Secrets of the ancient memelords

I say this with tremendous respect: it’s kinda surprising that the three largest religions in the world are Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. None of them are very sexy or fun, they come with all kinds of rules, and if they promise you any happiness at all, it’s either after you’re dead, or it’s the lamest kind of happiness possible, the kind where you don’t get anything you want but you supposedly feel fine about it. If you were trying to design a successful religion from scratch, I don’t think any of these would have made it out of focus groups. “Yeah, uh, women 18 to 34 years old just aren’t resonating with the part where the guy gets nailed to a tree.” Why, in the ultimate meme battle of religions, did these three prevail? Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s not because they have the divine on their side. (Otherwise, God appears to be hedging his bets by backing multiple religions at once.) Obviously there’s a lot of historical contingency here, and if a couple wars had gone the other way, we might have a different set of creeds on the podium. But I think each of these mega-religions has something in common, something we never really talk about, maybe because we don’t notice it, or maybe because it’s impolite to mention—namely, that they all have a brainy version and a folksy version. If you’re the scholarly type, Christianity offers you Aquinas and Augustine, Islam has al-Ash’ari and al-Ghazali, Hinduism has Adi Shankara and Swami Vivekananda, etc. But if you don’t care for bookish stuff, you can also just say the prayers, sing the songs, bow to the right things at the right time, and it’s all good. The guy with the MDiv degree is just as Christian as the guy who does spirit hands while the praise band plays “Our God Is an Awesome God”. It’s hard to talk about this without making it sound like the brainy version is the “good” one, because if we’re doing forensic sociology of religion, it’s obvious which side of the spectrum we prefer. But brainy vs. folksy is really about interest rather than ability. The people who favor the brainier side may or may not be better at thinking, but this is the thing they like thinking about. More importantly, the brainy and the folksy sides need each other. The brainy version appeals to evangelists, explainers, and institution-builders—people who make their religion respectable and robust. The folksy version keeps a religion relevant and accessible to the 99.9% of humanity who can’t do faith full-time—people who might not be able to name all the commandments, but who will still show up on Sunday and put their dollars in the basket. The brainy version fills the pulpits; the folksy version fills the pews.1 Naturally, brainy folks are always a little annoyed at folksy folks, and folksy folks are always a little resentful of brainy folks. It’s tempting to split up: “Imagine if we didn’t have to pander to these know-nothings”/”Imagine if we didn’t have to listen to these nerds!” But a religion can start wobbling out of control if it tilts too far toward either its brainy yin or its folksy yang. Left unchecked, brainy types can become obsessed with esoterica, to the point where they start killing each other over commas. Meanwhile, uncultivated folksiness can degenerate into hogwash and superstition. Pure braininess is one inscrutable sage preaching to no one; pure folksiness is turning the madrasa into a gift shop. Here’s why I bring all this up: we’ve got a big brainy/folksy split on our hands right now: That divide is biggest at the highest level of education: To think clearly about this situation, we have to continue resisting the temptation to focus on which side is “correct”. And we have to avoid glossing the divide as “Democrats = smart, Republicans = dumb”—both because going to college doesn’t mean you actually know anything, and because intelligence is far more complicated than we like to admit. I think this divide is better understood as cultural rather than cognitive, but it doesn’t really matter, because separating the brainy and the folksy leaves you with the worst version of each. This is one reason why politics is so outrageous right now—only a sicko would delight in the White House’s Studio Ghibli-fied picture of a weeping woman being deported, and only an insufferable scold would try to outlaw words like “crazy”, “stupid”, and “grandfather” in the name of political correctness. It’s not hard to see why most people don’t feel like they fit in well with either party. But as long as the folksy and brainy contingents stay on opposite sides of the dance floor, we can look forward to a lot more of this. Bifurcation by education is always bad, but it’s worse for the educated group, because they’ll always be outnumbered. You simply cannot build a political coalition on the expectation that everybody’s going to do the reading. If the brainy group is going to survive, it has to find a way to reunite with the folksy. So maybe it’s worth taking some cues from the most successful ideologies of all time, the ones that have kept the brainy and folksy strains intertwined for thousands of years. I don’t think politics should be a religion—I’m not even sure if religion should be a religion—but someone’s gonna run the country, and as long as we’ve got a brainy/folksy split, we’ll always have to choose between someone who is up their own ass, and someone who simply is an ass. As far as I can see, the biggest religions offer two strategies for bridging the divide between the high-falutin and the low-falutin. Let’s call ‘em fractal beliefs and memetic flexibility. The shape below is a fractal, a triangle made up of triangles. Look at it from far away and you see one big triangle; look at it close up and you see lots of little triangles. It’s triangles all the way down. The most successful ideologies have similarly fractal beliefs: you get the same ideas no matter how much you zoom in or out. If a Christian leans more into their faith—if they read the Bible cover to cover, go to church twice a week, and start listening to sermons on the way to work—they don’t suddenly transform into, say, a Buddhist. They’re just an extra-enthusiastic Christian with extra-elaborated beliefs. This is a critical feature: if your high-devotion and low-devotion followers believe totally different things, eventually they’re gonna split. If the brainy tribe is to survive, then, it’s gotta fractal-ize its beliefs. That means generating the simplest versions of your platform that is still true. For example, many brainy folks want to begin arguments about gender by positing something like “gender is a social construct”, and right out the gate they’re expecting everyone to have internalized like three different concepts from sociology 101. Instead, they should start with something everybody can understand and get on board with, like “People’s opportunities in life shouldn’t depend on their private parts”. Making your arguments fractal doesn’t require changing their core commitments; it just means making each step of the argument digestible to someone who has no inclination to chew. If you’re gotta bring up Durkheim, at least put him last. Brainy folks hate doing this. They’d much prefer to produce ever-more-exquisite versions of their arguments because, to borrow some blockchain terminology, brainy people operate on a proof-of-work system, where your standing is based on the effort you put in. That’s why brainy folks are so attracted to the idea that your first instincts cannot be right, and it’s why their beliefs can be an acquired taste. You’re supposed to struggle a bit to get them—that’s how you prove that you did your homework. (Only the brainy tribe would, for instance, insist that you need to “educate yourself” in order to participate in polite society, and that no one should be expected to help you with this.) It would be convenient for this analogy if folksy types operated on a proof-of-stake system (which is the other way block…