The Faith Instinct (8 page)

Making too many enemies in one’s own village is a bad idea if one is a Tsembaga. “Widespread antagonism toward a member of the group is likely to lead to general agreement that he is a witch,” writes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, “and when such agreement exists, betrayal to the enemy is unnecessary; a man’s own clan brothers may kill him.” Inquiring about the personalities of the people killed recently for witchcraft, Rappaport learned that the victims were “likely to be bad-tempered, argumentative, and assertive.”
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The egalitarian approach “appears to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism,” writes the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who has studied the transition from hierarchy to a society of social equals.
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A critical question in human evolution is how the hierarchy typical of ape societies was transformed into its opposite, the egalitarianism of hunter gatherers. Human brain size started to expand dramatically after the split with chimps. One consequence of this increased cognitive capacity was the invention of weapons such as wooden spears. Weapons are great equalizers, and would have had the effect of flattening out the male hierarchy of a still apelike society, Boehm suggests. Another leveler would have been the cognitive ability of the weak to form coalitions against tyrannical leaders.

But as egalitarianism slowly evolved in the human lineage, it would have exposed a critical weakness in the social structure: with the power of the alpha males eclipsed, how was order to be kept? If no one were willing to defer to anyone else, who would determine the interests of the group? Who would take the personal risk of punishing deviant and antisocial behavior?

The threat of freeloading and anarchy would have become increasingly serious as human cognitive abilities increased. Individuals would have figured out new and better ways to take advantage of the group’s protection without contributing anything in return. Nothing is more corrosive to a group’s cohesion than free riders. If they go unpunished, the advantage of social living quickly diminishes; others will contribute less, and the group will disintegrate or crumble under challenge from neighbors. Free riders would have gained new power with the advent of language, a perfect instrument with which to deceive, prevaricate and manipulate. Those who were not pulling their full weight had a new means of cloaking their selfishness.

Just as the emerging human societies were being undermined by the freeloaders within, they had to confront a pressing external threat, that of warfare. Like the ability to freeload, warfare became more sophisticated and deadly as cognitive capacity increased. People may not like warfare, but the point needs no belaboring that they are very proficient at it. The skill is an ancient one that reaches far back in the primate lineage, a fact that has come to light from close study of chimpanzees. Though at first thought to be peaceful, chimpanzees in fact occupy territories that are patrolled and defended by bands of males. Through raids and ambushes, they try to pick off the males of a neighboring group one by one until they are able to annex the group’s territory and females.

Early humans seem to have inherited the same instinct for territorial defense and warfare. As with chimpanzees, the aggressiveness of hunter gatherer societies was not at first recognized by anthropologists, partly because colonial administrations had suppressed warfare and partly because the style of primitive warfare differs greatly from that of modern societies. It was conducted not with campaigning armies but thr
ough ambushes and raids, in which aggressors would seek to kill a few of the enemy at minimum risk to themselves.

Anthropologists at first dismissed these skirmishes as hardly serious, until they recorded causes of male death over many years. They then realized that if you go to war every week, even low casualty rates start to mount. In some tribes up to 30 percent of male deaths occurred in warfare.

War seems to have been the natural state of hunter gatherer societies. “Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime,” writes the anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley in his survey of primitive warfare.
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He estimates that a typical tribal society lost about 0.5 percent ofits population in combat each year, far more than the toll suffered by most modern states—war deaths in the twentieth century would have amounted to 2 billion people had the tribal death rate persisted.
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Pre-state societies fought often. About 75 percent went to war at least once every 2 years, until they were pacified, whereas the modern nation state goes to war about once a generation. Adding to the carnage, primitive peoples were not in the habit of taking prisoners, unless to torture them as the Iroquois did, or to fatten them for eating later, as was the practice among certain tribes in Colombia. Otherwise, captured warriors were killed on the spot. “In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted,” Keeley concludes.
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Thomas Hobbes’s description of primitive warfare was all too accurate. “It is manifest,” he wrote in 1651, “that during the time that men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war. This war is every man against every other man.”
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Some anthropologists and archaeologists have long been reluctant to accept this conclusion. Instead, perhaps with a desire to portray modern warfare as unusually wicked, they have suggested that war is an aberration, or that it started only after the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.

The anthropologist Raymond Kelly (to be distinguished from Lawrence Keeley, quoted above) argues that there is little evidence of violent death in the Upper Paleolithic period, which lasted in Europe from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago. Since warfare would leave such evidence, he asserts, there can have been little or no warfare during the period. “The ‘nightmare past’ that Hobbes envisaged in which individuals lived in continual fear of violent death clearly never existed,” he writes.
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But the people of the Upper Paleolithic were hardly pacifists. They would not have been in Europe in the first place had they not wrested it from the grip of the fearsome Neanderthals and driven them to extinction. The style of primitive warfare—raids and minor skirmishes—would not leave a strong fingerprint in the archaeological record, and the absence of much evidence of warfare at this time cannot be taken as evidence of its absence.

Nor is it at all likely, as Kelly contends, that “war is not primordial but has a definite origin in the relatively recent past.”
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The existence of territorial warfare among chimps, and its practice by people today, suggests that both species inherited the behavior from their common ancestor who lived some 5 million years ago. The frequency of warfare may wax and wane and peaceful societies can always be found, such the Icelanders of today, who have no army, or Sweden, which last went to war in 1815. But given that both peoples are descendants of the hyperaggressive Vikings, no one is likely to accuse them of having pacifism in their genes. Human societies are remarkably well adapted to warfare, but exercise that capacity depending on circumstance and calculation of their own interests.

