Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (61 page)

Preposterous beliefs involve more costly displays of commitment,and require more costly commitments from believers, than do mundane beliefs. Devotion to supernatural agents tends to spread in a population to the extent they elicit costly commitments, usually in the form of ritual ceremonies, offerings, and sacrifices.
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When participants in costly rituals demonstrate commitment to supernatural beliefs, then observers who witness these commitments are more inclined to trust and follow the participants and so enhance group solidarity and survival. Consider, again, taking an oath before God among the Pashtun in terms of the ritual that underscores its seriousness, which involves time and labor and intense scrutiny by others:

Because swearing a false oath within village or farmstead is believed to bring illness or reduce the productivity of the land, the ritual must be held away from human habitation. Because the surface of the land is presumed to be polluted by contact with thieves, adulterers, and criminals, a half-meter deep hole is dug and a copy of the Quran laid in it. After undergoing ritual ablutions, the accused places his right arm on the Quran and swears by Allah that what he is saying is true and fair. Since at least some of the evil consequences that can befall a false swearer apply equally to a false accuser, demanding an oath unfairly also has serious consequences and may impugn the honor of the accuser.
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An examination of eighty-three utopian communes of the nineteenth century indicates that religious groups with more costly rituals were more likely to survive over time than religious groups with fewer rituals. Members and leaders often explicitly acknowledged that costly demands increased their religious engagement.
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Among Israeli kibbutzim (socialist agricultural settlements operating on the principle of labor according to ability with benefits according to need), groups with more religious rituals showed higher levelsof cooperation than other religious and secular groups with fewer rituals.
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Religious kibbutzim also economically outperform secular kibbutzim.
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Religious beliefs, then, are more likely to spread in a population and promote cooperation through mutual commitment than secular beliefs alone. Religious trust generally carries over to other beliefs and actions that the participants may affiliate with their ritualized religious beliefs, including cooperative works, charity, economic exchange, and warfare. As cooperating groups increase in size and expand, they come into conflict, competing with other groups for territory and other resources. The growing scope and cost of religious beliefs is both cause and consequence of this increasing group cooperation, expansion, and competition.

RELIGIOUS RITUALS AND THE RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Collective commitment to the absurd is the greatest demonstration of group love that humans have devised.

It is in religious rituals that supernatural agents, through their surrogates and instruments, manifest themselves in people’s affections. The ceremonies repetitively occur to make highly improbable, and therefore socially unmistakable, displays of mutual commitment. Within the congregation’s coordinated bodily rhythms (chanting, swaying) and submission displays (bowing, prostrating) individuals commune with, and signal giving over part of their being to, the intensely felt existential yearnings of others. This demonstration, in turn, conveys the intention or promise of self-sacrifice by and toward others (charity, care, defense, support) without any specific person or situation necessarily in mind. Profession of religious belief and adherence to its costly rituals is a convincing statement of open-ended social commitment.

Archaeological research that focuses on the co-evolution of ritual and society reveals that religious rituals became much moreformal, elaborate, and costly as societies developed from foraging bands to chiefdoms to states.
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In ancient Mexico, for example, the nomadic egalitarian way of hunter-gatherer bands (before 4000 B.P., or before the present) selected for informal, unscheduled rituals from which no one was excluded. Much the same goes for contemporary hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung of Africa’s Kalahari Desert, whose primary religious rituals, such as trance dancing, include everyone in the camp and are organized in an ad hoc manner depending on the contingencies of rainfall, hunting prospects, illnesses, and so forth.
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With the establishment of permanent villages and multivillage chiefdoms (4000–3000
B.P
.), main rituals were scheduled by solar and astral events and managed by social achievers (Big Men and chiefs). This also appears to be the case for predynastic Egypt (6000–5000
B.P
.) and China (4500–3500
B.P
.), as well as for nineteenth-century chiefdoms of Native North Americans. After the state formed in Mexico (2500 B.P.), most important rituals were performed by a class of trained full-time priests, materially subsidized by society, using religious calendars and occupying temples built at enormous costs in labor and lives. This is also true for the state-level societies of ancient Mesopotamia (after 5500 B.P.) and India (after 4500 B.P.), which, like their Mesoamerican counterparts, also practiced costly and fearsome human sacrifice.

Consider also what is arguably the first comparative study of society over time. The great fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldûn examined different waves of Islamic invasion of the North African Maghreb and the ensuing fate of their dynasties. He found that “dynasties of wide power and large royal authority have their origin in religion based on … truthful propaganda [that is, with demonstrated commitment]…. Superiority results from group feeling … individual desires come together in agreement, and hearts become united…. Mutual cooperation and support flourish. As a result, the extent of the state widens, and the dynastygrows.”
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Contemporary studies indicate that Islam’s spread into Kenya and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is associated with Muslim rituals (fasting, abstention from alcohol, from adultery, and from eating pork, etc.) drawing people into tighter networks of trust that facilitate trade and economic success.
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Similar considerations apply to the current growth of the Protestant evangelical movement in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
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Religious beliefs and obligations mitigate self-interest and reinforce trust in cultural norms, like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, by conferring on them supernatural authorship, or “sacredness,” and by enforcing them through supernatural punishment, or “divine retribution.” Sacred beliefs and values are invariably associated with taboos: nonnegotiable prohibitions on beliefs and behaviors that transgress the sacred. Punishment for transgressing taboos provides concrete markers and proof of the meaning and importance of what is sacred for society. Together, sacred values and taboos bound moral behavior at the most basic level of conduct in society (sex, diet, dress, greeting) and at the most general level (warfare, rule, work, trade). Along with religious rituals and insignia, these bounds strongly identify one cultural group as different from another, reinforcing interactions with one’s “own kind” while distancing the group from others.

