Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Such performer-composers are not just vocalists; their instrument is the congregation, and they play it with the passionate but knowledgeable artistry of a violinist entrusted with a Stradivarius. In addition to the immediate effects today—a smile or “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!”—and short-term effects—returning to church next Sunday, putting another dollar in the collection plate—there are long-term effects. By choosing which passages of Scripture will be replicated this week, the minister shapes not just the order of worship but the minds of the worshipers. Unless you are a remarkable and rare scholar, you carry around in your personal memory only a fraction of the holy texts of your faith—those that you have heard over and over again since your childhood, sometimes intoning them in unison with the congregation, whether or not you have deliberately committed any of them to memory. Just as the Latin minds of ancient Rome gave way to French and Italian and Spanish minds, Christian minds today are quite unlike the minds of the earliest Christians. The major religions of today are as different from their ancestral versions as today’s music is different from the music of ancient Greece and Rome. The changes that have been established are far from random. They have tracked the restless curiosity and changing needs of our encultured species.

The human capacity for reflection yields an ability to notice and evaluate patterns in our own behavior (“Why do I keep falling for that?” “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but why?”…). This enhances our ability to represent future prospects and opportunities, which in turn threatens the stability of any ill-grounded social practices that cannot survive such skeptical attention. Once people start “catching on,” a system that has “worked” for generations can implode overnight. Traditions can erode more swiftly than stone walls and slate roofs, and preventive maintenance of an institution’s creeds and practices can become a full-time occupation for professionals. But not all institutions get, or require, such maintenance.

2 Folk religion as practical know-how

Among the Nuer it is particularly auspicious to sacrifice a bull, but since bulls are particularly valuable, a cucumber will do just fine most of the time.

—E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley, Bringing Ritual to Mind

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In the face of inevitable wear and tear, no designed thing persists for long without renewal and replication. The institutions and habits of human culture are just as bound by this principle, the second law of thermodynamics, as are the organisms, organs, and instincts of biology. But not all culturally transmitted practices need stewardship. Languages, for instance, don’t require the services of usage police and grammarians—though in European languages they have long had a surfeit of these self-appointed protectors of integrity. One of the main claims of the previous chapter is that folk religions are like languages in this regard: they can pretty much take care of themselves. The rituals that persist are those that are self-perpetuating, whether or not anybody devotes serious effort to the goal of maintaining them. Memes could acquire new tricks—adaptations—that could help them secure this longevity of their lineages whether or not anybody appreciated them. Thus the question of whether folk religions have ever provided a clear benefit to people—whether the memes that compose them are mutualist memes, not commensals or parasites—could be left unanswered for the time being. The benefits of folk religion may seem obvious—as obvious as the benefits of language—but we need to remind ourselves that a benefit to human genetic fitness is not the same thing as a benefit to human happiness or human welfare. What makes us happy may not make us more prolific, which is all that matters to genes.

Even language should be viewed with as much neutrality as we can muster. Perhaps language is just a bad habit that happened to spread! How on earth could that be? Like this: Once language began to be the fad among our ancestors, those who didn’t swiftly catch on to language were pretty much left out of the mating game. Chat or go childless. (This would be the sexual-selection theory of language: glibness as the peacock’s tail for Homo sapiens. According to this theory, it might be true that if none of us had ever had language we’d all have done better in the offspring department, but once the costly handicap of language caught on among the females, males without it tended to die without offspring, so they couldn’t afford not to make the investment, however difficult it made their lives.) Unlike tail feathers, which you have to grow with whatever equipment your parents endowed you with, languages spread horizontally or culturally, so we need to consider them as interactors in the drama as well, with their own prospects for reproduction. On this theory, the reason we love speaking is like the reason that mice infected with Toxoplasma gondii love to taunt cats—languages have enslaved our poor brains and made us eager accomplices in their own propagation!

That’s a far-fetched hypothesis, since language’s contributions to genetic fitness are all too obvious. There are now over six billion of us crowding up the planet and monopolizing its resources, while our nearest kin, the languageless bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, are all threatened with extinction. Setting aside the hypotheses that our running ability or hairlessness is the secret of our success, we can be quite confident that the memes of language have been fitness-enhancing mutualists, not parasites. Nevertheless, framing the hypothesis reminds us that genetic evolution doesn’t foster happiness or well-being directly; it cares only about the number of our offspring that survive to make grand-offspring and so on. Folk religion may well have played an important role in the propagation of Homo sapiens, but we don’t know that yet. The fact that, so far as we know, all human populations have had some version of it doesn’t establish that. All known human populations have also had the common cold, which—so far as we know—is no mutualist.

How long could folk religion be carried along by our ancestors before reflection began to transform it? We may get some perspective on this by looking at other species. It is obvious that birds don’t need to understand the principles of aerodynamics that dictate the shapes of their wings. It is less obvious—but still true—that birds can be uncomprehending participants in such elaborate rituals as leks—the mating meeting places sometimes called “nature’s nightclubs”—where females of a local population of a species gather to observe the competitive performances by the males, who strut their stuff. The rationale for leks, which are also found in some mammals, fish, and even insects, is clear: leks pay for themselves as efficient methods of mate selection under specifiable conditions. But the animals that participate in leks don’t need to have any understanding of why they do what they do. The males show up and show off, and the females pay attention and let their choices be guided by the “dictates of their hearts,” which, unbeknownst to them, have been shaped by natural selection over many generations.²