Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (75 page)

So people stay afraid, keep believing that things have never been worse — and keep clinging to the comfort of religious ideas.

When religious ideas help people recognize their shared humanity, conquer their fears, and enlarge the circle of those they love and trust (as they often do), such ideas are part of the moral solution in the modern world. But when religious ideas reinforce ancient fears and hatreds, drawing lines and narrowing the circle of love and trust (as they often do), those ideas are part of the moral problem.

Framing the question right — why do people (mostly) behave so well?

Why are people so darn moral?

That’s not a question you hear every day. Try asking that out loud at your next family gathering and you’ll probably get incredulous laughter. Everyone “knows” how depraved people are and how much worse things are getting by the day. To say otherwise seems completely daft.

But a moment’s thought and a few statistics say otherwise.

Putting good and bad behavior in perspective

Most people behave pretty well most of the time. Immoral behavior is the exception, not the rule. Acts of cruelty and unfairness are noticed much more than kind or neutral acts. I tend to remember the three jerks who cut me off on the freeway on my way to work , but who ever notices the 10,000 people who could have done so, but didn’t?

Likewise, the news media reliably gather up and report on every murder, rape, and robbery in a given day, which gives the false impression that murder, rape, and robbery are happening constantly pretty much everywhere. In fact, the opposite is true — these things are newsworthy precisely
because
they are rare.
The vast majority of the acts most people perform in a given day aren’t immoral in the least.

In addition to less bad stuff going on, there’s more good. The World Giving Index shows that the world is becoming a more charitable place, with steady annual increases in volunteering time and the willingness to help a stranger.

One recent study focused on the wide gap between how ethical people are and how unethical people
think
they are. One group took a math test in which they could easily cheat. Another group watched on tape, then were asked to predict whether they themselves would cheat in the same circumstances. Actual cheating was much less common than predicted. Researchers think that’s because emotions are stronger when you’re experiencing an ethical dilemma than when you’re just thinking about it, and past research shows that emotions actually
help
people make the right moral decisions — the opposite of what is commonly thought.

No, the world isn’t a perfect place, and it never will be. But a lot can be gained in the quality of human life by recognizing that it’s much better, and people are much better, than you or I often think.

Playing nice

A lot of studies confirm our stronger tendency toward moral behavior. But isolating the variables out in the real world can be difficult. As a result, many researchers have been turning to a world where variables are under greater control — the world of video and online gaming.

For those who think human culture is losing its moral grip, these games are a convenient target. When they aren’t accused of sucking the brains out of children, video and online games are accused of greasing the slippery slope that’s plunging humanity into an abyss of immorality. After the Columbine High School killers were found to have played the violent video game Doom, many felt the case was closed. Violence in fantasy became violence in real life, they said — even though many experts consider such game play to be an expression of violent tendencies, or even a helpful release, not the cause.

And even though some games and situations do make me wonder about the human species, research in moral decision making using gaming scenarios is reinforcing the conclusion that people are actually surprisingly moral — even in situations you’d think would surely go the other way.

One such study looked at an online role-playing game called Pardus — a virtual life game in which hundreds of thousands of people assume other identities and interact in a completely artificial environment. Spaceships move through a universe perpetually at war, while players forge alliances, trade, battle, and build with other players. Almost no rules are in place to guide behavior in the game. Seems like a perfect place for human nature to go berserk — survival of the fittest in its usual, misunderstood meaning.

But when the researchers tracked the behavior of 400,000 players in the game, assessing millions of individual human interactions by those players, they found that only 2 percent of all actions were aggressive in any way. Most players (who didn’t know they were being watched) most of the time behaved in a way the researchers described as social and compassionate — even without specified rules. One researcher noted that far from anarchy, the result is participants organizing themselves as a social group with good intentions.

Even in a virtual world without consequences or rules in which individuals with masked identities
travel around in armed spaceships,
people tend more often than not to behave pretty well. So maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised that the real world — complete with social approval and disapproval, rules and consequences, and with far fewer starfighters — functions even better. And sure enough, similar studies in the workplace, in family settings, and in communities of various sizes and types have shown the same result — though people tend to mostly notice the bad exceptions, most people most of the time behave well.

Suddenly the whole moral question is a lot less frantic. Instead of seeking a way to somehow become moral, you’re left with the interesting but less urgent question of why most people most of the time already
are
moral, with and without religion — and the collective desire to work on the times they aren’t.

Discovering “moral molecules” and mirrors in your head

Science has only recently begun to really plumb the depths of the incredible three-pound blob of jelly that is the human brain. And one of the things research is uncovering is the complex, evolved mechanism humans have that reinforces their morality.

The role that the oxytocin molecule plays in sexual attraction and arousal has been known for a while, as well as its role in maternal feelings and bonding between people. But recent studies have also shown an important connection between oxytocin and moral behavior. When oxytocin is released, trust goes up and fear recedes. Individuals are more likely to feel empathy for others and therefore more likely to behave morally towards them. Subjects were 80 percent more likely to make generous decisions in simulated scenarios after getting a nasal injection of oxytocin. And on the flipside, it turns out psychopaths are bad at producing oxytocin. So it makes sense that Paul Zak, one of the top researchers in this area, calls oxytocin “the moral molecule.”

