Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (22 page)

The success of religion at promoting coordinated action might be one of the chief reasons why we welcome it into our ranks rather than try to chase it away. The uncomfortable truth of natural selection and cultural evolution is that dispositions—including religious ones—that serve individuals will be favored. On the other hand, this does not mean that all religious beliefs serve us. A religiously motivated suicide bomber might indeed be a case of religion taking over someone’s mind for the purpose of
meme-meme
warfare. The suicide bomber’s religious belief is only too happy to commit suicide—along with the suicide bomber’s genes—if it can kill copies of competing ideas in other people. Suicide can advance memes as well as genes. But examples like this shouldn’t make us think that all of religion is a mind virus. The life-dinner principle proposes we will evolve to evade memes that bring us harm, but it is not perfect: some of us will get infected despite our desperate attempts to evade these brain parasites.

In this light there is a suggestion that many suicide bombers come from the ranks of disaffected young men with little future, and this might make them more malleable or vulnerable. But on the other hand, as the life-dinner princple would expect, suicide bombers are rare, given the numbers we might expect if we had a psychology like that of a colony of ants or bees in a hive. They happily and enthusiastically stream out in their thousands in suicidal charges to save their queen. We should also not rule out the possibility that by their actions suicide bombers bring great honor to their families, and so in an obscene sense their actions can be seen through the lens of kin selection, or nepotism. Saddam Hussein is reported to have paid widows and mothers of successful Palestinian suicide bombers up to $25,000 each. The
CBS Evening News
quoted Mahmoud Safi, leader of a pro-Iraqi Palestinian group, the Arab Liberation Front, as acknowledging that the support payments for relatives make it easier for some potential bombers to make up their minds: self-sacrifice can pay in more ways than one, especially if it promotes copies of your genes in your relatives.

Here is a passage from the Gospel according to Matthew (Matthew 12:47–50) that draws on the psychology of kin selection. Someone in a crowd gathered around Jesus says to him:

“Behold your mother and your brethren stand without, seeking you.” Jesus replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” Then he pointed to his disciples and said, “Look, these are my mother and brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

Imagine if you were a believer the excitement these words would cause in you—you could become Jesus’ mother, brother, or sister simply by acting out God’s will. In Chapter 2, we saw how an altruistic disposition toward other members of your group can arise as a special and limited form of nepotism, in which we recognize we are related to someone at the altruism locus, if not on our other genes. Well, here Jesus is telling you that your relatedness is about to get much higher. If you believe his words, you might experience the same emotions toward Jesus and his religion as you do toward a member of your own family. It is a ploy that religions use widely, often referring to God, and even his priestly representatives on Earth, as “Father.” We in turn are often referred to as his children, making us all brothers and sisters.

RELIGION AS A WAY TO ADVERTISE COMMITMENT

THE IMPORTANCE
of the cultural survival vehicle in our history means that groups will want to know whom they can and cannot trust within their ranks, and it turns out that religious beliefs might be one of the best ways to advertise your commitment to your group. To understand why, we need to take a detour into a different arena: the arena of animal sexual displays. The connection might not be immediately apparent, but it will emerge once we have understood this puzzling topic. Darwin was troubled by the bizarre and seemingly useless but costly displays and behaviors of many animals in their attempts to acquire mates. Peacocks, for instance, produce spectacularly ornate and beautiful tails, but such tails are so big they almost prevent the peacocks from flying, they make them more vulnerable to being attacked by a predator, and they provide useful homes for disease-carrying flies and ticks. What bothered Darwin was that his theory of natural selection was an explanation for the survival of the fittest. How could his theory be true if such a thing as a peacock’s tail can evolve?

Darwin’s theory of
sexual selection
was an attempt to answer this question. Like the arts and religion, traits such as a peacock’s tail seem to lack any function other than to please our senses or occupy our minds. And indeed, it was by pleasing our senses that Darwin thought these costly traits could evolve. Darwin’s insight was that females would find males with long tails, bright colors, or melodic songs more attractive even if these traits made them less fit. In this way, the costly or sexually selected trait would more than pay its way because males with the best displays would get the most matings. You might die younger because your bright colors give you away to some predator, but you will still leave more offspring than someone who lacks your extravagant display, and it is leaving offspring that counts in the sweepstakes of natural selection.

