by Erik Davis
Whether motivated by religious conviction, right-wing politics, or greed, evangelical Christians pounce on new communications technologies for the same reason that advertisers and advocacy groups do: these technologies are a great way of spreading memes. A well-established pop concept in cybercircles, the meme can be defined as the mental equivalent of a gene: an idea or learned behavior that seeks to propagate itself in the competitive environment of culture. In his book The Selfish Gene, the evolutionary biologist and notorious atheist Richard Dawkins quotes N. K. Humphrey, the creator of the concept:
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.… The meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.17
Hard-core materialist philosophy like this often becomes rather ham-fisted when it comes to the life of the mind, and the reductionist concept of the meme is no exception. Though useful for tracking the infectious quality of ad slogans and hairstyles, the meme stumbles when it attempts to explain complex cultural artifacts and traditions, to say nothing of the often highly intrapersonal reasons that men and women come to lead religious lives. The fact that some materialists attempt to write off subjectivity itself as nothing more than a “meme complex” is probably the best demonstration of the concept’s fundamental weakness.
Nonetheless, the meme does give us a handy tool for understanding two related dimensions of evangelical communication: the almost technical desire to spread the Word, and the organic, infectious, and sometimes ecstatic power the Word has on many individuals. Evangelical language is itself thoroughly saturated with biblical code, and some preachers transform particular units of scripture into conversion slogans that can be propagated on tracts, in person, or on TV. The placards for John 3:16 that once invaded mass sporting events are only one example of this viral, almost Madison Avenue–worthy logic, a logic that scripture itself sometimes seems to support. Consider Isaiah 55:10–11, where the Lord proclaims:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout … so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.
With such infectious notions in mind, it hardly seems accidental that the idea that Humphrey chose as an example of a meme is the basic religious belief in life after death. As a materialist, Humphrey no doubt picked the example to take a potshot at believers, but I suspect that, for good or ill, his own memes may prove to be dodo birds compared to many of humanity’s most basic religious convictions. After all, these notions, and the experiences they help engender, have been coevolving with human beings for millennia, and in the end, it is they who may come the closest to achieving eternal life.
If nothing else, the power of the evangelical meme, and its successful interbreeding with electronic media, reminds us that communication always has an ecstatic, nonrational dimension. Pentecostals spread glossolalia as well as doctrine, and speaking in tongues can be considered communication so otherworldly that it transcends semantics entirely. In this sense, advanced telecommunication networks may only amplify the raptures and fears that ride the carrier wave of our more reasonable communication codes. This also happens to be one of the main themes of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, perhaps the most vibrant bit of cyberpunk mythology written since Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, and one that uncorks the notion of Pentecostal memes with a devilish wit.
Set in a dystopian near-future of franchise governments, suburban enclaves, and a strip mall cyberspace known as the Metaverse, the novel revolves around a conspiracy set in motion by the powerful and wealthy evangelist L. Bob Rife, who represents postmodern mind control at its worst. Besides his Scientological name and his global media empire, which includes the fiber-optic networks that support the Metaverse, Rife controls a number of his followers through radio antennas implanted directly into their cortexes. (Stephenson was prophetic: Some members of Japan’s apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo cult wore Perfect Salvation Initiation headgear in order to electronically synchronize their brain waves with those of their guru, Shoko Asahara.) But Rife’s main technology of mind control is Snow Crash, a “metavirus” that breaks down the distinction between computer and biological code. On the street, Snow Crash takes the form of a drug; in the virtual reality of the Metaverse, it exists as a computer virus that online avatars pick up visually, at which point the virus crashes the system and infects the user’s brain. Once infected, people go blank, lose their defenses against suggestion, and begin speaking in tongues, which the novel claims is the irrational language that lurks in the deep structure of the human brain.
According to the memetic mythology that Stephenson unfolds during the course of his book, all humans once spoke this primal Adamic tongue, which enabled our brains to be easily controlled by the biomental viruses propagated by ancient Sumerian priests. To become self-conscious, innovative, and ultimately rational beings, we had to repress this universal tongue. “Babel-Infocalypse,” the moment when human speech became mixed up and multiple, was thus a liberating event, because it delivered us from the old viral trance and forced us to consciously learn skills, to think, and to stand on our own two feet. The religions of the Book also kept this trance at bay through hygienic codes of behavior and the “benign virus” of the Torah, whose integrity was maintained through strict rules concerning its replication. Nonetheless, the old metavirus continues to lurk in the margins of human culture, where it rears up in phenomena like Pentecostal glossolalia and, one might add, the nostalgic dreams of universal and perfect communication that drive Western mystics and techno-utopian globalists alike. But Stephenson warns that we can only recover this Adamic state of collective mind at the price of our rational independence—a telling lesson in an era of worldwide communication nets and powerful media memes.
