Part 4 (2/2)

It generates as much anxiety as it allays: Vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits, and aggressive G.o.ds are as common as protective deities.

Religion was created at time t in human history.

There is no reason to think that the various kinds of thoughts we call ”religious” all appeared in human cultures at the same time.

Religion is about explaining natural phenomena.

Most religious explanations of natural phenomena actually explain little but produce salient mysteries.

Religion is about explaining mental phenomena (dreams, visions).

In places where religion is not invoked to explain them, such phenomena are not seen as intrinsically mystical or supernatural.

Religion is about morality and the salvation of the soul.

The notion of salvation is particular to a few doctrines (Christianity and doctrinal religions of Asia and the Middle East) and unheard of in most other traditions.

Religion creates social cohesion.

Religious commitment can (under some conditions) be used as a signal of coalitional affiliation, but coalitions create social fission (secession) as often as group integration.

Religious claims are irrefutable; that is why people believe them.

There are many irrefutable statements that no one believes; what makes some of them plausible to some people is what we need to explain.

Religion is irrational/superst.i.tious (therefore not worthy of study).

Commitment to imagined agents does not really relax or suspend ordinary mechanisms of belief formation; indeed it can provide important evidence for their functioning (and therefore should be studied attentively).

TABLE 1: Do's and Don'ts in the Study of Religion. From Pascal Boyer, ”Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 3 (2003): 11924.

When we talk about anything the brain believes or does, we have to go back to its structure and function. Religions are ubiquitous and thus are easy to acquire and transmit. They are tapping into modules that are used for nonreligious social activities but, as Marc Hauser said, are ”prepared” to be used in other related ways. There is not just one part of the brain that is used in religious thought; there are many areas that come into play. People who are religious do not have a brain structure that atheists and agnostics do not have. But remember, the brain is also constrained. As Boyer puts it, there is a limited catalog of concepts; religion is not a domain where anything goes. For instance, in most religions, invisible dead souls are lurking somewhere, but invisible thyroid glands are not. G.o.ds are either people, animals, or man-made objects with some ability beyond the normal, but otherwise they still conform to what we know about the world. A G.o.d has a theory of mind and may or may not have empathy, but a G.o.d would never be a pile of cow dung, for instance, or just a thumb.

People do not require the same standard of evidence for religion that they do for other aspects of their life. Why do people pick some parcels of incoming information and not others to use for their belief systems? What we have learned about bias and emotion should help us out with that. The a.n.a.lytical mind is rarely called in to help. Another interesting aspect has recently been teased out of some research subjects. What people say they believe and believe they believe, and what they actually believe, are two different things. Instead of the omnipresent, all-doing, all-knowing G.o.d that they say they believe in, when they are not focused on their beliefs, they use another concept of G.o.d that is humanlike. This G.o.d has serial attention (does only one thing at a time), a particular location, and a particular viewpoint.67 Now that we know about the interpreter, why doesn't that surprise us?

Boyer says religions seem ”natural” because ”a variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular (non-religious) domains of information, are activated by religious notions and norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible.”68 Let's look at our list of the moral intuitions and see how different aspects of religions can be seen as by-products of them.

SUFFERING.

That one is easy. Many religions speak to the relief of suffering, or wallow in it, or even seek to ignore it.

RECIPROCITY.

Easy again. Many natural and personal disasters are explained as G.o.d's or the G.o.ds' payback for bad behavior, that is, punis.h.i.+ng cheaters. Also, the social exchange is ubiquitous in religion: ”If you kill a bunch of innocent infidels, then you will go to paradise and have seventy virgins at your beck and call.” Does that work for women, too? Or ”If you renounce all physical desires, then you will be happy.” Or ”If I do this rain dance perfectly, then it will rain.” Or ”If you cure my disease, then I will never do such and such again.”

HIERARCHY.

Easy again. We can look at status. The person with the (appearance) of the highest morals is given higher status and more trust. Gandhi was known to have been quite successful with the women (status). Popes ruled vast stretches of Europe at one time (status, power, hierarchy). And how about the Ayatollah? Many religions are set up with a hierarchical structure; the most obvious is the Catholic Church, but it is not alone. Many Protestant religions, Islam, and Judaism all have hierarchical structures. Even in primitive societies, the witch doctors held places of esteem and power in their communities. The Greek, Roman, and Norse G.o.ds also had hierarchical structures, as do the Hindu G.o.ds. G.o.d is the big cheese, or there is a top G.o.d, like Zeus or Thor. You get the picture. The virtues of respect, loyalty, and obedience all morph over onto religious beliefs.

COALITIONS AND IN-GROUP/OUT-GROUP BIAS.

