The Ultimate Anti-Catholic Steelman (and its Refutation)
The ultimate anti-Catholic Steelman:
We don’t need to understand how it works in order to be “possessed” by a meme.
A meme is more than thoughts. It’s the interaction between thoughts, behaviors, and experiences.1
There is a radix of Christianity which originated in the person of Jesus Christ and spread virulently to his disciples the apostles (and then throughout the world).
The core of the meme (what I mean by “radix”) was something which transcended the small messianic Jewish community in which it originated.
People may formulate the meme in terms of something like the Apostles’ Creed, but this is not the meme in its entirety. It couldn’t be, because people read the creed all the time without being immediately convinced that all that it asserts is true.
The Christian meme involves practices and behaviors. In its fullness it consists of the entire phenomenon of Christianity. The essence of it is some subset of all the beliefs, teachings, and practices of Christianity, which Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular are perpetually trying to refine.
Jouissance is a technical term in Lacanian psychology which refers to a kind of negative compulsive behavior human beings do.2 It is a term meant to denote, for one thing, why people keep finding themselves in the same bad relationships, why we keep making the same mistakes. It describes a self-destructive tendency.
Lacan said that the modern world was generating too much contingent meaningless phenomena, and only Catholicism as a worldview has the apparatus necessary to cover them all with meaning and to return us to a kind of “sanity.”
But in any case—
All those who were closest to Christ (or rather, those who were closest to the precipitating phenomenon which “began” Christianity) had the most direct access to this intangible (in the sense that there is no promise that it is even possible to articulate it in simple terms) meme, and thus in their testaments and epistles they were somehow able to relate it to others effectively.
This became what the Catholic Church calls “scripture” and “sacred tradition.” Scripture is the linguistic counterpart to the intangible practice which somehow underlies and sustains it. In reality the meme as it exists in history is composed of both of these, supported also by the magisterium, the definitive interpretation of the prior two elements of the “deposit of faith.”
So, then, what is the magisterium? How is that explained? Well the magisterium itself and its operation is also part of the initial meme. The magisterium is a kind of summation and authoritative teaching regarding scripture and tradition, a kind of purification or refined simplification of the initial meme.
Taken together, scripture, tradition, and the magisterium comprise some assemblage of patterns which simply because it fits so well into the human psyche is extremely good at propagating itself.
Why is the Old Testament retained? It somehow serves to enhance Christ’s meme to assert and maintain that the Christian radix pierces and somehow resonates throughout all the major figures and events of Judaism.
This is very evident, although sometimes I think it is overstated.3
In theory it is possible to retroactively construct or even to stumble upon an underlying commonality in even a very large series of things.
Thing A has properties 1, 2, 3. Thing B has properties 2, 3, 4. Thing C has properties 3, 4, 5.
Thing D simply has property 3. Thus it appears to pierce through things A, B, and C like a needle. The effect seems miraculous. And this is what Christ’s life (or fabrications about his life) happened to do with various events in the Old Testament.
You could come up with more examples to account for every particularity of Christianity, but the point is that a method to do so exists. And on the surface, at least, it appears credible.
So that is the strongest possible argument I can think of against Christianity.
In the simplest possible terms, the great objection to Christianity is this: Christianity may merely be very convincing.
It seems likely that an idea which is optimized to be convincing will be more successful (that is, it will occupy more minds), than an idea which is optimized to be true (I mean, than an idea which is true, or at least more true than the more convincing idea). I disagree, however, and I’ve written about that elsewhere (1) (2).
But that’s not the avenue I want to go down in exploring and disproving this idea.
Here is the critical question: how is it possible to distinguish a mere meme (something which is popular because it is convincing) from a true idea?
Ok. The existence of memes, ideas which spread solely because they are configured such that they will spread, seems to indicate that any idea which one may encounter and find credible is more likely to be a “mere” meme than a truthful idea. Just as the number of viruses is far greater than that of truly living organisms. Even if you don’t accept that mere memes are more likely than true ideas, the very existence of memes casts doubts on all that we believe, just as the knowledge that one of the foods in our refrigerator was poisoned would cause us to throw everything away.
How is it possible to ever discover whether or not an idea is really true or false?
Imagine if a book was published which by pure chance was able to (clearly — that is, not through abuse of vagueness) predict all major historical events which would occur the next 1000 years.
Something like this may be very improbable, but it is not impossible.
How could someone who had seen the book make fifty accurate predictions in a row possibly know that it was not, in fact, some supernatural thing? Perhaps Christianity is simply this “most historically improbable event?”
I suppose that the deeper question is — what guarantee do you have that there is some connection between your mind and reality?
Take a Boltzmann brain, a striking thought experiment produced by this skeptical attitude.
Given that they are more likely to exist than the alternative, it would seem reasonable for us to infer that we are most likely Boltzmann brains.
Yet of course we are not. But why?
What the concept of Boltzmann brains throws into relief (or what it ought to throw into relief) is that, prior to discursive reason, all sane people have a fundamental hold on reality.
