by Mark Pagel
The fourteenth-century Chapel of Our Lady at Rocamadour in southern France is partly perched and partly cut out of a rocky cliff high above the Alzou Canyon, not far from the Lot River. The chapel is approached via the Great Stairway, 216 steps chiseled out of the limestone rock, giving breathtaking views out across the canyon valley. The laity and ordinary believers who would have daily trudged up these steps might have noticed embedded in them a burdensome irony to the modern mind: they contain fossils of ammonites and other shellfish millions of years old that stand in direct contradiction to a literal reading of scripture. Someone who demonstrates religious faith in the light of this sort of contrary evidence can be counted on as the sort of person disposed to make a commitment, not an evaluation that could change as the evidence or understanding of it changes. Or as Jesus tells Thomas in the quote from the Gospel of John that opened this chapter, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
(Having said this, I recently visited the magnificent eleventh-century Durham Cathedral in the north of England. A kind man who showed me around told me that as part of their training, guides are taught to expect people to ask them what the oldest part of the cathedral building is. Like most such cathedrals, Durham’s has been added to and altered over the centuries. For instance, its lower levels are built on Romanesque arches while its upper levels carry the distinctive pointed arches of the later Gothic period. But rather than pointing out this or that arch or column, my guide looked down at the floor toward a black marble tile known locally as Frosterley marble, after the village where this tile had been quarried centuries before. He told me to look at it closely; upon inspection the tile turned out to contain small fossil corals that had been exquisitely preserved in the marble for hundreds of millions of years. Quietly, and I thought just a little subversively, he confided in me that they were the oldest part of the cathedral.)
The existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard recognized what he saw as the virtues of faith without evidence in the story of Abraham. Genesis tells the story that “God tempted Abraham and said unto him, Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt offering upon the mountain which I will show thee.” Kierkegaard’s philosophical work Fear and Trembling, written in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, examines Abraham’s story as the ideal of commitment in a world in which our presence seems arbitrary, our purpose is unfathomable, and our existence a matter of chance. Abraham decides to kill Isaac and binds him to an altar. But all of a sudden an angel appears and intervenes to stop him. How could Abraham have known this was a test of faith, and that his son would be spared? He could not, and this is why in the biblical account God showed him compassion. Taken to Abrahamic extremes, we think of this sort of commitment as insane. But this kind of faith is often just what a group is looking for.
RELIGIOUS EXPLOITATION REVISITED
IN The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins writes, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Why, unless religion is just a manipulative brain parasite, would we embrace a god who endorses such behavior? In trying to answer that question, we must be clear that the reasons I have given here for considering how religion might act as a cultural enhancer do not suppose that religion is true, or that it is harmless, just that throughout our history it has, on balance, acted to promote individual survival and reproduction. This statement can be true even if, for example, large numbers of people might have died in its name. To expect that only “good” things will evolve is to miss an important point about Darwinian evolution. Natural selection does not wear moral glasses; it promotes collections of genes and ideas that triumph in competition with other collections of genes and ideas. No one would ever ask if a snake’s deadly poison has been a force for good or why the snake embraces it. No one would ask why our armies embraced better longbows, or later on, better guns. If religion has been an enhancer in our past—a bit of social technology—we shouldn’t look to understand its grip on us by expecting it to do good.
Instead of religions manipulating us, we might just have to consider the proposition that we concocted and groomed religions to motivate and give justification to behaviors that have served our groups and us individually throughout our history. Their particular forms might have evolved because they have proven to be good at giving us courage and hope, at coordinating our actions, uniting us against common foes, controlling weaker people, or suppressing those we think challenge the norms that glue society together, even if these norms are arbitrary. Then, those individuals and the societies that adopted them would have been at an advantage over those who did not. It is just possible, then, that we created religions and their gods in our image, not the other way around. To think otherwise is to ignore—depressing thought that it is—that violence and hatred are all too human characteristics that transcend any one religion or culture. It would be dangerous for us to blame all this on religion, and it would represent us as feckless in its presence. Indeed, to blame religions would do little more than shoot the messenger, albeit an often very efficient one.
This is in no way to justify our brutality and violence as a species, and it is in no way an apology for those who would use religion for these purposes. But it is to remind us that there is no reason to expect our species would stop killing, raping, and pillaging were we able somehow to expunge religions from our consciousness. The analogy to performance-enhancing drugs might be worth revisiting here. Those drugs might improve your performance in a foot race, but they are not the reason you are running. Equally, if you think religions cause us to fight wars, just consider for a moment that, throughout our history and even today, the people we are most likely to fight or have a war with live next door. It would be a coincidence indeed if we were fighting them for no other reason than that our two different religions had told us to. A far simpler explanation is that it is our neighbors that we will often be in competition with for the same territories and resources. Aware that they will be thinking the same about us, we could say that the fuse of conflict is always smoldering. Indeed, the most terrible violence of the twentieth century in terms of lives lost—World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the many millions who died in Stalin’s 1930s purges in Russia, Pol Pot’s Year Zero slaughter in Cambodia, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, to name just a few—have little or nothing to do with religion per se (I am taking the Nazi atrocities toward Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others as something other than a religious agenda).