A moral molecule would be a big hit with natural selection, of course, because fear and mistrust prevent societies from flourishing, whereas cooperation, empathy, and trust help them survive and thrive.

Okay, I’ve saved my favorite for last: the mirror neuron.

In your head are some neurons that fire whenever you do something. Pick up a marble, yawn, or slam your shin into a trailer hitch, and these neurons get busy. Scientists have known this for a long time.

But in the past decade or so, they’ve discovered that these same neurons also fire when you see someone
else
picking up a marble, yawning, or slamming a shin. They are the reason you wince when you see a car door slam on somebody else’s fingers, and yawn when someone else yawns. They’re called
mirror neurons,
and they have the powerful capacity to make you feel, quite directly, what somebody else is feeling.

You probably see where I’m going with this. The implications are huge. Mirror neurons make people vulnerable to the experiences and feelings of others. They go beyond sympathy (the concern for someone else’s well-being) to empathy — the ability to feel what someone else is feeling.

If Bill Clinton could really “feel your pain” like he said he did, his mirror neurons were helping him do that.

So why did mirror neurons evolve? Like any evolutionary “why” question, it helps to think about what the absence of the feature would have meant. Mirror neurons make teaching and learning much easier, for one. All primates have them, so it turns out monkey see, monkey do is a matter of hardware, not just software. When Cave-Kid saw Mom or Dad starting a fire, or picking berries, or spearing dinner on the hoof, mirror neurons would have made it easier to duplicate the task. Populations without this cool adaptive anomaly would have had a selective disadvantage, resulting in fewer survivors over time, and
voilà!
Mirror neurons became the norm.

Then there’s the selective advantage of being good. Without the hard-wired ability to feel what someone else feels, individuals really could be islands unto themselves, indifferent to each other’s pain and suffering. Picture one population of mutually indifferent, self-centered creatures, and another in which empathy is the norm. Which population is going to survive to pass on its genes?

The most powerful human moral concept is the Reciprocity Principle: Treat others as you would like to be treated. Christians may recognize their Golden Rule in that, but its origin is much older and its presence much more universal than a single religion or philosophy (see the nearby sidebar). It’s the heart of human morality, something people generally figure out on their own by age six. And mirror neurons are a continuous, helpful nudge.

Little effort is needed to see the root of empathy, sympathy, compassion, conscience, cooperation, guilt, and a whole lot of other useful tendencies in this remarkable neural system. It’s just one more reason humanity is still here after all these years.

Recognizing the changing nature of morality

I often hear that religion and God are necessary because they offer an unchanging moral code. It sounds very reassuring. But a moment’s reflection shows that an unchanging moral code is the last thing we want or need.

Most people wouldn’t want to live in a world governed by the moral norms of Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures — say about 3,500 years ago. Women were considered the property of their husbands. Slavery was accepted as the rightful dominance of the strong over the weak. It was considered a holy duty to stone gays, fortune tellers, and disobedient children to death. This is the period in which the Old Testament was written, in which each of these actions was endorsed as morally correct. But finding a living Christian or Jew who thinks these things are morally correct now is nearly impossible. Our moral understanding, thankfully, has changed.

The Pharisees in the New Testament apparently tried to evolve their morality a bit, but Jesus seemed to be irritated by that, scolding them for no longer observing the instruction to kill disobedient children (Mark 7:9–13). And women still had a miserable time of it, ordered to “obey their husbands as gods.” Again, most modern believers have now moved past that Bronze Age morality.

In Europe in the Middle Ages, guilt was decided not by evidence but by trials of fire, water, and combat. Fortunately the ethics of fairness have changed since then. It was also considered a pressing moral duty to identify and burn witches. Not so much today (except in some parts of Africa — see
Chapter 14
for a description of atheists working to protect women accused of witchcraft in Ghana).

Humanity finds its way forward, changing moral norms over time. Slavery ended in the United States and United Kingdom in the 19th century, a change in moral norms driven by courageous atheists, as well as theists who in many cases had to find the moral courage to ignore their own scriptures. Women, whose inequality was considered morally neutral or even good for most of history, were finally granted the vote and other rights in several countries by the early 20th century.

But there was more progress to be made. Despite many moral improvements in the United States, interracial marriage was still illegal in many states until 1967, and a woman couldn’t get contraception without her husband’s permission — both “moral” positions that have since changed for the better.

This list could go on, but you get the idea.

Don’t be seduced by the idea that unchanging moral norms would be good. Such norms do change over time, and despite dire warnings of moral chaos, most people of all beliefs eventually agree that the changes in moral understanding I’ve listed here have been big improvements. When someone feels a change isn’t for the best, it’s time to have a discussion. But wishing away the ability to change the human mind about morality isn’t good for anyone.