Does anyone really need this spelled out? As in ”My religion is right (in-group); your religion is wrong (out-group)”-just like soccer teams. Religion in its positive in-group form does create a community whose members help each other, as do many social groups, but in its extreme form it has been responsible for much of the killing in the history of the world. Even Buddhists are divided into rival sects.

PURITY.

This too is obvious. ”Uncontaminated food is good” has led to many religious food rituals and prohibitions. ”Uncontaminated body is good” has led to certain s.e.xual practices, or s.e.x itself, being viewed as dirty and impure. How many primitive religions used virgins for sacrifice? We can start with the Aztecs and Incas and build. Women who have been raped are considered impure by the Muslim religion and are regularly murdered by their male relatives in the practice of ”honor killing,” a twisted combination of the purity and hierarchy modules. Buddhism has its ”pure land” where all who call upon the Buddha will be guaranteed rebirth.

Has religion provided a survival advantage? Has it been selected for by evolution? Attempts to prove this have not been satisfactory because no one single characteristic has been found that generates religion, as we can see from Boyer's table. Natural selection, however, has been at work on the mental systems that religion uses or, as some think, parasitizes. Religions can be thought of as giant social groups with strong coalitions, often with hierarchical structures, and reciprocity based on notions of purity either of body, mind, or both. Giant social groups can have a survival advantage, whether they are based on religion or not. Ideology can strengthen coalitionary bonds, and that in itself can increase group survival. So are religions examples of group selection? This is a highly controversial question. D. S. Wilson points out that more is known about the evolution of the spots on a guppy than is known about the elements of religion.69 This is a work in progress.

Can understanding how morality and religion came to be help us today? If we understand that our brain is a machine for hunter-gatherers in small groups, full of intuitive modules that react in certain ways, that it is not yet molded for huge societies, can that allow us to function better in our current world? It seems it can. Matt Ridley70 gives the example caused by the phenomenon known as the ”tragedy of the commons,” which was unfortunately misnamed by Garrett Hardin, a biologist. He apparently did not distinguish between open-access free-for-alls and communally owned property. The phenomenon should have been named the ”tragedy of the free-for-alls.” Land that is free for all is subject to cheaters in social exchange. An individual would think, ”If everyone can fish, hunt, and graze livestock on this land, then I should get as much as I can now, because if I don't, someone else will, and there will be none left for me and my family.”

However, Hardin used grazing commons as his free-for-all example. What he didn't know was that most grazing commons were not free-for-alls. They were carefully regulated community property. Ridley points out that free-for-alls and regulated commons are two very different things. ”Carefully regulated” means that each member owns a right to something, such as fis.h.i.+ng in a particular area, grazing a set number of animals, or having specific areas to graze. Now it is in the owner's interest to maintain that area, which makes it possible to set up a long-term social exchange: ”If I graze only ten sheep and you graze only ten sheep, then we will not overgraze the common, and it will sustain us for a long period.” Cheating no longer becomes attractive.

Unfortunately, this misunderstanding of what was happening in much communal property led many economists and environmentalists in the 1970s to conclude that the only way to solve the cheating problem (which didn't even exist in many communal setups) was to nationalize communal property. Instead of several patches of communally managed lands, one huge government-managed patch was created. This has resulted in fisheries being overfished, land being overgrazed, and wildlife being overhunted, because the fisheries, land, and wildlife became a free-for-all on a grand scale. There were not enough enforcers to detect the cheaters, and only fools wouldn't take all they could while they could.

Ridley explains that this has been a disaster for the wildlife of Africa, where most countries nationalized their lands in the 1960s and 1970s. The wildlife was now owned by the government, and although it still did the same damage to crops and competed for grazing, it was no longer a source of food or revenue-except for poachers. There was no motivation to protect it and every motivation to get rid of it. Officials in Zimbabwe, however, realized what was happening. They gave owners.h.i.+p of the wildlife back to the communities, and presto, the att.i.tudes of the locals toward wildlife changed, and the animals became valuable and worth maintaining. The amount of private land owned by the villagers now devoted to wildlife has doubled.70 Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who has studied well-managed local commons for years, has shown in the laboratory that groups, when allowed to communicate and develop their own methods of fining free riders, can manage communal resources almost perfectly.71 And it turns out that those things that can be managed are those things that can be owned. We are territorial, just like chimps and many other animals. Thus, understanding our intuitive reciprocity and its constraints, and the fact that we are most comfortable in smallish groups, can lead to better management practices, better laws, and better governments. This is just like understanding that the plant you bought that came from the desert should not be watered as if it came from the tropics.

DO ANIMALS HAVE A MORAL SENSE?.

