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.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism. Behind us are two thousand years that have been marked by questions about God. Today’s atheistic calm, even from intellectuals, is equal to the eradication of our intellectual history.

At this point, the interviewer — perhaps sensing Walser has just made a personal confession that is not generalizable — asks the obvious question: Why?

Walser responds:

Because we would have to admit that we were crazy. You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

While we shouldn’t be fearful to find that our ancestors were wrong or a bit crazy, Walser is right to sense that this remains an interesting question. He is carrying on, without much luck it appears, in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Barth, and Nietzsche.

I get the sense that Walser’s empathetic range is limited and he is projecting, but judge for yourself.

As Philip Kitcher reminds us, people can be ethical and moral without religion. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Most primates, humans included, are intensely social. It’s impossible to be social without simultaneously behaving in ways that are considered “moral” or “ethical.” This aside, there is little to no evidence that religious people in modern societies are more ethical-moral than non-religious people. Moreover, there is little to no evidence that Axial or “ethical” religions have made people or societies more ethical-moral than previous peoples. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were no more or less ethical-moral than “modern” people who have lived in settled societies during the past 10,000 years.

If Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks knew anything about evolutionary ethics and the ethnohistoric record, he wouldn’t be writing silly articles arguing that modern religions are the existential glue that hold societies together. This sort of argument is typical of apologists who believe that history and civilization essentially began with the movement toward angry gods and moralistic religions.

Elsewhere, Juliane von Mittelstaedt reports on ultra-orthodox Jewish women in Israel who cover themselves from head to toe in up to 27 layers of clothes. It is part of a larger story on the fractures these fundamentalists are creating within Israeli society, which is something that caught my attention previously in Ultra-Orthodox Slackers.

Several aspects of the Mittelstaedt story intrigue. First, it appears that most of the women wearing all these clothes have suffered serious abuse; the covering up thus seems linked to shame. Second, ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel routinely harangue female soldiers. This is unreal, coming from losers who are exempt from military service. This is a good time to compare and contrast.

Someone in the story astutely observes that if some of these zealots didn’t have religion as cover for their obvious madness, they would probably be institutionalized. While witnessing the antics and ideas of American evangelicals, I’ve had occasion to observe the same sort of thing.

In this mordant piece on the future of funerary, Max Rivlin-Nadler begins with the premise that the industry is in crisis because Americans are becoming more secular and fewer people are willing to pay for the bells and whistles of religious funerals. As evidence of increasing secularism, he notes that some 25% of Americans no longer claim affiliation with a church. As Rodney Stark has been saying forever, just because people don’t go to church or identify with organized religion, this doesn’t mean they are becoming secular. Most are not atheists or non-believers; they simply have alternative “spiritual” beliefs and don’t identify with institutional religion. When funeral directors realize this and begin offering non-traditional “spiritual” funerals, they will be able to tap what Rivlin-Nadlin characterizes as the “secular” market.

As the process of explication began to unfold, one of the more troubling issues revolved around the fact that Nazi Germany was a thoroughly Christian nation. When Hitler came to power in 1933, 54% of Germans identified as Christian Lutheran and 40% as Christian Catholic. These numbers were unchanged on the eve of World War II.

For some, this issue had to be explained or explained away. German Christianity had to be disassociated from German Nazism. One of the ways in which this was done was to argue that Nazism was the godless product of materialist Darwinism. Thus was born a veritable cottage industry of apologetics which associates Nazism with evolution and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Yet anyone who has studied Nazism and the Third Reich knows it was drenched in a metaphysics with which German Christians were quite comfortable. The Nazis did not repudiate German Christianity: they drew on its resources to advance their nationalist project. German Christianity was deeply imbricated with Nazism.

In one of the best treatments of this relationship I have seen, astrophysicist Coel Hellier recently posted a nine-part article titled Nazi Racial Ideology was Religious, Creationist and Opposed to Darwinism. In this richly sourced piece, Hellier debunks the apologist mythology which associates Nazism with Darwinism and disassociates Nazism from Christianity.

Here are some excerpts from the summary, but I encourage you to read the whole thing:

The Nazi doctrine of race was fundamentally opposed to and incompatible with Darwinism. Instead Nazi racial theory and their justification for extermination of the “sub-human” races was religious and creationist.

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.”

The labelling 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.”

