The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (63 page)

One solution is to recognize the need for adherents of a particular religion to display some reliable “badge” of commitment to that religion. Believers spend their lives with each other and constantly count on each other for support, in a world where many or most other people adhere to other religions, may be hostile to your own religion, or may be skeptical about all religions. Your safety, prosperity, and life will depend on your
identifying correctly your fellow believers, and on your convincing them that they can trust you just as you trust them. What proofs of your and their commitment are believable?

To be believable, the proofs must be visible things that no one would or could fake for treacherous gain of temporary advantage. That’s why religious “badges” are always costly: high commitments of time to learn and regularly practise rituals, prayers, and songs and to undertake pilgrimages; high commitments of resources, including money, gifts, and sacrificed animals; publicly espousing rationally implausible beliefs that others will ridicule as silly; and publicly undergoing or displaying signs of painful permanent body mutilation, including cutting and bleeding sensitive parts of one’s body, disfiguring operations on one’s genitals, and self-amputation of finger joints. If you see that someone has made those expensive commitments with lifelong consequences, then they’ve convinced you much more effectively than if they merely told you, “Trust me, I’m with you, I’m wearing the right sort of hat (but I might have bought it cheaply yesterday and might discard it tomorrow).” For essentially the same reason, evolutionary biologists recognize that many animal signals as well (such as a peacock’s tail) have evolved to be costly, precisely because that makes them believable. When a female peahen sees a male peacock with a big tail displaying to her, she can be sure that such a male, capable of growing and surviving with such a big tail, really must have better genes and be better nourished than a male pretending to be superior but with just a small tail.

An interesting example of how religion fosters group cooperation and commitment comes from survival rates of American communes. Throughout the history of the United States continuing into modern times, people have experimented with forming communes where people can live together with other people chosen as sharing their ideals. Some of those communes share religious ideals, and others are non-religiously motivated; many non-religious communes were formed in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. But all communes are subject to financial, practical, social, sexual, and other pressures, and to competition from the attractions of the outside world. The vast majority of communes disband, whether gradually or explosively, within the lifetimes of their founders. For example, in the 1960s one friend of mine was a co-founder of a commune in a beautiful, peaceful, but remote area of Northern California. Gradually, though, the other founder members
drifted away because of the isolation, boredom, social tensions, and other reasons, until my friend was the last person left. She still lives there, but now just as a single person, no longer a member of a commune.

Richard Sosis compared the fates of several hundred religious and secular American communes founded in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all eventually dissolved, except for the extremely successful colonies of the religious group known as Hutterites: all 20 Hutterite colonies that were in Sosis’s sample survived. Leaving aside those Hutterite colonies, 199 sampled colonies eventually disbanded or died out, always preceded by a loss of faith in the group’s ideology, and sometimes also by natural disasters, death of a charismatic leader, or hostility of outsiders. However, the annual probability of dissolution was four times higher for the secular communes than for the religious communes. Evidently, religious ideologies are more effective than secular ideologies at persuading members to maintain a possibly irrational commitment, to refrain from deserting even when it would make rational sense to do so, and to deal with the constant challenges of living in a community that holds property in common and that is at high risk of being abused by free-riding members. In Israel as well, where for many decades there have been both religious kibbutzim and a much greater number of secular kibbutzim, the religious kibbutzim have been more successful than the secular ones in every year, despite the high costs imposed on religious kibbutzim by their religious practices (e.g., abstaining from all labor one day a week).

The other solution that I have found useful for resolving religion’s paradoxes is the approach of evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. He notes that a religion serves to define a human group competing with other human groups espousing different religions. The most straightforward measure of a religion’s relative success is its number of adherents. Why does the world today hold over a billion Catholics, about 14,000,000 Jews, and no Albigensian Manichaeans (members of a formerly numerous Christian sect believing in the dual existence of evil and good supernatural forces locked in eternal struggle)?

Wilson proceeds by recognizing that a religion’s number of adherents depends on the balance between several processes tending to increase the number of adherents and several processes tending to decrease that number. The number of adherents is increased by believers giving birth to children and successfully raising their children in that faith, and by conversions of adherents of other religions or previously non-religious people. The number is decreased by deaths of adherents, and by losses of adherents to conversion to other religions. One might pause at this point and say, “Of course, that’s obvious, so what?—how does that help me understand why Catholics believing in Christ’s resurrection outnumber Jews who don’t?” The power of Wilson’s approach is that it provides a framework for examining separate effects of a religion’s beliefs or practices on those various processes increasing or decreasing the number of adherents. Some of the results are straightforward, while others are subtle. It turns out that religions practise widely different strategies for achieving success.

