Humans also have a tendency to render and reduce complex successions or coincidences of events as a single “thing.” We give it a name and reify the succession-coincidence as an object which can then be subjected to analysis. The recent “financial crisis” is a perfect example. Whatever the crisis is or was, it is not a singular object that can be dissected with a simple story. Despite this fact, we have no shortage of stories which purport to explain not only what it is but also what caused it.

In “Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth,” behavioral scientist Reid Hastie explains that our brain’s inbuilt preference for narrative obscures the complex, multi-causal truths of the matter:

Compared with all other animals, we are endowed with remarkable capacities for causal discovery and causal reasoning, the skills that underlie the narrative habit. The divide between human and our nearest primate cousins in causal cognition capacities is as dramatic as our advantage in language use.

The trouble is that narrative thinking often supplants scientific thinking in domains of analysis and policy where we should look for more than a good story. Narrative thinking is easier for the thinker than its less natural analytic alternatives, and it is often persuasive when used to make arguments to others.

For one thing, narratives give us a false sense of understanding and control, when they are really mere re-descriptions of selected sub-parts of the events to which they refer. Once we have a good narrative summary, we have the illusion that we could have intervened and controlled outcomes, or could have predicted what in hindsight seems to be an obvious outcome. But, unlike valid causal explanations that support informative forecasts and suggest ways to change events further down the causal stream, narratives lack these basic properties of true causal explanations.

Narratives also tend to be dominated by a few major actors, and faux explanatory power is derived from simplistic interpretations of those actors’ characters and motives. And the universal human illusion that consciously accessible thoughts are in the driver’s seat and controlling our own actions means that the salient actors in a narrative we want to understand are attributed information and incentives to a greater degree than is warranted.

So the next time you hear a good story about why the financial recession, or any other economically significant event, was caused by a single collection of bad actors — or how a simple linear narrative “explains” an important event — remember this: Just as we are wired to like a diet rich in fats and sugars, we have an appetite for simple, coherent narratives. Neither habit is good for our long-term health.

This is good advice that should be applied across domains, including the evolutionary and historical study of religions. The next time you hear a simple, linear, and satisfying story about some outcome or event, interrogate it.

But it has stoked some controversy which centers on the fact that Carson is a young earth creationist who publicly dismisses evolution. Oops. The vetting committee apparently missed this, or if it was noticed, they figured it wasn’t a big deal. Except that it has become one.

Last week, nearly 500 Emory faculty members, post-docs, graduate students and others signed a public letter titled Ben Carson’s Outright Rejection of Evolution is Against Emory’s Ideals. When I first came across the story at Inside Higher Ed, it sounded like Carson was an evolutionary theist, which hardly seems objectionable:

Carson believes in natural selection, but not in the traditional evolutionary sense. “They say that natural selection is proof that things can change,” Carson said. “I say natural selection is proof that we have an intelligent creator who gave his creatures the ability to adapt to their environment.”

But after doing some digging it became clear that Carson is a young earth creationist and Seventh Day Adventist. The two go hand in hand. This artfully drafted profile of Carson by the Institute of Creation Research reveals the nature of Emory’s problem:

Benjamin S. Carson, M.D., one of the world’s foremost pediatric neurosurgeons, is professor and chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Born on September 18, 1951, in Detroit to a single mother in a working class neighborhood, Ben showed promise from a young age. A graduate of Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School, he was rated by a Time issue titled “America’s Best” as a “super surgeon.” Dr. Carson was also selected by CNN and Time as one of the nation’s top 20 physicians and scientists, and by the Library of Congress as one of 89 “living-legends.”

Dr. Carson is a leading research scientist. A “voracious reader of the medical and scientific literature” from his graduate school days, he has long been very interested in scientific research and has been very active in this area for his entire career, with over 120 major scientific publications in peer reviewed journals, 38 books and book chapters, and grant awards of almost a million dollars. His achievements have so far earned him 51 honorary doctorates, including from Yale and Columbia Universities.

