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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eleven - Religion is a Team Sport
[Starts with a description of the college, specifically UVA, football experience.]
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p247 It’s a whole day of hiving and collective emotions. Collective effervescence is guaranteed, as are feelings of collective outrage at questionable calls by the referees, collective triumph if the team wins, and collective grief if the team loses. Followed by more collective drinking at postgame parties.
Why do the students sing, chant, dance, sway, chop, and stomp so enthusiastically during the game? Showing support for the football team may help to motivate the players, but is that the function of these behaviors? Are they done in order to achieve victory? No. From a Durkheimian perspective these behaviors serve a very different function, and it is the same one that Durkheim saw at work in most religious rituals: the creation of a community.
A college football game is a superb analogy for religion... from a sociologically informed perspective, it is a religious rite that does just what it is supposed to do: it pulls people up from Durkheim’s lower level (the profane) to his higher level (the sacred). It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole.” It augments the school spirit for which UVA is renowned, which in turn attracts better students and more alumni donations...
p248 Religions are social facts. Religions cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees. Durkheim’s definition of religion makes its binding function clear:
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 which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
...Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore... [that “Morality binds and blinds”] and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices. They conclude that religion is an extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally [like the inebriated football fans] while leaving a long trail of victims [again like people injured by football or drinking]... if we are to render a fair judgement about religion -- and understand its relationship to morality and politics -- we must first describe it accurately.
The Lone Believer
[New Atheism is introduced in the context of 9/11]
p249 ...After decades of culture war in the United States over the teaching of evolution in public schools, some scientists saw little distinction between Islam and Christianity. All religions, they said, are delusions that prevent people from embracing science, secularism, and modernity...
...The first... [book] out was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, followed by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and, with the most explicit title of all, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. These four authors are known as the four horsemen of New Atheism, but I’m going to set Hitchens aside because he is a journalist whose book made no pretense to be anything other than a polemical diatribe... These three authors claimed to speak for science and to exemplify the values of science -- particularly its open-mindedness and its insistence that claims be grounded in reason and empirical evidence, not faith and emotion.
I also group these three authors together because they offer similar definitions of religion, all focusing on belief in supernatural agents...
(Note 7. [Harris 2004] p. 12 Harris elevates belief to be the quintessence of humanity: “ The very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts” (ibid., p 50). That’s a fine definition for a rationalist, but as a social intuitionist I think the humanness of any brain consists in its ability to share intentions and enter into the consensual hallucinations (i.e., moral matrices) that create cooperative moral communities. See my discussion of Tomasello’s work in chapter 9. See also Harris et al. 2009.)
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p250 Supernatural agents do of course play a central role in religion, just as the actual football is at the center of the whirl of activity on game day at UVA. But trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passions of college football by studying the movements of the ball... You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.
Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars. When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religions that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists. I’ll call this competing model the Durkheimian model, because it says that the function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the group we belong to.
p251 The New Atheist model is based on the Platonic rationalist view of the mind...
...To understand the psychology or religion, should we focus on the false beliefs and faulty reasoning of individual believers? Or should we focus on the automatic (intuitive) processes of people embedded in social groups that are striving to create a moral community?
I can’t help reading this with Alyosha in mind. He senses that Haidt is going to refute the New Atheists and is encouraged. Only to realize that Haidt is attacking them from what is an even more scientific perspective. He’s gone beyond looking at religion (god and the devil) as things man creates/invents out of his own, perhaps spiritual, nature, to looking at the religious as bees and religion as just another form of social activity. I believe he would see this as even more dehumanizing than anything Ivan said in The Brothers K.
The New Atheist Story: By-Products, Then Parasites
Here Haidt does a lovely job of using their own words against the New Atheists when viewing them from our new, hivish, sociological perspective.
To an evolutionist, religious behaviors “stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade,” as Dennett puts it. Evolution ruthlessly eliminates costly and wasteful behaviors... yet, to quote Dawkins, “no known culture lacks some version of these time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counterproductive fantasies of religion.” ... The New Atheists... accounts all begin with the discussion of multiple evolutionary “by-products” that explain the accidental origin of God beliefs, and some then continue on to an account of how these beliefs evolved as sets of parasitic memes.
