The Body of Christ, a Scientific Study; Part I

 When I was in high school, my friend Ray came up with an idea for a game. He did that a lot, as those of you that have read many of my articles have come to understand. He was working on his graphic design and that's where he started with the idea: he started by working on a portfolio. His idea was about the River Styx, the fabled river of the underworld in Western mythologies, and how the souls of the dead flowed down the River, those not fished out by the heavens finding their ways in the depths of Hell. There, they would be eaten by the local wildlife: demons, and incorporated into an ecology based on the seven deadly sins, with Sloth being the foundation to the rest in the same way that plants are the foundation for our own terrestrial ecology. 

This was around the time that the game Spore, was in development. There were so many promises made during the development of Spore that by the by the time it came out, it was incredibly disappointing, having been made significantly simpler than it was promised to be. If you know me, then you know I hate simplified games. A game I love getting simplified is one of the most insulting things I can endure. I've been through it with Magic: the Gathering, with Dungeons and Dragons, with the World of Darkness. 

Anyway, there are times where I reflect on how I would have gone about the game Ray was designing, if it were up to me, and it looks a lot like Spore, but instead of cells, this life is composed of souls and everything we see is really a kind of metaphor to help us simple humans understand the higher dimensions demonic ecology exists in. Each cell is a whole person, and it's in the binding them all into one organism that we come up with an angel or demon. 

Ray came up with a term for this: multsoulular. This is the quality of being an organism that is comprised of more than one soul, just as we humans are comprised of billions and billions of individual cells, each of which is alive in its own right. Now, I don't believe that angels and demons are really organisms comprised of colonies of human souls that have been incorporated into some kind of communal organism. But there is something that I think has something in common with those fictional biologies. 

The Body of Christ. 

This was a metaphor of the Church as an organized whole that was primarily established and developed by the apostle Paul, throughout his epistles in the New Testament. Jesus himself established a fair foundation for this when he talked about being the Vine, while his followers were branches. But it was Paul that tied together three different images, using one to provide light on another, and the first two to provide light on the third. These images pertained to the relationships of a head with its body, a husband with his wife, and Jesus with his Church. 

I could go on for a very, very long time about how this trio of images formed the foundations of my understanding of both my role as a husband and my role as a follower of Christ. Obviously, as some of you know, my understanding of my role as a husband was limited anyway, because my marriage ended. And in its way, this passage kind of perpetuates the kind of heteronormative idea of family that bigoted Christians weaponize against people of the lgbtqia+ community. I need to figure out how to work that out. 

All that being said, I'm still enamored with the image of the Body of Christ. There is something moving and motivating for me to think that I am part of Jesus' incarnation on Earth at this time in history and thus have responsibilities to represent him appropriately. I am like a net, collecting ideas and things from all different sources over the years, if they seem to connect to something I already have interest in. I like to analyze things, taking them apart to understand them, sure, but my true joy comes from synthesis, or the combination of extant parts into a new and greater whole. 

Let me share with you some of the books that have caught my attention that are relevant to this field of thought. The first I want to bring to your attention is the book In the Likeness of God, which is a combination of two books cowritten by Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, though the real writer of those two is Philip Yancey. The two books are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and In His Image. Yancey was a serious influence in the beginnings of my deconstruction, mostly for his book The Jesus I Never Knew, but after that one caught me, I followed up and read a number of his other books, including Fearfully. It takes the image of being the Body of Christ seriously and goes through some different aspects of the human body, drawing parallels to functions of the Church. It's some good stuff. 

The second book is a secular book, called The Virus of the Mind, by Richard Brodie. This one really gets into the introductory aspects of memetics. It breaks down the three most basic types of memes, the distinction meme, which is how we categorize things, telling one thing from another; the strategy meme, a plan that starts with an a trigger and ends in an action made in response to that trigger; finally, the association meme, which is how our minds connect distinction memes and strategy memes into larger constructs. Beyond that, I think it stops a little short, leaving a reader to see memes as the mental equivalents to pathogens. From this book, you might be led to believe that memes are basically like viruses, infecting minds to reproduce and that's it. But it falls short.

The next book, the one I feel is great for building bigger ideas with, is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. This book specifically deals with one species of social organism, the scientific community, and details how such a community evolves over time. This book doesn't address memes by name, instead addressing a whole complex of memes, sometimes called a memeplex, calling it a paradigm. Before this book came out, paradigm was a very rarely-used word, just as The Virus of the Mind made the term "viral" a way we talk about ideas. 

Finally, I want to bring attention to one of the only scholars today doing real work in the realm of memetics, as far as I could find on Google, anyway. Structural Memetics is an article by a man named Chuck Pezeshki. This is some of the closest I could find on the internet today to the kinds of things I want to talk about. There was another guy who wrote stuff in a blog, but I can't find him and when I went looking, Mr. Pezeshki is what I found. So, let me finally put the pieces together. Edit: I did in fact find the guy I was looking for, and here's a link to his blog, though at this point, it's very old and incomplete: On Memetics. Also, bear in mind that this guy has some pretty controversial ideas that he didn't publish when I first found him, which has to be like 15+ years ago, now.

