Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

One of the best ways of ensuring copying fidelity over many replications is the “majority rule” strategy that is the basis for the uncannily reliable behavior of computers. It was the great mathematician John von Neumann who saw a way of applying this trick in the real world of engineering, so that Alan Turing’s imaginary computing machine could become a reality, permitting us to manufacture highly reliable computers out of unavoidably unreliable parts. Practically perfect transmission of trillions of bits is routinely executed by even the cheapest computers these days, thanks to “von Neumann multiplexing,” but this trick has been invented and reinvented over the centuries in many variations. In the days before radio communication and GPS satellites, navigators used to take not one or two but three chronometers aboard their ships on long voyages. If you have just one chronometer and it starts running slow or fast, you’ll never know it is in error. If you bring two and they eventually begin to disagree, you won’t know whether one is running slow or the other is running fast. If you bring three, you can be quite sure that the odd one out is the one in which the error is accumulating, since otherwise the two that are still in agreement would have to be going bad in exactly the same way, an unlikely coincidence under most circumstances.

Long before it was consciously invented or discovered, this Good Trick was already embodied as an adaptation of memes. It can be seen at work in any oral tradition, religious or secular, in which people act in unison—praying or singing or dancing, for instance. Not everybody will remember the words or the melody or the next step, but most will, and those who are out of step will quickly correct themselves to join the throng, preserving the traditions much more reliably than any of them could do on their own. It doesn’t depend on virtuoso memorizers scattered among them; nobody needs to be better than average. It is mathematically provable that such “multiplexing” schemes can overcome the “weakest link” phenomenon, and make a mesh that is much stronger than its weakest links. It is no accident that religions all have occasions on which the adherents come together to act in public unison in rituals. Any religion without such occasions would already be extinct.¹⁵

A public ritual is a great way of preserving content with high fidelity, but why are people so eager to participate in rituals in the first place? Since we are presuming that they are not intent on preserving the fidelity of their meme-copying by constituting a sort of social computer-memory, what motivates them to join in? Here there are currently a welter of conflicting hypotheses that will take some time and research to resolve, an embarrassment of riches in need of culling.¹⁶ Consider what we can call the shamanic-advertising hypothesis. Shamans the world over conduct much of their medicine in public ceremonies, and they are adept at getting the local people not just to watch while they induce a trance in themselves or their clients but to participate, with drumming, singing, chanting, and dancing. In his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937), the anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard vividly describes these proceedings, observing how the shaman cleverly enlists the crowd of knowing onlookers, turning them into shills, in effect, to impress the uninitiated, for whom this ceremonial demonstration is a novel spectacle.

It may be supposed, indeed, that attendance at them has an important formative influence on the growth of witchcraft beliefs in the minds of children, for children make a point of attending them and taking part in them as spectators and chorus. This is the first occasion on which they demonstrate their belief, and it is more dramatically and more publically affirmed at these séances than in any other situation. [Evans-Pritchard, 1937 (1976 abridged edition, pp. 70–71)]

Innate curiosity, stimulated by music and rhythmic dancing and other forms of “sensory pageantry” (Lawson and McCauley, 2002), could probably account for the initial motivation to join the chorus—especially if we have an evolved innate desire to belong, to join with the others, especially the elders, as many have recently argued. (This will be a topic in the next chapter.) Then there are the phenomena of “mass hypnosis” and “mob hysteria,” still poorly understood but undeniably potent effects observable when people are brought together in crowds and given something exciting to react to. Once people find themselves in the chorus, other motivations can take over. Anything that makes the cost of nonparticipation steep will do the trick, and if community members get the idea of encouraging other members not only to participate but to inflict costs on those who shirk their responsibility to participate, the phenomenon can become self-sustaining (Boyd and Richerson, 1992).

Doesn’t there have to be someone to prime the pump? How would this initially get started unless there were some people, some agents, who wanted to start a ritual tradition? As usual, this hunch betrays a failure of evolutionary imagination. It is of course possible—and in some instances surely likely or even proven—that some community leader or other agent set out to design a ritual to serve a particular purpose, but we have seen that such an author is not strictly necessary. Even elaborate and expensive rituals of public rehearsal could emerge out of earlier practices and habits without conscious design.¹⁷

Public rehearsal is a key process of memory enhancement, but it is not enough. We also have to look at the features of what is rehearsed, for these can themselves be designed to be more and more memory-friendly. A key innovation is breaking down the material to be transmitted into something like an alphabet, a smallish repertoire of norms of production. In appendix A, I describe how the reliability of DNA replication itself depends on there being a finite code or ensemble of elements, an alphabet of sorts, such as A, C, G, T. This is a form of digitization that allows tiny fluctuations or variations in execution to be absorbed or wiped out in the next round. The design idea of digitization has been made famous in the computer age, but earlier applications of it can be seen in the ways in which religious rituals—like dances and poems and words themselves—can be broken down into easily recognizable elements fit for what Dan Sperber (2000) calls “triggered production” (see appendixes A and C). No two people may do their curtsy or salute or kowtow in exactly the same way, but each will be clearly recognizable as a curtsy or salute or kowtow by the rest of the group, which thereby absorbs the noise of the moment and transmits to the future only the essential skeleton, the spelling out of the moves. When the children watch their elders doing the moves, whether in a secular folk dance or a folk-religious ceremony (and that distinction will be quite arbitrary or nonexistent in some cultures), they learn an alphabet of behaviors, and they may vie with one another to see who can do the most dashing A-move or the curliest B-move or the loudest C-chant, but they all agree on what the moves are, and therein lies a huge compression of the information that must be transmitted. This kind of compression can be accurately measured on your home computer by comparing a bitmap of a page of text (which makes no distinction between alphabet characters and smudges or inkblots, laboriously representing every dot) and a text file of the same page, which will be orders of magnitude smaller.

To speak of an “alphabet” as composed of a “canonical” set of things to remember is to be doubly anachronistic, using later technology (written language and the conscious and deliberate elevation of a restricted canon of prescribed beliefs and texts) to analyze the design strengths of earlier innovations in transmission methods that had no authors. These were further enhanced by the use of rhythm and rhyme—to commit a further anachronism, since these “technical” terms were surely invented long after the effectiveness of the properties was “recognized” by the blind watchmaker of cultural selection. Rhythm and rhyme and musical pitch all provided additional bolstering (Rubin, 1995), turning unmemorable strings of words into sound bites (let’s wallow in anachronism, while we’re at it).