As is evident from the piece, Hitler professed belief in a creator God to whom the Nation and Volk were indebted. He led by example:

Hitler Attending Church

It is a thoughtful exchange but contains nothing new. Similar debates have been ongoing for well over a century without advance or resolution. Science and religion debates which take “God” as a starting point are myopic. They begin with the false assumption that humans throughout history have been preoccupied with the idea of God, and that the monotheistic concept of God is the starting point for this kind of inquiry. Such assumptions are usually embedded in a Whiggish or progressive religious history with “God” being the apotheosis of supernatural thinking.

The kind of “God” that Lightman discusses is a relatively recent idea, limited in time and space, that ignores religious history and diversity. We can see this in the definitions Lightman proposes:

For the purposes of this discussion, and in agreement with almost all religions, God is a being not restricted by the laws that govern matter and energy in the physical universe. In other words, God exists outside matter and energy. In most religions, this Being acts with purpose and will, sometimes violating existing physical laws (i.e., performing miracles), and has additional qualities such as intelligence, compassion and omniscience.

We can categorize religious beliefs according to the degree to which God acts in the world….Most religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, subscribe to an interventionist view of God.

This is just wrong. It is not true that “almost all religions” have this particular conception of “God.” Nor is it true that “most religions” subscribe to an interventionist view of “God.”

Humans have believed in the supernatural for at least 45,000 years and perhaps longer. The anthropomorphic and interventionist kind of God to which Lightman refers is perhaps 3,000 years old. This particular conception of God is limited in time and space. It is a modern God that derives primarily from the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). It is not a majority God and never has been.

Because Lightman frames his entire science/religion discussion around the God debates that take place within his own high culture salon, his definitions are not a problem so long as they are limited to that tiny arena. But they are not generalizable.

While Western intellectuals may arrive at resolutions or accommodations they find satisfying, these say little or nothing about debates that haven’t existed throughout most of human history and which huge numbers of modern people without God would never even consider.

Tossing around the word “cult” advances these issues not a whit. It signifies nothing other than one’s opposition to other or outsider beliefs. But what about Fallow’s assertion of bigotry? Casting aspersions of this sort requires substantial justification. If someone wouldn’t vote for Romney because he is Mormon, is that person a bigot?

Merriam-Webster defines a bigot as: “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.”

Fallows justifies his claim that being against Romney because of his religion is bigotry by asserting, as if it were self evident, that it also would be bigoted “to oppose Barack Obama because of his race or Joe Lieberman because of his faith or Hillary Clinton or Michele Bachmann because of their gender or Mario Rubio or Nikki Haley because of their ethnicity.”

For Fallows’ bigotry conclusion to follow from his premise, race, gender and ethnicity must occupy the same conceptual space as religion. They must be the same or roughly equivalent. They aren’t.

What is called “race” is a social construction; it is not a biological classification. This social construction is built around variation in skin color. People are born with more or less pigmentation in their skin. Being prejudiced against someone because of skin pigmentation is irrational and bigoted. Skin pigmentation says nothing about a person’s thinking.

Likewise, people are born gendered. Being prejudiced against someone because they are male or female is irrational and bigoted. Gender says nothing about a person’s thinking.

Though less clear (because “ethnicity” is often jumbled and socially constructed), people are perceived as being ethnic simply by being born in a particular place. Being prejudiced against someone because of “ethnicity” is irrational and bigoted. Ethnicity says nothing about a person’s thinking.

But what about religion? People aren’t born religious. Religion is a choice (even if that choice is never exercised). Because religion can be chosen, it can be changed. Religion says something about a person’s thinking.

Religion is not like “race” or gender or “ethnicity”: none of these are matters of choice. They can’t be changed in the way that religion can be changed. Another way of saying this is that “race,” gender, and “ethnicity” are (largely) immutable characteristics; religion is a mutable choice.

With these distinctions in mind, we can ask whether it is bigoted to be against Romney (or any other political candidate) because of his or her religion. I suppose if the answer comes from inside religion — you wouldn’t vote for Romney because you have particular religious beliefs and Romney has different beliefs — a case for bigotry can be made. But if the answer comes from outside religion — you wouldn’t vote for Romney because he believes in the fantastic and absurd — it isn’t bigotry.