Stephenson uses the term Infocalypse to suggest the tendency of languages and information systems to diverge, to explode into mutually incomprehensible complexity. But for some technosavvy evangelicals, his term would take on a far different meaning. In Matthew 24:14, Jesus promises that “this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” Many premillennialist evangelicals interpret this to mean that Christ will not hit the return button until every person living on earth has been exposed to the Word—a situation that media-equipped Christians are hoping to bring about as fast as possible. Globally minded ministers like Pat Robertson, who adopted Matthew 24:14 as the corporate motto of CBN, have thus reimagined the technology of communication itself as a kind of apocalyptic trigger. In his McLuhanesque book The Electric Church, Ben Armstrong, the former head of the televangelist consortium known as the National Religious Broadcasters, cites Revelation 14:6: “And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” With the almost cartoon literalism common to many evangelicals, Armstrong suggests that this angel symbolizes the satellites that now broadcast the gospel to a sinful planet.
Curiously enough, John of Patmos, the visionary author of Revelation who concocted this image of the geosynchronous angel in the first place, is himself notably self-conscious about the mechanics of information propagation. His apocalypse is laced with images of literary materials. A seven-eyed lamb cracks open the seven seals of a divine book, unleashing the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, while later the heavens roll up like a scroll. John also frames his drama with language that focuses somewhat obsessively on the process of reading and writing. In the vision that
opens the text, Jesus Christ announces himself as the Alpha and Omega (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet), and then orders John to “Write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven churches.”18 As Harry Gamble argues in his history of early Christian writings, “[John’s] prophecy is not a visual apprehension or an oral message subsequently preserved in writing: the text is what was originally intended.”19 That is, John’s book is not a recollected reflection, but the site of divine revelation itself.
Given that his revelation foretold the imminent end of the world, John was understandably compelled to get the word out as fast as possible. The time was at hand, and Christ had enjoined him to “not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book.” John thus explicitly framed his text as a letter, and he blessed “he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and … those who hear, and who keep what is written therein.”20 The historian W. M. Ramsay argues that John chose the particular seven churches he did because each was located at a natural center of communication and was thus ideally located for circulating copies of Revelation throughout the Christian community. Given the fact that copying introduces noise and distortion, John sought to control the replication of his text by warning the potential reader or scribe not to alter any of his words, because otherwise “God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” The success of John’s memetic endeavor can be measured by the simple fact that Revelation made it into the final cut of the Bible, over and against any number of more manageable contenders.
Needless to say, the first generations of Christians did not live to see the Second Coming. But though the orthodox Church tried to clamp down on millennialist fever, John’s almost hallucinogenic guidebook continued to feed the fires of apocalyptic expectation throughout the course of Christian history. John’s cast of characters were particularly intriguing: exactly who were the great whore of Babylon, the false prophet, the two witnesses, and the seven-headed beast? Though many Christians interpreted Revelation as allegory or impenetrable mystery, it was tough for some to suppress the hunch that John’s text, along with the apocalyptic prophecies of Ezekiel and Daniel, encoded specific information about actual events on the historical horizon. Given that John’s elaborate symbolic language forms a kind of literary Rorschach blot, countless self-appointed prophets through the ages have been able to find apocalyptic significance in current events, from the crowning of the Holy Emperor Frederick II to the Gulf War. The Book of Revelation itself can thus become a kind of metavirus. By drawing readers into the apocalyptic time of the text, it encourages them to uncover the true meaning of John’s eschatological drama by matching it to living history. In other words, Revelation reveals itself as a code to be cracked.
Though many Bible-crackers stick to the narrative imagery of biblical prophecy, others have treated the text of scripture itself as a literal cipher. As we saw in chapter 1, Jewish Kabbalists squeezed additional meanings out of the Torah with techniques such as Temurah, the transposition of letters, or Gematria, which uses the numbers associated with each Hebrew letter to suggest esoteric correspondences between words (for example, the Hebrew words for “serpent” and “messiah” both equal 358). Much of this code-breaking has been directed toward mystical ends, but countless exegetes have deciphered literal historical predictions as well, and continue to do so today. In Michael Drosnin’s best-selling 1997 book The Bible Code, for example, the author claims that by rearranging the Torah into a kind of crossword puzzle, all sorts of curious words and correspondences pop out: Kennedy is near Dallas, Newton intersects gravity, and Hitler looms only twenty rows away from Nazi. Though Drosnin doesn’t do anything as audacious as date the Eschaton, he does claim that the Torah is “an interactive database” that predicts the future. His metaphor is not altogether out of place; the impressive if ultimately empty synchronicities he discovered are based on statistical analyses performed by Israeli scientists using massive number-crunching computers. It seems that the vision of computer-aided Kabbalah that Umberto Eco spun in Foucault’s Pendulum has become a reality; in fact, Hebrew hermeneuts can download Gematria software from the Internet.