As if these credentials weren’t enough, the article next details Carson’s world-renowned surgical skill and medical accomplishments. The picture is undeniably impressive and designed to overwhelm the reader with an aura of authority. At this point, the creationist bomb is dropped:

After Dr. Carson reviewed in detail the evidence for design in nature, he concluded, “I just don’t have enough faith to believe” that the living world happened by evolutionary processes. He added that 150 years after Darwin, there is still no evidence for evolution:

It’s just not there. But when you bring that up to the proponents of Darwinism, the best explanation they can come up with is “Well…uh…it’s lost!”…I find it requires too much faith for me to believe that explanation given all the fossils we have found without any fossilized evidence of the direct, step-by-step evolutionary progression from simple to complex organisms or from one species to another species. Shrugging and saying, “Well, it was mysteriously lost, and we’ll probably never find it,” doesn’t seem like a particularly satisfying, objective, or scientific response.

Carson concluded that the “plausibility of evolution is further strained by Darwin’s assertion that within fifty to one hundred years of his time, scientists would become geologically sophisticated enough to find the fossil remains of the entire evolutionary tree in an unequivocal step-by-step progression of life from amoeba to man.”

As a neurosurgeon, he stresses the “factors that contribute to the failure to utilize fully the most amazing God-given resource, our brain, such as peer pressure and political correctness, which often limits our willingness, even as objective scientists, to have thoughtful, rational discussions about evolution versus creationism.” It is even harder for him to accept how so many people who can’t explain how evolution can account for all life claim that it is a fact, while at the same time “insisting anyone who wants to consider or discuss creationism as a possibility cannot be a real scientist.”

The article then recounts a testy exchange between Carson and paleoanthropologist Don Johanson at a conference. Johanson is of course depicted as an ideological bully. It appears that Johanson was simply pointing out the distinction between evidence and belief — a distinction that Carson either refuses to recognize or doesn’t understand.

I usually don’t have much to say about creationism because it tends to be futile. Those deeply committed to it, for some combination of psychological, social, and religious reasons, are relatively impervious to facts and persuasion. I will say, however, that Carson’s fame provides him an impressive pulpit. He’s like the Army of One for creationism. All it takes is one person like Carson to undo the work of many thousands of scientists and teachers. Those who might be open minded about evolution often need only one authority figure to assist them with their non-decision. Carson appears to be that figure.

Carson also stands as a one man refutation of Stephen Jay Gould’s naive idea (or idealistic hope) that science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria (“NOMA”). Science writ large has a great deal to say about religion and it is obvious that religious belief like Carson’s can strongly influence scientific perception. It is vain to hope that the two can be kept apart.

Where does all this leave Emory University? Not in a good place. It would be one thing if Carson thought evolution were guided or designed and that it can’t or doesn’t address the issue of ultimate origins. It is quite another for him to believe there is no evidence for evolution while simultaneously asserting that all life on earth was specially created some 7,000 years ago. This kind of claim is anti-science and antithetical to what universities are all about.

Haidt’s mistake is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations:  “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.

Does anyone really think that the Patrick Henry binary of liberty/oppression is a universal moral concern? Or that for the past 50,000 years, humans everywhere have been so pressed by this binary that it amounts to an evolved moral disposition? During this same span of time, has everyone also evolved a Foucauldian sounding moral sense regarding authority/subversion?

Simply asking these kinds of historical and cross-cultural questions suggests that Haidt isn’t trafficking in evolved moral universals. This kind of naive evolutionary psychology often mistakes the current and local for the ancient and global.

In his recent review of Haidt’s book, John Gray understands this and more. I encourage you to read the whole but for those who don’t have time, these choice excerpts shouldn’t be missed:

Haidt’s account of the emergence of morality is disputed by other evolutionary psychologists, who argue that group selection is a part of Darwin’s inheritance that should be discarded. The debate has been heated and at times rancorous, an exercise in sectarian intellectual warfare of the kind that is so often fought in and around Darwinism. As is often the case, a larger issue has gone largely unexplored. In evolutionary theories of this kind, what exactly is it that is being explained?