The ancient Hebrew kingdom of Judah, to take an example, used circumcision, dietary laws, prohibition against Sabbath work, and other ritual rules and commandments to mark off their belief in the ineffable one true God with no name. This enabled the alliance of Hebrew hill tribes to set themselves apart from coastal peoples (Philistines, Canaanites) and to pull themselves together to withstand conquest and fragmentation by stronger invaders (Egyptians, Babylonians).
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Violating the Sabbath along with idolatry were considered the gravest of norm violations and punishable by death. These were the most arbitrary markers of collective identity relative to the concrete needs of social life shared with othergroups (in contrast to taboos against stealing, adultery, murder, and the like). Willful disregard of them was considered a strong signal of personal sin and rebellion. If left unchecked, rebellion could spread to the whole body politic and spell chaos and ruin, especially in a competitive situation of constant warfare against other groups: “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry” (Samuel 15:23).

For the Hebrews, as for the Catholic Church and its Holy Inquisition in their fight for survival against the Protestant Reformation, intolerance for religious deceivers “who fake miraculous signs” or who secretly entice defection “to serve other gods” was extreme: “the dreamers of dreams shall be put to death,” and it is incumbent on those who find them out to assist in their execution, whether “your brother … your son or daughter … the wife … your friend” (Deuteronomy 13:6, 15). This religious prescription expresses the primacy of large-scale corporate society over kin and tribal loyalties and is a hallmark of state-level and trans-state societies. Recall that “Islam” means “submission” of family and tribe to the larger community under God.

Thus, in the course of human history, moral religions requiring costly commitments made large-scale cooperation possible between genetic strangers, people who weren’t kin and kith, especially cooperation to compete in war. A quantitative cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies found that the larger the group, the more likely it culturally sanctioned deities who are directly concerned about human morality.
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Another survey of 60 societies reveals that males in warring societies endure the costliest religious rites (genital mutilation, scarification, etc.) that “ritually signal commitment and promote solidarity among males who must organize for warfare.”
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Recent surveys and experiments by my colleagues Jeremy Ginges, Ian Hansen, and Ara Norenzayan with Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza show that frequency of involvement in religious rituals predicts support for martyrdom missions(for Palestinians, suicide attacks; for settlers, support for the 1993 Hebron mosque massacre by a religious immigrant). This relation is independent of mere expressions of religious devotion (amount of prayer). Similar findings were obtained for representative samples of Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, and Indonesian Muslims. Greater ritual participation predicts both declared willingness to die for one’s god or gods and belief that other religions are responsible for problems in the world.
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To the extent that oppression of religious minorities and leaders results in broadcasting their costly commitments, then such oppression can help rather than hinder the growth of their message and following. Historical studies suggest that early Christianity spread to become the majority religion in the Roman Empire through displays of costly commitment, such as martyrdom and charity: for example, risking death by caring for non-Christians infected with plague.
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In the case of the civil rights movement, the mediatization of police brutality ultimately worked to the good, by sensitizing America’s political establishment and mainstream population to the oppressive plight of minorities.

So publicizing martyrdom actions is a good idea if you want the attraction of martyrdom to increase, but a bad idea if you want it to end.

ABRAHAM’S CHILDREN

The Takfiri call to spectacular acts of killing and self-sacrifice is a media-wise act of zealotry. Its proximate goal is to gain publicity and support for a global cause of God-given “justice.” It is but one extreme variant of what billions of people who follow the Abra-hamic religions consider to be one of the most moral acts in all of human existence: Abraham’s willingness to slit the throat of his most beloved son for a voice no one else could hear. For Christians, only God’s bloody sacrifice of
His
only son for the sake of someunrealized and perhaps unrealizable notion of “humanity” rivals Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice.

Almost two thousand years ago, the last of the Jewish Zealots fighting Rome pledged to kill one another rather than submit to Roman rule. Their young leader, Eleazer, reportedly rallied them with these words:

My loyal followers, long ago we resolved to serve neither the Romans nor anyone else but only God … now the time has come that bids us prove our determination by our deeds…. One thing only let us spare our store of food: it will bear witness when we are dead to the fact that we perished, not through want but because … we chose death rather than slavery….

Ever since primitive man began to think, the words of our ancestors and of the gods … have constantly impressed on us that life is the calamity for man, not death. Death gives freedom to our souls and lets them depart to their own pure home where they will know nothing of any calamity; but while they are confined within a mortal body and share its miseries, in strict truth they are dead…. And isn’t it absurd to run after the freedom of this life and grudge ourselves the freedom of eternity? … So let us deny our enemy their hoped-for pleasure at our expense, and without more ado leave them dumbfounded by our death and awed by our courage.
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