In 2006, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg laid out the non-bigoted case for refusing to vote for Romney (or any other candidate) because of religion:

Not applying a religious test for public office, means that people of all faiths are allowed to run—not that views about God, creation, and the moral order are inadmissible for political debate. In George W. Bush’s case, the public paid far too little attention to the role of religion in his thinking. Many voters failed to appreciate that while Bush’s religious beliefs may be moderate Methodist ones, he was someone who relied on his faith immoderately, as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues. Nor is it chauvinistic to say that certain religious views should be deal breakers in and of themselves.

There are millions of religious Americans who would never vote for an atheist for president, because they believe that faith is necessary to lead the country. Others, myself included, would not, under most imaginable circumstances, vote for a fanatic or fundamentalist—a Hassidic Jew who regards Rabbi Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah, a Christian literalist who thinks that the Earth is less than 7,000 years old, or a Scientologist who thinks it is haunted by the souls of space aliens sent by the evil lord Xenu.

Such views are disqualifying because they’re dogmatic, irrational, and absurd. By holding them, someone indicates a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.

While it would be tempting to date the first skeptical interrogation of — and explanation for –- religion to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776 CE), we can trace it further back in time to Epicurus (340-270 BCE) and Lucretius (circa 50 BCE). Presaging Hume, Epicurus developed an empirical theory of knowledge based on the senses; he “believed that, on the basis of a radical materialism which dispensed with transcendent entities such as the Platonic Ideas or Forms, he could disprove the possibility of the soul’s survival after death, and hence the prospect of punishment in the afterlife” (Konstan 2009). Although Epicurus did not flatly dispute the existence of the Greek gods, he suggested they were chimerical thought-constructs that served a moral purpose.

Two centuries later, Lucretius advanced these arguments in his poem On the Nature of Things. While Lucretius is little remembered today, his thinking was far ahead of its time:

Lucretius envisages how life first emerged from the earth, and how humans developed from nomadic hunters to city-dwellers with language, law and the arts. In this prehistory the exclusion of divine intervention, while rarely foregrounded, is plainly the underlying motivation. The fertile young earth naturally sprouted with life forms, and the organisms thus generated were innumerable random formations. Of these, most perished, but a minority proved capable of surviving – thanks to strength, cunning, or utility to man – and of reproducing their kind. This account, which has won admiration for its partial anticipation of Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, is plainly using a kind of natural selection to account non-teleologically for the apparent presence of design in the animal kingdom.

Much the same anti-teleological program underlies the ensuing prehistory of civilization. Each cultural advance was prompted by nature, and only subsequently taken up and developed by human beings. Hence, it is implied, no divine intervention need be postulated as an explanatory tool. No Prometheus was needed to introduce fire, which rather was first brought to human attention by naturally kindled forest fires. Language emerged because people started to notice how their instinctive vocal responses to things, comparable to animal noises, could be put at the service of their intuitive desire to communicate (for which infants’ pre-linguistic pointing is cited as evidence). The [book] is rich in other cultural reconstructions, including the origin of friendship and justice in a primitive social contract, and of conventional religion in early mankind’s misguided tendency to link visions of the gods, above all in dreams, to their desire to explain cosmic phenomena.

[In conclusion], Lucretius works through a range of the phenomena that physical theorists were standardly called upon to account for: storms, waterspouts, earthquakes, plagues and the like. Once more the exclusion of divine causation undoubtedly motivates the account, the phenomena in question being nearly all ones popularly regarded as manifestations of divine intervention. Lucretius not only explains them naturalistically, but is ready to mock the rival, theological explanations: for example, if thunderbolts are weapons hurled by Zeus at human miscreants, why does he waste so much of his ammunition on uninhabited regions, or, when he does score a hit, sometimes strike his own temple? (Sedley 2008).

The skeptical naturalism of Epicurus and Lucretius was soon forgotten, and completely submerged under the conjoined weight of Platonic philosophy and Christian religion for nearly 1500 years. Although an Italian scholar discovered two complete copies of Lucretius’ work in 1417, On the Nature of Things was not made publicly available until 1563. After its publication, Lucretius’ work contributed to the general ferment – and questioning – that characterized the Renaissance. Ecclesiastical authorities were not pleased with this fact, and duly condemned both Epicurus and Lucretius as atheists.

Greenblatt and I clearly got the same memo on Lucretius and I look forward to reading his book.

