8 From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism

We live in a relationalist universe. It is not relativist, and it is definitely not dualist, in either a Platonist or in any other sense. Which leads to complications when we humans, with our limited perspective – for understandable reasons, a strictly anthropocentric one – and our expedient but extremely selective and elucidating perception apparatus, are going to form a picture of the world and everything that transpires in our environment. What we see and apprehend is a world filled with clearly delimited things: chairs, tables, and pots and pans that are either standing on the stove or inside cupboards, if they are not lying around somewhere cluttering up where they really have no place being. But these clear delimitations constitute a mixture of wishful thinking and simplifications that are dictated by functionality. We must be able to orient ourselves and act in order to survive. In reality, the world consists of more or less impermanent and fuzzily delimited phenomena, where it is the system’s organisation that determines their function and properties to an infinitely greater extent than the phenomena in themselves. These systems are changing all the time and are in incessant and infinitely complex interaction with all other systems, which also keep changing all the time. This means that the constant conflict between form and matter is illusory. Form is matter, matter is form. There is no conflict between the one and the other. The world is a whole thing, but it never stays the same from one moment to the next.

The principle of explanatory closure is based on the insight that at the end of the day the Universe is a gigantic, unmanageable ontic flow that is expanding at a tremendously high rate. The Universe did not create itself in some kind of unique moment of self-genesis – in the manner that the traditional religions, and up until recently the natural sciences as well, imagined the whole process to have taken place. Rather, it creates and recreates itself all the time in a constantly ongoing process. But all explanatory models of everything require an arbitrarily chosen but nevertheless necessary freeze of this flow, an eternalisation, in order to be possible, or even conceivable. The reason is quite simply that as soon as some individual explanation has been formulated, the world with all its mutable and interacting systems of atoms has already rushed onwards in all directions from the eternalisation in space–time that the explanation requires and claims to interpret and clarify. The Universe thereby constantly evades all of Man’s pathetic attempts at explanatory candour. Everything of this nature by definition lies outside our human capabilities. This means that the only intellectually honest attitude to the Universe is to accept it as a constantly mutable entity that continuously evades us, pantheism’s the One as God, the explanatory closure par excellence.

But we are also living in an informationalist world – no longer in a world of just written language or oral communication – where the total quantity of information is expanding at such tremendous speed that the world around us is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp and more and more incomprehensible to us. We see how the ontic deluge in the Universe gets an ontological equivalent in the gigantic, rapidly expanding and thereby incalculable flow of words, thoughts and ideas that confront us in our immediate environment. This ontological rather than ontic flow of impulses gushes – with the same torrential force as our expanding Universe – through the interlinked, interacting and therefore in practice convergent media that shape and dictate the conditions of our socio-cultural biotopes, which puts a lot of pressure on our brains and senses. We cannot possibly not be part of it, but instead live very much within – always and only within – the ontic as well as ontological flows of existence. This means that the principle of explanatory closure, at least under informationalism, also must include ourselves and our communications with each other and the world around us.

The concept of information stress is not particularly old, but with the advent of informationalism we have been forced to relate to this phenomenon and create strategies for managing it to some extent and preserving at least an illusion of overview and control. This means that our only possibility of embracing the world as a whole under informationalism arises if we complement the ontic relationalism for the natural sciences with ontological relationalism.html">social relationalism for the social sciences. We are now being forced to realise that we are not only constantly forced to eternalise the mobilist world around us in order to make it understandable and manageable (see The Global Empire), but that in addition our new eternalisations on top of our earlier eternalisations – because of the explosive expansion of the Universe and the sheer quantity of information – are constantly being moved further and further away from the fundamental mobilist ontics of existence. This insight means that we are reduced to trying to manage our relations with both the surrounding world and ourselves, our own identity as ethical creatures, through transrationalism – and with the starting point in a conception of existence as an open entirety, not through rationalism based on a conception of existence as a closed logical construction in all its constituent parts.

We are forced to abandon the old Cartesian internarcissism in order to construct a universocentric interdependism instead. And based on a universocentric interdependism, society or the social must be a primary emergence, that is, we apply the One in a Spinozist sense to the social under the name Syntheos, in the same way that we already apply the One to the universal under the name Pantheos. What is essential here is that the social as a whole thereby precedes the Kantian relation between the subject and the object instead of the other way around, just as the Universe on the whole precedes all kinds of atomist constructions within physics. In addition, interdependism must be relationalist and not relativist; the mutual dependence of the agents applies at all levels in the hierarchy, and thus also within the phenomena themselves.

