Robert Kurzban & Peter Descioli. Skeptic. Volume 15, Issue 2, Summer 2009.
Religion has presented a complex array of puzzles for scientists from many different disciplines. Recently, work by sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists has been supplemented by researchers who have tried to explain aspects of religion by taking an evolutionary approach, and this has presented numerous mysteries, including why people engage in ritual, why people entertain supernatural beliefs, how such beliefs spread, why religion is frequently at the center of intergroup conflicts, why morality and religion are so closely intertwined, why religious groups’ members are frequently willing to sacrifice for one another, and so on.
Here, we ask if the evolutionary approach might be useful in understanding why the world’s major organized religions can be so oppressive.
Religious Organizations and Oppression
In Alexandria in 415 AD, a Christian mob attacked a woman, stripped her naked, and dragged her through the streets. She was taken to a church where she was torn apart and set ablaze. The woman, Hypatia, was an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. She was murdered because some of her ideas differed from the beliefs of her Christian attackers. The man who orchestrated Hypatia’s murder, “Saint” Cyril of Alexandria, ceaselessly persecuted pagans, Jews, and heretics for their dissenting beliefs.
In Rome in 1600, a group of Christians led by Cardinal Bellarmine condemned a man for violations against the Church. The violator was taken to a market square where he was gagged, stripped naked, tied to a stake, and burned alive. The man, Giordano Bruno, was a renowned philosopher and scientist who held beliefs deemed morally wrong by his killers. Among Bruno’s offending beliefs, he thought it possible that the Earth was not the only planet with life, that the universe might be infinite, and that bread and wine are not really transformed into the body and blood of Jesus.
Religious organizations do not simply offer ideas about the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, and the inclinations of make-believe otherworldly beings. Religions are very concerned with people’s thoughts and behavior, seeking to impose control not only on their own members but also on non-members. The long, gruesome history of persecutions for heresy and blasphemy attests to this concern. Countless victims have been tortured, burned, mutilated, and beheaded for trivial differences in beliefs, including differences between two sets of equally false supernatural beliefs.
Beyond people’s individual thoughts and actions, religions also seek to control many spheres of public life from art and science to sexuality and reproduction. Only a few decades ago, the Catholic Church’s “Legion of Decency” asked members to protest movies that the Legion deemed immoral and to boycott theatres offering the films. Religions seek to control how people use their sexual organs and with whom they use them. They seek to control people’s choices about their own family and reproduction; some advocate forcing women to bear the children of men who rape them. They seek to control what scientific information is transmitted to children, diluting scientific knowledge with creation myths. They seek to control the use of such medical technologies as stem cells, artificial fertilization, embryo cryopreservation, contraceptives, gene therapy, and cloning.
Why do organized religions seek so much control? Why have religions meted out some of history’s most brutal torments to force compliance with their idiosyncratic rules? Religious doctrines and their authoritarian agendas are the product of human brains, so it is there that the answer to these mysteries will be found.
Evolutionary Psychology and Social Minds
Evolutionary psychology begins with the fact that humans like other animals are the product of evolution by natural selection. Living things consist of devices, or adaptations, that allow them to solve problems such as avoiding predators, catching prey, and finding mates. The particular problems members of different species face depend on their life history, giving rise to species-specific adaptations. By the process of natural selection, organisms come to be engineered to cause the replication of the genetic material which, in concert with the environment, constructed the organism. Therefore, the bodies of organisms—including their brains—can be thought of as machines that lead to the further production of similar machines. This is why organisms tend not to be designed to benefit others, whether of their own or another species. Instead, they are designed to benefit themselves or, more precisely, to benefit the genes that give rise to them.
There appear to be numerous adaptations for social behavior. Humans are exquisitely well adapted to life in the social world, equipped with computational programs—strategies and counter-strategies—for handling the intricate problems that arise in interactions with other humans, both competitively and cooperatively. This model nicely explains competition, but why do people cooperate? The answer to this lies in the fact that while other people represent potential threats, they also represent potential opportunities, and human minds are designed to reap these benefits.
Because of the way that evolution operates, genes can be selected because they cause their bearers to endure costs to help their close genetic relatives. This process, known as kin selection, has resulted in adaptations that cause individuals to deliver benefits to genetically related others. It is unsurprising that much of human social life is tied up with close family. But humans also engage in the mutually profitable exchange of goods and services with non-kin, and humans have complex adaptations designed to reap gains from such exchanges as well.
Thus, humans are not “basically,” “fundamentally,” or “naturally” either selfish or altruistic—such claims are misplaced because they underestimate the complexity of the human mind and the many strategies people have for dealing with the social world. People are designed to help some, harm others, and, very often, remain indifferent.
Not always, however. One aspect of human psychology involves intervening even when one’s own interests are unaffected: morality.
Morality
In a recent article, we suggested that there are two different phenomena that functional accounts of morality can focus on: (1) conscience, the psychological system that produces decisions about one’s own (morally relevant) acts; (2) condemnation, the psychological system that judges others’ acts along a moral dimension of right versus wrong, and desires punishment for people who commit wrongs.
Explaining why conscience evolved in a world of moral condemnation is straightforward. Conscience defends against moral accusation by guiding one away from behaviors that will draw punishment. Many organisms avoid acts that will lead to costs being imposed on them; deference to high status individuals when one is in a subordinate position in a status hierarchy is one example. We suggest that human conscience similarly functions as a defense system.
