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.”
Changes in religion’s functions
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
Those shifts of function make it harder to define religion than to define electric organs, because electric organs at least all share the trait of setting up detectable electric fields in the surrounding medium, whereas there is no single characteristic shared by all religions. At the risk of coming up with yet another definition to add to those of Table 9.1, I’d now propose: “Religion is a set of traits distinguishing a human social group sharing those traits from other groups not sharing those traits in identical form. Included among those shared traits is always one or more, often all three, out of three traits: supernatural explanation, defusing anxiety about uncontrollable dangers through ritual, and offering comfort for life’s pains and the prospect of death. Religions other than early ones became co-opted to promote standardized organization, political obedience, tolerance of strangers belonging to one’s own religion, and justification of wars against groups holding other religions.” That definition of mine is at least as tortured as the most tortured definitions already in Table 9.1, but I think that it corresponds to reality.
What about religion’s future? That depends on what shape the world will be in 30 years from now. If living standards rise all around the world, then religion’s functions numbers 1 and 4–7 of Figure 9.1 will continue to decline, but functions 2 and 3 seem to me likely to persist. Religion is especially likely to continue to be espoused for claiming to offer meaning to individual lives and deaths whose meaning may seem insignificant from a scientific perspective. Even if science’s answer to the search for meaning is true, and if religion’s meaning is an illusion, many people will continue not to like science’s answer. If, on the other hand, much of the world remains mired in poverty, or if (worse yet) the world’s economy and living standards and peace deteriorate, then all functions of religion, perhaps even supernatural explanation, may undergo a resurgence. My children’s generation will experience the answers to these questions.
CHAPTER 10
Speaking in Many Tongues
The world’s language total How languages evolve Geography of language diversity Traditional multilingualism Benefits of bilingualism Alzheimer’s disease Vanishing languages How languages disappear Are minority languages harmful? Why preserve languages? How can we protect languages?Multilingualism
One evening, while I was spending a week at a mountain forest campsite with 20 New Guinea Highlanders, conversation around the campfire was going on simultaneously in several different local languages plus two lingua francas of Tok Pisin and Motu, as commonly happens when a group of New Guineans from different tribes happens to be gathered. I had already become accustomed to encountering a new language approximately every 10 or 20 miles as I walked or drove through the New Guinea Highlands. I had just come from the lowlands, where a New Guinea friend had told me how five different local languages were spoken within a few miles of his village, how he had picked up those five languages as a child just by playing with other children, and how he had learned three more languages after he began school. And so, out of curiosity that evening, I went around the campfire circle and asked each man to name each language that he “spoke,” i.e., knew well enough to converse in.
Among those 20 New Guineans, the smallest number of languages that anyone spoke was 5. Several men spoke from 8 to 12 languages, and the champion was a man who spoke 15. Except for English, which New Guineans often learn at school by studying books, everyone had acquired all of his other languages socially without books. Just to anticipate your likely question—yes, those local languages enumerated that evening really were mutually unintelligible languages, not mere dialects. Some were tonal like Chinese, others were non-tonal, and they belonged to several different language families.
In the United States, on the other hand, most native-born Americans are monolingual. Educated Europeans commonly know two or three languages, sometimes more, having learned in school the languages other than their mother tongue. The linguistic contrast between that New Guinea campfire and modern American or European experience illustrates widespread differences between language use in small-scale societies and in modern state societies—differences that will increase in coming decades. In our traditional past, as is still true in modern New Guinea, each language had far fewer speakers than do the languages of modern states; probably a higher proportion of the population was multilingual; and second languages were learned socially beginning in childhood, rather than by formal study later in schools.