Though they think their theories are universally applicable, evolutionary theorists commonly take their local conception of morality for granted. Books such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, one of the more impressive of recent applications of Darwinism to ethics, assume that acting morally is a matter of following rules or principles having mainly to do with justice and the prevention of harm. This may seem self-evident to secular social scientists in American universities, but it hardly squares with how most human beings (or most Americans, for that matter) understand morality.

Haidt makes some sharp criticisms of naïve rationalism—the idea, found among the “new atheists” and others like them, that human life may someday be governed by science. But his claims for the usefulness of evolutionary psychology are hardly less naïve and rationalistic. Much of his book is an attempt to apply the findings of evolutionary psychology to the political gridlock that currently exists in the United States. The incongruity of the exercise should not go unnoticed. Whatever the causes of division in Washington, they have nothing to do with evolution. The phenomenon is much too recent for any evolutionary explanation to be remotely plausible. It is also too distinctively American to be explicable in the universal terms of evolutionary theory.

VAINLY INVOKING the universal laws of science to account for the accidents of history, Haidt has fallen into a classic confusion of categories. His analysis of American divisions, he tells us, is an application of “Moral Foundations Theory,” which identifies “the universal cognitive modules upon which cultures construct moral matrices.” But there is more than a hint of absurdity in Haidt’s pronouncements, and it is not because he is necessarily mistaken in his analysis of American politics. He may be right that American political divisions are currently correlated with attitudes to morality in the ways that he specifies. The absurdity comes from neglecting the historical contingencies that have produced the correlations he describes.

In the end, however, Haidt’s attempt to apply evolutionary psychology is yet one more example of the failures of scientism. There is no line of evolutionary development that connects our hominid ancestors with the emergence of the Tea Party. Human beings are not amoebae that have somehow managed to turn themselves into clever primates. They are animals with a history, part of which consists of creating cultures that are widely divergent. Using evolutionary psychology to explain current political conflicts represents local and ephemeral differences as perennial divisions in the human mind. It is hard to think of a more stultifying exercise in intellectual parochialism.

Like distinctions between right and left, typologies of liberalism and conservatism may apply in societies that are broadly similar. But the meaning that attaches to these terms differs radically according to historical circumstances, and in many contexts they have no meaning at all. Dissidents against the Soviet state were no more bound to be liberals than were the people who toppled Mubarak. Are the Salafists who are outflanking the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt on the right or the left of politics? Were the market reformers who dismantled the Maoist economy (but not the state apparatus that enforced it) liberals or conservatives? Such questions are senseless, indeed ludicrous. They involve fitting polities and societies whose histories and present circumstances are profoundly different from ours and each other’s onto a map that was designed to chart the conflicts of a small number of closely related countries.

This is pretty harsh but it needed to be said. If evolutionary psychologists would seriously test their proposals historically and cross-culturally, these sorts of mistakes would be far less common.

(AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

In this context, “new” is a relative term, given that so much material touching upon religion is old and often obscure. When the itch develops I can go to Google Scholar, plug in search terms related to religion, and have 50 articles in short order. Many will have been published years ago in obscure journals and have been largely forgotten — or worse, were never acknowledged because they were read only by the author’s peers, which may mean that perhaps 100 people read the article. Discovering these articles, many of which are brilliant, is an immense pleasure. Though I wish I could cover all of them, other projects like books, work, and teaching prevent this. Speaking of books, during the recent course of writing one I’ve had the pleasure of reading several articles which deserve mention. Over the next few months, I’ll be covering as many as I can. Some will have more coverage and some less. My hope is to bring attention to superb or provocative work which languishes in the archives.

For those interested in historic Native American religion, I strongly recommend “The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege” (1971) by Patricia Albers and Seymour Parker. This is one of those rare or old school articles in cultural anthropology where the authors formed a hypothesis and tested it with ethnographic data. They hypothesized that the social construction and cultural import of the vision experience would vary in accord with societal type. They identified three kinds of Plains societies: peripheral hunter-gatherers (e.g., Shoshoni, Flathead, Kutenai), True Plains societies (e.g., Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow), and peripheral farming groups (e.g., Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa). Those familiar with Native American ethnohistory will recognize these as valid ecological-economic classifications. All lived on the Plains and all cultivated the vision experience to one degree or another.

