Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (58 page)

—DAVID HUME,
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RELIGION
, 1757

We—with God’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it…. Almighty God says: “Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter?” But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place … for God hath power over all things.

—OSAMA BIN LADEN, “FATWA URGING JIHAD AGAINST

AMERICANS,” 1998

E
ver since Edward Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
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written in Britain as the American Republic was born, scientists and secularly minded scholars have been predicting the ultimate demise of religion. But in many places around the globe, religious fervor is increasing. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, new religious movements (NRMs) continued to arise at a furious pace—perhaps at the rate of two or three per day.
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There are now more than 2 billion self-proclaimed Christians (about one third of humanity), a quarter of whom are Pentecostals or Charismatics (people who stay in mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches but have adopted Pentecostal practices like healings, speaking in tongues, casting out demons, and laying hands upon the sick). The Winner’s Chapel, a Pentecostal church that celebrates newfound market wealth and success, is less than twenty years old but already has tens of thousands of members in thirty-two African countries. During the same period, the Falun Gong, a Buddhist offshoot, has grown to over 100 million adherents in East Asia, and Islamic revivalist movements have spread across the Muslim world.

The United States—the world’s most economically powerful and scientifically advanced society—is also one of the world’s most professedly religious societies. Evangelical Christians and fundamentalists include about 25 percent of Americans, and together with charismatics constitute about 40 percent of the American population. According to a June 2008 Pew poll, more than 90 percent believe in God or a universal spirit, including one in five of those who call themselves atheists. More than half of Americans surveyed pray at least once a day, but about three quarters of religious believers in America think that there is more than one way to interpret religious teachings and that other religions can also lead to eternal salvation.
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Even in France, the most secular of societies, two thirds of the population believe in “a spirit, god or life force.”
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An underlying reason for religion’s endurance is that sciencetreats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well suited to deal with people’s existential anxieties—death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness, or longing for love or justice. Religion thrives because it addresses people’s yearnings and society’s moral needs.

Although science may never replace religion, science can help us understand how religions are structured in individual minds (brains) and across societies (cultures) and also, in a strictly material sense, why religious belief endures. Religion is neither a naturally selected adaptation of our species nor innate in us. All of its cognitive and social components are universally found in various mundane thoughts and activities. Nevertheless, since the Upper Paleolithic, several naturally selected elements of human cognition have tended to converge in the normal course of social interaction to produce a near-universal family of phenomena that most people recognize as religion. Roughly, religion exploits ordinary cognitive processes to passionately display costly commitment to supernatural agents that are invoked to deal with otherwise unsolvable existential problems, such as death and deception.

EVOLUTIONARY ENIGMAS

The origin of large-scale cooperative societies is an evolutionary problem because people frequently cooperate with genetic strangers of unknown reputation whom they will never meet again, and whose cheating, spying, lying, and defection cannot be monitored and controlled.
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Kinship cannot drive cooperation among genetic strangers, although “imagined kinship”—a cultural manipulation of kin psychology and terminology (“brotherhood,” “motherland,” etc.)—can be a potent psychological mobilizer of groups formed through other means.
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Difficulty inmaintaining trust based on accurate information about reputation is progressively less reliable the larger the group (reliability of information and mutual trust for an
n
-person group tends to decline as a function of 1/n).
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Moreover, “Watch my back and I’ll watch yours,” and other sensible reciprocity strategies in politics and economics fail to account for cooperation with people you only meet once:
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like aiding a stranger who asks for directions or a dollar for food, taking the hand of a lost child or a disabled person to cross the street, leaving a tip at a roadside restaurant you’ll never visit again, or risking life and limb to save someone you don’t know.

Studies show that people are usually quite suspicious of strangers who belong to an entirely different social milieu or cultural group and don’t even bother to find out about their reputation or the history of their past transactions. The default assumption is usually zero-sum: anything I do for the other person is likely to be bad for me.
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But other studies show that invoking God or other supernatural concepts leads to reduced cheating and greater generosity between anonymous strangers.
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The key to the difference in behavior seems to be belief that there’s a God watching over to make sure everyone stays honest.
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Thus, as societies grow, it can be harder to enforce moral and altruistic norms, and to punish free-riders on the public good. This in turn can make such societies less cohesive and less able to compete with other expanding societies. Moral deities define the sacred boundaries of societies and the taboos you can’t transgress. If you really believe in these moral gods, then the problem of punishment becomes easier, as you punish yourself for misbehavior. Consider the power of taking an oath before God among the Pashtun as a way of ensuring that a potential liar or thief would think twice before acting for fear that Big Brother would always know what went on and exact retribution, even if no other person on earth could possibly spot the transgression:

