What attitudes in a philosophy/meme ensure it will spread widely

Great Debates
1

By philosophy I’m mostly discussing religion, but it can also mean philosophies like political philosophies, economic philosophies, etc.

For example, with religion certain beliefs tend to ensure the religion will spread:

  • Encourage believers to have a ton of kids
  • Try to convert non-believers through missionary work, military conquest, political conquest, trade, etc
  • Punish people who leave the religion

Attitudes like this ensure the religion will have more adherents than religions that discourage having children, discourage converting others and allow people to leave the religion.

Judaism for example doesn’t really try to convert non-believers via missionary work or military conquest. As a result there are only about 20 million jews on earth now, vs around 2.6 billion christians and 2 billion muslims.

India Has a lot of Hindus, but they don’t really try to export their beliefs to other countries the way Christianity and Islam do. However Buddhism, which is an offshoot of Hinduism, has spread to various countries.

But again, to truly export your beliefs you need certain things like military supremacy, ties to powerful political leaders, or trade. You can use these to push your religion. You can conquer a nation, or convert a political leader, or express your ideas doing trade or missionary work.

Another aspect is how appealing a new philosophy is. If you are an impoverished peasant, communism is appealing because it promises a higher quality of life. If you are in an oppressed caste or tired of suffering, Buddhism which rejects castes and promises an end to suffering is appealing. I guess the promise of eternal paradise in Islam and Christianity make them appealing to people.

I believe within ~100 years of the creation of communism, about 1/3 of the world was communist. The economic and nationalist/anti-imperialist appeals were very appealing to people who were downtrodden.

2

Douglas Hofstadter re: Christianity:

Consider the following:

Begin:

X₁: Anyone who does not believe System X will suffer in hell.

X₂: It is your duty to save others from suffering.

End.

If you believed in System X, you would attempt to save others from hell by convincing them that System X is true. Thus System X has an implicit “hook.”

3

A fun fictional example of this is ‘The Snowball Effect’ by Katherine McLean, from the SF Golden age.

‘The Snowball Effect by Katherine MacLean | Project Gutenberg’

Facebook is, unfortunately, close to a real-world instance…?

4

Yup, there is a massive carrot and stick there. Believe and you get eternal paradise. Do not believe and you get eternal torture. This creates far more incentive than a belief system where believers and disbelievers both disappear for all eternity upon death, or a system where everyone goes to heaven for all eternity no matter what they believed or what they did in life.

Having said that, its also about military and political conquest. The reason Islam and Christianity spread so far is also because these philosophies were tied to militaries that conquered large amounts of territory. I’m sure there have been endless other philosophies in history that felt non-believers faced eternal torment but they didn’t have the military capabilities of Christian or Islamic nations to force their beliefs. But then again, Buddhism didn’t spread by military conquest (as far as I know) but it still managed to spread. And there were areas where Christianity and Islam spread due to missionaries, not due to conquest.

5

Thats interesting, a sewing circle taking over the entire world. Its sad that philosophies like Jainism do not spread as well as philosophies that promote conquest and eternal punishment for dissidents.

6

That’s Pascal’s wager, of course.

But it starts to make a lot less sense when you widen your view beyond medieval Europe and realise that there are lots more gods that other people believe in.

Which one are you gonna bet on?

7

A historically effective method is to assert that unbelievers are evil and must be killed. This encourages expansion via war, conversion by the sword, and the destruction of competing beliefs by conversion and genocide. This works regardless of what one believes about the afterlife, as demonstrated by Communism.

8

Or, it doesn’t work — you get embroiled in an endless series of wars and eventually lose enough to them to end up as one of history’s might-have-beens.

The thread is at risk of falling prey to survivor bias and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy — people look at characterics of the now-dominant religions that they are familiar with and assume that those religions have become dominant because they had those characteristics. It ain’t necessarily so. Many religions which didn’t become dominant might have had the same characteristics. Plus, the religions which did become dominant might have other characteristics that account for their dominance.

Dawkins’ meme theory argues that ideas propagate, survive and flourish if they are well-adapted to their environment. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they focus on propagating themselves — if they are useful they will be propagated anyway. Practically everybody learns in childhood how to ride a bicycle, not because of any ideology that teaches the moral urgency of transmitting this knowledge, but because it is useful, life-enhancing knowledge.

The dominant religions are those that tend to be associated with the materially successful cultures. In so far as the religion has anything to do with this, the successful religions will be those whose contribution to culture makes the culture more successful. So, the religous beliefs that are conducive to, rather than opposed to, the development of agriculture will tend to supplant those which favour the maintenance of a subsistence hunter-gatherer culture. Beliefs that are favourable to and compatible with the scientific investigation of the natural world will tend to eclipse those which are opposed. Etc, etc. Beliefs which foster war, violence, robbery, etc will prevail only to the extend that a prediliction for war, violence, robbery, etc is a good survival strategy for a culture. But in fact excessively warlike cultures tend to crash and burn. Expansion via war, conversion by the sword, and the destruction of competing beliefs by conversion and genocide turned out to be not such a crash-hot survival strategy for Naziism, after all.

9

No, since science is destructive to many belief systems. Such beliefs only thrive when they suppress science, regardless of the cost to larger society.

As well, suffering and despair are very effective at making some beliefs attractive, and therefore making society materially worse helps spread and maintain them.

