Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (38 page)

It isn’t all that unrealistic or as far-fetched as might be imagined by the scientifically inclined nor as critical of religion as believers might fear. After all, even devoted pro-science atheists (such as this book’s author) take all sorts of things “on faith,” without actually having personally tested their validity. I believe in the existence of atoms, in the germ theory of disease, that the moon causes the tides, and that
E
=
mc
²
, and not because I’ve investigated any of these things first-hand. Rather, I take the words of those
I trust, plus the chain of logical sequence that involves them. It saves me a lot of time and trouble to adopt an almost religious perspective in these and many other cases.
ⁱ
Isn’t it reasonable, at least, to think that our ancestors may have found religion similarly useful as a labor- and time-saving device?

Add to this the possibility that religion can provide reassurance, a kind of ideological Prozac (i.e., antidepressant) for those disappointed with the circumstances of their current lives, combined with the doctrinal equivalent of Xanax (an antianxiety medication) for those worried about their eventual death. The English poet Rupert Brooke is best known for writing “If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” But for all his sentimentality, Brooke took a gimlet-eyed view of religion’s promise of a reassuring afterlife. Here is his cynical take on “Heaven,” as imagined by fish:

… This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud!—Death eddies near—
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

For Marx, religion was the opiate of the masses. For Brooke, it offered reassurance … at least for credulous fishes. The Brooke-ian hypothesis can even be rendered compatible with evolutionary biology, if piscines (or people) who were calmed and reassured by the promise of heavenly bliss in an Eternal Brook might as a result be calmer, more confident, and therefore likely to experience higher fitness
this
side of heaven.

For another hypothesis involving a positive selective payoff, consider the argument for religion as a rational choice. When social scientists refer to something as resulting from “rational choice,” they mean that it owes its existence to the fact that it somehow maximizes the payoff that comes from doing it. Thus, there is a rational choice argument for what people purchase, how much schooling they obtain, where they decide to live, even who they court or marry. Economists are especially fond of such arguments, and their discipline is largely founded on the presumption that human beings are rational “utility maximizers,” with utility meaning essentially anything that people find to be in their interest: happiness, health, wealth, and so forth (most often, wealth).

The rational choice hypothesis for religion has been especially championed by sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke.
¹
Not surprisingly, this approach is far more approving and supportive of religion than are most of the hypotheses we have encountered thus far. “It now is impossible,” write Stark and Finke, “to do credible work in the social scientific study of religion based on the assumption that religiousness is a sign of stupidity, neurosis, poverty, ignorance, or false consciousness, or represents a flight from modernity.” It is one thing, after all, to debate whether religious
believers are correct in that God (or gods) actually exist, after all, not to mention whether their particular religion is the correct way to worship Him, Her, or Them. It is another to ask whether such worship is, in its own way, rational. People—often perfectly intelligent and rational ones—put their faith in any number of false gods, from Marxism to laissez-faire capitalism, Freud to Derrida. Just think, for example, of how hard-headed, data-minded investors have often bestowed money on stocks that turned out to be worth next to nothing. Rationality can go awry.

But at the same time, seemingly irrational actions can be motivated by an underlying logic that is in fact subject to a precise calculus, in which benefits end up exceeding costs, thus yielding a net positive payoff. Take romance, which, in popular imagination at least, is totally driven by emotion, hormones, more than a touch of insanity resulting from the magical impact of Cupid’s arrow, or some equivalent. “Who can explain it, who can tell you why?” we are asked in the song
Some Enchanted Evening
. And the question is immediately “answered” in a way that fits closely the style of God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind: “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try!”

But in fact, when romance is stripped of its, well, romance, and examined with a cool, Darwinian eye, when it is designated “mate selection” and analyzed in terms of how it accords with the evolutionary prescription whereby the decisions of most living things accord with the expectations of fitness maximization, we find that romance (even its human manifestations) is typically a rational choice after all. People tend to choose mates that maximize their fitness. People may tend to choose religion for the same reasons—although in neither case are they likely to be consciously aware of the factors behind their choice.

Thus, depending on circumstances, religious commitment can increase personal wealth—not merely that of the preachers, but of parishioners, too—if being part of a belief network enhances access to a trade and business network, improves one’s reputation for reliability, and so forth. More generally, it can increase one’s “social capital.” If a religiously based society has established the firm expectation of religious practice (regardless of the initial cause for this expectation), it can quickly become a self-generating system, especially if the norm is to exclude or actively attack nonparticipants.
Groucho Marx famously quipped that he wouldn’t want to be a member of any group that would accept him. Most people wouldn’t want to be excluded from a group that would shun, injure, or kill them if they remained outside. Under such circumstances, necessity could quickly be presented—and perceived—as a virtue.

Add to this certain health-related payoffs (whether or not placebo generated), as well as some or all of the hypotheses already discussed, and religious commitment can emerge as a highly rational choice, despite the fact that it might perch atop a mountain of irrational rubble. Thus, even though we don’t currently understand why natural selection might have promoted religion via its placebo payoff, for example, once such a payoff exists, it can make sense for individuals to partake.

