ABSTRACT
Protestantism was largely a protest against aspects of Catholicism that had evolved into a corrupting and self-perpetuating memeplex. Reform-minded theologians in Early Modern Europe analyzed the way institutional Christianity had, in their opinion, gone badly astray, but vast numbers of their followers settled for demonizing the Pope. Homo sapiens evolved in small communities where understanding the personal strengths, weaknesses, and intentions of one’s immediate neighbors was far more important than understanding multiculturalism or macroeconomics or calcium sequestration. President Nixon’s tape-recordings seemed to refute such high-flown suspicions: the information and planning in the White House were even cruder than the notorious deleted-expletive language. Social constructivists emphasize the limitations of the notion that human history is essentially the work of autonomous heroic or villainous individuals. The study of complex systems allows some middle ground between the understanding of reality, and hence of social structures, as either inevitable or random.
