Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (21 page)

In other walks of life, the stock analyst’s advice to buy stocks when they are low and sell when they are high capitalizes (in this case, literally) on regression effects, but we pay stock analysts to give us this advice. All doctors know most common illnesses spontaneously get better within about two weeks. If a shaman-doctor proposes some sort of ritual or ceremonial treatment in that time, even if ineffective, it can come in our minds to be connected to the improvement, just as Skinner’s pigeons associated their twirls with getting food. We often consult homeopaths as a last resort only after other medical treatments have failed. Homeopaths might owe to regression a greater proportion of what success they do have than they care to entertain, but if you have been “cured” by one you will not believe this. Finally, regression is also why, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, praising your children seldom works nearly as well as a rebuke.

THREE REASONS TO BET AGAINST EXPLOITATION

THE FOREGOING
gives us plenty of reasons to expect that cultural evolution can sculpt the arts, music, and religion to fit into the particular crevices of our brains. But I want to suggest that there are at least three good reasons to doubt that they are exploitative or hedonistic brain candy. One is they ask and receive far too much of us. Religions can command our loyalty even sometimes to the point of death; music can take control of our emotions; and art can consume our time and money. The “life-dinner” test of the Prologue tells us it is precisely those things that are costly in time and effort, or capable of causing us harm, that we would be expected to evolve defenses to—unless of course they somehow pay their way. A second reason is that—far from being frivolous or purely hedonistic pursuits—it should at least intrigue us that the arts and religions everywhere concern themselves with ideas, shapes, and emotions directly relevant to our lives. In all societies most art is about other people, romance, landscapes, animals, and social relations, except where this has been prohibited by religious beliefs. Music in all cultures expresses or elicits the range of our emotions, and our emotions exist to motivate our actions. Religions are about understanding an inscrutable and even terrifying world. They respond, as Hume in
The Natural History of Religion
says, to “the incessant hopes and fears that actuate the human mind.”

The third reason is that it would be surprising indeed had humans missed an opportunity to hitch our survival and well-being to cultural traits that can get our minds so hungrily to pursue aesthetic and psychological rewards. Precisely because the arts and religion can get us to spend the night in rapturous song, believe things that are false, and even put our money, well-being, or lives on the line, they become forces we could put to our own use, somehow to
enhance
our performance. Any human group that failed to acquire these cultural forms could find themselves in competition with others that had. Religion, art, and music become part of the environment of being human that others have to compete against. If they can somehow promote our survival and reproduction, it will behoove us to adopt them, whether or not they are true, frivolous, or hedonistic!

CONSOLATION, HOPE, AND OPTIMISM IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF

EVEN IF
we are prepared to accept one or all of these reasons for believing there is more to the arts and religion than mere exploitation and fun, we are left in the case of religion with the nagging worry that it is all a delusion or spell. Religions don’t really work as they say they do because nothing really is exchanged between you and the gods: miracles don’t happen, your prayers don’t bring immortality, the winds don’t change direction and blow the enemy’s ships away, and you are not granted protection against arrows or bullets. Even so, it might be important to take a step back from the perspective many of us have in our modern societies of religion as an irrational and non-scientific way of seeing the world. Today, we separate science from religion, but our ancestors would not have had sophisticated scientific knowledge, and what we think of today as a supernatural explanation might not have appeared to them all that different to a natural one.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of trying to imagine the perspective of someone alive early in our history as a species. Religion at that time, in its earliest forms, might have been something closer to the received causal understanding of the world rather than “religion” in the carefully articulated and restricted modern sense. It would not have been the rather awkward poor relation to “real” scientific understanding that it is today. It would not have been this poor relation because there wasn’t any richer relation. Instead, to prehistoric people, religion provided an explanatory framework for why things happened, and would have acted like a sophisticated model of the cosmos, giving a rationale for people to behave one way as opposed to another in an arbitrary, dangerous, capricious, and unpredictable world.

David Hume, again in
The Natural History of Religion
, put it this way:

The first ideas of religion arose, not from a contemplation of the work of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life… . Accordingly we find that all idolaters, having separated the provinces of their deities, have recourse to that invisible agent to whose authority they are immediately subjected, and whose province it is to superintend that course of actions in which they are at any time engaged. Juno is invoked at marriages; Lucina at births. Neptune receives the prayers of seamen; and Mars of warriors. The husbandman cultivates his field under the protection of Ceres; and the merchant acknowledges the authority of Mercury. Each natural event is supposed to be governed by some intelligent agent; and nothing prosperous or adverse can happen in life, which may not be the subject of peculiar prayers or thanksgivings.

Religion in prehistoric times would not even have had to be very good at providing solutions. We have seen, for instance, how little it takes for us to acquire false beliefs. Even today, the natural environment can brutally remind us of the impotence of our best medical treatments, engineering solutions, or resources for staying alive and prospering in the world. No matter how good one’s scientific knowledge, there is little we can do in the face of epidemics, tsunamis and earthquakes, floods, many cancers and inherited disorders, or even tomorrow’s weather. Nature taunts us to appeal to something stronger than our rational human best, and for animals with our brains this has often meant looking to supernatural powers.