Rita Joyce Copyright

As predicted, each group constructed and construed the vision experience differently. Moreover, the differences systematically varied between groups. The authors make a strong case for a regular relationship between type of society and type of vision experience. Before anyone’s eyes start to glaze thinking this is one of those dessicated research projects demanding that anthropology be a nomothetic science, it isn’t. The authors have a deft touch and deep understanding of cultural complexity. They are quite sensitive to lived experiences. I’ve read most of the material on the Plains vision complex, and this article is one of the best. It brings some order and understanding to a field content to collect cultural butterflies in the past (i.e., Ruth Benedict’s work on the vision complex).

The summation is reminiscent of Julian Steward, and worth quoting at length for those who don’t have institutional access to the article:

Given the findings of this paper with respect to the relationship between social-structural variables and the vision experience, it would seem reasonable to assume that socially recognized visions provided an ideology to “explain” and to support the existing societal opportunity structure. In hunting and gathering societies they served to explain inequalities in personal talents and achievements. In True Plains societies they no longer merely validated differences in personal attributes and achievements but represented a means for justifying existing differences in wealth. Finally, in farming societies the institutionalization of standardized visions served to validate the transfer of inherited property and to legitimize ascribed status positions. Further, these visions supported and reinforced the formalization of status inequalities.

This paper also suggests that the specific functions of visions as a form of anticipatory socialization were not uniform. While it seems clear that in all of the societies under consideration visions have an important role in motivating people to conform to existing institutions, they vary in terms of the nature of the conformity that is encouraged. In the peripheral hunting and gathering societies, as well as in the True Plains societies, most socially recognized visions can be seen to function in encouraging personal achievements, initiative, and independence. However, when the symbolism in visions becomes standardized and is associated with social groups, as in the peripheral farming societies, it appears that visions served to reinforce anchorage in and dependency upon organized collectivities. Therefore, depending on the symbolism manifested in visions, they can be seen as rein- forcing either psychological independence or dependence.

Our paper supports the position that the relative importance of purely individualistically defined religious experiences decreases as one moves to societies with greater economic surplus and social complexity. The growth of status inequality and formalized modes of status allocation are accompanied by increasing restrictions on the incidence, occasions, and participants in personal-spontaneous religious experience that are publicly sanctioned. Private religious experiences, however, do not disappear but increasingly become articulated with formal social groups and their activities. Further, when societies develop larger and more complex corporate structures, such religious phenomena no longer provide a viable or socially acceptable mechanism for status allocation and the assumption of secular power. Societal myths develop to provide a satisfactory rationale for identity with and anchorage in a more complex sociopolitical structure. There is another important factor, however, that comes into play: namely, the increasing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, power, and privileges, and the increasing stabilization of this differentiation. This influence increasingly serves to limit access to and control over supernatural powers. The ideology underlying the vision thus serves (a la Marx) to support the existing distribution of secular power.

That’s really good stuff. The implications for other societies and religions are pretty obvious.

Reference:

Albers, Patricia, & Parker, Seymour. (1971). The Plains Vision Experience: A Study of Power and Privilege Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 27 (3), 203-233

In Israel’s Other Temple: Research Reveals Ancient Struggle Over Holy Land Supremacy, we learn that the Samaritans and Jews have a common and competitive history. The Samaritans at one time were the dominant Israelite tribe with a spectacular temple that was the political and religious center of the region. Jerusalem at the time was sparsely populated and a relatively inconsequential sideshow.

Geography being a form of destiny, the Samaritans had the misfortune of being in the north where they bore the harsh brunt of Assyrian invasions. Samaria was devastated and many of its people fled 30 miles south to Jerusalem, which grew in size and importance. Leaders in Jerusalem sensed and seized opportunity, finishing the job started by the Assyrians: they destroyed Samaria and the original temple.

