Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (39 page)

It may have worked wonders for the ancient Israelites. “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies,” we read in Deuteronomy 20:1, “and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more [numerous] than thou, be not afraid of them, for the Lord thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Such promises might not be altogether adaptive, when we consider other examples, such as the assurance—surprisingly common, especially among colonial people fighting against western armies possessing guns—that their religion will render them invulnerable to bullets. But in much primitive war, when there was an enormous price to be paid by the side that turned and ran, religiously based reassurance could have been hugely helpful. Not unlike placebo: Those who believed in the cure (promise of victory) were more likely to experience it.

Other creatures engage in highly destructive warlike activities, notably ants, which, like human beings, occupy a pinnacle of social evolution. Unlike people, however, their coordination is achieved (at the level of proximate causation) by pheromones and, at the level of ultimate causation, by unusually close genetic relatedness among the colony members.
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People, lacking either of these
factors, have used religion. On the other hand, there are many highly social birds and mammals that have attained remarkable levels of cooperation but without anything even approximating religion. It is one thing, however, to cooperate in building a nest or migrating to a new feeding territory, but quite another to risk your life in lethal, organized encounters; maybe human beings, lacking the instinctive social repertoire of weaverbirds, elephants, dolphins, or chimpanzees, needed something else to generate cooperation in the face of such dangerous activities as war.

It is clear, for example, that the early Aztec empire owed its extraordinary success not only to the ferocity of its warriors but also to the coordinated and thus highly effective aggression by which the Aztec armies attacked their neighbors. And it is also clear that the major driving force behind this spectacularly effective organized violence was provided by the Aztec religion itself, which insisted that in the absence of tens of thousands of sacrificial victims, angry gods would destroy the earth.

Writing of the extraordinary military success of the Aztec (Mexican) armies prior to Cortes, a pair of anthropologists note that

The Mexicas’ sacrificial cosmology gave them the competitive edge needed for such victories: fanaticism. The unending hunger of the gods for mass sacrifices also generated the tireless dynamism of Mexica armies, a persistence which allowed them to wear down some of the most obstinate of their opponents.
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I hope it will not seem unduly disrespectful to suggest that when the Aztec empire slaughtered the vanquished to nourish their sun god with the blood of these victims, the deity in question probably was not really made healthier or happier, and thus, the Aztecs themselves were probably not
directly
aided by their bloodthirsty and immensely demanding worship practices.
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Thus, it seems unlikely that in the absence of these sacrifices, the sun god would have become enfeebled, forgetful, or churlishly disinclined to rise in the morning and warm the Aztecs’ world. More likely, these and other egregious excesses were adaptive for the practitioners in
another way—notably, by providing a motivating force around which their triumphal military exploits were able to cohere.

Long before such highly structured empires as the Aztecs, success in war and its earlier antecedents of organized violence and intertribal raiding would have given the upper hand to early human groups that were more cohesive than their competitors—and nothing promotes such cohesion more powerfully than shared religion. Part of this cohesion presumably involved encouraging tolerance and restraint toward other group members (more on this shortly). But in-group cohesion likely posed a problem for groups, tribes, and ultimately states that sought to engage in war: Having taught that killing others within one’s group is bad, how to justify the killing of others, outside the group? Religion could have pitched in here, too. Thus, objective observers agree that one of the ethical downsides of religious practice involves the frequent exhortations to kill followers of other religions (or deviationists from the accepted orthodoxy).

There are cases, at least in recent times, of religion standing athwart political power. One thinks of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights and antiwar movements in the United States, the Catholic Church in opposition to Soviet-backed authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, Buddhist peace programs around the world, and so forth. It is also true, however, that religions have contributed to means of social and political control by supporting governmental power. It is unclear which was the predominant orientation of religion in its long evolutionary infancy, but the likelihood is that religious and political leadership has long been mutually supportive, and that religious and secular power have long been hand in hand, if not one and the same. Divine commands have long been a convenient way to get people to follow orders, even though more recently, governments have discovered how to obtain loyalty without necessarily relying on such pressure.

It can certainly be argued, therefore, that religion doesn’t only promote within-group cohesion, but it also generates schisms, competition, and war. This raises the question of whether religion is an aid in waging successful war or a cause of war. In many cases, however, it can at least be argued that religion isn’t the fundamental, underlying basis for organized violence, which involves competition among polities or ethnic groups, squabbles
between leadership elites, misunderstandings and personal animus, ambition, fear, etc., so much as it provides an organizing principle and rallying point once wars have been generated for these and other reasons. It is debatable, for example, whether the hostility between Jew and Muslim in the Middle East is literally caused by their religious differences or whether these differences serve as proxies for differences arising when groups contend for the same real estate.
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Ditto for most of the other iconic cases of “religious wars,” such as between Hindu and Muslim in India/Pakistan, Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland, and so forth. There seems little doubt, in any event, that once war breaks out, groups that are more coherent and whose population is more disposed to altruistic, self-sacrificial devotion, if called for, would be more likely to prevail—and here, religion may provide the winning margin, now and in the past.
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Religion’s pro-social, pro-group orientation could well have provided other benefits in addition to heightened success in warfare. And anthropological evidence suggests that such benefits might have begun paying dividends quite early in human prehistory. Thus, current hunter-gatherers such as Australian aboriginals, Kalahari bushmen, indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and so forth—who are farthest removed from elaborate technology and thus seem closest to what our earlier ancestors may have resembled—are overwhelmingly egalitarian in their social structure, typically with strong inhibitions against excessive individuality, taking more than one’s share, etc. Nicholas Wade
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makes the intriguing suggestion that religion developed early in human prehistory in association with the switch from a presumed hierarchical social organization like that of modern baboons, macaque
monkeys, and chimpanzees to the egalitarianism that presumably characterized early human societies.

