Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (60 page)

All the world’s cultures have religious myths that are attention-arresting because they are counterintuitive in the technical sense of violating intuitive ontology. Still, people in all cultures also
recognize
these beliefs to be counterintuitive, whether or not they are religious believers. In our society, Catholics and non-Catholics alike are undoubtedly aware of the difference between Christ’s body and ordinary wafers, or between Christ’s blood and ordinary wine. Catholics are no more crazed cannibals for their religious beliefs than are Muslims sick with sex when they invoke the pretty girls floating in paradise.

Reasoning and inference in the communication of many religious beliefs is cognitively designed never to come to closure, but to remain open-textured. To claim that one knows what Judaism or Christianity is truly about because one has read the Bible, or what Islam is about because one has read the Koran, is to believe there is an essence to religion and religious beliefs. But psychological science (and the history of exegesis) demonstrates that this claim is false.

Polls suggest that 30 to 40 percent of all religious Christians say they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God
⁴⁰
and about 50 percent of religious Muslims say they believe this of the Koran.
⁴¹
But deeper study shows that evangelicals and other self-styled “fundamentalists” who espouse belief in a stable text as literal words of God do not ascribe fixed meanings to them. Indeed, it is literally impossible for normal human minds to do so. As for “oneinfinite, omnipotent, and eternal God,” observed Thomas Hobbes, even the religiously enlightened “choose rather to confess He is incomprehensible and above their understanding than to define His nature by ‘spirit incorporeal,’ and then confess their definition to be unintelligible.”
⁴²

Instead of fixing meaning, studies show that people use the words to evoke many different ideas to give sense and significance to various everyday contexts.
⁴³
Consider a telling example of how religious beliefs are actually processed by human minds. Many argue that the Ten Commandments mean exactly the same thing today as they did when Moses received them on Mount Sinai.
⁴⁴
That’s hardly likely, given changes in social conditions and expectations over the last two and half millennia. Thus, failure to heed the commandments to honor the Sabbath or forswear blasphemy merited capital punishment in ancient Israel, but no one in our time and in our society is condemned to death for frolicking on the Sabbath or cursing their Maker.

One study by students in my class on evolutionary psychology compared how people interpret the Ten Commandments. The study found that only autistics—who take social cues, including what is said, strictly at face value—produced consistently recognizable paraphrases: for example, “Honor the Sabbath” might be rendered as “Honor Sunday (or Saturday).” In contrast, university students and members of Jewish and Christian Bible study groups produced highly variable interpretations that third parties from those groups could not consistently identify with the original commandments: “Honor the Sabbath” might be interpreted as “Don’t Work So Hard” or “Take Time for Your Family.”
⁴⁵
Despite people’s own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. (Unlike religious utterances, control phrases such as “two plus two equals four” or “the grass is green” do pass intact from mind to mind.)

Rather, religion is psychologically “catchy”—cognitively con-tagious—because its miraculous and supernatural elements grab attention, stick in memory, readily survive transmission from mind to mind, and so often win out in the cultural competition for ideas that the collectivity can use. Like other human productions that are easy to think and good to use, religious beliefs spontaneously reoccur across cultures in highly similar forms despite the fact that these forms are not evolved by natural selection or innate in our minds. Religion is no more an evolutionary adaptation as such than are other near universals like calendars, maps, or boats.

THE TRAGEDY OF COGNITION

Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary notions about how the world is, with all of its inescapable problems, to produce surprising but easy-to-remember supernatural worlds that treat existential problems, like fear of death and worry about deception and defection: for example, a world with beings that resemble us emotionally, intellectually, and physically except they can move through solid objects and be immortal, such as angels, ancestral spirits, and souls.

It’s not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people’s belief systems. Mickey Mouse and the talking teapot are minimally counterintuitive, but people don’t truly believe in them. An emotional component is needed for belief to take hold. If your emotions are involved, then that’s the time when you’re most likely to believe whatever the religion tells you should be believed. Religions stir up emotions through their rituals—swaying, singing, bowing in unison during group prayer and other ceremonial rituals, sometimes working people up to a state of physical arousal that can border on frenzy. And religions gain strength during the natural heightening of emotions that occurs in times of personal crisis, when the faithfuloften turn to shamans or priests. The most intense emotional crisis, for which religion can offer powerfully comforting answers, is when people face mortality.

“I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death,” wrote Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager doomed to die in a Nazi concentration camp. “I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too; I can feel the sufferings of millions; and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again…. I want to be useful or give pleasure to people around me who yet don’t really know me. I want to go on living after my death!”
⁴⁶

There’s no rational or empirically evident way to escape our eventual death. The tragedy of human cognition—of our ability to imagine the future—is that there is always before us the looming reality of our own demise, whereas the prospect of death for other creatures only arises in actual circumstances, in the here and now. Evolution has endowed all its sentient creatures with the mental and physical means to try to do everything in their power to avoid death, yet practically all humans soon come to understand through everyday reason and evidence that they can do nothing about it in the long run. Cross-cultural experiments and surveys indicate that people more readily accept the truth of narratives containing counterintuitive elements, including miracles, when they are reminded of death through images or descriptions,
⁴⁷
or when facing danger or insecurity, as with pleas of hope for God’s intervention during wartime.
⁴⁸

Fear of death, then, is an undercurrent of belief. The spirits of dead ancestors, ghosts, immortal deities, heaven and hell, the everlasting soul: The notion of spiritual existence after death is at the heart of almost every religion. Believing in God and the afterlife is a way to make sense of the brevity of our time on earth, to give meaning to this short existence.