This has the consequence that syntheist ethics cannot be based on anything other than a kind of constantly variable existentialist adaptation to the irrefutably overwhelming ontic and ontological flows of existence, a pragmatist as well as spiritual subordination in relation to the expanding, mobilist enormity. For us as temporal creatures, this existentialist adaptation must take the form of amor fati, the unconditional acceptance of and love for the past as the basis for syntheist ethics. Once we have accepted the past as one long line of always equally unlikely but nevertheless real actualities in an endless ocean of never realised potentialities – just think of how many millions of sperm nature wasted in order for just one sperm to penetrate the only egg at your own genesis – we turn amor fati towards the future, a future that is open, indeterminist and full of potentialities that can all be brought to life. In this future, the utopia may be highly unlikely and yet fully possible, and this fact becomes the target of our syntheist faith. Amor fati is consummated as a truth as an act in a fixed direction towards the utopia; an act from which everything else of importance in our lives subsequently gets its ethical substance.

Syntheist ethics is thus sociorelationalist and not cultural relativist, based on the original Zoroastrian understanding that intention, decision and interaction sooner or later coincide and together form the only possible ethical substance of both the individual human being and the collective civilisation. This means that the principle of explanatory closure not only kills Kant’s rationalist idea that Man is born with the natural ability to understand rather than simply subordinate himself to the world in its entirety; even Kant’s rationalist idea of Man being able to understand himself as a being within his own lifeworld is dead. The solid, closed and primary individual is replaced by the divided, open and secondary dividual as the human ideal. This means that the conceited idea that our thoughts and words belong to ourselves, that we can identify ourselves with what we think and say without connecting this to body, action and environment – as though what we are thinking and saying were originally created by and exclusive to ourselves – is dead. We will never have any sustainable identity as the inventors of these ideas, but on the other hand as their potential thoroughfares and interim receptacles.

This in turn means that we need a new, informationalist explanatory model for how words, thoughts and ideas arise and are formed, and above all for how they are interpreted and altered over time; how communication between bodies and media occur and above all what consequences this process has for our new, dividual identity. Precisely such a de-personified explanatory model has also emerged in parallel with digital technology, which is the foundation of the ongoing paradigm shift, and it is called memetics. We have already written extensively about this research field numerous times from many different angles (see The Futurica Trilogy). Memetic theory – which explains how words, thoughts, ideas and cultural components of various kinds multiply and are modified according to the same Darwinian selection principles that also regulate how genes multiply and are modified within biological systems – was launched in an essay by Ted Cloak in 1975 and popularised in exhaustive detail by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene one year later. It was also Dawkins who coined the term meme for this replicator which is active within the sociocultural biotope and which is selfish in the same sense that the selfish gene is selfish, that is, its primary interest, if we allow ourselves to reason with the aid of an anthropomorphic image, is to multiply itself through dissemination to the greatest possible extent. It wants to infect the world.

Memetics simply strives to construct an evolutionary model not just for natural but also for cultural information transfer. A meme is quite simply the cultural gene, a package of information, a kind of cultural unit – for example an idea, a technology, a belief or a pattern of behaviour – which is lodged in a mind or a medium and which cannot reproduce itself through producing copies of itself and transferring itself between different minds and media. The meme’s reproductive success is conditional upon people’s ability and desire to imitate each other and thus pick up new thoughts and behaviour. This means that we no longer regard communication as primarily something that concerns an individual who is trying to influence another individual in a certain direction, but instead as a flow of selfish memes that reproduce themselves to the best of their abilities by travelling from mind to mind via various accessible media and making themselves at home the moment they find a receptive environment in the form of a brain furnished with various sets of compatible meme clusters, called memeplexes.

An interesting aspect in this context is that memetics pays no heed to whether any particular meme proves to be true or false, useful or useless, from some arbitrarily chosen perspective. What is decisive is that the memes which are best suited to the prevailing conditions will survive and be disseminated. Meme X either fits with the patterns formed by the dominant memeplexes in an environment, which might just as well be a dividual brain as a collective community, or else it doesn’t – an environment that this meme then contributes to modifying by adding to the existing patterns, even if only the tiniest little bit. The decisive factor for a meme’s success is thus how it matches already existing memeplexes in the host body in question and whether it appears useful or in any other way appealing in the life situation in which this body finds itself. This means that the more effectively the meme offers infotainment to the intended host organism, the greater the chance that this host will spread the meme further by inspiring imitation in other potential hosts.

