Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Could our proclivity for participating in religious rituals have a similar explanation? The fact that our rituals are passed on through culture, not genes, doesn’t rule out this prospect at all. We know that specific languages are passed on through culture, not genes, but there has also been genetic evolution that has tuned our brains for ever more adept acquisition and use of language.³ Our brains have evolved to become more effective word processors, and they may also have evolved to become more effective implementers of the culturally transmitted habits of folk religions. We have already seen how hypnotizability could be the talent for which the whatsis center imagined in chapter 3 has been shaped. Sensitivity to ritual (and music) could be part of that package.

There is really no reason to suppose that animals have a clue about why they do what they instinctually do, and human beings are no exception; the deeper purposes of our “instincts” are seldom transparent to us. The difference between us and other species is that we are the only species that cares about this ignorance! Unlike other species, we feel a general need to understand, so even though nobody had to understand or intend any of the design innovations that created folk religions, we should recognize that people, being naturally curious and reflective, and having language in which to frame and reframe their wonders, would have been likely—unlike the birds—to ask themselves what these rituals were all about. Not everybody. The itch of curiosity is not strong in some people, apparently. Judging by the variation observable around us today, it is a fair bet that only a small minority of our ancestors ever had the time or inclination to question the activities they found themselves engaging in with their kinfolk and their neighbors.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Paleolithic times may well have lived a relatively easy life, with abundant food and leisure time (Sahlins, 1972), compared with the hard work that was required to scratch out a living once agriculture was invented, more than ten thousand years ago, and populations grew explosively. From the beginning of this, the Neolithic period, until very recently indeed on the biological timescale—the last two hundred generations—life for just about all our ancestors was, as Hobbes famously said, nasty, brutish, and short, with few brief pockets of spare time in which to get…theoretical. So it is probably safe to imagine that pragmatism compressed their horizons. Among the gems of folk wisdom found around the world is the idea that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A corollary not often noted is that sometimes it might therefore be safer to substitute a potent myth for incomplete knowledge. As the anthropologist Roy Rappaport put it in his last book:

…in a world where the processes governing its physical elements are in some degree unknown and in even larger degree unpredictable, empirical knowledge of such processes cannot replace respect for their more or less mysterious integrity, and it may be more adaptive—that is, adaptively true—to drape such processes in supernatural veils than to expose them to the misunderstandings that may be encouraged by empirically accurate but incomplete naturalistic understanding. [1999, p. 452]

The practical demands of coming up with a way of putting together all the puzzling bits and pieces of life on the fly are not the same as the practical demands of science, and as Dunbar (2004, p. 171) observes, “The law of diminishing returns means that there will always be a point after which it is just not worth investing more time and effort into figuring out the underlying reality. In traditional societies, anything that does the trick will do.”

So we can expect that our ancestors, no matter how curious they were by temperament, did more or less what we all still do today: rely on “what everyone knows.” Most of what you (think you) know you just accept on faith. By this I do not mean the faith of religious belief, but something much simpler: the practical, always revisable policy of simply trusting the first thing that comes to your mind without obsessing over why it does so. What are the odds that “everybody” is just wrong to think that yawning is harmless or that you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom? (Remember those “good healthy tans” we used to covet?) Unless somebody publishes a study that surprises us all, we take for granted that the common lore we get from our elders and others is correct. And we are wise to do so; we need huge amounts of common knowledge to guide our way through life, and there is no time to sort through all of it, testing every item for soundness.⁴ And so, in a tribal society in which “everyone knows” that you need to sacrifice a goat in order to have a healthy baby, you make sure that you sacrifice a goat. Better safe than sorry.

This feature marks a profound difference between folk religion and organized religion: those who practice a folk religion don’t thinkof themselves as practicing a religion at all. Their “religious” practices are a seamless part of their practical lives, alongside their hunting and gathering or tilling and harvesting. And one way to tell that they really believe in the deities to which they make their sacrifices is that they aren’t forever talking about how much they believe in their deities—any more than you and I go around assuring each other that we believe in germs and atoms. Where there is no ambient doubt to speak of, there is no need to speak of faith.

Most of us know of atoms and germs only by hearsay, and would be embarrassingly unable to give a good answer if a Martian anthropologist asked us how we knew that there are such things—since you can’t see them or hear them or taste them or feel them. If pressed, most of us would probably concoct some seriously mistaken lore about these invisible (but important!) things. We’re not the experts—we just go along with “what everybody knows,” which is just what the tribal people do. It happens that their experts have got it wrong.⁵ Many anthropologists have observed that when they ask their native informants about “theological” details—their gods’ whereabouts, specific history, and methods of acting in the world—their informants find the whole inquiry puzzling. Why should they be expected to know or care anything about that? Given this widely reported reaction, we should not dismiss the corrosive hypothesis that many of the truly exotic and arguably incoherent doctrines that have been unearthed by anthropologists over the years are artifacts of inquiry, not pre-existing creeds. It is possible that persistent questioning by anthropologists has composed a sort of innocently collaborative fiction, newly minted and crystallized dogmas generated when questioner and informant talk past each other until a mutually agreed-upon story results. The informants deeply believe in their gods—“Everybody knows they exist!”—but they may never before have thought about these details (maybe nobody in the culture has!), which would explain why their convictions are vague and indeterminate. Obliged to elaborate, they elaborate, taking their cues from the questions posed.⁶

In the next chapter, we will look at some striking implications of these methodological issues, once we have sketched more of an account to serve as our test bed. For the moment, it may help if you try to put yourself in the shoes of an anthropologist’s informant. Now that the modern world with its particular complexities is descending on tribal people, they have to make wholesale revisions in their views of nature, and, not surprisingly, this prospect is daunting to them. I daresay if Martians arrived with marvelous technology that struck us as “impossible” and told us that we had to abandon our germs and atoms and get with their program, only the most nimble-minded of our scientists would make the transition swiftly and gladly. The rest of us would cling to our dear old atoms and germs as long as we could, matter-of-factly telling our children about how water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—at least that’s what we’ve always been told—and warning them about germs, just to stay on the safe side. What looms large in every person’s life is the problem of what to do now, and there are few discomforts more stressful than the quandary of not knowing what to do, or what to think about, when baffling novelty strikes. At times like that, we all seek refuge in the familiar. The tried-and-true may not be true, but at least it is tried, so it gives us something to do that we know how to do. And usually it will work pretty well, about as well as it ever did in any case.