The pop fascination with The Bible Code also conceals the old dream of the universal book: the Torah that creates the world, the book of Nature that mirrors the Logos of God, or the great tome that Dante glimpsed in the empyrean of Paradise: “I saw buried in the depths, bound with love in one volume, that which is scattered through the universe.”21 Attempting to make this dream a reality, the scholar theologians of the Middle Ages produced great summae, theological texts that attempted to demonstrate the fundamental unity of all things by philosophically organizing them according to the great chain of being. By the time of the Enlightenment, when scientists had taken over the labor of decoding the world, the summa had mutated into the secular encyclopedia, which organized human knowledge according to rational categories, alphabetical listings, and indexes. In the age of the Internet, when information moves too fast for the codex and even the Encyclopaedia Britannica has gone online, Dante’s universal book has returned in the fantasized and idealized image of the universal hypertext: an infinite network that links documents, images, and fragments of knowledge and news into a constantly mutating multidimensional library that divinely ingathers the evolving cosmos. The Internet has become infected with this dream, which in theological terms seeks to mirror the mind of God. As Paul Virilio told the online journal CTheory, “The research on cyberspace is a quest for God … and deals with the idea of a God who is, sees, and hears everything.”22
Perhaps the manic enthusiasm for information, for producing, packaging, transmitting, and consuming scattered fragments of a coded world, is partly motivated by an unconscious desire for a totalizing revelation, an incandescent apocalypse of knowledge. After all, the word apocalypse simply means an uncovering or revealing. As a literary genre, the apocalypse presents itself as a kind of visionary freedom of information act, with God granting the prophet a glimpse of his multimedia, literally all-time book of the world. All apocalyptic writings are shot through with the desire for the transparency and fullness of knowledge, a yearning for that time when all will be revealed, when a truer Torah will emerge, when light will come to the hidden things in the dark. In Matthew 10:26, Jesus even sounds like a pundit for the open surveillance society, promising that, in the last days, “there is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nothing hidden that will not be made known.” But of all prophetic intimations of the information age, the most suggestive remains Daniel 12:4, at least in its squirrelly and much-loved King James translation. After proclaiming the future resurrection of the dead, when the “wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament,” the messiah tells the exiled prophet to seal up his book until the time of the end, when “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
Now there’s a vision that most of us can relate to. Today we are drowning in an information glut, and the faster we move about, online or off, the more ferocious the flows become. In this sense, our high-speed information overload is itself generating an ersatz apocalyptic buzz, though not quite the way that Daniel envisioned. As we wire ourselves into the buzzing networks of information exchange, we give ourselves over to the time-splicing, space-shrinking, psychic intensification of the whole giddy and heedless rush of Progress, its hidden eschatological urges laid bare at the very moment they become the most profane. We can no longer even keep time with the modern sense of history, because its feisty rhythms were still very much a product of books and material memory, both of which are now evaporating into the sound-bite, quick-cut, self-referential “now” of the ever-forgetting electronic universe.
In one of his apocalyptic theoretical tracts, Baudrillard called this mediated rapture “the ecstasy of communication.” He argues that the “harsh and inexorable light of information and communication” has now mastered all spheres of existence, producing an omnipresent system of media flows that has colonized the interior of the self.
Passion, intimacy, and psychological depth evaporate, and we wind up “only a pure screen, a switching center of all the networks of influence.” No longer subjects of our own experience, we abandon ourselves to a cold and schizophrenic fascination with an infoglut he likens to a “microscopic pornography of the universe.”23 Though one suspects that Monsieur Baudrillard might do well to cancel his premium cable service, his dour prophecy certainly resonates. Many of us have indeed enclosed our nervous systems within a vibrating artificial matrix of devices that monitor us as much as we monitor them. As we attempt to micromanage this onslaught of posts, emails, links, and data dumps, we lose the slower rhythms and gnawing silences of the inner world. We lose the capacity to speak and act from within, and communication is reduced to a reactive, almost technical operation. And so we drown, believing that to drown is to surf.
The problem with the totalizing pessimism of Baudrillard and other technological doomsters is that humans remain protean beings, blessed with enormous elasticity and a profound potential for creative adaptation. Indeed, I suspect we will hack this phase-shift in our own tangled way, and that part of this adaptation may actually involve moving the ecstasy of communication to a higher ground, where we might grab the visionary bull by the horns. Along the multiplying planes of information and communication, we may learn to move like nomads, becoming errant seers despite ourselves, just to grapple with it all. And in the periphery of perception, where all the networks intersect, we may glimpse the outlines of some nameless system emerging, some new structure of being and knowing that undergirds the merely material real, a vast webwork of collective intelligence within which we are at once on our own and one with the immense ecology of a conscious cosmos.