The American philosopher Daniel Dennett connects memetics to a more extensive theory of mind in his book Consciousness Explained from 1991. According to Dennett, the majority of our memes are undisturbed and inactive in our brain, and only when the brain experiences a concrete change in its lifeworld does it react by accepting new or modifying old memes, in order to then spread them further. The mind, according to Dennett, consists of memes and only memes that have taken control of the brain and that think the thoughts of the host, and it can also be described in precisely this way. Thus, there is no longer any need for an individual in the Cartesian sense. Even the I-experience as such is a meme in itself and nothing else, albeit unprecedented in its success. It constitutes a phenomenon that we, with a clear reference to the father of individualism, call the Cartesian meme.

The British psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of the influential and controversial book The Meme Machine, defines memes as all things that allow themselves to be copied from one human being to another: habits, fashion trends, knowledge, songs, jokes and all other forms of packaged information. Memes are disseminated horizontally through imitation, learning and other methods. The point is that the copies are never one hundred per cent identical to the original; in the same way as genes, memes are also copied with extensive variation. Most mutations are completely unviable, while some exceptions constitute a competitive improvement in the interplay with the conditions that happen to prevail. Since the memes are often spread considerably faster than genes – mutations occur at every interaction, so too within the brains and media where the memes are located – the speed of mutation within memetics is extremely high in comparison with biological systems, where the spread occurs exclusively vertically. And just like genes, memes can be said to compete for a limited space where they are located, and thereby also fight for the chance to survive, be copied and spread further. The critical factor here is people’s attention – a very strictly limited resource.

But while Dawkins has a markedly reductionist attitude towards memetics – all human expressions can be broken down into their smallest components, individual memes – Blackmore is the first proponent of a relationalist memetics. She points out that a cluster of memes often undergoes an emergence and together these memes form in fact a memeplex, a phenomenon that de facto constitutes something more than just its smallest constituent parts (the various memes). Thereby Blackmore succeeds in doing something which Dawkins and Dennett failed to do: namely, to explain how a society, a culture, a civilisation – the outermost forms of memeplexes – arise, survive and even propagate, based on a strictly memetic explanatory model. Thus, as a memeplex of its own, memetics must be regarded as a memetic replication of semiotics, a discipline in the borderland between philosophy and science whose roots go back to John Locke’s vision of a science of signs which he formulates in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as early as the end of the 17th century.

Semiotics deals with the investigation and interpretation of signs within all sorts of communication: firstly, the relationship of signs to what they are intended to represent (semantics); secondly the relationship of signs to each other (syntactics) and thirdly the relationship of signs to their users (pragmatics). The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure are usually regarded as the two philosophical giants of semiotics. From the mid-19th century up until the early 20th century, quite independently of each other, they both constructed extensive systems that were later used as platforms for all subsequent forms of working with semiotics. Peirce launches the idea of a triad of signs and, as early as a century before Dawkins, is inspired by Charles Darwin into describing the signs as replicators, while de Saussure – who for the sake of clarity calls his theory semiology rather than semiotics – focuses primarily on the binary relationship between the word in itself and the concept behind the word within language.

The transition from semiotics to memetics – that is, the transition from the sign to the meme as the smallest component of information and communication – is partly about a broadening of what it actually is that is transferred between minds and media when information is communicated to one or more recipients – a broadening that semiotics itself deals a lot with after Peirce and de Saussure (when the semiotics of the 21st century uses the term sign, this is more or less synonymous with the term meme in memetics) – but above all it is about a deeper understanding of how mobile and mutable information is, and how this influences our philosophical understanding of subjectivity and social identity.

Semiotics is primarily pragmatic rather than syntactic, not least since Peirce is a relativist and not yet a relationalist. Thus it is still in the individualist paradigm. Semiotics is namely focused on what the sign is presumed to represent – according to Peirce the sign would not be a sign if it did not correspond to and translate some external object into language – while memetics chooses to act regardless of typically Kantian concerns, such as whether external, objective or intersubjective truths really exist, and if so in what way. This means that semiotics presumes that the interpretation of signs in a prevailing society – the discipline that is called hermeneutics within philosophy and exegesis within theology – can be carried out by an independent, external observer: the hermeneuticist. But nothing could be further from the truth. The hermeneuticist is of course also steeped in the prevailing paradigm, and therefore must be primarily regarded as a technological as well as ideological by-product of the same, and not, in some exceedingly diffuse and mysterious way, as its neutral and distanced interpreter. There are indeed no neutral and distanced interpreters, either within physics or sociology; such a position is quite simply both physically and socially impossible.

