the form we see today in Central and South America, it had to have a delivery system comprised of objectively-questionable morality. (And this is not to say that the Incas and Aztecs wouldn't have done precisely the same thing to Europe had their roles been reversed.)

Is it possible for a meme to survive and spread without being morally compromised by its delivery system? Sure. There are plenty of memes on Facebook that propagate on their own without insisting that they be propagated. There are even religions (such as the aforementioned Unitarian Universalism and Judaism) that either accept the morality of other religions or make few promises to their adherents. In the case of memes without moral payloads, success can come from artistic merit (episodes of Game of Thrones, the entire Beatles catalog) or unexplained anthropological resonance ("Gangnam Style"). But it's doubtful a religion can grab much in the way of market share without either making lavish promises to its adherents (Christianity, Islam) or condemning non-adherents to an eternity of sorrow (again: Christianity & Islam). It's also doubtful that the truism-spouting or overly-sentimental memes spread by your marginally-literate Facebook friends would stand a chance if their paragraphs didn't conclude with thinly-veiled threats urging the reader to propagate them further.

Judas Gutenberg, June 5 2013