Despite what Brodie would have you believe in Virus of the Mind, memes don't just stop at the lowest possible parallel to biology: the virus. In fact, memetics explains a whole a slew of sociocultural phenomenon. When I imagine it, it's like a whole different dimension to reality. Actually, there are those that call the realm of ideas the noosphere, very similar to the biosphere. It's a dimension, meaning a kind of direction, like height or width, that coexists with all the ones we are aware of. The cool thing, though, is that this dimension is kind of perpendicular to us normally, meaning it's kind of above us in a way that has nothing to do with physical height and everything to do with metathinking, or thinking about thinking. Genes come together in entities more complex than viruses, like bacteria, or colonies of single-celled organisms, or worms, or reptiles, or mammals, or humans. A body like a human's is comprised of trillions of cells, each with a complete copy of the genome that codes for its entire structure. Somehow, each of these cells working together creates a greater entity, a human. Well, memes are like genes, but cultural instead of physical. Where physical genes code for physical structures, memes code for cultural structures. An collective of cells that share the same genome is an organism, while an collective of people that share the same paradigm would be an organization. Just like there is an ecosystem of organisms that grow and feed on each other and evolve, so too is there an ecosystem of organizations that grow and feed on each other and evolve. From the simple nematode-like organization of simple village on some island in the South Pacific, to the great, predatory organization like capitalistic corporations on Wall Street, to the lumbering behemoths of nation-states, to the ancient, constantly evolving religions. 

I'll let that sink in for a little while. 

There is a whole world around us, of creatures that graze and hunt and eat each other alive, just as action-packed and danger-filled as any nature documentary about lions on the savanna. 

My original idea, the one that I had years ago, was something I called meme therapy. This is meant to be analogous to gene therapy. In theory, gene therapy is simple to understand. When a broken gene codes for something like an autoimmune disorder or a cancer, then you remove the erroneous genetic information and replace it with healthy information. Unfortunately, in practice, such work is incredibly difficult. Again, there are trillions of cells in the human body and in the case of something like cancer, all the cells need to have their copies of erroneous genetic code fixed. The tools we have available to do that are pretty sloppy, too. In this case, what I'm aware of is retroviruses, which do in fact reverse transcribe genetic information onto their hosts. However, they don't have the kind of control necessary to target specific genetic sequences, because they don't actually care what part of the host genome is overwritten with their information, since all a virus cares about is using its host machinery to make more copies of itself, healthy functions be damned. Also, it takes a lot of experimentation to find out which genes code for which traits. This required decoding the genomes of a bunch of different specimens, comparing the external traits to the genes inside, finding correlations, then figuring out for sure which ones work with which by deleting potential target genes and seeing if the structure expected to change actually does. And if it doesn't, then you have to do it again. 

Most of this is still true in the case of memetics. The scale of such experiments is exhausting just thinking about it. The ethics of such experimentation is also in doubt. I mean, the ethics of some of the gene therapy, as it's effectively gene editing, is also questionable. Both rely on human experimentation. Withe genetics, sometimes this can run terribly close to eugenics and by extension: genocide. Obviously, not all scientific inquiry into the realm of human genetics is evil, or even close to eugenics. But that line is out there, and we have to be mindful of it whenever we want to experiment with human genetics. Something like that is also a danger when talking about memetic inquiry. There is a chance we can dabble in cultural eugenics. It's important to value human life, human cultural heritage, with our experimentation. Beyond that, because memetics is the realm of ideas, and ideas live in the minds of people, experimenting with them carries a risk of brainwashing, or other psychological violence. Another element we need to be mindful of. 

Finally, I need to express just how little we know when it comes to memetics and the organizations they code for. I express this at time when the parallel science we draw on to understand biology, genetics, is also still in its infancy. We have only just recently actually decoded most of the human genome. We are currently wrestling with genetic testing, designer procreation, gene therapies. There's still so much about genetic that we still don't understand. In fact, if any of the more fringe theories have any weight, then we are even more ignorant of genetics than we're already aware of. And some of the experimental results point to supporting some of those more fringe theories. I will come back to those at a later time, because those fringe theories are absolutely ripe for storytelling. 

What little we know about genetics, we at least have a measurable proficiency with our understanding of biology as a whole, and human anatomy more specifically. Western medicine is founded on our understanding of the human body. We do infectious diseases and surgical medicine to a degree that almost no other culture has in recorded history. Between antibiotics and vaccines, we have made huge strides against infectious diseases. With the advent of anesthetics, we have surpassed centuries, millennia, of surgical expertise. But we still don't know everything about the human body. We are still learning so much about it.

How much less do we know about the Body of Christ, or any memetic organization for that matter. How does the Body of Christ observe the world around it? In what ways does it mobilize itself? What does it feed on? How does it decide how to behave? How does it reproduce? Does it reproduce? How old can a Body of Christ live for? What is its life cycle look like? All questions we barely have answers for. 

I think it's important that we study the anatomy of the Body of Christ, in earnest. While science is sometimes about experimentation, it starts mostly with observation. Making observations of the world and its parts can make one just as scientific as anyone who performs experiments. And anyone who performs experiments with learning as much as possible from observation as possible, I believe is asking to make mistakes. 

I will be making posts in the near future that have to do with this topic. One of the most interesting aspects of the Church has been its tendency to do something the ancients called "breathing". That will be my next post in the Scientific Study series. At some point, I want to touch on the matter of collective intelligence, because I think that is one of the most critical aspects of any given life form, how it thinks and makes decisions. 

Thanks for reading through this whole piece. It was a long one, but I hope you can see how excited I am about this topic. I hope you get excited about some of this, too. See you next time.