by Stanley
It is possible to educate people in ways that are harmful to them. Some cultural traditions are fundamentally pathological: an education in religious fundamentalism is an extreme example.
We can think of such cultural ideas as ‘memes’ or viruses that infect the human mind. We can say that although such cultural memes are successful at replicating themselves, passing from one mind to another, they do so at the expense of their hosts. Many harmful religious doctrines are of this kind. This phenomenon is not unusual in the story of evolution. An example is the aids virus which uses a host, a living human cell, to replicate itself in order to infect other cells. You are also host to millions of bacteria in your body. Some are benign and actually assist certain necessary functions of your body. Some are pathological and harmful.
Ideas behave in the same way. You are host to many that are damaging to human wellbeing. They are transmitted from one host to another, not as organisms, but as packets of information we call ‘memes’. Their sole purpose is replication. A successful religion is an example successful memetic replication. Many religious practices (memes) are unquestionably harmful. For example, the idea of going to hell for your sins - no one today, except those infected with the meme, can possibly pretend that this idea is in any way helpful.
Let’s take the vivid example of Muslim women who wear the burka. A burka is a head to toe costume worn by some traditionally devout Muslim women designed to conceal every part of their bodies, except for the eyes.
In looking at this cultural practice, we can do a post-modernist move by saying that all cultural values are relative. We can say that when a Muslim woman says she is quite happy being enclosed in a burka we should take this at face value. Who are we to say that she is wrong? In saying this we are also agreeing that there is no basic human nature that this practice offends. A human beings, so the post-modernist doctrine goes, is a blank slate upon which anything can be written; human beings are infinitely malleable and there are no objective values by which we can judge. This is a very late western view in which we deny there is anything like a universal human nature. Every human being is nothing more than the product of their society. Any judgement we make is simply the one-sided product of our own culture and therefore without any universal justification.
However, biological science is showing us what we already know from common sense observation: that there is such a thing as human nature and that we are indeed born with predispositions, some are universal to all humanity. Not only this, but each individual is born with slight but important variations – a fact obvious to any mother. We do not come into the world as a blank slate upon which any whacky idea can run the show without fear of harm.
What we call our human nature can adequately be accounted for by our biological makeup. Cultural memes are a different class of events. Harmful cultural memes use our natural biological makeup as hosts for their own purposes, just as other parasitic organisms can.
It is impossible to imagine that a child who has not been infected with the burka meme, that is to say educated as a devoted Muslim girl, would freely choose to wear a burka. There is nothing in our biological make up that would instinctively incline a child toward that kind of choice.
Of course, once infected, the meme virus induces a certain kind of typical behaviour and reinforces it with instructions from a, in this case, divine source. The idea is that a woman will be happier and safer protected from the lascivious gaze of men. This meme is supported by the whole information package of the Islamic religion. So of course, in wearing a burka the woman may well feel happy and contented. But this fact does not make it any the less an offence against her nature than it would if she felt she deserved to be murdered by her father as punishment for being raped by a stranger – another Islamic meme.
‘The moment we admit that there is anything to know about human wellbeing, we must admit that certain individuals or cultures might not know it.’ [1] Some cultural practices and ideas are obviously inimical to human nature; there are universal truths about what conditions are bad for human wellbeing. Would anyone like to argue that celibacy for catholic priests is good for them or for the sexually abused children under their institutional care?
The moment we reject the post-modern idea of the relativity of what is good for people the whole ground of our discourse is changed. We realise that people can be hypnotised into believing that they are happy or that adverse circumstances are good for them. A principle survival mechanism of a successful meme is the hypnotic instruction that you are happier and better off, or will be, for willingly embracing its instructions, (e.g. sacrificing yourself as a suicide bomber or giving yourself to Jesus).
The desire to be happy is part of our genetic makeup and the meme mobilises this for its own use; just as the aids virus mobilises the ribosomes, enzymes and cellular reproductive machinery of the cell to reproduce itself and spread itself to other hosts.
There is a level, then, at which we have to say that people can lose their sense of what is good for them. People hypnotised into a religion, for example, are obviously not responsible for their judgements. It is well known how notoriously difficult it is to debrief someone who has been infected by a cult-church. We should not submissively tolerate this kind of human abuse in the name of cultural and religious tolerance.
The view expressed here may seem dangerous in that it looks as though it runs counter to human rights and our belief in democracy and self-determination. But it is a primary requisite for judgements that are consistent with the needs of human nature that there is a genuine freedom of choice. Once we admit this we throw into doubt many questionable practices that have gained immunity to debate.
[1] Harris, Sam. Moral Confusion in the Name of Science: http://www.project-reason.org/newsfeed/item/moral_confusion_in_the_name_of_science3/
Also: http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
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