For example, the American religion known as the Shaker movement was for a period in the 19th century very successful, despite demanding celibacy of its believers and thus lacking completely the commonest method by which religions propagate themselves (by having children). The Shakers achieved their success entirely by winning converts for many decades. At the opposite extreme, Judaism has persisted for several thousand years despite not seeking converts. Not surprisingly, Christianity and Islam, which do proselytize, have far more adherents than does Judaism, but Judaism has nevertheless persisted because of other factors contributing to its demographic growth: relatively high birth rates, low death rates except at times of persecution, emphasis on education to generate economic opportunities, strong mutual help, and low losses by conversion of Jews to other religions. As for Albigensian Manichaeans, their disappearance was only indirectly due to their belief that the forces of evil and of good are locked in eternal struggle. It wasn’t the case that that belief discouraged Albigensians from having children, or that it was so implausible as to prevent their winning converts. Instead, that belief was anathema to mainstream Catholics, who declared a holy war against the Albigensians, eventually besieged and captured their stronghold, and burned all remaining Albigensians there to death.

More subtle reasons emerge from Wilson’s framework for answering one of the biggest questions of Western religious history. Why, among the innumerable tiny Jewish sects competing with each other and with non-Jewish groups within the Roman Empire in the first century AD, did the one of them that became Christianity emerge as the dominant religion three centuries later? In late Roman times Christianity’s distinctive features contributing to this outcome included its active proselytizing (unlike mainstream Judaism), its practices promoting having more babies and enabling more of them to survive (unlike contemporary Roman society), its opportunities for women (in contrast to Judaism and Roman paganism at that time, and to later Christianity), its social institutions resulting in lower death rates of Christians than of Romans from plagues, and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. That doctrine, which is often misunderstood as the simplistic notion of indiscriminately turning the other cheek, actually proves to be part of a complex, context-dependent system of responses ranging from forgiveness to retaliation. Under certain circumstances, experimental tests carried out by playing simulation games show that forgiving someone who has done you one wrong may really be the response most likely to gain you advantages in the future.

Another example of the use of Wilson’s framework involves the success of Mormonism, which has been among the most rapidly growing religions of the last two centuries. Non-Mormons tend to doubt the claim I cited earlier, by Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, that the angel Moroni appeared to him on September 21, 1823, to reveal golden plates buried on a hilltop near Manchester village in western New York State and awaiting translation (
Table 9.2
). Non-Mormons also doubt the sworn statements of 11 witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, Christian Whitmer, Hiram Page, and 8 others) who claimed to have seen and handled the plates. Hence non-Mormons may wonder: how have those apparently implausible claims led to the explosive growth of Mormonism?

Wilson’s approach involves realizing that a religion’s success in increasing its number of adherents does not depend on whether its tenets happen to be true, but instead on whether those tenets and associated practices motivate the religion’s adherents to conceive and successfully rear children, win converts, constitute a smoothly functioning society, or
do all of those things. In Wilson’s words, “Even massively fictitious beliefs can be adaptive, as long as they motivate behaviors that are adaptive in the real world…. Factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate an adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better.”

In the case of Mormonism, its tenets and practices have been outstandingly successful at promoting demographic growth. Mormons tend to have many children. They form a strongly supportive and interdependent society offering a full and satisfying social life and incentives to work. They emphasize proselytizing; young Mormons are expected to devote up to two years of their lives to winning converts, either overseas or else near home. Mormons are expected to pay to their church an annual tithe equaling 10% of their income (in addition to paying the usual U.S. federal, state, and local taxes). These high demands for commitment of time and resources guarantee that those who choose to become or remain Mormons take their faith seriously. As for the supposed implausibility of the statements of Joseph Smith and his 11 witnesses about divine revelations via the golden plates—what, really, is the difference between those statements and the biblical accounts of divine revelations to Jesus and to Moses, except for millennia of elapsed time and our differing skepticisms derived from our different upbringings?

What does Wilson have to say about the basic hypocrisy common among religions, in preaching noble moral principles while urging the killing of believers in other religions? Wilson’s response is that a religion’s success (or its “fitness,” to use the language of evolutionary biology) is relative and can be defined only by comparison with the successes of other religions. Whether one likes it or not, religions can increase, and often have increased, their “success” (defined as the number of their adherents) by killing or forcibly converting adherents of other religions. As Wilson writes, “Whenever I strike up a conversation about religion, I am likely to receive a litany of evils perpetrated in God’s name. In most cases, these are horrors committed by religious groups against other groups. How can I call religion adaptive in the face of such evidence? The answer is ‘easily,’ as long as we understand fitness in relative terms. It is important to stress that a behavior can be explained from an evolutionary perspective without being morally condoned.”

Let’s finally return to my initial question about the functions and definition of religion. We now see why religion is so difficult to define: because it has changed its functions as it has evolved, just as have electric organs. In fact, it has changed functions even more than have electric organs, which have adopted only six functions, compared with the seven functions variously characterizing religions
(
Figure 9.1
)
. Of those seven functions, four were entirely absent at one stage of religion’s history, and five were still present but in
decline at another stage. Two functions had already appeared and were at their peak by the time of the emergence of intelligent questioning humans before 50,000 BC, and have been in steady decline in recent millennia: supernatural explanation (in steeper decline), and defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual (in gentler decline). The other five functions were absent (four of them) or weak (the fifth) in early intelligent humans, rose to a peak in chiefdoms and early states (three of them) or late Renaissance states (two of them), and have declined somewhat or sharply since that peak.

Figure 9.1 Religion’s functions changing through time