I have based some of the logic of this chapter on the life-dinner principle. That argument says that we will desperately evolve to avoid things that bring us harm. In this context it says that if religion is a mind virus, natural or cultural selection will have acted on us more strongly to evade its pursuit of us (because it can take our “life”) than it will have acted on religion to infect us (each of us is merely one of its “dinners”). It is a principle, not a law, so we shouldn’t expect too much of it. But it does give us a way of understanding how selection acts on competing sets of replicators, in this case, our genes versus religion’s memes. Biological replicators that take over our minds and bring us harm, such as biological brain flukes and other biological brain parasites, are really rather rare, and this is as the life-dinner principle would expect. So are things that we could imagine are culturally transmitted and could bring us harm, such as reckless drug taking, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, or simply an annoying (to others) inability to stop singing some song. If this is what we expect of the life-dinner principle, then we are granted at least some permission to turn the argument around and wonder if the things that are common in our lives are less likely to be things that have brought us great ha
rm. If so, we might wish to seek adaptive or functional explanations for their presence.
It is often countered that colds and flu are common, in fact ubiquitous, and yet we don’t seek adaptive explanations for them. This is true, but misses an important point. Colds and flu might be ubiquitous but they are not omnipresent. A person infected with a cold or the flu might be ill for two or three weeks out of the typical year, and even then in most cases not very ill. But a person infected with a mind virus—as is suggested of religion—is infected twenty-four hours per day from early in life. The life-dinner principle would therefore predict that if religions really do exploit us in harmful ways, selection will have acted more strongly on us to avoid them than it has acted on us to avoid the common cold (or, it could be that in our past colds and flu did routinely kill us and our immune systems have responded). If we stack up all of the different diseases we get, they probably do approach being omnipresent in us. But this is not a relevant comparison. Each of these diseases is a separate “gene pool,” and it is their individual success that we can predict from the life-dinner principle.
If we accept this argument, then religion’s omnipresence might suggest we are not trying very hard to avoid it, and that could be because it is not harmful to us, at least on average. A comparison from the biological world might be helpful. There is a biological infection we have that is omnipresent, and we could wager it is the exception that proves the life-dinner rule. The billions of bacteria that reside in our gut are with us from life, beginning shortly after birth. They are an infection, but as we might expect from the life-dinner principle, they are often described as symbiotic. Still, the religions-as-mind-viruses argument is at its most persuasive in drawing attention to how this set of culturally transmitted ideas uses parents and others to infect vulnerable children, who then go on to do the same to their children. Human children are almost certainly unique among animals in the extent to which they have evolved to look to their parents and others in positions of authority to learn the rules of their society. More than any other species, we rely for our successes on the accumulated knowledge of past generations, and so this has wired our brains to have a certain docility and openness about learning per se—as youngsters we don’t discriminate too much what we are taught. Our rule is to believe elders, and it is difficult to imagine it being any other way in our species.
This is all true, but the religion-as-mind-virus account requires the further assumption that the religion memes are so incomparably good at their task that, even when they don’t return any rewards (as the mind-virus argument presumes) and can be downright costly, parents somehow will still wish to teach them to their children because they can’t help themselves. But this seems peculiar because we know that adults can easily reject many of the mental infections that fool children. It is also peculiar because if our children’s success is, uniquely among animals, dependent on learning, it will also be dependent on parents teaching their children useful things. Given this, it seems that human parents will have been equally as strongly selected to exercise careful judgment about what they teach their children as their offspring have been to learn from them. Put it this way: imagine parents who could see through a mind virus and not teach it to their children, or better yet, inoculate their children against religious memes. If the religion meme really is harmful, these lucky children would outcompete children of less discriminating parents. The awful chain would have been broken (although memeticists might counter that the religion memes would fight back by getting others in the community to ostracize the lucky but wretched nonbeliever!).