Lest I misrepresent the rational actor thesis, however, it should be clear that it does not necessarily endorse a view that religion arose and endures purely because of its practical, this-world payoffs. Stark and Finke, for example, are quite clear about the special appeal of the supernatural in general, and of God in particular. As they see it, a religion without God would be

like expecting people to continue to buy soccer tickets and gather in the stands to watch players who, for lack of a ball, just stand around. If there are no supernatural beings, then there are no miracles, there is no salvation, prayer is pointless, the Commandments are but ancient wisdom, and death is the end. In which case the rational person would have nothing to do with church. Or, more accurately, a rational person would have nothing to do with a church like that.

Robert Wright’s book, somewhat misleadingly titled
The Evolution of God
, similarly emphasizes the practical, self-serving, and thus rational components of religion, although with a different twist.
²
Wright’s basic point is that people have the ability to recognize win–win opportunities (trade, mutual tolerance, etc.) and that this recognition, in turn, gives rise to religion, which expands the “moral circle” and enables everyone to benefit as a result. This approach says very little about why religion evolved in the first place, or—more crucially—why religion rather than some other mechanism has been called upon to perform this function. Moreover, there is nothing in Wright’s speculation that requires or explains the distinctive feature of religion: its evocation of the
supernatural. But it might well shed light on the secular successes of religion, here in the very natural world.

The hypotheses we have examined thus far, whatever their merit, have been limited in one crucial aspect: All have been concerned with the evolution of religion as a phenomenon of individuals, whereas religious practice is overwhelmingly social. Even our proffered definition, from Daniel Dennett, spoke of religion as a “social system,” thereby distinguishing it from, say, superstition or “magic,” preoccupations that are fundamentally solitary.

At the other explanatory pole from William James and his concern with religion as something subjectively experienced, there is Emil Durkheim, founder of sociology, who wrote his masterpiece,
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
at about the same time as James’s magnum opus. For Durkheim, “religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it.” Just as picnic goers note that there is no such thing as a solitary ant, there is no such thing as a religion-of-one; for Durkheim, and most scholars, religion “must be an eminently collective thing,” whose crucial dimension is social more than individual. Here is another, better known definition from Durkheim: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices that unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.”

It is worth noting that when small nonreligious social groups were compared with those that had been organized around explicitly religious themes, the religious ones were on average four times more likely to remain in existence the following year than were their secular counterparts.
³
Thus, there appears to be something about organizing a group around shared religious belief and practice that makes it more likely to endure. But what?

One possibility is that almost by definition, and in contrast to groups organized around secular themes (politics, age, shared hobby, etc.), religion provides more social glue, generating
enhanced cohesion—which includes greater staying power for the group as a whole—simply because of its more densely structured rules and social patterning, which typically include songs, chants, ceremonial events, prohibitions and requirements, and so forth. If so, then this contributes to the prospect that religion may indeed prosper as a kind of viral meme, operating by virtue of its positive impact on groups themselves, rather than within the minds of individual practitioners and believers.

The origin of the word
religion
is uncertain, but seems most likely to involve the Latin word
religare,
meaning “to bind together.” Perhaps it is this unifying, binding aspect of religion that explains not only its emotional appeal but also its adaptive function. Groups do better when their actions are coordinated, when individuals subordinate their immediate personal interests to the benefit of the greater community. It seems plausible, therefore, that religion developed and prospered because it bound people together, creating groups that were more coherent and thus more successful than were groups lacking religion, and which, as a result, were more “atomic,” individualistic, and selfish.

Prominent among the possible group-oriented benefits of religion would have been enhanced coordination, notably when it came to the high risk, high payoff associated with coordinated violence—which is to say, warfare. After all, human beings are a very social species, whose major threats have derived—ironically—from other social units of the same species.
Homo sapiens
is unusual in living in social groups whose major enemies are other social groups. Usually, animals that live in large social units do so to obtain protection from predators, not from others of their own species, although there are exceptions, such as colonies of social insects (notably ants) and some nonhuman primates including chimpanzees and, on occasion, baboons and gorillas. Insofar as early hominids and even prehominids experienced violent and sometimes lethal competition with other groups, it seems likely that the better organized, more coherent groups were victorious. And when it comes to mechanisms that generate such cohesion, religion ranks high.

Anthropological accounts of primitive warfare among contending tribes are replete with examples of how tribal religions help generate and shore up enthusiasm and mutual commitment. Religious rituals, with communal dancing, singing, chanting, body
decorations, and various forms of blessings on the part of shamans, priests, and other consecrated elders are intimately associated with preparing warriors for battle. In many cases, religious faith also serves to discourage defection, with threats of social ostracism in this world and often eternal damnation in the next helping to ensure compliance. The promise of afterlife rewards—of which the supposed 72 dark-eyed virgins awaiting Islamic suicide “warriors” is a notorious but not unusual example—can help motivate otherwise improbable actions that are fitness reducing for the practitioner but potentially beneficial for the warring society of which he or she is a member. Beyond this, assurances of immediate battlefield success, even in the face of seemingly long odds, can—if believed by the believer—translate into an enhanced prospect of success … or at least, reduced likelihood of catastrophic defeat, if it makes the believer more likely to fight.