Now this is an interesting question. Of course when we humans ask it, we are asking it from our own perspective, and the implied question is really Do animals have a moral sense like ours? I have just presented the case that many stimuli induce an automatic process of approval (approach) or disapproval (avoid), which may lead to a full-on emotional state. The emotional state produces a moral intuition that may motivate an individual to action. These moral intuitions have sprung from common behaviors we share with other social species, such as being territorial; having dominance strategies to protect territory; forming coalitions to garner food, s.p.a.ce, and s.e.x; and reciprocity. We share some aspects of this chain of events with other social species, and in fact we have the same emotional reactions, which we term moral, to some of the same inciting stimuli. We get angry at property violations or attacks on our coalition, just as chimps and dogs do. So in that sense, some animals have an intuitive morality that is species-based, centered on their own social hierarchies and behaviors, and affected by the emotions that they possess.

The differences lie in the wider range and complexity of moral emotions that humans have, such as shame, guilt, embarra.s.sment, disgust, contempt, empathy, and compa.s.sion, and in the behaviors these have contributed to. The most notable of these behaviors is prolonged reciprocal altruism, of which humans are the undisputed grand masters, but humans can also indulge in altruism and expect no reciprocity. I know that all you dog owners are now going to tell me that your dog feels shame when you walk into the house and see that he has just chewed your new shoes. But to feel shame, embarra.s.sment, or guilt, which Haidt calls the self-conscious emotions, an animal must have self-awareness beyond recognizing his visible body and be conscious of that self-awareness. We are going to talk more about self-awareness and consciousness in chapter 8, but the short version for now is that the presence of this expanded sense of self in other animals has yet to be discovered. Your scowl at the sight of the gnawed Guccis and your terse comment are what your dog is reacting to. The alpha animal is angry. The moral emotions of shame and embarra.s.sment have their animal roots in submissive behavior but have become more complex. You recognize this submissive cowering in your dog and call it shame, but that is a more complex emotion than it is feeling. Its emotion is fear of a swat or of getting dragged off the couch, not guilt or shame.

But in humans there is something going on in addition to more complex emotions and their repercussions: the post hoc need to interpret the moral judgment or behavior. The human brain alone seeks an explanation for the automatic reaction that it has no clue about. This is the unique interpretive function of the human brain in action. I suspect that this is also the point where humans put a value judgment on their actions: good behavior or bad. To what degree the value judgment may match the emotional approach/withdraw scale is an interesting question. There are the occasions, however, when the rational self becomes an earlier partic.i.p.ant in the judgment and informs the behavior. We humans can inhibit our emotionally driven responses. Then the conscious, self-aware mind steps in, bellies up to the bar, and takes command. That is a uniquely human moment.

CONCLUSION.

David Hume and Immanuel Kant were both right in a way. As the neurobiology of moral behavior becomes fleshed out, we shall see that some of our repugnance for killing, stealing, incest, and dozens of other actions is as much a result of our natural biology as are our s.e.xual organs. At the same time, we will also realize that the thousands of customs that people generate to live in cooperation with each other are rules generated by the thousands of social interactions we have every day, week, month, and year of our lives. And all of this comes from (and for) the human mind and brain.

One could say most of our life is spent battling the conscious rational mind and the unconscious emotional system of our brain. At one level, we know that by experience. In politics, a good outcome happens when the rational choice is consonant with the emotions of the time. A lousy political decision occurs when a rational choice is made at a time when the emotions of the populace are at odds with the projected outcome. On a personal level, it can go a different way. A poor personal decision can be the product of a powerful emotion overriding a simple rational directive. For all of us, this battle is continuing and never seems to go away.

It is as if we are not yet comfortable with our rational, a.n.a.lytic mind. In terms of evolution, it is a new ability that we humans have recently come upon, and we appear to use sparingly. But, using our rational mind, we have come across other uniquely human traits: the emotion of disgust and a sensitivity to contamination, the moral emotions of guilt, shame, and embara.s.sment, blus.h.i.+ng, and crying. We have also found that religions are large social groups that have their foundation in the notion of purity of either mind or body, another uniquely human construct with its roots in the moral emotion of disgust. And the know-it-all interpreter is there, coming up with explanations for our unconscious moral intuitions and behaviors. And we have our a.n.a.lytical brain occasionally chiming in. Not only that, there is even more going on that we aren't conscious of. Stay tuned....

Chapter 5.

I FEEL YOUR PAIN.

If my heart could do my thinking, would my brain begin to feel?

-Van Morrison.

WHEN YOU SEE ME SMASH MY FINGER IN A CAR DOOR, DO you wince as if it happened to you? How do you know the milk your wife just sniffed is bad without her saying anything? Do you know how a finalist for the women's gold medal gymnastic compet.i.tion feels when you see her miss a landing on the balance beam, fall, and break her ankle? How is that different from when you see a mugger running from his victim, trip in a pothole, fall down, and break his ankle? Why can you read a novel and feel emotions engendered by the story? They are just words on a page. Why can a travel brochure make you smile?

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