Mount Gerizim -- Site of Samaritan/Israelite Temple

They were not able, however, to destroy all the books and several older (i.e., Samaritan) versions of the Torah survived. These older versions tell a quite different story from the newer and revised versions written by the victors from Jerusalem:

[W]hich Torah is the original? Until recently, the generally accepted school of thought was as follows: In the fourth century BC, the Samaritans split off as a radical sect. In the Bible, they appear as outsiders and idol worshipers; they are evil. The parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37) offers a rather atypical portrayal of a member of this sect.

The historian Titus Flavius Josephus, himself a Jew, mentions that the apostates erected a shrine “in all haste” in the year 330 BC, as a rather dilettantish attempt to emulate the Temple in Jerusalem.

Increasingly, though, it looks as though the Bible has handed down a distorted picture of history. Papyrus scrolls recovered from Qumran on the Dead Sea, as well as a fragment of the Bible that recently surfaced on the market for antiquities, necessitate a “complete reassessment,” says Professor Stefan Schorch.

At first — so much is clear — the Samaritans had the upper hand. Indeed, compared with Jerusalem, [the Samaritan temple on] Mount Gerizim enjoyed significantly older rights: In the great tale of the history of the chosen people, the mountain plays a key role.

Abraham, the progenitor of the Israelites — who, according to legend, roamed through the Orient as a shepherd around 1500 BC — stopped there because God had appeared to him in a wondrous vision. Later, Jacob the patriarch traveled there to build the original shrine.

In the fifth book of Moses, the mountain summit finally earns a prominent place in biblical history: After the flight from Egypt, the Israelites wandered through the Sinai desert for 40 years. At last, they reached the Jordan River from the east. Their old and weary leader gazed across the river to the promised land, where “milk and honey flow.”

Shortly before his death, Moses issued an important command: The people must first travel to Mount Gerizim. He said that six tribes should climb it and proclaim blessings, while the other six tribes should proclaim curses from the top of nearby Mount Ebal. It was a kind of ritual taking possession of the promised land.

Finally, the prophet tells the Israelites to build a shrine “made of stones” on Mount Gerizim and coat it with “plaster.” Indeed, he said, this is “the place that the Lord has chosen.”

That, in any case, is what stands in the oldest Bible texts. They are brittle papyrus scrolls that were made over 2,000 years ago in Qumran, and have only recently been examined by experts.

In the Hebrew Bible, which Jerusalem’s priests probably spent a good deal of time revising [after subjugating the Samaritans and destroying the Gerizim temple], everything suddenly sounds quite different. There is no longer any mention of a “chosen place.”

The word “Gerizim” has also been removed from the crucial passage. Instead, the text states that the Yahweh altar was erected on “Ebal.” “By naming the mountain of the curses,” says Schorch, “they wanted to cast the entire tale in a negative light, and deprive Gerizim of its biblical legitimacy.”

[Torah scholar] Stefan Schorch dates the intervention to around 150 BC. The researcher stops short of calling it fraud, though, preferring to label it an “adaptation of the Bible to their own religious view.”

There is obviously a great deal at stake here, and I expect that the scholars and archaeologists working on these issues will be attacked from all directions. Their work will upset both Jews and Christians, albeit for curiously different reasons.

As the scholarly investigation continues and attacks are made, I think it important keep cui bono in mind at all times. Who is doing the attacking and what benefit do they derive from what may be the newer, revised, and mythical (hi)story?

The discovery that two events, symbols, thoughts or texts, while so utterly separated by time and space that they could not “really” be connected, seem, nevertheless, to be the same or to be speaking directly to one another raises the possibility of a secret interconnection of things that is the scholar’s most cherished article of faith.

– Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual”

With this observation, the famous historian of religion touches on my favorite aspect of scholarship: seeing connections in disparate things. While Smith was commenting on the subtle connections at the heart of both ritual and scholarship, I am often reminded of such coincidences when one thing mysteriously leads to another, forming a train of novel thought which excites.