Modern humans have lived as hunters and gatherers for most of their existence, and the warlike nature of most contemporary hunter gatherer societies can reasonably be assumed to have prevailed throughout the distant past as well. “We need to recognize and accept the idea of a non-peaceful past for the entire time of human existence,” writes the archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. “To understand much of today’s war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human.”
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Morality, altruism, loyalty and duty are considered high virtues, but policies of aggression and extermination reflect the darkest aspects of human nature. It is not a comfortable thought that both should have been shaped by the same selective pressure, the need for a degree of social cohesion sufficient to withstand the demands of intergroup warfare. Still, as Lawrence Keeley notes, “Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it.”
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Human nature, as has often been remarked, is a mixture of contrarieties, with capacities for great good and great evil being interwoven. It is not so surprising that both should be branches of a tree that itself is rooted in deeply ambiguous moral territory, the struggle to survive in a dog-eat-dog world.

Early human societies transitioning away from male dominance th
us faced two social problems of the utmost severity—the t
hreat of free riders from within and the threat of hostile neighbors from without. H
ow were the new societies to be fortified against these threats? One solution would
have been to build on the premoral systems that had evolved in
primate societies: from these emerged the innate moral dispositions of early humans.
“There appears to be a universal short list of values that all cultures share
: negative ones that proscribe killing, seriously deceptive lyi
ng, or theft within the group, and positive ones that call for altruism and cooperat
ion for the benefit of the whole community,” writes Boehm.
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But moral restraint by itself is not sufficient to deter freeloading or to energize a group to prepare for warfare. Knowing what’s right and doing it are two different things. Freeloaders may figure the chances of getting caught are acceptably low. A man may desire d
eeply to defend his community, but what rational motive could make him sacrifice his
life to do so?

A solution gradually emerged to counter the two acute threats of freeloading and of warfare: religion.

Religious behavior addressed these two leading challenges to social order in the evolving human lineage. It both enforced the moral instincts and motivated people to pay any cost in defense of their community. Religion secured a new level of social cohesion by implanting in people’s minds a stern overseer of their actions. The Nuer, for instance, believe that “if a man wishes to be in the right with God he must be in the right with men, that is, he must subordinate his interests as an individual to the moral order of society,” writes Evans-Pritchard.
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It was belief in these supernatural supervisors that enabled egalitarian societies to emerge from the dictatorship of the alpha male that primate societies had endured for so long.

Ants, the other evolutionary masters of social living, are distinctive for the high degree of cooperation between members of the same colony. But with ants, just as with people, sociality toward the in-group is combined with relentless hostility toward other ant colonies. Ants are territorial and will fight pitched battles at their borders with neighboring groups. Some species have developed special soldier castes. Victory may lead to the opponents’ extinction, their queen being killed, their workers and larvae eaten or enslaved, and their territory and other property annexed. “The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men,” observed the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel.
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It is striking that, with both ants and people, evolution should have made cooperation and warfare two sides of the same coin. Social cohesion is critical to both the ant and human systems. With ants, cohesion is secured by the shared chemical signals that regulate their behavior and by the high degree of relatedness among members of a colony. Neither of these factors is compatible with human physiology. This is why ants don’t need religion but people do.

All religions have concepts of the supernatural, whether in the form of gods or the spirits of departed ancestors. These supernatural entities, whether real or not in themselves, exerted a pervasive impact on human societies. To understand religion, it seems essential first to reconstruct how the gods came into the picture and what their primary role might have been.

In the view of nineteenth-century anthropologists such as Edward Tylor, people assumed that the figures seen in dreams were spirits. Speculating about the nature of death, they inferred that after the body was
dead, its spirit essence lived on in another world. In dreams, the appearance of particular spirits known to the dreamer proved that this was so. It was a small step from there to assume the existence of greater spirits with supernatural powers, and that in dreams or trances communication could be established with the spirit world.

Though Tylor’s proposal that dreams were the source of early ideas about the supernatural cannot be proved, it is significant that dreams are of central importance in many religions. The dreamworld is the central focus of Australian Aborigine religion, in which even conception is accomplished through dreams. In Judaism, Jacob dreamed at Bethel of the ladder of angels ascending to heaven and Yahweh promising him the land of Israel. Joseph had prophetic dreams of ruling his brothers and interpreted the pharaoh’s dreams. In Christianity, the Joseph of the New Testament is prepared by angels in a sequence of four dreams to accept his wife’s pregnancy, to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of the newborns, to return to Israel on Herod’s death, and then to live in Nazareth. “Throughout history, in cultures worldwide, people have seen their dreams first and foremost as religiously meaningful experiences,” writes the dream specialist Kelly Bulkeley.
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If the idea of the supernatural first came through dreams, the concept of regular, controllable access to the supernatural realm was perhaps suggested by trances. Trances would have been attained, accidentally at first, during the prolonged dance sessions of early ritual. Because people in trances would expect to see what others had seen, a community would eventually construct a consensus view of the supernatural world and its named inhabitants. This doorway into the supernatural realm was so compelling that people throughout history have sought different ways to gain access to it, whether through prolonged exertion, hallucinogenic drugs or anesthetic gases.