10

Science is only desctructive of belief systems that are incompatible with what science shows to be true — e.g. a belief system that accounts for lightening bolts by saying that they are sent by the gods as a punishment.

But there’s a wide class of beliefs that are not undermined by science — e.g. the ethical belief that a woman has a right to choose to terminate her pregancy is not undermined by science. Nor is the (inconsistent) belief that an unborn child has the right to be carried to term and delivered. This is an ethical question on which science has, basically, nothing to say, one way or the other.

And then you have beliefs that are positively pro-science. The belief that the universe is real (as opposed to being an illusion or a delusion); the belief that the universe is regular rather than random; the belief that the rules that govern the universe can be learned by observation; the belief that the universe is worthy of study. These beliefs are fundamental axioms of the scientific method and belief systems (religious or secular) which include them are obviously favourable to the development and pursuit of science. Cultures which are formed or characterised by such belief systems are more likely to develop the scientific method and to pursue and acquire scientific knowledge that cultures which do not. And this would explain why the belief systems of those cultures tend to be survive, to be successful and to be propagated.

Taking a step back, your approach here seems to be open only to the idea that belief systems are apt to be spread widely only by their negative, destructive characteristics. But there’s no reason why this should be true — ideas which are useful, productive or constructive would, on the face of it, seem to be well adapted to survive and propagate. There’s no basis for assuming that only negative or destructive characteristics of religions can account for their success.

11

No, that’s undercut badly by science, since science shows their justification for that position make no sense.

Science has a great deal to say on ethics, for the simple reason that answering ethical questions correctly for anyone who actually cares abut the results of their actions requires actual understanding of the circumstances they are addressing and what the results of their actions will be. And many ethical/moral/etc positions are therefore undercut by science because they use falsehoods to justify themselves.

But beliefs that are destructive do so more efficiently, since they sacrifice human interests for their own benefit. Beliefs are at a fundamental level hostile to humanity, because we are just their hosts and our own needs are at best secondary to them. What matters is what spreads them as far and wide in the short term as possible; they lack the capability for foresight.

12

UDS1 - spot on analysis

By definition this is false. Science is a process of increasing the predictive accuracy of the fundamental nature of the universe and applying that knowledge in technology among other things, and has nothing to do with ethics whatsoever (because goodness is not a unit of measure). Science concerns itself entirely with ‘is’ and has nothing to say with regard to ‘ought’. The Earth orbits the Sun because of the nature of gravity, not because it has a morally obligated duty.

To the OPs question, it seems the conviction demonstrated by persuasive leaders is among the qualities that successfully spread a philosophy.

13

You completely ignored what I said. Science can tell people what the world is like and what the effects of an action are, which is crucial for ethics. “Ethics” that don’t involve objective reality are just hypotheticals, the moment they impinge on reality science becomes relevant.

14

Exactly right, which is entirely outside of ethics. Observation is not ethics, which is why those are separate disciplines. The observed phenomenon following the scientific method should not be influenced by ethical positions.

Ethics concerns itself with a value hierarchy, which appears as subjective.

Smart folks like Sam Harris strive toward a scientific ethical framework, but haven’t found the thread yet. Bridging the ‘is’-‘ought’ gap is quite the difficult problem to solve.

15

No it isn’t. Ethics is at best meaningless if it doesn’t touch on reality; and as soon as it touches on reality science applies. Ignoring or falsifying science is one of the more common features of unethical behavior for exactly that reason.

16

I don’t agree. “Right” and “wrong” are not scientific concepts, or capable of emperical observation or demonstration. Real-world ethical questions arise all the time — reproductive rights, the death penalty, tax policy, honesty in relationships — and while science can sometimes illuminate some of these (e.g. economics can tell us what the consequences of tax policy choices are likely to be) ultimately it can’t answer the ethical question (whether a particular tax consequence is “good” or “bad”).

If you disagree, please provide a scientific proof for the proposition that a woman has a right to make reproductive choices for herself (or, if you prefer, for the opposing proposition).

17

You’re simply ignoring what I am saying. I never claimed that science could tell us what is right or wrong, only that it can tell us what the world is like and what our actions will accomplish. Which is necessary to make “moral decisions” that actually accomplish the desired results.

18

I’m not ignoring that; I expressly made the point that science can illuminate moral issues. But it can’t tell us what is right or wrong, as you concede, and therefore I don’t understand your claim that science “has a great deal to say on ethics”. If I want to gas 6 million Jews, scientific understanding and technical know-how will make the task acheivable, but they’ll do absotutely nothing to establish that my desire is profoundly evil. That’s simply not a question with which sicence concerns itself, or can concern itself.

19

A religion or philosophy is more likely to spread if it provides practical benefits like encouraging people to behave in pro-social ways towards other believers. Eg by following rules banning theft, violence etc, cooperating on big projects, and supporting other members who need help. Not only does this encourage more people to join to get the benefits, but groups acting in this way will be more successful than those who don’t.

What’s less obvious is why giving some kind of meaning to life helps a belief spread. Why did humans evolve to want this? On the other hand, demanding discipline and some kind of self-improvement also seems to be a common feature of religious beliefs, and it’s more obvious how that could benefit believers.

20

Of course it will; it’ll tell you that the claims of the Nazis about the Jews are lies, and that killing them will just result in a lot of dead people and a worse-off Germany. Because it turns out that a great many, probably most immoral decisions are based partially or completely on falsehoods.