This happened to me after reading How the Power of Positive Thinking Won Scientific Credibility, in which Hans Villarica interviews psychologist Micheal F. Scheier. Scheier’s 1985 study, “Optimism, Coping, and Health: Assessment and Implications of Generalized Outcome Expectancies,” demonstrated that dispositional optimism is variable and healthy, leading to a range of better outcomes across life domans. A raft of subsequent studies have confirmed these findings. In evolutionary terms, it appears that dispositional optimism is adaptive.

When I read about Scheier’s studies, I was just finishing Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior, an extraordinary book that transports us into world of the Wyoming-Montana Crow just before their buffalo hunting way of life disappeared. Although many books attempt to take us there, few succeed. Most were written by anthropologists who conducted interviews many years after the fact, and while these ethnohistories are culturally comprehensive, they are short on biographical and personal detail. They give us general ethnographic pictures that don’t really bring people or culture to life. Historians often do better with this but too often focus on big people and events, making it hard to imagine what Plains peoples were doing, saying, and thinking on a daily basis. Two Leggings does this.

The story behind the book, which reads like a historical novel, is remarkable. In 1918, businessman William Wildschut moved to Billings, Montana near the Crow Reservation. He soon got to know several elders and became particularly interested in Two Leggings (1847-1923), a fairly typical Crow warrior-hunter who never became an important or famous chief. Over the next few years, they often met with Wildschut recording the details of Two Leggings’ life. When finished, Wildschut deposited nearly 600 pages of rough and detailed notes at the Smithsonian, where they languished until Peter Nabokov discovered them in the 1960s. Realizing the value and potential of the notes, Nabokov painstakingly worked the material into a coherent life-story told from the first person perspective.

Two Leggings was an ambitious man born into a culture that strongly encouraged male ambition, whether on the hunt or warpath. Ambition, however, was not enough — one obtained success and rose to prominence not by deeds alone, but through deeds that were directed and validated by spiritual help and guidance. If the spirits bestowed gifts through visions, one could be confident — or optimistic, that success was to be had. If the spirits were neither generous nor favorable, confidence would plummet.

Not lacking personal ambition, Two Leggings throughout his life sought spiritual assistance and validation, though with only limited success. This seriously affected his confidence, and at times he was less than optimistic about his prospects. Due to lack of success with the spirits, a minor sense of dread pervades his life. He watches others seek and receive spiritual sanction. In nearly all cases, these fortunate ones set forth with boundless optimism, sure in the fact they were doing the right thing and would be successful doing it. In many cases, they were. All the major chiefs had strong visions and powerful spirit helpers.

I can’t help but think that here we have a unexpected connection. Scheier’s psychological studies on dispositional optimism surely says something about Crow and other Plains Indians cultures. Because it is healthy to have confidence, and one gains confidence through visions and signs, I see this as one of those connections of which Smith speaks.

I tried to be really clear that you can keep asking “Why?” forever. At some level there might be ultimate questions that we can’t answer, but if we can answer the “How?” questions, we should, because those are the questions that matter. And it may just be an infinite set of questions, but what I point out at the end of the book is that the multiverse may resolve all of those questions. From Aristotle’s prime mover to the Catholic Church’s first cause, we’re always driven to the idea of something eternal.

If the multiverse really exists, then you could have an infinite object—infinite in time and space as opposed to our universe, which is finite. That may beg the question as to where the multiverse came from, but if it’s infinite, it’s infinite. You might not be able to answer that final question, and I try to be honest about that in the book. But if you can show how a set of physical mechanisms can bring about our universe, that itself is an amazing thing and it’s worth celebrating.

I don’t ever claim to resolve that infinite regress of why-why-why-why-why; as far as I’m concerned it’s turtles all the way down. The multiverse could explain it by being eternal, in the same way that God explains it by being eternal, but there’s a huge difference: the multiverse is well motivated and God is just an invention of lazy minds.

Here Krauss betrays his metaphysical game and tells us that, in his opinion, why questions are less important than how questions. There may be some or considerable justification for thinking this, but it is an ought preference rather than an is reality. I certainly prefer how questions and think they shed much light on why questions, but this is my own preference and acknowledge it as such.