A meme survives and multiplies by making copies of itself, and thanks to its ability to blend in and appear useful or entertaining for a certain subject in a given situation at a certain point in time. Once again: it has nothing to do with what is true or false. This distinguishes the meme from the sign as a concept. Memetics quite simply constitutes a relationalist radicalisation of semiotics in the same way that Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy is a relationalist radicalisation of Peirce’s and William James’ relativist pragmatism. Through memetics – in particular through the introduction of emergent memeplexes – we shift towards a network-dynamics understanding of culture’s relationship to nature. The individual is no longer needed and has no function in this analysis. The dividual of network dynamics (see The Netocrats) takes over, and as a result of this paradigm shift, Man is taken from the centre of science to a peripheral seat in the grandstand, where he must be content with acting as the passive spectator and at the same time being seized as a storage and transportation vessel subservient to the extremely dynamic evolution of memes. All the work is done by the memes. The anthropocentric impulse and Man’s pride thus gets yet another flick on the nose, which in turn opens the way for universocentric interdependence, which is attendant on network dynamics.

This does not have to mean that the role of semiotics as a scientific discipline is passé – quite the contrary. The focus of modern semiotics is in fact no longer on producing a theory of signs, and not of memes either, nor how these relate to each other – it is nowadays memetics rather than semiotics that is fulfilling Locke’s original vision of a science of signs – but on a theory of how the signs are interpreted by, and both mentally and physiologically de facto influence, their hosts: a pragmatic phenomenon that is called semiosis. What is really interesting arises and shows itself when we remove ourselves from the mental to the physiological, since we can then just as easily study the spread of signs between animals and plants as between humans, not to mention the communication across the boundaries between the various categories of biology. Accordingly, semiotics comes down to the study of biological signalling systems, while memetics pursues the construction of explanatory models for the genesis and the disintegration of cultural paradigms.

This explains why biosemiotics (the study of the relations between signs and the biology of the senders, receivers and users of the signs) is a rapidly growing area, while an equivalent area does not exist within memetics. Consequently it is a biosemioticist, Thomas Seboek who, in his book A Semiotic Perspective on The Sciences from 1984, independently of Dawkins and Dennett claims that not only can we exchange metaphors to advantage between nature and culture, but also that the very division between the natural and the social sciences, from a biosemiotic perspective, must be regarded as both fundamentally arbitrary and extremely unfortunate. But while Seboek’s ideas get a very limited spread among semioticians, the ideas of Dawkins and Dennett successfully spread across a considerably broader philosophical and scientific field. Ironically, memetically speaking memetics becomes more successful than its predecessor semiotics.

If we conceive of a relationalist version of semiotics and memetics, in the same way as a relationalist version of the natural sciences, it must be based on a deep understanding of the largest unit and then build downwards towards the smallest, instead of the classical reductionist obsession of semiotics and memetics with the little sign or the little meme, which is presumed to explain everything that goes on higher up in the hierarchy. According to the writing of the history from the point of view of information technology, the necessary point of departure is that Man is the constant and technology is the variable. For Man, this means that technology drives a paradigm (see The Futurica Trilogy), a plane that sooner or later has its structure studied and explained by a metaphysics that is already initially logically built-in but tacit, and is only formulated and engineered after the fact. Metaphysics then shapes the conditions for the ideology that is tied to the paradigm, the sign-interpreting narrative that prepares you for choosing, the narrative about why things necessarily are the way they are. The ideology in turn consists of large, sluggish blocks called fictions – consciously created narratives about current people and their relationships to the world around them, in contrast to the necessarily subconscious ideology – where the nimble and smallest components of fictions are called fictives (see The Global Empire), a kind of network-dynamics cousin to the signs of semiotics and the memes of memetics, and accordingly also the fundamental component in the paradigm hierarchy.

Note how the relationships between each step, just like when it comes to all forms of relationalist hierarchies, must be understood of course as emergent rather than reductionist. The fiction is not built into the fictives beforehand; it seems to always deliver something extra over and above the fictives in themselves. In the same way, the ideology is not built into the fictions in advance; it always appears as something more and extremely attractive over and above the fictions. And it is precisely these emergent qualities that keep us adamantly embedded in the ideological memeplex in question – every new level adds yet another layer of a kind of compact mysticism to the growing metanarrative, not least in the big step from the seemingly open and therefore creative fictions to the obviously concealed ideology, which brings us to a standstill – which explains why our relationship to the outermost framework of memeplexes, the metaphysical, can never be anything but humbly subservient. Even our relationship to a created syntheist god – a deliberately named projection surface vis-à-vis an indisputably real phenomenon in the surrounding world that we must relate to, that is, fiction par excellence – must subordinate itself to this premise. This is precisely because no memes exist outside memetics, just as no signs exist outside semiotics. Nor are there any fictives – and in turn fictions constructed from these, and in turn ideologies constructed from these – nor are there in turn any credible metaphysical systems deduced from these ideologies that stand outside the current information technology paradigm.

