Motus Mentis

I do hope readers will forgive me for rather a rambling post yesterday. (My editorial staff was off for the holidays.) I think some clarification is in order.

The post was written as part of an ongoing discussion of the appropriate limits of tolerance. I have been upbraided on occasion for discussing certain topics, particularly those having to do with religion and the clash of secularism with fundamentalism, in harsh, and perhaps polemical, terms. Such a tone strikes some as insufficiently respectful of the people who believe and espouse the ideas in question, and organize their lives in accordance with them.

First of all, I want to make very clear once again that my purpose is not to “dehumanize” any racial or ethnic group, excluding them from the circle of moral consideration on the basis of the circumstances of their birth. My criticism, however scornful it may be, is of ideas.

It seems clear to me that a great many people are held in the grip of pernicious idea-complexes that have been designed and refined over time to take hold of a host mind and transform that mind into an engine for the defense and propagation of the idea-complex itself. These idea-systems have an impressive array of offensive and defensive mechanisms, by which they suppress normal processes of critical thinking, refocus the host’s moral machinery so as to deem only other carriers to be entitled to full membership in the moral circle, and deflect criticism from outside by stressing “faith” over skeptical inquiry, and treating such inquiry as hostile attack. The resemblance between the behavior and transmission of ideas and viruses is simply too obvious to ignore, as we acknowledge when we talk about an “infectious” melody, or an idea that “catches on”. And in their suppression of the processes of critical thinking that normally constitute the mind’s “immune system”, the most virulent of these idea-complexes resemble nothing so much as the virus that causes AIDS.

These idea-systems, or mind-viruses, vary greatly. Some of them are beneficial, some merely harmless, and some are very dangerous indeed. The oldest and most highly evolved of them all are religions.

Ther can be no question that religion has played an enormous role in the success of our species. Religious idea-systems have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with human minds since our earliest days. Religions typically encourage moral obligation and altruism toward other members of the group, while at the same time offering clear and trustable ways of delineating who is, and who is not, a member. Groups in which individuals are willing to forgo relative within-group success in exchange for the increased fitness of the group as a whole will do better than groups without such arrangements. Brain designs that are better equipped for imprinting with such cognitive structures will be favored. As the group succeeds, and its numbers increase, the number of minds into which the idea-system is copied will increase as well. So from an evolutionary view, the success of the group improves the success of the idea-system, and vice versa. It should come as no surprise that after countless generations of such tuning, we are primed with what some have called a “religious instinct”.

But just as we have other instincts that, although they arose for sound adaptive reasons, are now a liability — our fondness for sweets is a good example — so it is that in a world as massively interconnected as ours, in which the confining pressures of explosive population increase, zero-latency long-range communication, and global travel have squeezed formerly separate cultures into continuous and energetic collision, these ancient mechanisms have, in the most conspicuously worrisome instances, become an atavistic threat to us all.

The greatest vulnerability of religious idea-systems is that they depend upon the suspension of our normal procedures for establishing beliefs about the world, namely skeptical inquiry, reliance on evidence, and falsifiability. They are elegantly designed to protect this soft spot in clever and extremely effective ways: first and foremost by insisting on faith as the cornerstone and “litmus test” of membership, and also, at the group level, by propagating in society a “meta-belief” about belief itself, one that affect even doubters and skeptics — namely, that it is better to believe — and by instituting social taboos that strongly condemn questioning of the idea-complex itself, or of another’s faith. It is commonplace for people to criticize one another’s political views — it happens all the time, in harsh and intemperate language — but religious ideas are, generally, strictly off-limits. In my own case I have made no criticism of religion that is any more stern or severe than what goes on all the time in political discourse, but — and very tellingly indeed — in the case of religious criticism alone I am charged with failing to respect other people’s humanity. Not their absurd ideas, mind you, but their very humanity itself.

I am doing nothing of the sort, of course. I am pushing back hard, and in robustly valuative language, on what I perceive to be, nowadays, the single greatest obstacle to human progress: an obsolete and intellectually bankrupt approach to understanding the world, and one another, that is a primitive holdover from our earliest attempts, in the childhood of our race, to make sense of our surroundings, and our predicament — a disabling parasite of the mind that we have hosted for far too long.

That I see such idea-systems as such a grave threat to our prospects as to denounce them, in clear and disapproving terms, as the trap and folly that they plainly are has nothing whatsoever to do with my respecting the “humanity” of those in their grip. Furthermore, the fact that I am charged with grave social malfeasance just for sounding the alarm is, in my view, evidence of how terrifyingly pervasive the influence of these religious memes really is — and how effective the social armor with which they defend themselves continues to be.