COSTLY COMMITMENT

We are a cultural species, evolved to have faith in culture. Unlike other animals, humans rely heavily on acquiring behavior, beliefs, motivations, and strategies from others in their group. These psychological processes have been shaped by natural selection to focus our attention on those domains and those individuals most likely to possess fitness-enhancing information.
⁴⁹

Like our own distant ancestors, contemporary foragers routinely process plant foods to remove toxins, often with little or no conscious knowledge of what happens if you don’t process the food.
⁵⁰
Such foods often contain low dosages of toxins that cause little harm for months or even years, and don’t badly damage the food’s flavor. But these toxins can accumulate and eventually cause severe health problems and death. A naive learner who favors her own experience of eating the foods without performing the arduous and time-consuming processing will do less work in the short run but possibly die earlier in the long run.
Placing faith in traditional practices, without understanding why, can be adaptive.
Similarly, manufacturing complex technologies or medicines often involves a sequence of important steps, most of which cannot be skipped without producing something shoddy. We also have faith that any electronics we buy won’t blow up in our faces, and that the buildings we go in won’t collapse.

But here’s the rub: Because of language, it’s simple for people to lie. You just have to say one thing and do another. Politicians do it often enough; so do shysters and fraudsters like Bernie Madoff. With evolution of language, faith in culturally transmitted information became vulnerable to exploitation, particularly by successful and prestigious individuals who could now transmit practices or beliefs they themselves may not hold. Language makes deception easy and cheap. Before language, learners observed and inferred people’s underlying beliefs or desires by their behavior. Thosewishing to deceive would have to actually perform an action to transmit it.

Suckers, though, really aren’t born every minute—at least when it comes to most things that are important. It usually takes a lot of work, like cozying up to a victim, or special circumstances, like a distraction, to lure people into a con. That’s because humans are universally endowed with a couple of important ways of deciding whether or not to trust what others say and do.

The first way of figuring out who to trust is by
rational reasoning:
Consider if a person’s expressed beliefs, and the actions they imply, are logically in line with their other beliefs and empirically consistent with prior actions.
⁵¹
If the political candidate who expresses belief in the sanctity of the family also expresses belief in free love or turns out to be an adulterer, then you might conclude that the candidate’s belief in family sanctity is suspect. (There are various psychological “biases and heuristics” that impinge on academic notions of “pure rationality,”
⁵²
but these are orthogonal to the basic distinction between rational and religious beliefs.)

The second way to spot deception is by looking for
costly commitment:
See if the person expressing a belief is willing to commit himself to act on those beliefs. Studies show that young children usually refuse to taste a new food offered by a stranger unless the stranger eats it first.
⁵³
If the food were really bad or dangerous, then it would have been too costly to the stranger to eat it. Developmental studies of the cultural transmission of altruistic giving show that neither preaching nor exhortation to charitable giving are effective without opportunities to observe costly giving by the models.
⁵⁴
Similarly, studies of beliefs about the existence of entities like intangible germs and angels show that children only subscribe to those agents whom adults seem to endorse through their daily actions, and seem rather skeptical of unseen and supernatural agents that are unendorsed in our culture, like demons and mermaids.
⁵⁵
Interviews with a racially diverse sample of parents fromhighly religious Christian, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim families reveal that parents see religion holding their families together on a virtuous life course primarily because of costly investments in “practicing (and parenting) what you preach.”
⁵⁶

A person who is being courted usually knows that a suitor is really in love if the suitor courts with extravagant disregard for expense and time, and struggles against all comers and through thick and thin. That kind of “irrational” and costly display is hard to fake.
⁵⁷
It makes little sense unless the suitor is sincerely in love beyond reason, at least during courtship, because it’s unreasonable for anyone to believe that his current honey is the most attractive and understanding person in the world and that no other will ever come along to compare.

Preposterous beliefs fail the test of rational reasoning, which puts them at a disadvantage relative to mundane beliefs in terms of the learner’s own commitment to figuring out the social relevance and implications of a belief. But religious beliefs overcome this disadvantage through ritual acts of costly commitment. These extravagant acts are designed to convince learners to pay attention to what socially successful actors say and do, to try to understand the underlying meanings and motivations for that success, and if possible to emulate it.

Mundane beliefs can be undermined by reasoned argument and empirical evidence. Not so religious beliefs, which are rationally inscrutable and immune to falsification: You can’t possibly disprove that God is all-seeing or show why he’s not more likely to see just 537 things at once. Experiments suggest that once people sincerely commit to religious belief, attempts to undermine those beliefs through reason and evidence can stimulate believers to actually strengthen their beliefs.
⁵⁸
For the believer, a failed prophecy may just mean there is more learning to do and commitment to make.