This means that the medium is not only the message, as the Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan clear-sightedly proclaims as early as the 1960s, but that the medium also creates the actor herself, rather than the other way around. We are literally the media with which we communicate. The netocrat of the information age therefore has a sober view of herself as an affirmative by-product of the interactive technologies that she is using in order to interact with her environment, rather than the other way around. And it is precisely because of the superiority of interactivity vis-à-vis the preceding one-directional communicating technologies – given the choice between on the one hand interactivity, with its equality at all levels, and on the other hand one-directional communication from the top down, from those in power to the masses, the current actors always choose interactivity – that ultimately the netocracy vanquish the bourgeoisie of the industrial age and take over society’s central functions. Since the ideas are fictives – concealed within ideologically coloured fictions, which move according to a certain metaphysical structure – according to the syntheist view, the ideas can never be said to be owned by any individual actor or any group of actors in any real sense.

Not surprisingly, the memeplexes of the powers that be and religion throughout history tend to be entangled and therefore also mutually reinforcing. Religion legitimises power, which protects and enriches religion. In many cases, over time the collaboration became so intimate that it was no longer possible to distinguish the one from the other. But this in itself does not constitute a particularly elucidating answer to the question of why these winners in the cultural evolutionary process in particular have developed the way they have done, and why these memeplexes in particular have been as tenacious as they actually have been and have wiped out all the losers. Why God in particular? Why the Bible in particular (for example)? There has hardly been a lack of alternatives, to put it mildly. But the great majority of these were weeded out, ruthlessly. This is, of course, a topic that has not given memetics any peace; it is close to being a whole science in itself.

The problem could be presented in this way: If religion happens to be the answer, which it apparently has been in every type of society that we know of throughout all of human history up until today – what then is the question? What is it that makes the religious memeplex in particular so attractive and successful in the cultural evolutionary process?

To start with, we cannot help but note that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to eagerly welcome religious memes and become a believer brain. Being part of the religious community is thus something that in one way or another feels satisfying for the individual member of the congregation, while the religious collective gains competitive advantages in relation to other groups because of their special form of cohesion and mutual understanding which creates trust, impetus and efficiency to an extent that is hard to top. Moreover, at least in the transition from the nomadic existence of hunters and gatherers to a settled agricultural one, religious memes are blessed with dedicated propagandists and watchdogs, who regard it as their mission in life to spread these memes in particular further, and to protect them from dangerous competitors in the struggle for survival.

So what is it then that religion has to offer and that makes up for the small and big sacrifices that have always been connected with the practice of religion? First of all, we must start by bearing in mind that this question would be entirely incomprehensible to our forefathers on the savannah and in the first permanent settlements. For these people, religion was a completely unknown concept. What we call “religion” today was for them quite simply everyday thoughts and actions, conditioned by a surrounding world that, for obvious reasons, could appear to be controlled by supernatural forces in many respects. That which we see as the “religious” element in their lives would be impossible for them to distinguish from everything else in an existence that crying out loudly for theories intended to clarify obscure causative links, real or illusory. Old Hebrew is one example of a language that lacks a word for “religion”. There was nothing that was not religion, and against which such a concept could be contrasted in a meaningful way.

But the crass and simple answer to the question of what value religion – or what we call religion today – had and still has to offer its practitioners, is survival. Man is a flock animal and can only cope with the hard struggle for survival to the extent that he can create well-functioning groups. A lone individual is easy prey on the savannah. In order to achieve a well-functioning group, at least two things are required: effective communication, and mutual trust which functions best when in it based on common values. And it is precisely that you share the values and feelings of the collective which the devoted practice of religion signals to the world around you. You show that you can be trusted, that your loyalties are the right ones, and that you are a worthy member of the community. Therefore, there are also invariably costs involved in the practice of religion: through paying what it costs to demonstrate your commitment and loyalty to the continued existence of the group you signal that you are prepared to set aside self-interest. A religion, argues the anthropologist William Irons, is basically a control system where the loyalty and devotion of the members of the congregation is monitored by examining the zeal with which they carry out the mandated and preferably also costly rituals.

