The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (62 page)

The remaining four features of religion that I’ll discuss—standardized organization, preaching political obedience, regulating behavior towards strangers by means of formal moral codes, and justifying wars—were absent in small-scale societies, appeared with the rise of chiefdoms and states, and have declined again in modern secular states. A defining feature of modern religions that we take for granted is standardized organization. Most modern religions have full-time priests, alias rabbis, ministers, imams, or whatever else they may be called, who receive either a salary or else life’s necessities. Modern religions also have churches (alias temples, synagogues, mosques, etc.). Within any given sect, all of its churches use a standardized sacred book (Bible, Torah, Koran, etc.), rituals, art, music, architecture, and clothing. A practising Catholic who has grown up in Los Angeles and visits New York City can celebrate Sunday mass in a New York Catholic church and find all those features familiar. In religions of small-scale societies, on the other hand, all of those features either aren’t standardized (rituals, art, music, clothing) or don’t exist at all (full-time priests, dedicated churches, sacred books). While small-scale societies may have their shamans, and some of those shamans may receive fees or gifts, the shamans are not full-time professionals: they have to
hunt, gather, and grow crops like every other able-bodied adult in their band or tribe.

Historically, those organizational features of religion arose to solve a new problem emerging as ancient human societies became richer, more populous, and both obliged and enabled to become more centralized. Band and tribal societies are too small and unproductive to generate food surpluses that could feed full-time priests, chiefs, tax collectors, potters, shamans, or specialists of any sort. Instead, every adult has to acquire his or her own food by hunting, gathering, or farming himself or herself. Only larger and more productive societies generate surpluses that can be used to feed chiefs and other leaders or craft specialists, none of whom grow or hunt food.

How did such a diversion of food come about? A dilemma results from the confluence of three self-evident facts: populous societies are likely to defeat small societies; populous societies require full-time leaders and bureaucrats, because 20 people can sit around a campfire and reach a consensus but 20,000,000 people cannot; and full-time leaders and bureaucrats must be fed. But how does the chief or king get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites? This problem is familiar to the citizens of any democracy, who ask themselves the same question at each election: what have the incumbents done since the last election to justify the fat salaries that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?

The solution devised by every well-understood chiefdom and early state society—from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, through Polynesian Hawaii, to the Inca Empire—was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets: the chief or king is related to the gods, or even is a god; and he or she can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants, e.g., to send rain or to ensure a good harvest. The chief or king also renders valuable services by organizing the peasants to construct public works, such as roads, irrigation systems, and storehouses that benefit everybody. In return for those services, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and tax collectors. Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach those religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Also fed by food collected from the peasants are armies obedient to the chief or king, with which the
chief can conquer neighboring lands and thereby acquire more territory for the benefit of his peasants. Those armies bring two further advantages to the chief: wars against neighbors may enlist the energy of ambitious young nobles who might otherwise scheme to overthrow the chief; and the armies are ready to put down revolts by the peasants themselves. As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became more elaborate. That’s why Karl Marx viewed religion as the opium of the people (
Table 9.1
), and an instrument of class oppression.

Of course, within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been reversed, and religion is much less than before the handmaiden of the state. Politicians and the upper classes now rely on means other than assertions of divinity to persuade or coerce all of us peasants. But the fusion of religion and state persists in some Muslim countries, Israel, and (until recently) Japan and Italy. Even the United States government invokes God on its currency and places official chaplains in Congress and in the armed forces, and every American president (whether Democrat or Republican) intones “God bless America” at the close of speeches.

Yet another attribute of religion that became important in state societies but that didn’t exist in the smallest societies was to dictate moral concepts of behavior towards strangers. All major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave. But this link between religion and morality is weaker or absent, especially as regards behavior towards strangers, in the New Guinea societies of which I have experience. Instead, social obligations there depend heavily on relationships. Because a band or tribe contains only a few dozen or a few hundred individuals respectively, everyone knows everyone else and their relationships. One owes different obligations to different blood relatives, to relatives by marriage, to members of one’s own clan, and to fellow villagers belonging to a different clan.

Those relationships determine, for example, whether you may refer to people by their names, marry them, or demand that they share their food and house with you. If you get into a fight with another tribe member, everyone else in the tribe is related to or knows both of you and pulls you apart. The problem of behaving peacefully towards unfamiliar individuals doesn’t arise, because the only unfamiliar individuals are members of enemy tribes. Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you try to kill him or else to run away; our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be suicidal.

Thus, a new problem arose by around 7,500 years ago, when some tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals—a far greater number than any single person can know by name and relationship. Emergent chiefdoms and states faced big problems of potential instability, because the old tribal rules of behavior no longer sufficed. If you encountered an unfamiliar member of your chiefdom and fought with him according to tribal rules of behavior, a brawl would result as your relatives jumped in on your side and his relatives jumped in on his side. A death in such a brawl would spark efforts by the victim’s relatives to kill one of the murderer’s relatives in revenge. What’s to save the society from collapsing in an incessant orgy of brawls and revenge murders?

The solution to this dilemma of large societies is the one used in our own society, and documented in all chiefdoms and early states for which we have information. Rules of peaceful behavior apply between all members of the society, regardless of whether some individual whom you encounter is familiar to you or a stranger. The rules are enforced by the political leaders (chiefs or kings) and their agents, who justify the rules by a new function of religion. The gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules, codified in formal codes of morality. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them (because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods). Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments.