[B]ecause the role of honor is so serious … particularly because oaths required of men who are accused of dishonorable acts (such as theft) come from potentially dubious sources, there are a host of supernatural consequences that will rain down upon the perjurer should a man lie. These include becoming poor, having your opinions disregarded, having your body become pale and ugly, seeing your land and livestock lose their productivity, as well as endangering the life of your children.
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But the natural origin of gods and religious traditions is itself an evolutionary puzzle because all religions require costly commitment to beliefs that violate basic tenets of rational inference and empirical knowledge necessary for navigating the world: like the belief in sentient but bodiless beings or beings with bodies that defy gravity and can pass through solid walls.
¹³
In all religions, there are bodiless but sentient souls and spirits that act intentionally though not in ways empirically verifiable or logically understandable. For the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, true faith can only be motivated by “a gigantic passion” to commit to the “absurd.” Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice more than his own life—that of his only and beloved son—is exemplary: “For love of God is … incommensurable with the whole of reality … there could be no question of human calculation.”
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Hundreds of millions of people across the planet celebrate Abraham’s actions as noble and heroic, rather than murderous, evil, or insane.

Imagine creatures who consistently believed that the dead live on and the weak are advantaged over the strong, or that you can arbitrarily suspend the known physical and biological laws of the universe with a prayer. If people literally applied such prescriptions to factual navigation of everyday life they likely would be either dead or in the hereafter in short order—too short for most individuals to reproduce and the species to survive. The trick is in knowing how and when to suspend factual belief without countermandingthe facts and compromising survival. But why take the risk of neglecting the facts at all, even in exceptional circumstances?

Religious practice is costly in terms of cognitive effort (maintaining both rational and nonrational networks of beliefs) as well as material sacrifice (ranging from human sacrifice to prayer time) and emotional expenditure (inciting fears and hopes). A review of anthropological literature on religious offerings concludes: “Sacrifice is giving something up at a cost…. ‘Afford it or not,’ the attitude seems to be.”
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Indeed, what could be the calculated gain from:

Years of toil to build gigantic structures that house only dead bones (Egyptian, Mesoamerican, and Cambodian pyramids).

Giving up one’s sheep (Hebrews) or camels (Bedouin) or cows (Nuer of Sudan) or chickens (Highland Maya) or pigs (Melanesian tribes, Ancient Greeks), or buffaloes (South Indian tribes).

Dispatching wives when their husbands die (Hindus, Inca, Solomon Islanders).

Slaying one’s own healthy and desired offspring (the firstborn of Phoenicia and Carthage, Inca and postclassical Maya boys and girls, children of South India’s tribal Lambadi).

Chopping off a finger for dead warriors or relatives (Dani of New Guinea, Crow and other American Plains Indians).

Burning your house and all other possessions for a family member drowned, crushed by a tree, or killed by a tiger (Nâga tribes of Assam).

Knocking out one’s own teeth (Australian aboriginals).

Making elaborate but evanescent sand designs (Navajo, tribes of Central Australia).

Be willing to sacrifice one’s life to keep Fridays (Muslims) or Saturdays (Jews) or Sundays (Christians) holy.

As billionaire Bill Gates pithily put it, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
¹⁶

Evolution can’t account for religion simply as a biological adaptation, naturally selected for some ancestral task that is “hard-wired” into us. Try to come up with an adaptive logic that generates a unitary explanation for all of the strange thoughts and practices above, or for just stopping whatever you’re doing to murmur often incomprehensible words while gesticulating several times a day. And individual devotion to religion is quite variable, much wider than for other behaviors that likely did evolve as adaptations: the ability to walk, to see, to think about other people thinking, or to imagine imaginary worlds that may or may not come to be. There’s no gene for the complex of beliefs and behaviors that make up religion any more than there’s a gene for science; nor is there likely any genetic complex with lawlike or systematic qualities that is responsible for most religious belief or behavior.
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Research with my colleague Joe Henrich, an anthropologist and behavioral economist, suggests that the two evolutionary enigmas, large-scale cooperation and costly religion, have resolved one another through a process of cultural coevolution.
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This coevolution centers on the concept of costly communal commitment to absurd, counterintuitive ideas that have no consistent logical or empirical connection to everyday reality.

BORN TO BELIEVE: THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL

Humans are cause-seeking, purpose-forming, storytelling animals. As the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume famously noted, we find patterns in nature and look for the “hidden springs and principles” that bring those patterns to life and let us navigate them.
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We can’t help doing this. Nature made us so.

Our mental facility for confabulation is strikingly evident in experiments with split-brain patients, where the left hemisphere (which controls language and the right hand) is physically cut off from the right hemisphere (which controls the left hand).
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In one classic study, images were selectively presented to each hemisphere: The left was shown a chicken claw, the right a snow scene. Patients were presented with an array of objects and asked to choose an object “associated” with the image they were shown. A representative answer was that of a patient who chose a snow shovel with his left hand and a chicken with the right. Asked why he chose these items, “he” (that is, the left hemisphere story spinner) said: “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need the shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Michael Gazzaniga, who carried out the experiment, observes, “The left brain weaves its story in order to convince itself and you that it is in full control.”