In this way, you lay the foundation for the necessary trust within the group, and also lay the foundation for the body of regulations that has the task of governing the actions of its individual members, which in turn creates order and security within the system. Accordingly, the selfish deviant is provided with strong incentives to align herself with the group and subordinate herself to its values and set of beliefs. Or at least act as if subservience were the obvious choice. The alternative would be ostracisation or some other powerful sanction. And considering that our hunting and gathering forefathers in principle were constantly at war with other groups of species kinsfolk, who constituted their determined and dangerous competitors in the daily struggle for crucial resources, the cohesion of the collective has always been of the greatest importance. With time Man develops such an intense dependence on the chemicals serotonin and oxytocin, which are released in a torrential stream right at the point when feelings of belonging to the collective are felt, that this dependence in itself appears to be an equally strong foundation for Man’s special status as language or consciousness are.

Warfare necessitates collaboration, in both people and ants, as the science journalist Nicholas Wade observes in his perceptive book The Faith Instinct. For both these species, it is necessary to be able to reliably identify group membership. The ants handle this exclusively with the aid of chemical signals and therefore, in contrast to humans, have no need for religious symbolism. In this context and from this point of view, the fear of the wrath of all-seeing divinities is a good thing: it increases the precision of the signalling system. People believe that selfish behaviour is punished and therefore submit to the given rules. The stronger this fear, the stronger the fabric that binds the society together will be. And the stronger this fabric, the more powerfully the chemical-hormonal reward system that the human being partly shares with the ant will be strengthened. This explains why soldiers who return from the most brutal conflicts often long to be back on the battlefield so intensely that they find it completely impossible to adapt to the peaceful environment at home. They quite simply lack the intense fellowship in the trenches and the chemical-hormonal rewards this sense of belonging is associated with – an experience whose strength only war and religion have succeeded in matching throughout history. With this fact in mind, it is not particularly easy for pacifist atheists to find satisfaction in life.

Islam originally means precisely submission and every faithful Muslim submits to a strictly circumscribed way of life filled with more or less arduous duties in the form of daily prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, etc. The believer thus becomes a small but significant cog in an infinitely much greater machinery. In key respects, religion is precisely this: a liberation from the petty perspective of one’s own ego and the limited possibilities for asserting oneself in the world, which leads to a merging into a collective organism with everything that this means in terms of the feelings of expansion and ecstasy associated with coordinated behaviour, that is, participation in a socio-cultural emergence process. Singing, dancing, speaking in tongues: through various types of liturgical rites, religion binds the collective together emotionally and creates at least one convincing illusion of access to the transcendental. Personal antipathies and conflicts are lessened or disappear in the rhythmically synchronised intoxication of the community.

When the material conditions of a society then change, the function of religion is also changed. The hierarchical complexity that grew in the settled agrarian society demands other and more controlled forms for how the community is manifested. Gradually the music and dancing are regulated. The direct channel to the supernatural is abandoned and is increasingly taken over by a specially educated clergy, while the focus in this communication with the worshipped god is gradually shifted from good fortune in hunting and bountiful harvests here on Earth to eternal happiness among the angels in the afterlife. For a long time, it is the individual and her salvation that is the core activity of religion. The questions change, and therefore religion’s answers also change. The primary task of the church pews is by no means to make the visitors to the service comfortable – and they are not particularly comfortable either anywhere – but quite simply to prevent dancing.

This functionalised and utility-centred view of religion stems to a large extent from the theories of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Interestingly enough, it is self-evident for Durkheim that capitalist ideologies such as nationalism and individualism must be regarded as religion’s latest forms of revelation. Ironically enough, two of memetics’ prominent figures – Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – who are also two of militant, scientific atheism’s pioneering mouthpieces, speak for a diametrically opposed point of view. If the atheist Freud regards religion as an illusion determined by existential anxiety and feelings of defencelessness vis-à-vis the overwhelming and inexplicable forces of Nature, Dennett and Dawkins argue that the memeplexes of religion should be regarded as a dangerous virus that, without invitation and without offering any advantages whatsoever, penetrates people’s brains and devastates their cognitive abilities. Accordingly, religion’s role vis-à-vis mankind would be purely parasitical and not symbiotic in any respect.