The economist Rodney Stark maintains that when we are driven to such desperate circumstances, we often enter into straightforward exchanges with the gods, seeking to purchase the commodities only they can offer—such as better weather, more plentiful game, and immortality—in return for prayer, ritual, offerings, ceremonies, and sacrifices. There is often little or nothing to lose in exchanges with the gods and much potentially to be gained. This was of course Pascal’s famous wager for belief in God: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.” Because regression effects will often cause extreme situations to improve anyway, the wager will frequently appear to have worked. If you pray long enough for rain, it will eventually come, and if your god predicts an earthquake is coming, it eventually will. And the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey reminds us that “in a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.”

Now, imagine further that confronted with this harsh world, merely holding the view that things can be made better by belief, effort, or hard work—whether or not they can—improves your hope, motivation, or confidence, and eventually your performance or well-being. Thus, whether or not some god can actually control an outcome that matters to you, a belief that it can affects your motivation to make something happen. Robert Trivers has called this tendency to look out for reasons to be optimistic
perceptual defense
and
perceptual vigilance
. In his
Social Evolution
, Trivers points to the tendency for humans to “consciously see what they want to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive.”

The destructive Haitian earthquake of 2010 flattened the town of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, killing thousands and making more homeless. I watched on television as a journalist interviewed a man whose wife and children had been killed in the earthquake and his home destroyed. Not only had he survived that earthquake, he had also survived the ferocious hurricanes that swept the island in 2008 and 2009. From this he concluded that God had chosen to spare him: a delusion perhaps, but a useful one. He was full of hope and confidence for the future even while he stood among the ruins of his life. His belief was, as Julian Barnes might have put it, a “convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds.”

This gives us an answer to a question that bedevils the subject of religion. People often say that religions somehow satisfy our longings to understand the universe, or how we got here. But this merely raises the question of why we have minds that want to know the answers to such questions. Our minds, as the above example shows, might want answers because they give us hope or direction, and illusory or not, that hope is in itself useful. Once we have come up with a belief like that of the Haitian man, we can set it running like a piece of computer software in our subconscious minds, where it can intercept and disarm our worries and anxieties. This does not say why it is religious rather than some other form of belief that we acquire and make use of; but we have seen how our minds might be partial to constructing gods, and those gods might provide as useful an explanation for what happens in the world as anything else.

It is easy to adopt a supercilious tone about the Haitian man’s views, but people like him in our past will probably have produced more children than those of us who disconsolately withdrew from life, and genes that granted a sunny disposition would have spread. The alternative of facing the stark truth head-on can, for many people, be debilitating. Psychologists have discovered that people susceptible to depression often have more accurate perceptions of the world than non-depressives. When they say they have no friends, nobody likes them, they are hopeless at their job, or have no future, they are often more right than not. No wonder they are depressed!

RELIGION AND GROUP CONFLICT

THE EVOLUTIONARY
psychologist David Sloan Wilson gives a vivid example of false beliefs conferring benefits when people act together in groups. He uses the language of genes but it is just as readily thought of as a cultural example in which an idea rather than a gene spreads through a population by people copying one another for what they perceive to be some advantages. In his article on “Species of Thought,” Sloan Wilson imagines a tribal world in which

A mutant gene arises that causes its bearer sincerely to believe certain distorted versions of reality. For example, the mutant might believe that his enemies are by nature despicable people when in fact they are by nature just like him [and thus think of him as despicable] and are enemies merely because they compete for limiting resources. Nevertheless, fear and hatred of despicable people is more motivating than accurate perception that one’s enemies are the same as oneself. The mutant is a more successful competitor than his truthful rivals and the mutant gene spreads through the population.

Sloan Wilson is, of course, describing the familiar beliefs that power xenophobia, racism, bigotry, and parochialism, and the violence that often attends those views. In his example, the beliefs take hold because they promote survival, not because they are true. Odious as we might find them, once again we have to imagine a world in which this kind of belief becomes part of the environment that others have to adapt to. Up against a group in battle who consider you despicable, it might be useful for you to acquire your own brand of motivational bigotry.

Many people think that religions promote group conflict by means similar to those that Sloan Wilson imagines here. Indeed they might, and it is important to see that in Sloan Wilson’s example, any tendency to adopt religious or other precepts that make you and your group more formidable foes can bring real Darwinian advantages to those who hold them. Recall that even dispositions that put your life at risk can nevertheless bring you benefits if enough people around you share that disposition. It is then easy for a fledgling tradition of false beliefs to grow as it acquires a collection of different beliefs that get woven together, and all of which motivate people to action. Tribe A on this side of the valley says that Tribe B treats their women badly, and that their greed is a threat to Tribe A’s territories. The first belief acts as a justification to steal their women in battle (indeed, it would be to do them a favor). The second is a justification to eradicate the others owing to the threat of their greed.

Once such a story catches on, it can become self-promoting, and people will follow it without even knowing why. There is an anecdote about group beliefs in monkeys that is probably apocryphal, but so instructive it bears repeating. A group of monkeys is in a room with a banana tethered from the ceiling. They can reach the banana by hopping up on a box. But whenever one of them does this, they are all sprayed with water. Monkeys don’t like water because in their natural environment, ponds, lakes, and rivers often hide crocodiles and other predators. So, after a while, they all avoid hopping up on the box and even restrain each other from doing so. Then a monkey is removed and replaced by a new monkey. It is naive so it climbs up on the box to get the banana. The others quickly pull it down and eventually it too stops trying to get the banana. One by one the monkeys get replaced this way, and one by one the naive ones are trained by the others not to jump up on the box, until none of the original monkeys remains. At this point not one of the monkeys knows why, but they all avoid climbing the box to get the banana. As far as they know, they have always behaved that way.