Darwin was right; these gaudy ornaments, songs, and other displays do attract females. But there was a problem. Why should a peahen have these particular aesthetic tastes? Why should she prefer a peacock with a trait that slows him down and can even harm him? Why not just go for the more ordinary fellow? He might be dull, but at least he will survive, and probably stay at home and help you look after the children. A convincing answer to that question wouldn’t be proposed until the 1970s, when the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi brilliantly conceived of a peacock’s elaborate tail and other ornaments or displays as a form of showing off, or what Zahavi called
handicaps
. Zahavi said that the peacock uses his large tail to advertise to the peahens that his genes are of such quality he can afford to drag his long, ungainly, and costly tail around behind him and still survive. Like a runner carrying extra weight in a foot race and yet still winning, handicapping yourself is the key to the message of your genetic worth. Less genetically fit peacocks could perhaps make a large tail, but could not withstand such a drain on their energy and resources. Natural selection favors males that can make ever more extreme ornaments because this is a way of showing the females who is wheat and who is mere chaff.

The females’ aesthetic preferences now evolve for a good reason: the “medium is the message” in Marshall McLuhan’s memorable phrase. Here the medium is a wasteful display whose message is, “you can believe me.” It is a symbol of something greater lurking underneath, and this is why the peahens prefer it. The sociologist Thorstein Veblen anticipated this idea seventy-five years before in his
Theory of the Leisure Class
. Veblen made the bold claim that rich people throughout history have advertised their wealth through acts of what he called
conspicuous consumption
—ostentatious and extravagant displays that genuinely reveal how much they have by showing how much they can afford to throw away on otherwise useless objects. As with the peacock’s tail, the waste allows us a way of glimpsing what must lie behind the flamboyance. One of Veblen’s favorite examples was the bizarre behavior of the so-called potlatch Native American tribes of the American Pacific Northwest. These tribes would invite a neighboring tribe—potential adversaries—to a lavish feast. When their guests had finished and were preparing to return to their village, the hosts would erect a bonfire and throw blankets, food, and even canoes on to it. Was this superstition, an offering to a god, or perhaps disgust at the thought their guests carried lice or some infectious disease that needed to be eradicated? No. To Veblen it was their way of showing, or perhaps warning, their neighbors just how much they had in reserve by showing how much they could afford to lose.

Veblen’s and Zahavi’s ideas tell us something startling: some traits and behaviors evolve precisely because they are reckless and wasteful, and the more reckless and wasteful they are, the more they tell us something believable about the owner. This is why a $25,000 wristwatch is better than a $10 one, despite both keeping equally good time, or a Ferrari better than a Ford even if you only need to get to the nearest shop. It is why larger diamonds make better engagement rings, why silver is better than silverplating, why turning your back on your adversary is so compelling, and why fifty pairs of shoes are better than the one pair you need to protect your feet. Famously, in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, it is the size of Mr. Darcy’s house and not his looks or personality that finally takes Elizabeth’s breath away, helping to convince her to marry him. No one
needs
a home with hundreds of rooms, but that is not the point. It is precisely because Mr. Darcy does not need the rooms that his house advertises he has wealth to burn.

We are now in a position to see why religious belief can be a powerful indicator of someone’s commitment. Your religion is not just a marker of group membership, such as your language might be. Faith is about believing things that by all known rules cannot possibly be true or verified, and could even get you killed. It is about acting without evidence, participating in its rituals, fasting (a form of starvation), memorizing scripture, scarification, crucifixion, and paying of tithes. Veblen and Zahavi’s insights tell us that it is the utter recklessness and costliness of adhering to religious beliefs that makes them a believable way of advertising your commitment to a group, and thereby of attracting altruism from others (you could try to demonstrate your commitment to your group by, for example, helping to build a boat, but its usefulness means your effort might be seen as partly for your own gain). Now, if you are the sort of person who can hold false beliefs, or have an ability to act on blind faith, you are probably also the sort of person who could be persuaded of the moral superiority of your group over the one next door. When group conflict is never very far away, religious believers become the kind of people others like to have around.

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.