We share a fundamental intuition that there is some true correspondence between our perceptions and the way things are.
In other words: we know that we can know at least some truth, even before it has been proven that we can know the truth. Indeed, it cannot be proven. If you don’t accept that as an axiom (that it’s possible to know some truth), you can’t even begin to reason.
So perhaps the problem is that meme theory “proves too much” because in the end it subtly denies that human beings can have any access to the truth.
The central proposal, the adamantine heart of the steelman, is this: it is more philosophically parsimonious to say that Christianity is believed by people because it is such that it accommodates itself to being accepted by people than to say that it is accepted by people because it is true.
One might reply that the things which Christianity demands (sacrifice, suffering) are so out of line with what most people love and desire that it makes no sense for it to spread unless it were true.
But the subtler objection here is that that strictness itself is somehow, mysteriously, a part of its appeal. That is, that it taps into our capacity for jouissance, our drive for self-destruction. I think you find this objection in Nietzsche4 and later in psychoanalysis. We have some force in us that demands to be expended, and perhaps Christianity saddles that perfectly (yet without being true). In fact, the fact that it accommodates itself so perfectly to our desires and the operations of our mind is precisely what allows it to triumph over the truth.
Or there is the more basic atheist argument that, above all else, Christianity beckons to or promises a beautiful supernatural transcendent eternity, the fulfillment of all our desires, to those who believe. If these things are real, human beings really would be right to love them more than anything, certainly more than their sins. And it is this which Christianity exploits.
The trick to overturning this steelman is in seeing that it is a subtle form of relativism. This allows you to turn the meme theorist’s argument back around at them:
“People only accept meme theory as explanatory of the acceptance of ideas because its structure is such that people will accept it, not because it is true.”
“Thus meme theory is itself is at least doubtful.”
Any idea which leads to a contradiction is false.
The Steelman disproved more succinctly/more formally:
P1: The statement that “People only accept ideas because the ideas’ structure is such that human minds will be convinced that they are true, not necessarily because they are, in fact, true.” is itself true.
In other words: People only accept ideas because they’re convincing, not because they’re true.
P2: If one accepts P1, it is only because its structure is such that minds will think it is true, not necessarily because it is true. In other words, it might not be true.
P3: If something really is true, then it is not true that it also might not be true.
Conclusion: P1 leads to a contradiction.
Objection (to P3): It is unrealistic to demand absolute certitude anywhere. In other words, it’s alright to operate based off of judgments of probability (i.e: that proposition A is more likely to be true than proposition B) because we have no other choice.
Response to objection: We can live off of nothing but such judgements of likely-to-be-true, but we have no choice but to act in a binary way, either to opt for one course of action or another. And if we are going for nothing more than the most probable choice of action, then what makes the anti-Christian position more likely to be true than the Christian one? If the mind can’t actually grasp truth, but can only embrace provisional stances which reflect what seem most truthful in this or that given moment?
NB that this all assumes that Christianity is such that the “neutral” mind is likely to judge it as most probable.
Memes are those patterns of human thought or behavior which, by virtue of their adaptation to the “habitat” of the human psyche, tend to reproduce themselves in human minds and in human culture.
People will probably disagree with this or the other definitions, or my general picture of Lacan’s theories. But that is all I have been able to gather from Lacan which I found insightful. Most of the time he’s vague or otherwise confusing. No Christian ever caviled over the most abstruse theology in the way Lacanians endlessly debate over their mysterious terms and concepts.
I mean that people will uncritically repeat that Christ fulfilled hundreds of prophecies, as if it were so cut and dry as that God in every case said something like: “The messiah will be a Galilean Jew named Jesus Christ, born of a Virgin under the rule of Emperor Augustus.” Although sometimes I think that the prophecies really are that clear, in other cases I think that “fulfillment” is more Christocentric. I mean that many events in the Old Testament seem like fragments of something, and Christ is their summation and completion (and indeed, He surpasses them), just as a completed image could be called a “fulfillment” of various puzzle pieces. There is a kind of obscurity in each puzzle piece, in that it’s hard to predict what the completed puzzle will look like from a single piece or even many pieces. In fact, that is the point of a puzzle, that there is some arbitrary difficulty. It is the completed image which makes sense of the puzzle pieces more easily than the opposite. Although I believe that the Jews of Jesus’ day were clearly expecting a messiah, the impression which I get from the gospels is that there was often confusion about whom the messiah would be, when he would come, or what he would look like.
It’s as if they had a bunch of puzzle pieces, but didn’t know how they fit together. Or they were beginning to form an image. And Christ is the full image — and perhaps he even includes things beyond the margins of the pieces the fragments of which the people had never received. I think that describing things this way is more true to the relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and it doesn’t detract from Christ.
“Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life. Hatred of ‘the world,’ condemnation of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for ‘the sabbath of sabbaths’—all this always struck me, no less than the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, as the most dangerous and uncanny form of all possible forms of a ‘will to decline’—at the very least a sign of abysmal sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the impoverishment of life…”