Explaining condemnation, however, is much more difficult. First, it is important to recognize how zoologically remarkable moral condemnation is. Most organisms are indifferent to other organisms’ acts that do not affect them. Indeed, this is unsurprising from a functional viewpoint. If an organism’s acts represent neither a fitness threat nor a fitness opportunity, intervention serves no function. So why am humans so concerned about others’ acts, especially those that do no harm?
One answer is that condemnation is related to cooperation in groups, in which people punish others because it improves the aggregate welfare of the group to which one belongs. Models of this variety predict that people will condemn acts that lead to fitness losses summed across the group, but not acts that do not have this effect. This prediction sits poorly with the vast literature showing that people condemn harmless acts or even welfare-improving acts. Why should so many want to punish so much for so little?
Religious Organizations and Moralistic Punishment
The acts that the major organized religions condemn are stunning in their scope and include dietary choices, sexual acts, art, dance, economic transactions, clothing, word choice, performance of ritual, leisure activities, work activities, and so on. Some rules do seem like sensible ways to help organize groups of people, such as prohibitions against unjustified harm, taking of property, and violation of contracts.18 However, many condemned acts harm no one, so prohibiting them helps no one.
One explanation was proffered by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his experiments demonstrating that people are often unable to articulate the reasons that they believe certain acts are immoral, such as incest between consenting siblings who used birth control and enjoyed the experience. Evidence suggests people reach a moral judgment and then, after the judgment has been reached, generate a justification for it. This justification might not logically support the moral claim, but is offered with enthusiasm nonetheless.
Indeed, reasons people give to justify a moral rule frequently cannot possibly be its basis. Consider abortion. Most anti-abortion advocates are demonstrably not driven by the moral principle of protecting “life.” If they were, they would oppose exceptions for rape and incest—which they do not, by a large margin. Clearly, a person’s right not to be killed is not diminished by the manner of their conception or the relationship of their parents. People who are anti-abortion but in favor of exceptions cannot, therefore, hold their position as a result of a belief in the rights of an embryo.
Another explanation has to do with the control of other people’s sexual activities and choices. This is easily comprehensible within an evolutionary framework. Many organisms manipulate others’ reproduction for their own benefit. Dominant female meerkats, for example, can render subordinates infertile for periods of time, improving the chances of survival of their own offspring as a result. Weeden argued that conflicts among individuals pursuing different sexual strategies—short-term versus long-term—explain abortion attitudes. Briefly, when abortion is prohibited, causal sex becomes more costly, which is to the advantage of individuals who are in long-term monogamous relationships.
Even if some attempts to constrain others’ behavior have a relatively straightforward evolutionary interpretation, other moralistic rules pertain to doing things that work against people’s own fitness interests, such as homosexuality. The existence of such rules seem to indicate that the function of moral intuitions in the context of religion cannot be straightforwardly understood as a simple extension of fitness interests.
Why, then, is religion frequently in the business of oppression? Again, our claim is not that only religions oppress, or that all religions do. However, we think it important to ask why, historically and in the present day, leaders and members of organized religions will oppress people for behavior that is harmless, or even beneficial.
One possibility is that religions are like bullies. One feature of bullying is that attacks am often made for no reason aside from the ease of attacking the target. (26) Such attacks can be used to establish dominance, or, at least a reputation as someone to be feared and obeyed; indeed many bullies enjoy favorable reputations among their peers. By forcing obedience in trivial matters—even harmless ones—religious leaders establish a reputation for punishment that allows dominance in more meaningful aspects of life. In this view, the content of rules is relatively arbitrary. What is important is that there be a lot of rules so that there are many opportunities to dominate. This might in part explain the wide diversity of roles.
The fact that religions oppress non-members with moral rules is an interesting clue. Perhaps the attention paid to suppressing the freedoms of non-members is a way to signal the will and capacity to use force. Religions can condemn outsiders to remind followers about the social and physical consequences of disobedience while avoiding provoking skirmishes within the group. This might explain why moral bullying often focuses on relatively powerless minorities—such as teenage girls or homosexuals. The ability of marginalized groups to retaliate is limited, so targeting these groups is a relatively cheap way to build a reputation for domination. This fits well with the way that bullies single out the most helpless when they abuse others—physical weakness is a key predictor of peer victimization.
A related idea is that enforcers of moral rules, such as religious leaders, have an incentive to generate rules that can be selectively used against enemies. Individuals who have the power to use instruments of a corporate entity to attack others serve their interests by generating roles that can be applied to whomever they designate whenever they want, the costs defrayed by using the instruments of the corporate entity. What type of rules are useful for this kind of selective enforcement? First, roles about the minutiae of life, which people might violate frequently. Second, roles about beliefs, which are difficult to deny. Third, roles about violence surrounding the supernatural for which innocence is impossible to demonstrate, such as consorting with the devil. This argument might make some sense of the wide variety of moral rules, particularly rules against harmless activities.
Conclusion
Humans are very social, with adaptations designed to deploy strategies for both competing with others and cooperating with them. The complexity of the social world ensures that there is an array of such computational mechanisms. Advances in theory and research in the social sciences have allowed great steps forward in understanding these psychological systems.
In contrast, the psychology that underpins morality remains a subject of debate. Humans condemn others, and when they do so in coordinated fashion, they can use punishment or the threat of punishment to constrain others’ behavior. This occurs, interestingly, even in so-called liberal societies. Many moral rules limit people’s freedom of action, and some moral rules do so discriminately, reducing the freedoms of some but not others. A great deal more work will be needed to understand the complex relationship between morality and religion.