Krauss also shows he isn’t bound to data or averse to speculation. When he starts talking about the unobservable possibility of multiverses, he has ventured beyond the empirical-evidentiary reservation. As Claude Levi-Strauss might say, such things may be good to think but we don’t know if they are real.

Krauss is on a mission not just to rid the world of religion, but also of philosophy. This is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you don’t understand what philosophy is or what it does. On that score, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci settled some with this post on Krauss.

While polite attention is fixed on Saudi women and the prohibitions against driving or competing in the Olympics, several disturbing articles have appeared this week which put the spotlight on women in Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan. In Why Do They Hate Us, Mona Eltahawy pulls no punches:

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.”

What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either.

After this opening salvo, which presumably starts with Egypt because Eltahawy was born there and was recently raped by Egyptian police, she tours other Arab countries, all united to one degree of another in the abuse of women and use of Islam to justify it.

Photo by Aaron Goodman for Foreign Policy

As might have been expected given the incendiary nature of Eltahawy’s article (and provocative photos such as the one above), the blow-back has been substantial. Angry critics argue that Eltahawy painted with too broad a brush and has oversimplified the issues and causes. Undoubtedly she did oversimplify both the issues and the causes. If this ignited a debate, is it did, it seems a good thing.

As might also have been expected, some critics were quick to argue that the problem isn’t religious. Max Fisher, for instance, proclaims this in his title of his Atlantic post: “The Real Roots of Sexism in the Middle East (It’s Not Islam).” As a titular matter, this is correct. Because there is no essential “Islam” and “Islam” is not a reified thing, “Islam” can’t be a cause or root. But there are interpretations, constructions, and deployments of ideas that its practitioners call “Islam” which helped develop and maintain sexism, misogyny, and abuse. Despite declaring “Islam” innocent and blaming colonialism for sexism-abuse, even Fisher recognizes this:

The colonial rulers who conquered Muslim societies were skilled at pulling out the slightest justification for their “patriarchal bargain.” They promoted the religious leaders who were willing to take this bargain and suppressed those who objected. This is a big part of how misogynistic practices became especially common in the Muslim world (another reason is that, when the West later promoted secular rulers, anti-colonialists adopted extreme religious interpretations as a way to oppose them).

While there may be some or substantial truth to this, Fisher seems to be saying that colonial rulers promoted men who justified sexism-abuse with religion, and that anti-colonialists “opposed” this by adopting even more extreme religious interpretations. Under this strange scenario, women get colonial abuse coming and anti-colonial abuse going, all justified in the name of religion or “Islam.” By Fisher’s own account, these constructions and uses of “Islam” cannot be dismissed as a cause.

From the fire of the Middle East we go to the frying pan of Pakistan, where Zara Jamal reports things aren’t any better. In To Be a Woman in Pakistan: Six Stories of Abuse, Shame, and Survival, we glimpse a small world of suffering. Jamal prefaces the six stories with this odd observation:

Westerners usually associate the plight of Pakistani women with religious oppression, but the reality is far more complicated. A certain mentality is deeply ingrained in strictly patriarchal societies like Pakistan. Poor and uneducated women must struggle daily for basic rights, recognition, and respect. They must live in a culture that defines them by the male figures in their lives, even though these women are often the breadwinners for their families.

Is Jamal suggesting that the abuse of these women is a byproduct of free-floating or traditional patriarchy? If so, my questions to her would be how did this patriarchy develop and how is it maintained? It surely isn’t by vague obeisance to tradition or patriarchy. The “mentality” and “culture” that Jamal mentions are substantially anchored in and justified by a particular reading of Islam, even if she wants to minimize this or not mention it. While questioning and complicating standard narratives is good, complexity needn’t eclipse reality or truth.

In a piece which probes closer to the core of these issues, we have Karim Sadjadpour’s The Ayatollah Under the Bed(sheets). In the past, I’ve sometimes thought that these kinds of societies should be analyzed using a Freudian approach. As Sadjadpour shows, this can bear some fruit:

Ayatollah Khamenei contends that the health of the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic’s well-being and is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:

In Islam, women have been prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one’s physical attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be undermined.

Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women — fitna — is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Ahmadinejad’s contested reelection. In other words, women’s hair is itself seen as seditious and counter-revolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran’s first post-revolutionary president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women’s hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays.

Against this backdrop of repression, temptation, and domination, other countries are attempting to gauge whether the Iranian government is fundamentally rational or irrational. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the ayatollahs continue wrangling with their other great fear — that Western sex will invade Iran and the revolution will eventually become limp:

Khamenei’s vast collection of writings and speeches makes clear that the weapons of mass destruction he fears most are cultural — more Kim Kardashian and Lady Gaga than bunker busters and aircraft carriers. In other words, Tehran is threatened not only by what America does, but by what America is: a depraved, postmodern colonial power bent on achieving global cultural hegemony. America’s “strategic policy,” Khamenei has said, “is seeking female promiscuity.”

All this leaves me wondering: What it is about some men in some countries that makes them so fearful of women? When personal weakness and insecurity marry themselves to domestic, religious, and political power, the results aren’t pretty.

Just last week, Richard Dawkins debated Cardinal George Pell in another installment of the interminable debates which convince atheists that atheism is best and theists that theism is best. Pell, on par for the theist course, argued that atheism leads to bad things like Hitler and the Nazis. Dawkins responded by observing that Hitler wasn’t an atheist.

This exchange, unenlightening though it was, at least generated useful commentary by an historian familiar with the debates about Nazis and religion. He notes that scholars are of three schools of thought: (1) the Nazis were neo-pagans, (2) Naziism was a political religion, or (3) Nazis were peculiar Christians. Based on everything I’ve read over the years, all three descriptions seem to be correct — they aren’t mutually exclusive. Hitler himself admired the Catholic Church and used it as a model for his own movement.

One thing is clear: Hitler wasn’t an atheist and almost no Nazis were. However idiosyncratic, Hitler clearly had creationist ideas:

Hitler argued for a critical review of the Bible, to discover what sections met an “Aryan” spirit. In these same notes, he took a “biogenetic” history as the main biblical emphasis, arguing that original sin was solely racial degeneration – sin against the blood. He also argued in favour of the notion of a creator, a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing. This again came back to race, and meant that he argued in Mein Kampf that one could not avoid the “commands” of “eternal nature” or the “Almighty Creator”: “in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

For theists this sort of thing is best ignored, as is the fact that 99% of Germans were avowed Christians during the Nazi era. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this debate is its relationship to evolution. Aside from mistakenly believing that Nazis were atheists, most theists assume that the Nazis were Darwinian evolutionists. They weren’t.

As Coel Hellier documents in this superb post, Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist, and opposed to evolution. After an extensive examination of Nazi ideas, Hellier concludes:

The main ideas of Darwinism are that natural selection, operating over lengthy time periods, can cause species to transform into other species, and that all modern mammals descend from a common ancestor. Both of these notions the Nazis explicitly rejected, finding them abhorrent, materialistic notions that would strip man of his soul and of his special status. The Nazis preferred, as do many other religious people, to see man as God’s special creation. It was seeing, in particular, the Aryan race as “God’s handiwork” that led the Nazis to consider it sinful to allow the destruction of the Aryan race by allowing racial inter-marriage, and hence the necessity for removing the possibility by finding a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.”

Thus nothing in Nazi ideology derives from Darwinism. The few aspects in common were pre-Darwinian; the ideas that originated with Darwin were anathema to and rejected by the Nazis. The widespread blaming of Darwinism as an inspiration for Nazi crimes has no support in historical evidence and instead derives purely from a desire on the part of the religious to smear Darwinism.

The labeling of the Nazis as “atheistic” is similarly motivated and is also the exact opposite of what the evidence says. The Nazi ideology was theistic and religious and an offshoot of Christianity, merging Christianity with Nazi racial theory. It is true that the Nazified Christianity was opposed to more mainstream Christian views, and thus that the Nazis wanted radical reform of the Christian religion, but in no sense was it “atheistic.”

It would be splendid if, before the next debate, the theist representative would read Hellier’s piece and leave the Hitler-Nazi-atheist canard out of it.