In recent secularized societies, such rules of moral behavior within society have moved beyond their religious origins. The reasons why atheists, as well as many believers, now don’t kill their enemies derive from values instilled by society, and from fear of the potent hand of the law
rather than fear of the wrath of God. But from the rise of chiefdoms until the recent rise of secular states, religion justified codes of behavior and thereby enabled people to live harmoniously in large societies where one encounters strangers frequently. Religion’s function in permitting strangers to live peacefully together, and its function in teaching the masses to obey their political leaders, constitute the twin aspects of the often-discussed roles of religion in maintaining social order. As Voltaire remarked cynically, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” Depending on one’s perspective, these roles of religion have been regarded as either positive (promoting social harmony) or negative (promoting exploitation of the masses by oppressive elites).

Another new problem faced by emergent chiefdoms and states, but not by the bands and tribes of previous history, involved wars. Because tribes primarily use relationship by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify rules of conduct, tribesmen face no moral dilemmas in killing members of other tribes with whom they have no relationship. But once a state invokes religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens with whom one has no relationship, how can a state convince its citizens to ignore those same precepts during wartime? States permit, indeed they command, their citizens to steal from and kill citizens of other states against which war has been declared. After a state has spent 18 years teaching a boy “Thou shalt not kill,” how can the state turn around and say “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances,” without getting its soldiers hopelessly confused and prone to kill the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens)?

Again, in recent as well as in ancient history, religion comes to the rescue with a new function. The Ten Commandments apply only to one’s behavior toward fellow citizens within the chiefdom or state. Most religions claim that they have a monopoly on the truth, and that all other religions are wrong. Commonly in the past, and all too often today as well, citizens are taught that they are not merely permitted, but actually obliged, to kill and steal from believers in those wrong religions. That’s the dark
side of all those noble patriotic appeals: for God and country,
por Dios y por España, Gott mit uns,
etc. It in no way diminishes the guilt of the current crop of murderous religious fanatics to acknowledge that they are heirs to a long, widespread, vile tradition.

The Bible’s Old Testament is full of exhortations to be cruel to heathens. Deuteronomy 20:10–18, for example, explains the obligation of the Israelites to practice genocide: when your army approaches a distant city, you should enslave all its inhabitants if it surrenders, and kill all its men and enslave its women and children and steal their cattle and everything else if it doesn’t surrender. But if it’s a city of the Canaanites or Hittites or any of those other abominable believers in false gods, then the true God commands you to kill everything that breathes in the city. The book of Joshua describes approvingly how Joshua became a hero by carrying out those instructions, slaughtering all the inhabitants of over 400 cities. The book of rabbinical commentaries known as the Talmud analyzes the potential ambiguities arising from conflicts between those two principles of “Thou shalt not kill [believers in thine own God]” and “Thou must kill [believers in another god].” For instance, according to some Talmudic commentators, an Israelite is guilty of murder if he intentionally kills a fellow Israelite; is innocent if he intentionally kills a non-Israelite; and is also innocent if he kills an Israelite while throwing a stone into a group consisting of nine Israelites plus one heathen (because he might have been aiming at the one heathen).

In fairness, this outlook is more characteristic of the Old Testament than of the New Testament, whose moral principles have moved far in the direction of defining one’s dealings with anyone—at least in theory. But in practice, of course, some of history’s most extensive genocides were committed by European Christian colonialists against non-Europeans, relying for moral justification on the New as well as the Old Testament.

Interestingly, among New Guineans, religion is never invoked to justify killing or fighting with members of an out-group. Many of my New Guinea friends have described to me their participation in genocidal attacks on neighboring tribes. In all those accounts, I have never heard the slightest hint of any religious motive, of dying for God or the true religion, or of sacrificing oneself for any idealistic reason whatsoever. In contrast,
the religion-supported ideologies that accompanied the rise of states instilled into their citizens the obligation to obey the ruler ordained by God, to obey moral precepts like the Ten Commandments only with respect to fellow citizens, and to be prepared to sacrifice their lives while fighting against other states (i.e., heathens). That’s what makes societies of religious fanatics so dangerous: a tiny minority of their adherents (e.g., 19 of them on September 11, 2001) die for the cause, and the whole society of fanatics thereby succeeds at killing far more of its perceived enemies (e.g., 2,996 of them on September 11, 2001). Rules of bad behavior toward out-groups reached their high point in the last 1,500 years, as fanatical Christians and Muslims inflicted death, slavery, or forced conversion on each other and on the heathen. In the 20th century, European states added secular grounds to justify killing millions of citizens of other European states, but religious fanaticism is still strong in some other societies.

Secular people remain puzzled and troubled by several features of religion. Foremost among those are its regular association with irrational supernatural beliefs, such that each religion has a different set of such beliefs and adheres firmly to them but dismisses most such beliefs of other religions; its frequent promotion of costly, even self-mutilating or suicidal behaviors that would seem to make people less rather than more disposed to be religious; and its apparent basic hypocrisy of preaching a moral code and often claiming universality, while at the same time excluding many or most people from application of that code and urging the killing of them. How can these troubling paradoxes be explained? There are two solutions that I have found useful.