(Note 15. A meme is a bit of cultural information that can evolve in some of the same ways that a gene evolves. See Dawkins 1976.)
p252 [Haidt agrees with them about “hypersensitive agency detection”] ...we see faces in the clouds... because we have special cognitive modules for face detection. The face detector is on a hair trigger, and it makes almost all of its mistakes in one direction -- false positives (seeing a face when no real face is really present...)
[This leads to our “hypersensitive agency detection module”] ...The hypersensitive agency detection device is finely tuned to maximize survival, not accuracy.
[By attributing agency to the weather and good or bad fortune, early man spawned] ...the birth of supernatural agents, not as adaptation for anything but as a by-product of a cognitive module that is otherwise highly adaptive...
p253 ...Dennett suggests that the circuitry for falling in love has gotten commandeered by some religions to make people fall in love with God... In all cases the logic is the same: a bit of mental machinery evolved because it conferred a real benefit, but the machinery sometimes misfires, producing accidental cognitive effects that make people prone to believing in gods. At no point was religion itself beneficial to individuals or groups. At no point were genes selected because individuals or groups who were better at “godding” outcompeted those who failed to produce, fear, or love their gods... the genes for constructing these various modules were all in place by the time modern humans left Africa, and the genes did not change in response to selection pressures either for or against religiosity during the 50,000 years since then.
p254 [Dennett,]
The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us. This mindlessly generates a vast overpopulation of agent-ideas... only a well designed few make it through the rehearsal tournament, mutating and improving as they go. The ones that get shared and remembered are the souped-up winners of billions of competitions for rehearsal time in the brains of our ancestors.
To Dennett and Dawkins, religions are sets of memes that have undergone Darwinian selection. Like biological traits, religions are heritable, they mutate, and there is selection among these mutations. The selection occurs not on the basis of the benefits religions confer upon individuals or groups, but on the basis of their ability to survive and reproduce themselves. Some religions are better than others at hijacking the human mind, burrowing in deeply, and then getting themselves transmitted to the next generation of host minds...
A Better Story: By-Products, Then Cultural Group Selection
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p255 ... As with the New Atheists, [the first hypersensitive agency detector step posited by the anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich] was followed by a second step involving cultural (not genetic) evolution. But instead of talking about religions as parasitic memes evolving for their own benefit [this too is like Persig’s "Giant" which I guess is a kind of meme], Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. Atran and Henrich argue that the cultural evolution of religion has been largely driven by competition among groups. Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas (not their genes) spread. Groups with less effective religions didn’t necessarily get wiped out; often they just adopted the more effective variations. So it’s really the religions that evolved, not the people or their genes.
Among the best things to do with a by-product God, according to Atran and Henrich, is to create a moral community... As [hunter-gatherer] groups take up agriculture and grow larger... their gods become far more moralistic. The gods of larger societies are usually quite concerned about actions that foment conflict and division within the group, such as murder, adultery, false witness, and the breaking of oaths.
p256 If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group... Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.
...When people believe that the gods might bring drought or pestilence on the whole village for the adultery of two people, you can bet that the villagers will be more vigilant for -- and gossipy about -- any hint of an extramarital liaison. Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.
...There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.
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[The anthropologist Richard Socis studies 19th century American communes and discovers that the religious communes survive much better than the secular ones.]
p257 [Looking for the “secret ingredient” Sosis,] ...found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. [The usual cult tools.] For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosic was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.
...Sosic argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when a secular organization demands sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. [Or even to do things that do make logical sense.] In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. [I have to add here that in history the downtrodden most often rebel not when things are the worst -- when they are making the most sacrifices -- but when things are actually getting a little better. This doesn't really apply to what he's saying here, but I think there may possibly be a connection.] Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
p258 ...Religions that do a better job of binding people together and suppressing selfishness spread at the expense of other religions, but not necessarily by killing off the losers. Religions can spread far faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. A successful religion can be adopted by neighboring people or by vanquished populations.
Atran and Henrich... doubt that there has been any genetic evolution for religiosity... [they] believe that gene-culture coevolution happened slowly during the Pleistocene... [they] join the New Atheists in claiming that our minds were not shaped, tuned, or adapted for religion.
...But how could there be no optimizing, no fine-tuning of modules to make people more prone to adaptive forms of hiving, sacralizing, or godding, and less prone to self-destructive or group-destructive forms? [in the past 50,000 years.]
I think you can sense that a third interpretation is coming up -- and you won't be surprised to hear that it is termed "Durkheimian." But I'm going to take a break here and finish this next time.
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