During such a transition (if, indeed, it occurred), a problem would have arisen: How to organize and orchestrate the behavior of the various group members—especially how to curb tendencies to be a freeloader, a show-boater, or any other kind of independent spirit whose individuality and independence threatened the cohesion and thus the success of the group? Given that religion is an effective way of subordinating the individual to the group, it could well have provided one of the answers.

Writing of the Nuer people of Sudan, famed anthropologist A. E. Evans-Pritchard noted that “if a man wishes to be in the right with God he must be in the right with men, that is, he must subordinate his interests as an individual to the moral order of society.”
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Religions often include an explicit threat that the nonbelieving nonparticipator will be punished, which, not surprisingly, makes deviance less likely, and which leads in turn to yet more group cohesion and coordination.

The punitive aspects of religion, in addition to keeping participants in line, provides an additional payoff: To some extent, it frees others from the odious task of being enforcers or punishers. Moreover, the punishment can be magnified (at least in concept) to include eternal torment. As for the fact that there may well be nothing to back up such a threat, consider the mirror image of placebo, and the fact that the mere expectation of harm can—at least on occasion—actually cause harm to frightened believers who anticipate the worst. (Think, for example, of the well-documented impact of “black magic” and “voodoo,” whereby serious belief that one is about to be harmed generates physiological responses such that genuine harm actually takes place.)

In addition, just as hoped-for outcomes sometimes occur, simply by chance alone—as with rain that may serendipitously follow a rain dance, thereby giving undeserved credence to the dance—negative outcomes are readily interpreted as divine retribution for religious back-sliding. Consider Rev. Jerry Falwell’s claims about 9/11:

The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God … successfully with the help
of the federal court system … throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. … I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America … I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.

And this observation, from a senior Iranian imam, who claimed that the “un-Islamic” behavior of certain “loose” women is responsible for earthquakes: “Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,” claimed the cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi. (Iran, it should be noted, is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries.) “What can we do to avoid being buried under the rubble?” Mr. Sedighi went on to ask during a Friday prayer sermon. His answer: “There is no other solution but to take refuge in religion.”
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This leads us to yet another possible group-related payoff of religion, the ostensible connection between religious belief and social morality. Concerning the idea that religion serves as a way of discouraging deviancy, Nicholas Wade points out that this helps explain an otherwise puzzling feature of religion, the fact that it is almost universally assumed that gods care about what people do. “Why,” asks Wade,

should human sexual affairs or dietary preferences matter in the least to immortal beings living in a spirit world? The assumption makes little sense unless the gods are viewed as embodying a society’s moral authority and its interest in having all members observe certain rules of social behavior.

It has often been argued, as Ivan Karamazov did in
The Brothers Karamazov
, that “without God, all things are permissible.” Although agnostics and atheists vigorously maintain otherwise,
many believers claim that religion is a prerequisite for moral behavior. And although sometimes the proposition is more narrowly stated—“only
my
religion will guarantee moral behavior”—not uncommonly, the claim is made that fundamentally, all religions are the same, and therefore belief in some religion, any religion, is key, such that which one hardly matters.

This perspective is itself illuminating, suggesting that maybe there really is a sense in which all religions are the same, in that they help steer people from self-interest toward group interest. Thus, late in his life, Jurgen Habermas, for most of his career a staunch supporter of Enlightenment values, has begun arguing in favor of moderating reason with religion, because of the latter’s capacity for generating “morally guided collective action.”
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Let’s note, first, that religious people can certainly be hypocritical and immoral, and that religious commitment is no guarantee of morality (plenty of horrors have been perpetrated in the name of religion). Nonetheless, it is also worth acknowledging that much of social life depends on people having confidence in the motives and reliability of their colleagues. Legal restraints and criminal sanctions go only so far; most of our interactions—and nearly all of our economic exchanges—assume at least a minimal degree of shared values. Significantly, people are far more likely to feel comfortable when interacting with someone else who shares their religion, with the implication that as a result the other’s motivations are more comprehensible and thus more trustworthy. Insofar as this is so, then religion serves as a societal lubricant no less than a glue.
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There are comebacks to this social morality hypothesis for the evolution of religion. Although shared moral codes may be necessary for societies to survive without destroying themselves, it isn’t clear that these codes must derive from religion. Thus, many animal species engage in elaborate social systems (bees, ants, wasps, chimpanzees, bonobos, baboons, gorillas, zebras, blackbirds, even many reptiles and fish) without wielding anything resembling religion. In such cases, biology provides the equivalent of moral codes
that regulate such activities as altruism, selfishness, communication, courtship, competition, parental care, and so forth. Are people notably bereft of biology in this respect, such that were it not for religion, human social life would be impossible, intolerable, or, at least, less efficient and acceptable? Japan, for example, lacks rigid religious beliefs but has lots of social cohesion.