Monoculture

These days, we tend to use the word monoculture to refer to human culture, but it's originally a agricultural term. Most bananas and oranges, for example, are clones of one particular plant that had favourable characteristics. Other crops, like dwarf wheats, are not identical, but very similar. You end up with a monoculture either directly, because growers are just cloning the same plants, or indirectly, because the plants are all being optimised for the same things. This leaves systemic weaknesses in the plant population; a single problem, instead of affecting a proportion of the plants, affects them all. At its worst, this leads to devastatic plant pandemics like the Irish potato famine.

But, to return to human culture, it can be useful to reconstruct this idea of monoculture and its dangers. You could say that the agricultural idea of monoculture is about genetic diversity, but the human cultural equivalent is about memetic diversity. In memetics, a collection of related ideas that exist as a replicable unit is called a memeplex, and Dawkins argues that religion is one such memeplex. Of course, there are many others as well. And, much as certain combinations of genes are vulnerable to diseases, certain combinations of memes can be exploited, both by other people and other self-replicating ideas.

In other words, religious ideas are vulnerable to people and ideas that can exploit religion. But it's not just a religious thing; collectivist ideas were vulnerable to the horrific excesses of soviet communism, and individualist ideas are vulnerable to the callousness of laissez-faire capitalism. Even when we work hard to build rigorous ideas and inure them to external threats, it's a Turing nightmare-esque endless uphill battle; any sufficiently complex idea will have vulnerabilities. Some part of a thing that is beneficial to believe can always be twisted into something harmful.

Note that I'm not making the vastly less interesting argument that there are no good or bad ideas, or that some ideas can't be better than others. Rather, much like dwarf wheats are basically the best wheats, some ideas far outshine their nearest competitors. But, even so, we should be wary of a world where everyone believes the best ideas. If there is some vulnerability in those ideas, some way in which they prove to be maladaptive in certain circumstances, we may just specialise ourselves out of existence.