I offer the thoughts in this chapter in a speculative way and not as proof or refutation of others’ views. My purpose is to raise the possibility that the forms of religion we see around us today are indeed collections of highly evolved memes, but ones that we have shaped to suit our needs. This is not to say we should necessarily cling to them, teach them to our children, or have established (i.e., state) religions. We have cast off many old practices that might have once served a purpose but have outlived their usefulness: for example, we no longer build defensive walls around our cities. Equally, no one should think that even if religion has historically played the role of a cultural enhancer—and that it is not merely an exploitative mind virus—its uses are limited solely to consolation, engendering cohesion in groups, or demonstrating commitment to them. An entire topic of religion that we have not even touched upon concerns how purveyors of religion might use it for their own ends. I do not include here the many people who use or rely on religion in genuine and selfless attempts to help other people. Rather, I have in mind people who use religion to control other people’s behavior, to exploit the vulnerable, to marshal armies of “crusaders” to attack foreign lands or gather wealth. The list of these purveyors runs from the pious to the ludicrously crass and rich televangelists, from prehistoric shamans to modern-day popes, and from child abusers to the charismatic leaders of mass suicide cults.
Perhaps nowhere more effectively do the purveyors of religion excel than in the great cathedrals of Christianity. Visit one sometime, such as the immense Durham Cathedral whose subversive tour guide I mentioned earlier. Imagine yourself as a typical eleventh-century peasant standing in front of this imposing edifice 80 feet tall at the roof, 200 feet at the tower, and over 400 feet long, comparing it to your home—probably a one-room hovel with mud floors, no windows, and possibly shared with your animals. Then, you enter one of these palaces to God. The space inside takes your breath away. There are gently curving Romanesque and daintily pointed Gothic arches. The spectacular vaulted ceilings are so high above you, you couldn’t hit them with a stone you cast. They are supported on rows of enormous round columns, far bigger in diameter than the giant oak that sits on your village green. They are engraved with geometric patterns whose perfect symmetry and alignment trumpets the skills of the stonemasons. The cathedral is ornately decorated with carved objects, precious paintings that tell stories, and it has vivid stained-glass windows that dazzle your senses, normally accustomed to the dull drab gray tones of your life. And a group of choristers is singing in celestial harmony.
This is not so much a palace to God as a peacock’s tail of an advertisement of the wealth and power of the religious social clique that built it. Its construction would have required the quarrying, transportation, and then carving of unthinkable quantities of materials. Still, you can’t eat it or live in it; it doesn’t sow your corn, feed your children, or look after your animals. Nevertheless, it commands your loyalty because its unmistakable and probably irresistible message is “Join us and we (or He) can do for you what we did here.”
But this is another topic and one that is not necessarily about religion per se. Rather, it merely reminds us that we shouldn’t necessarily expect people to look out for others’ well-being. These purveyors of religion to a greater or lesser extent are behaving in ways that do not differ from anyone else who might try to manipulate social systems for their own gain. Religion might just be a particularly effective tool for them to use, and it is the purveyor’s skills that we should marvel at—and often denounce—rather than the particular way he or she does it. Thus, religious indoctrination or exploitation might be one way to take advantage of others, but Maoist style political reeducation is another. In the hands of a skilled politician, nationalist rhetoric devoid of religious connotations can also be a powerfully motivating tool; just think of Churchill’s many rallying speeches during World War II. The point is that to denounce religion because of the ways others might exploit it is potentially to blame the wrong agent, even though we should be aware that this dangerous agent lurks in our midst. We surely wouldn’t denounce morphine because some use a different form of this opiate to make enormous profits from the sale of heroin, even killing people along the way to do so.
SOME POSSIBLE DARWINIAN ROLES
FOR MUSIC AND VISUAL ART
WE SHOULD remind ourselves that, just as with religions, our early ancestors�
�� art and music might have started out as little more than simple acts, nothing like the sophisticated forms we have today. Some of these would have caught on, then grew, filling what was before them an empty space, not one occupied by some other artistic or musical traditions. The first art might have been a map or an image of an animal, scratched into the earth as it is known Australia’s Aborigines and some Native American tribes do, or something cut into a tree, or maybe a sketch on the wall of a cave using a piece of charcoal. It is easy to imagine the curiosity at an image being able to resemble something real, almost as if the image itself captured some essential quality of the object, as some traditional societies still believe is true of photographs.
A similar story could be told for the origins of music. We might be primed for music by our evolutionary history with the other animals. Songs or calls or vocalizations have an ancient evolutionary foundation in animals as ways of attracting prospective mates, warning off competitors, and marking out territories. We retain in our modern brains an equally ancient structure known as the limbic system that processes many of these signals. It is sometimes called our “lizard brain” because it acts as a powerful emotion-charged center for responding to sights, sounds, and odors. Emotions are, of course, some of our most powerfully motivating forces. Appropriately, the word “limbic” derives from the Latin limbus, meaning “edge,” and it is the limbic system that can so quickly put us on edge.
