The Faith Instinct (29 page)

Historians and political scientists tend to see religions as simply one component of culture. But they are much more than that. They knit societies together, and with particular power when they overlap with other integrative forces such as ethnicity and language. Religions may in fact be essential for social cohesion. No society yet known has lasted long without a religion. The Soviet Union endured a mere 70 years. To be sure, it had other problems, but the fact remains that it tried to extirpate religion, it failed to do so, and the Orthodox rite is once again Russia’s official faith.

Religion plays a vital role in societies old and new because, as discussed in the three chapters ahead, it shapes morality and trust and the institutions that depend on them, such as trade and commerce; it strongly influences reproductive behavior and demographic growth rates; and it is intimately involved in many aspects of a society’s severest test, that of warfare.

MAX WEBER
²²⁹

JOHN LOOKE,
A Letter Concerning Toleration,
1689

 

 

 

T
he philosopher John Locke, in common with many of his day, believed religion was integral to the working of society. Society might allow different Christian sects to exist but atheists, he wrote in his
Letter Concerning Toleration,
could not be tolerated: their oaths and promises were worthless because without fear of divine punishment they had no reason to keep them.

Locke’s conception of the social fabric—that people trust one another because they know others will keep their promises from fear of divine punishment—has been held throughout history and is still widely believed today. The idea is not without basis. The extent to which people observe moral constraints is heavily influenced by religion. So too is the level of trust in a society, which in turn affects the costs of transactions and the operation of an economy. Because religion shapes the quality of the social fabric, it may have a greater influence than commonly acknowledged on modern economies.

In ancient and medieval societies, religion pervaded almost every action, in particular the exchange of goods and services. In modern states, secul
ar institutions have taken over many of religion’s roles, masking the central place it held in social life until recent times. Yet religion retains, even in modern economies, an essential role in establishing the trust on which all economic transactions ultimately depend.

In the economies of primitive societies, which lacked modern institutions for regulation and enforcement, religion played a central part in supporting trade and commerce. One of the most remarkable instances of religion undergirding an economy was the Kula exchange system of the Trobriands, part of the Melanesian islands that lie off the east coast of Papua New Guinea.

The Kula consisted of two parallel transactions, one ceremonial and the other commercial. The first was based on gifts of immense prestige but no commercial value or utility, exchanged between partners in far distant islands who were bound in a lifetime bond of giving and receiving ceremonial gifts. The meetings in which the gifts were exchanged also served as the occasion for bartering commercial goods between the islands. Presumably the high standards of honor and obligation in ceremonial exchange also governed the commercial exchange since the same partners were involved in both.

The Kula, a remarkably elaborate institution for a primitive society, involved thousands of individuals and fleets of up to 80
sailing canoes which traversed islands hundreds of miles apart and separated by dan
gerous seas.
²³⁰

The ceremonial gifts of the Kula were of two kinds. One was armbands made from a species of large shellfish; the other was necklaces, crafted from disks of red shell. The gifts were traded in opposite directions around the ring of participating islands, with the necklaces going clockwise and the armbands counterclockwise.

The armbands and necklaces were so precious and unique that each had its own name. Possession of one conferred enormous prestige on the owner. But the gifts could not be kept. The recipient of a famous armband had to regift it after a few weeks or months to his exchange partner in the next island counterclockwise in the ring. In return, he would in due course receive a necklace, judged by his partner to be of equal value.

A gift might take 2 to 10 years to make the full circuit of islands in the Kula ring. Though the same gift reappeared several times in a person’s lifetime, the participants on each island had little notion of how the whole system worked. “Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organized, social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications,” writes Malinowski, the anthropologist who
has provided the most detailed account of the Kula.
²³¹
(It could of course be the case that many intelligent Americans and Europeans have no clear idea of the complex institutions that underpin their own economies.)

The Kula armbands and necklaces were gifts, so no haggling was allowed. Everyone was on his honor to give in due course a gift of equal value for one received. The bartering channel was kept entirely separate in people’s minds, even though the fleets that brought the ceremonial gifts also carried items of trade. These included such essentials of Melanesian life as cassowary and parrot feathers, obsidian, line sand for polishing ax blades, red ochre, boars’ tusks, wooden dishes, combs, pots, mussel shells and ebony spatulas.

All these items were traded by barter. A comb that might be exchanged for 4 coconuts in the Trobriand Islands, in the northwestern sector of the Kula trading ring, would fetch 4 coconuts and a bunch of betel leaves in Dobu, an island some 50 miles to the south.

The Kula exchange was a prominent part of the islanders’ lives. The arrival of a fleet from a neighboring island was a big event. Months would be spent each year in building new canoes and patching up old ones. The whole system was deeply embedded in religious concepts. Magic incantations were required to keep the canoes safe, make them light when heavily laden, and avert the many dangers of sailing. The inhabitants of Kitava Island, to the east of the main Trobriand island, wielded special magic that controlled the southeasterly wind, while those in the Lousançay Islands on the other side were masters of the northwestern winds.

Magical protection was doubtless a comfort because the Kula fleets faced many dangers. The shallow seas between the islands are full of reefs and sandbanks. The crews of canoes shipwrecked on strange shores were liable to be killed by the inhabitants. Canoes forced into the open ocean by wind or currents were unlikely ever to return.

