A Deadly Contagion

An evolutionary theory of witch-hunting (and other mind viruses?)

Why did people in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe burn “witches” at the stake, sometimes their own friends and loved ones, even though we now know that these supernatural creatures—flying on broomsticks and cavorting with the devil in nocturnal sabbaths—were just figments of their imagination?

In our thoroughly secularised age, where the power of religious belief is a pale shadow of what it once was, the European witch hunts seem difficult to comprehend. Not only do we no longer believe in witches, but we find it hard to believe that anyone else ever believed in witches. Still, despite a common misconception, the largest outbreaks did not happen in the Dark Ages, but at the cusp of modernity and Enlightenment, with the most deadly peaks happening around the time of Galileo’s discoveries of the solar system and Francis Bacon’s program for a new science.

The epidemiological term “outbreak” is chosen deliberately and, as the historian

Steije Hofhuis

argues in his new book The Evolutionary History of Witch-hunting, accurate in more ways than we would imagine. Here’s the blurb of my friend Steije’s book:

Why did early modern Europeans hunt for witches? Were these persecutions a shrewd tool to oppress women or the poor, or were they just a way of making money? Or were witch-hunters primarily driven by a genuine belief in witchcraft? The witches’ sabbath, the diabolical pact, and the nightly flight were elements in the early modern concept of witchcraft that seem to have been intelligently designed to trigger persistent witch persecutions. But in contrast to what many past historical scholars presumed, witch-hunts were not based on intelligent design. So how to explain them? This book proposes a new model: Darwinian cultural evolution. It contends that witch-hunting’s apparent design emerged from a hidden evolutionary process in which cultural variants which accidentally unleashed larger persecutions were cumulatively preserved. Witch-hunting did not so much evolve to serve human interests but to ensure its own ‘selfish’ reproduction. Historians have often compared witch persecutions to the outbreaks of contagious disease, but only as a figure of speech. But shouldn’t we take the similarities more seriously? This book argues that witch-hunting was a cultural ‘virus’ that spread at the expense of its human hosts, and thus bridges the gap between qualitative history and the burgeoning field of Darwinian cultural evolution.

Even seventeenth-century critics of the witch craze had already remarked on the analogies between witch trials and outbreaks of diseases: one town would “infect” the next through word-of-mouth, the distribution of pamphlets, or the travels of certain notorious preachers. The disease would run amok for a few weeks or months, and then would subside again. There even seems to be an analogy with “vaccination”. After a village or town experienced a serious bout of witch craze, it was rarely if ever re-infected.

For a long time, however, historians assumed that the witch hunts must have really been about something else: oppressing women, subjugating the poor, appropriating other people’s possessions, or just settling personal scores. And they had a point: the whole sordid affair just seemed too calculated and clever—large witches sabbaths, confessions under torture, flying on broomsticks over long distances—to be the result of mere chance.

But as Charles Darwin taught us, sometimes we can have designs without a designer. What if the system of witchcraft beliefs and practices in early modern Europe were designed by a “blind watchmaker”, an evolutionary process winnowing and selecting cultural variants unbeknownst to the terrified believers?

It is easy to get carried away by such speculations about brain viruses and parasites of the mind, and we should be careful not to pathologize other people’s strange beliefs. If we want to demonstrate that some cultural designs are the result of unguided evolutionary processes, we can’t just make up some just so stories that strike us as plausible. We have to carefully study historical sources, trace the origins of different cultural variants, and show how they evolved and adapted to cultural environments.

This is exactly what Steije accomplishes in this groundbreaking work on the history of the European witch hunts. Critics of the notion of selfish memes or mind viruses (originally coined by

Richard Dawkins

) have long complained that memetic approaches are merely fanciful redescriptions of what we knew all along, that meme enthusiasts have yet to explain something that scholars of culture don’t already understand.

That complaint should now be retired. With meticulous care, Steije describes the problem that historians of witchcraft had been wrestling with, and why previous theoretical approaches failed to solve it. In a nutshell, the conundrum is this. On the one hand, the system of witchcraft beliefs and practices seems intricately designed, suggesting some intelligent designer. On the other hand, nobody has succeeded in identifying some plausible human designer(s), some interested party behind the scenes who stood to gain from the witch trials. Strange though it may seem to believe, the people involved in the witch trials really believed in witches.

But what if the witchcraft beliefs and practices were designed not to serve some human interests, but to serve their own interests, namely their further propagation? No historian seems to have seriously considered the possibility that witchcraft memes could evolve “interests” of their own, subverting our human interests.

Steije Hofhuis is not the first one to apply Darwinian thinking to culture, but I think he’s the first to provide a historical Exhibit A of selfish memes subverting the interests of their hosts. Compared to other work in the field of cultural evolution, which tends to be highly theoretical and quantitative, Steije also demonstrates that you can have a solid understanding of evolutionary theory and offer the sort of thick descriptions of human motivation and cultural context that are dear to historians.

This book is based on Steije’s PhD dissertation, which I read as a member of the defense committee. Academic dissertations tend to be stuffy and unreadable except for narrow specialists (and even then…), but this was one of the most captivating and well-written dissertations I’ve ever read. Steije is a masterful storyteller, taking the reader on an engrossing journey with strange plot twists and tragic ironies. This book version, published with Palgrave, is more readable still, as Steije got rid of some of the introductory and theoretical chapters. The only thing decidedly not accessible about this book is the hefty price tag (€138 for the hardcover), which is downright predatory. But if you’re interested, perhaps a judicious inquiry might yield an electronic copy of the book.

One of the most marvellous findings in Steije’s research—almost too good to be true—is that some of contemporary critics more or less understood that the witchcraft system was designed for maximal propagation but, not knowing anything about evolution and natural selection, they attributed the design to the most devious agent in their explanatory arsenal: Satan. Yes, it was that “crafty old weaver” and “subtle and devious spirit” who had cleverly designed the witch hunts to be as virulent and ravaging to human communities as possible.

In 1802 the natural theologian William Paley famously wrote about the similarity between the human eye and a mechanical watch, which provided evidence of divine intelligence in his eyes. Like Paley, these early critics of the witch hunts almost understood what was going on, but they erroneously personified the “watchmaker”.

In many ways, this is a timely book. With the emergence of QAnon, 9/11 conspiracy thinking, anti-vaccination beliefs and other bizarre belief systems wreaking havoc in our societies, we have become more attuned to the possibility of viruses of the mind, beliefs that spread like diseases while ravaging our societies and also hurting their hosts (as in the case of anti-vaccination beliefs). Hopefully Steije’s book will inspire more researchers to explore other possible viruses of the mind, with equal theoretical rigour and attention to detail.

In only one respect, I’m sad to say, the moment of publication is untimely. Daniel Dennett, one of the most important evolutionary thinkers of our age who recently passed away, was an avid (and lonely) proponent of selfish memes, as in his seminal books Breaking the Spell and From Bacteria to Bach and Back. It is a pity that he is no longer around for this book to see the light of day, as he was a generous supporter of Steije’s work. I’m sure that he would’ve been thrilled to read it (and he also would’ve loved to write the foreword in my stead). Dan infected us with a lot of good ideas, and we’ll miss him (See my In memoriam about Dan).

But the selfish meme meme itself is anything but dead. With scholars like Steije Hofhuis, it promises to have a long life-span, fruitfully multiplying in many academic quarters.

***

(This is a slightly edited version of the Foreword I wrote for Steije’s book. See also our joint academic papers on cultural evolution and mind parasites, as well as our recent Quillette piece).