It would be much more accurate to ask: If Vancouver were imposing an economic stranglehold on Seattle, and regularly assassinating and kidnapping its city leaders while murdering civilians at will, would we consider a barrage of primitive rockets from Seattle—incapable of landing with any precision—to be an appropriate response? And if, in alleged response to such crude rockets, Vancouver bombed and invaded Seattle, with horrific effects on civilians, women and children alone numbering in the hundreds, what would we then do? And which objective observer would put credence to any claim that the attack was Vancouver’s only option in self-defense?
If you are inverting reality, it helps to have many others inverting it, too, making it more plausible by repetition alone and by excluding alternative voices. To me, the near-unanimity of the political class and most of the news commentators in the United States in supporting Israeli terror on a mass scale is astonishing—evidence of the stranglehold that a good false historical narrative can exert on an entire group. It is, after all, the unconditional support of Israel by the world’s military superpower that permits Israel to act in ways it would never dare if it had to relate to its neighbors on a level playing field. Here the false historical narrative is so powerful—the hate-filled terrorist Palestinians, anti-Semitic to the core, need regular punishment—that hideous attacks on one’s neighbor are both moral and praiseworthy.
The savagery continued for seventeen days and included numerous well-known Israeli devices, including attacks on UN positions, on ambulances, on mosques, on infrastructure, on civilians ordered to leave buildings, on young men, women, and children. That numerous assaults on civilians were deliberate is evident on inspection even if routinely denied. A war that began with lies ended with them. Indeed, it was not actually a war, more like a massacre of any and all. “Shooting fish in a barrel,” as one observer aptly put it.
Certainly if it was meant as a surgical strike on an alleged terrorist group (Hamas), someone forgot to tell the soldiers. When leaving homes they had vandalized after murdering the occupants and their neighbors, the soldiers left behind graffiti more honest than any Israeli government spokesperson: “Arabs need 2 die,” “Die you all,” “Make war not peace,” “1 down, 999,999 to go,” and written over the image of a gravestone, “Arabs 1948–2009.” Hamas, like Hezbollah, is a fictitious enemy, or at least a demonized one. The whole point is to frighten—indeed terrorize—the enemy into submission.
Someone also forgot to tell soldiers afterward not to tell the truth about the onslaught. As we know from Israeli testimony alone, massive firepower was used to cover advances, there was systematic demolition of housing, indeed constant destruction through massive firepower regardless of whether buildings were known to be occupied, the use of Palestinians as human shields, the use of deadly white phosphorus, rules of engagement in which “any movement must entail gunfire. . . . No one is supposed to be there. If you see any signs of movement at all, you shoot.” These rules referred not to combatants but to everyone.
Military rabbis were busy whipping the troops up to a pitiless state because “the Palestinians are like the Philistines of old, newcomers who do not belong in the land, aliens planted on the soil which should clearly return to us.” Not too different from the hordes of clerics who proclaimed passionately on each side of America’s Civil War over slavery, or the clerics who have risen up to support numerous other wars. In this case, ancient genocidal logic is called upon to justify the current form. Of course, the Israeli military kept up the usual pretense. Its actions were governed by “uncompromising ethical values,” which is certainly true, but are they just values or purely Israel-benefiting ones? Far from wantonly slaughtering innocent people, Israel made “an enormous effort to focus its fire only against the terrorists whilst doing the utmost to avoid harming uninvolved civilians.” But quite the opposite was true.
The attack was sold under patently false pretenses. Hamas and Israel had agreed to a six-month cease-fire, during which rocket attacks on Israel (by primitive devices lacking guidance signals and killing all of seventeen Israelis in the previous seven years) were reduced by 97 percent, and the remaining few may well have been beyond Hamas’s control. It was Israel that broke the truce, first by failing (as required) to open access to Gaza when in fact it slowly tightened its stranglehold. Israeli forces then entered Gaza contra agreement on November 4 and murdered six so-called Hamas militants; the next day, Israel cut imports to Gaza to one-tenth of their former trickle. Hamas responded by not renewing this one-sided “truce,” and Israel in turn unleashed its long-planned assault, killing about 1,300 Palestinians in three weeks, roughly the number it had killed in the previous five years. The vast majority were civilians, and more than half were women and children. There can be no doubt that the operation’s chief function was to terrorize, once again, its Arab neighbors. Only thirteen Israelis died, for a kill ratio of 100:1.
The brutal opening assault on police cadets held a special irony, because one of Hamas’s signal achievements since gaining power through democratic elections was its ability to sharply reduce common street crime, including murder, robbery, and rape. But when the Zionists are in full blood, the Arabs are not allowed even police guns to protect themselves. They are seen instead as irremediable terrorists intent on inflicting suffering on their innocent prison wardens, the Israelis.