There were other dangers, perhaps less tangible but just as muc
h feared. The kwita, a giant octopus the size of a village, lay in wait beneath cert
ain waters. If it attacked a canoe it could be assuaged only by
sacrificing any young boy who might be aboard. There were
yoyova,
flying witches, and vast jumping stones that leapt out of the ocean. For those who
might drift north of the Trobriands, there was the much dreaded
land of Kaytalugi, inhabited by women whose lust was so intense that no man could s
urvive their favors.
²³²

The islanders of the Kula ring braved all these hazards for the sake of their trading system, a seamless blend of religion and economics.

In the view of the sociologist Marcel Mauss, the Kula system of the Trobriands, like the potlatch ceremonies of Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, demonstrated the power of gifts to drive large-scale systems of exchange in primitive societies. Goods of all kinds—dried fish, canoes, or slaves—could be included in the potlatches, which were in essence large-scal
e regional exchange systems between variou
s tribes such as the Kwakiutl and the Haida.

The gifts had thick strings attached, compelling the recipient
to return an item of the same or greater value at an appropriate interval, or else s
uffer serious loss of social status. “An obligation to give
is the essence of the potlatch,” Mauss wrote. A chief could only preserve his
authority by proving he was so favored by good fortune that he had a bounty of gift
s to give away. Since every receiver had to reciprocate at a la
ter date, the net result was a large exchange of goods. “It is therefore a sys
tem of law and economics in which considerable wealth is consta
ntly being expended and transferred,” Mauss noted.
²³³

The exchange systems among the Trobrianders and the peoples of the Pacific Northwest enabled goods to be traded but on a nonmonetary basis. The exchanges were driven not by profit but by honor, meaning the maintenance or accumulation of social prestige. They were regulated, in essence, by the gods whose retribution was feared for any failure to reciprocate. “Where does the system get its energy? In each case from individuals who are due to lose from default heaping obloquy on defaulters and from beliefs that the spirits would punish them,” writes the anthropologist Mary Douglas.
²³⁴

The roots of this honor-based trading system may be very ancient. The first settled societies may have generated agricultural surpluses not for nutrition but to exchange in return for honor and power, advantages of greater interest to them than extra food. Religious behavior too may have had an ancient role in securing the regimen of trust under which such exchanges could take place.

In the view of the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, religious beha
vior may have evolved in step with language as a way of offsetting language’s
power to deceive. The greatest internal threat to early societ
ies would have been freeloaders and cheaters, people who took from others while givi
ng less in return. As language evolved, freeloaders’ ability to take advantage
of others would have increased, threatening the stability of s
ociety. Religion, in Rappaport’s view, offered a truth-testing function to offset the freeloaders’
lies. In primitive societies without any central authority, “
the sanctification of norms goes far to insure that they are honored,” Rappapo
rt writes. “Sanctity, thus, is a functional equivalent of political power amon
g some of the world’s peoples.”
²³⁵

The idea of the sacred is of central importance to the working of society because it helps certify the symbolic statements made in certain ritual contexts. Any secular statement may be a lie, but a statement made in a ritual context is presumptively true, and supernatural sanctions will follow should it prove otherwise.

Expectations of sacredness are usually induced by holding rites in a special place, such as a cave, grotto, temple or cathedral, decorated with symbols that mark it as hallowed ground. The words of a liturgy ar
e recited not because they convey new information—to the contrary, they are deeply familiar to everyone-but because they reevoke the congregants’ feelings of awe at communing with higher powers and their sense of communion with one another and society.

“We are inclined to think that sacred texts, canonical texts, have in themselves an intrinsic meaning and are by nature qualitatively different from other texts, but this is an error,” writes the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah. “In fact, sacred texts must be read or listened to in the context of a community for which they are sacred: it is in the ritual practices of a living community that they become sacred. Ritual is the place where meaning occurs.... The ritual of reciting the Lord’s Prayer reiterates the meaning of
^our
worship of God.”
²³⁶

Besides their function in ritual, the sacred texts or narratives may include a cosmology that explains people’s place in the world, sets out a framework for the moral code, and justifies the punishments inflicted for transgressing it. A set of beliefs common among Australian Aborigines holds that the landscape and its features were created by men who lived in the Dreamtime. This, in the Aborigines’ view, is a long-ago epoch that continues in parallel with the present. By performing the appropriate rituals, living men can become the heroes for a brief time and participate in the Dreamtime. The actions of the Dreamtime heroes are full of moral examples, including their punishment for misdeeds such as incest. Among literate peoples religion performs the same role except that moral codes are made explicit in written texts such as the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount.

Belief in omniscient and punitive supernatural powers is a feature of most religions and, as discussed in chapter 3, seems likely to be an innate part of the mind’s furniture. The belief helps enforce compliance with a society’s prevailing codes of behavior. Each religion provides its own version of these supernatural deities and a list of the offenses that may be expected to trigger their wrath. Rites like confession help refresh congregants’ sense of guilt and reliance on priests for intercession with angry deities.

Primitive religions held that the gods inflicted disease and disaster as punishment for flouting their rules. The religions of advanced societies extended the roster of punishments from this world to the afterlife as well. The dramatic escalation of penalties, from temporal to eternal, was perhaps necessary because in large settled societies crime and religious skepticism were more frequent.