If we stay with Christianity, it is of course indisputable that it must be regarded as an unprecedented success from a crassly Darwinian perspective. The Catholic Church’s brand has held up remarkably well through the centuries in spite of considerable difficulties connected with doctrinal oddities and clerical misbehaviour of various kinds. At the same time, the Bible must arguably be the most successful text in history if one looks at the number of copies that are spread across the world. It exists in countless variants everywhere, in more than 2,000 languages and in many of these languages in several translations. As the theologian Hugh S. Pyper writes in his essay The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics, the Bible must be a strong candidate for the title of best-suited of all texts ever if the concept survival of the fittest has any plausibility whatsoever. It colours Western culture to an extent that is impossible to overestimate; regardless of how much the Reformation, to take just one example, damaged the Church, it involved a powerful push out into the world for the Bible, whose text preaches explicity and repeatedly that it wants to be copied and spread. In this way it builds “survival machines” in the form of brains that pay attention to and relay its message. Pyper points out the ironic aspect of the energetic Bible opponent Dawkins himself having allowed his own presentation to become heavily influenced by the Bible in fact, to which he constantly refers, which makes even Dawkins himself one of many survival machines of the Bible that is so harshly criticised.

And so the question is: At the deepest level, is this about symbiosis or parasitism? Does the memeplex of religion mean that the odds of the host organism surviving are bettered or worsened? In his book Breaking the Spell, Dennett recounts the story of the little ant in the meadow that laboriously climbs up a straw of grass, only to fall to the ground and then immediately resume its climb, over and over again. The reason for this behaviour is not that the ant is striving to survey its surroundings in order to improve its chances of finding food, but that its little brain has been taken over by a microscopically small parasite which is called the lancet liver fluke (dicrocoelium dendriticum) and which necessarily must get to a sheep or cow stomach in order to procreate. Therefore, the parasite manipulates the ant to position itself in a way that favours its own survival but which grossly disadvantages the ant’s survival. This is Dennett’s graphic image of how religion manipulates human beings, who, he claims, have died in great numbers in their misdirected eagerness to defend and conquer holy sites or texts. That religion might be able to be of some reproductive use to us is not a theory that is closely examined by Dennett.

In his essay Viruses of the Mind, Dawkins assumes the role of spokesperson for the defenceless little children, who are said to be particularly vulnerable to attacks from the dangerous parasite of religion. In his view, the human child is designed by evolution such that it willingly lets itself be brainwashed, since it is precisely during childhood that the human being assimilates the culture of his environment and the foundation for all the knowledge he needs in order to survive and procreate, something that the cunning parasite of religion exploits in other words. The small child’s gullibility is programmed into him and makes her utterly vulnerable to evil nuns and others that are already infected by this virus and who are therefore programmed to promote its propagation to the innocent brains they are educating. The result of all this is that various absurd and meaningless types of behaviour are reproduced in yet another generation: one bows in the direction of Mecca, nods rhythmically towards a wall, shakes uncontrollably (“like a lunatic”), speaks in tongues, and so on.

This enumeration of various sorts of nonsensical behaviour caused by the religion memes leads our thoughts to the superstition among pigeons that was documented by the behaviourist psychologist B. F. Skinner. A group of pigeons were “rewarded” with food at arbitrary points in time completely unrelated to what the pigeons happened to be doing or not doing, and soon enough one could observe how these pigeons started to perform complicated dances which, according to Dennett, proves that superstition and self-suggestion can cause amusing miracles even in small and unremarkable brains. The dynamics that drive bizarre effects of this kind do not require any conscious reflection, merely amplification. In brains that are designed to discern intentions and causes everywhere, the effects become all the more spectacular.

Dawkins emphasises the memeplex of religion’s kinship with the computer virus: its success is partly dependent on it being difficult for the victim to discover the infection, at least until it is too late. The person who is actually a victim of such a virus probably does not know it and would anyway energetically deny the infection. How does one then ascertain that the evil parasite has taken hold of a brain? The first indication that Dawkins mentions is that the patient usually is inspired by a deep, inner conviction that the one thing or the other actually is true; a conviction that in no way is related to any proof or any reasonable argumentation, but that nevertheless feels entirely convincing to the infected person. And here it gets interesting in a way that Dawkins probably has not intended. In his aggressive attacks on religious faith, in fact he makes an extremely accurate diagnosis of himself.