What is striking about the Gaza attack is how radically differently it is viewed by most of the world—the account given above is a fair summary—as opposed to the version believed by Israel and the United States. Why this incredible blindness in the United States to the moral outrages being perpetrated by its client state of Israel? The key factor, I believe, is the false historical narrative that links Christianity, Judaism, and American exceptionalism—that is, Christian Zionism (see Chapter 10). Fortunately, the excesses of the Gaza operation seem to have caused enough general revulsion that a prominent Jewish-American critic of Israeli behavior can ruefully title his new book on the subject This Time We Went Too Far.
Likewise, there are welcome signs in the US Jewish community alone of a change in the narrative. A revulsion at the old “anything Israel says is fine and anyone who says otherwise is an anti-Semite” style of arguing is seen in such organizations as J Street in Washington, D.C., Jews-4-Peace in Los Angeles, and Justice in Palestine, popular at US universities, to name but a few. There are parallel, though unpopular, organizations in Israel.
SELF-DECEPTION AND THE HISTORY OF WAR
In one sense, Israel’s attack on Gaza was a stupefying act of violence. In another, it was merely the latest example of heartless intergroup murder and warfare that stretches back perhaps some five million years when, chimpanzee-like, we started to regularly kill neighboring group members. That is, by the standards of behavior within a group, the attack was stupefying, heartless, and cruel, but by the standards of behavior between groups, it was routine. We have all done it: Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, animist, and atheist. In Sudan, people are raped and killed by the thousands, in the Congo, by the millions. Every ethnic group, it seems, in every corner of the globe indulges this ancient habit.
Of course, we have made enormous progress since chimpanzee days—in technological sophistication, for example, and in the scale of the adventure, but also in the use of language, both prior to the attack (permitting planning and coordination) and afterward (permitting rationalization). The latter is especially important in the face of onlookers, members of the rest of the species who may witness the attack or learn about it, yet another novel feature of recent warfare, depending also on language.
Chimpanzees appear not to face this problem of verbal self-deception or to have any verbal component to warfare. Indeed, it is hard to see any communication system, though one surely must exist. Nobody has been able to detect a signal by which male chimps organize for war. So far as we can tell, when they are about to go to war, they do not suddenly start looking at one another or otherwise communicate before setting out
on territorial patrols, a common prelude to attacking neighbors. They do so either spontaneously or in response to a sound or smell from a neighboring territory. When on a border patrol, males are quiet—they stop, sniff, listen as a group, and are at all times alert. Sometimes they make deep incursions into neighboring areas, the signal or means of coordination being completely unknown to us. Nobody has seen anything resembling group discussion afterward—certainly no need to justify the behavior in the face of external observation—so that the verbal element seems entirely missing from chimpanzee warfare start to finish and the basis for the cooperative synchrony is completely unknown.
By contrast, consider the contrary set of arguments unleashed after Israel’s attack on Gaza. Either, at one extreme, the attack was a fully justified assault on a terrorist entity and its critics were Hitler’s newest anti-Jews or, at the other, it was an Israeli terrorist attack on the human remnants of the ethnic cleansing on which it is itself based. So language, which permits the past to be expressed, communicated, and remembered, both vividly and in detail, adds immense opportunities to dress up the past or deny it, to one and all, present and future. Perhaps no aspect of language acts as a more powerful force for war than religion, the topic to which we turn next.
CHAPTER 12
Religion and Self-Deception
A book could be written on this subject—no, a twelve-volume treatise. Religion is a deep and complex subject, and so are its interactions with deceit and self-deception. Religions range from animists to monotheists to nontheists to atheists and then from Christian to Hindu to Buddhist to Muslim to Jew, with many subspecies. Here I can only hope to sketch out some of the major biological forces favoring religion and some of the important ways in which religion may encourage deceit and self-deception. This is a very tentative chapter, one that is heavily biased toward my own limited knowledge, namely that of the monotheistic religions of the West, chiefly Christianity, and not toward polytheism or the great Eastern religions. Nevertheless, I hope to show how religion and self-deception can interact in important ways and invite others to make the more important advances.
Some people think of religion itself as complete self-deception, all of it nonsense on its face, counterfactual, and in the extreme having nothing but negative side effects. In this view, the entire enterprise is self-deluded at the outset, so religion should be studied as a well-developed system of self-deception, as it certainly is—but is it only that? This may in fact be true, but these people have no theory for how this malady could have spread so far—to every culture and almost every human being in every culture—by self-deception alone.
What some have is a metaphor. Religion is a viral meme; that is, it is not an actual virus, which can easily bring a population to its knees, but rather it is merely a thought system that happens to propagate as if it were a virus, to the detriment of those with the belief system. Despite its negative effects, it apparently generates insufficient selection pressure to suppress the spread of this non-coevolving nonorganism. This is not a very impressive foundation for an evolutionary theory of religion, and it easily invites undue optimism regarding the life span of current religions. For example, from one such proponent of the meme-centered view: “I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about twenty-five years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe it does today.” I think it more likely (though not the most likely) that twenty-five years from now, evolutionary biologists and philosophers will be in hiding from the then-dominant religious groups. Fifty years from now, no one stubbing his or her toe will say, “Charles Darwin, Charles H. Darwin, this hurts!” but they will still be saying, “Jesus H. Christ, this fucking hurts.”