If it had been the case that religion really had been parasitic on mankind and had impaired the chances of survival and procreation of religious people and other groups, one might argue whether this state of affairs deserved a categorical condemnation from any other point of view than the strictly anthropocentric. For the planet as a whole, it might even be something positive if people did not multiply as vigorously and if religion therefore to some extent held back the population explosion. There are scarcely any scientific reasons to moralise over what the little parasite is doing to the ant, any more than there is reason to moralise about what the sheep is doing to the grass (and thereby also the ant), or about what the wolf or any other predator does to the sheep if an opportunity presents itself. It is quite simply nature taking its course; every attempt at moralising is as misdirected as it is irrelevant. And the same must probably also apply to an attack on religion for the reason that it impairs people’s survival chances by occasioning cost without handing out any rewards to the host organism, that is, it is at the very least misdirected and irrelevant from a Darwinian perspective. So if our brains happen to be the survival machines of religion, this is simply the way it is.

But that’s not all. It is also the case that the notion that religion would impair people’s chances of survival quite simply is not correct. Conversely, there has long been very convincing evidence to the contrary: religious people and groups unequivocally demonstrate that they enjoy reproductive advantages, which has been proven a number of times, among others in an essay by the religious studies researcher Michael Blume which is entitled in fact The Reproductive Advantage of Religion and which has been noted by Susan Blackmore, among others. Statistics unequivocally show that religious peoples have more babies. This applies across the board in all countries. Dawkins, Dennett and the other true-believer atheists are incapable of including this uncontroversial data in their argumentation that is strongly critical of religion, and is one of the cornerstones of their faith in science, and they therefore choose to turn a blind eye to it. But this, as Blackmore points out, is not the way that science is meant to function. If indisputable facts contradict theory, one simply has to shred one’s theory and produce a new one that is in line with the knowledge in the area that actually exists. But living up to this strict ideal is not easy, particularly not when one happens to be a believer oneself, and particularly not when one is completely ignorant of the fact that one is in fact a believer either. In that case, the temptation to devote oneself instead to one’s deep inner conviction and close one’s eyes to awkward facts that point in a completely different direction is virtually irresistible. It is faith and nothing else that gives one the strength to soldier on.

With the advent of syntheism, we witness the death of the Cartesian theatre – and thereby also the individual. The wide acceptance of memetics gives us a superior alternative to faith in the atomised individual as the centre of existence. We are talking here of a syntheist agent which, in contrast to a Cartesian subject, never imagines that she is a little isolated figure, a sort of tenant who temporarily resides in the body; a passive observer behind the eyes who sometimes reluctantly, sometimes neutrally ontologically speaking, anticipates the surrounding world with which it then communicates via the lips and hands. An agent is instead an actor in various combinations and situations; partly an arbitrarily and temporarily delimited dividual, partly an arbitrarily delimited body, but also a body in collaboration with other bodies and phenomena in her environment. And it is as such an actor, mobile at all levels, in the midst of, and not in any mysterious way preceding the intra-acting – which in every moment is eternalised – that syntheist agentiality can arise as a self-experience.

However counter-intuitive this may sound for the syntheist agent, she can only regard herself as a by-product of the ideology coming from the future, and in this Hegelian sense act in a revelatory role and as a supervisor vis-à-vis the now prevailing but rapidly eroding ideology. For it is only in the collision between the ideological paradigms – the history of ideas time after time shows how philosophy virtually explodes with creativity as a direct consequence of a socio-cultural paradigm shift, with Axial Age Greece and India and early Industrialism’s Western Europe and North America as illuminating examples – that speculative philosophy can see through and reveal the illusory qualities of the prevailing ideologies. And there we are at this moment, in informationalism’s infancy, in the midst of a cascade of information flows exploding in all directions, where syntheism is slowly but surely growing as the paradigm’s built-in and necessary metaphysical Higgs field.

From this insight concerning the logical terms and creative possibilities of the metalevel, we can formulate syntheism’s revolutionary ambition – its sabre thrust straight into the solar plexus of the old individualism – with the battle cry that is devastating for capitalism: Ideas want to be free, ideas cannot be owned! In fact, ideas do not belong to any of us; it is we who belong to them, and we cannot do anything other than obey them. Without owning one’s ideas, which never even belonged to the individual except in her own imagination – which was not either the individual’s own to command, in accordance with the free will that she has never owned either – the individual is completely castrated. And it is precisely in this manner that the netocratic dividual wants to regard the bourgeois individual. Therefore the question of who owns the ideas – not to mention the question of who, practically speaking, can own them – is the greatest, most important and controversial question of the current, burgeoning paradigm shift. Power’s memeplex has been set in motion and the world is trembling. Welcome to the informationalist class struggle!

Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58