At the same time, many, many people believe religion is the received truth from the Almighty—or, more to the point, that their religion is. Some have a book—a Torah, a Bible, a Koran—all of whose words are true, often literally so. Their view has as little backing as the viral-meme story and appears at first to be nothing more than a deep form of self-justification. If their own religion is God’s own truth, then competing religions are often seen as anti-truth, or the work of the devil, the ultimate target. So we begin with two very extreme views of religion, with the truth probably somewhere in between, but where exactly and why?
First we need to separate the truth value of religious statements from the possible benefits of believing in them, and likewise separate partaking in religious ceremonies from the truth value attributed to them. Then we need to analyze beliefs and behavior in a more fine-grained way so that we can evaluate the meaning and function of particular beliefs. In my own view, there is often an internal struggle within religions between general truth and personal or group falsehood. That is, the essence of religion is neither self-deception nor deep truth, but a mixture of the two, with self-deception often overwhelming truth.
Religions tend to increase within-religion cooperation at the cost of lowered cooperation with outsiders. Often this involves a false historical narrative and shared group self-deception: “We are the chosen people or the original people from creation or those whose beliefs [e.g., in the divinity of Jesus] cause God to favor us [or whatever].” In short, religions often act as templates for in-group/out-group biases. Insofar as they encourage in-group cooperation, many benefits may accrue, but insofar as they encourage in-group cooperation in aggressive attacks on out-groups, they both inflict harm on others as a price of their cooperation and inflict harm on self when they fail (which, in warfare, is roughly half the time).
At the same time, certain features of religion provide a recipe for self-deception, removing nearly all restraints from rational thought. The universal system of truth espoused by a religion usually gives special status to the believer. Various phantasmagorical things are easily imagined, and “faith” is permitted to supersede reason.
Religion has a complex relationship with health and disease. On the one hand, health may be a major selective factor favoring religious behavior and beliefs. Not only do religions often preach healthy behavior, but there also is evidence that religious belief and association improve individual survival, immune function, and health. Even music, so common in religion and courtship, has positive immune effects. Medicine was originally embedded within religion, and both provide strong placebo benefits to at least part of the population.
A completely unexpected association between disease and religion emerges when we study the entire globe for degree of religious diversity (number of religions per unit area) as a function of parasite load (roughly, degree of human loss due to parasites). Here we find many more religions (and languages) per square inch when parasites are high. Since splitting of religions is also naturally associated with ethnocentrism and ethnic differentiation, parasites are a factor expected to degrade general religious truth value over time and thus to be positively associated with in-group deceit and self-deception. This may be especially true of the polytheistic religions, but with monotheism came additional forces of self-deception associated with global conquest and a single, dominant spirit.
Finally, we consider the role of prayer and meditation, specific teachings against self-deception, and the contrast between the social and internal sides of religious devotion.
COOPERATION WITHIN THE GROUP
By logic, religion ought to increase altruistic and cooperative behavior among group members—of obvious potential benefit—but it may do so along with reduced such behavior toward nonmembers and, worse still, outright aggression and murder. That is, an increased degree of hostility toward neighboring groups can heighten the within-group bias (and vice versa). This is the double-edged sword of religion, inside and outside: a religion urges its own members to treat each neighbor as they would treat themselves, yet also to slaughter every nonbeliever and outsider, as is ordered in the good book, for group after group, down to every last man, woman
, and child. At the extremes, some religions advocate in-group love and out-group genocidal hatred.
In some religions, people imagine that God is watching and evaluating their every action. Reputational concerns are expected to have obvious effects on human cooperative tendencies. One study shows that even a pair of eyelike objects on a small part of a computer screen can unconsciously increase cooperative behavior in an anonymous economic game. An awareness of observing, judging god(s) may have similar effects. Indeed, providing a “God prime” hidden in a game of sentence creation increases cooperative tendencies to about the same degree that primes of secular retribution do (police, courts, etc.). Insofar as fear of God’s judgment entrains more moral behavior on our part toward others, it can be seen either as a device that costs us some occasional selfish behavior but protects us from the greater cost of such behavior being detected by others and of being aggressed against, or as a form of imposed self-deception by others, in effect, scaring us into greater group orientation.
A tendency to detect agency in nature likely supplies the cognitive template supporting belief in supernatural agents transcending the usual limitations of nature. Since only in some religions do these gods watch, monitor, and respond to human behavior, it would be most interesting to know which religions do so and why. Is this, in part, a means of increasing in-group cooperation?
Although those Christians who frequently pray and attend religious services reliably report more altruistic behavior—such as charity donations and volunteer work—it is uncertain how much this applies only within the religious group or even whether it applies at all. This is because various measures of religiosity repeatedly have been shown to correlate with higher false opinions of self, suggesting an obvious self-deceptive effect of religion: you think better of yourself than you otherwise would. In Islam, it is mandatory to give to the poor, but there must be variability in doing so, and it would be most interesting to know what such variability correlates with.
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life Page 32