References:

Konstan, David.  2009 (Spring).  “Epicurus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/epicurus/>.

Sedley, David.  2008 (Fall).  “Lucretius,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/lucretius/>.

I remember thinking the book would appeal primarily to those who were vaguely hostile to religion, but didn’t know why. In Breaking the Spell (“BS”), they would find professional confirmation that their hostility was justified. But they still wouldn’t know why. At least they would be able to say that some really smart guy, a philosophy professor at Tufts, had somehow confirmed their suspicions.

During the ensuing years, I haven’t given the book much thought. I neither recommended it nor loaned my copy. Recently, however, I stumbled across Armin Geertz’s extraordinary review of BS: “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Geertz, professor of religious history and cognition at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, rips Dennett using language not often seen in academic journals:

A recent book by philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) is a catastrophe if our goal is to persuade skeptics of the advantages of cognitive approaches to the study of religion—or even just introduce cognition to the curious! Dennett seems to be hellishly bent on turning his readers off.

I used to think that philosophers by definition are sophisticated thinkers, gifted in the art of persuasive argument, valiantly exposing hidden assumptions and opaque meanings. But I am wrong. What Dennett has done is a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.

Geertz’s trashing made me wonder: What did others say about BS? They were not kind.

In The God Genome, Leon Wieseltier takes Dennett to task for not distinguishing between the past and present: “And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins?  “Breaking the Spell” is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism.” This is a poignant question, one not contemplated by evolutionary scholars of religion who (mistakenly) believe that the current functions of religion explain past origins.

Dennett’s problem is he believes everything can be explained in evolutionary terms. Like David Sloan Wilson and E.O. Wilson, Dennett thinks evolution is a unified meta-theory. It isn’t, for one simple reason: cultures are not organisms. While Darwinian monism may be simple and satisfying, it is wrong.

In another harsh review of BS (Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark), Daniel Hart explains why:

Unfortunately, all evolutionary stories about culture suffer from certain inherent problems. Evolutionary biology is a science that investigates chains of physical causation and the development of organic life, and these are all it can investigate with any certainty. The moment its principles are extended into areas to which they are not properly applicable, it begins to cross the line from the scientific to the speculative.

This is fine, perhaps, so long as one is conscious from the first that one is proceeding in stochastic fashion and by analogy, and that one’s conclusions will always be unable to command anyone’s assent. When, though, those principles are translated into a universal account of things that are not in any definable way biological or physically causal, they have been absorbed into a kind of impressionistic mythology, or perhaps into a kind of metaphysics, one whose guiding premises are entirely unverifiable.

In fact, the presupposition that all social phenomena must have an evolutionary basis and that it is legitimate to attempt to explain every phenomenon solely in terms of the benefit it may confer is of only suppositious validity. Immensely complex cultural realities like art, religion, and morality have no genomic sequences to unfold, exhibit no concatenations of material causes and effects, and offer nothing for the scrupulous researcher to quantify or dissect.

When evolutionary theory is applied to culture change, we are dealing in metaphors and analogues. Societies do not evolve; they have histories. The sooner we stop talking about memes and “cultural evolution” the better. Time to break the spell.

Reference:

Geertz, A. (2008). How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 20 (1), 7-21 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X260232

This history is long, complicated, and fascinating. There are written records going back to the Shang Dynasty which began in 1766 BC. For Westerners accustomed to thinking that 2,000 years of Christian history is ancient and Americans who think that 1776 AD was a long time ago, the time depth of Chinese civilization and religion must be awe inspiring.

In a recent post, I touched on one of the more notable aspects of Chinese religiosity: ancestor worship. While this is a prominent aspect of Chinese religions (acknowledged in the Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist traditions) another major theme is cosmological, involving what the Chinese call “Heaven.” There is a force or potency in the cosmos that gives rise to all things and which governs everything on earth. This potency is cyclic, and under ideal circumstances there is a balance or equilibrium that results in fertility and stability.

As Howard Smith observes in “Divine Kingship in Ancient China,” Chinese cosmological monism stands in sharp contrast to Western cosmological dualism:

The universe as a whole was referred to as “heaven and earth.” Man must assist, by means of religious ceremonies, the yang forces to overcome the yin forces in the spring and early summer, but he must help the yin to rise to ascendancy in autumn and winter.

These two forces, which permeated all natural phenomena, and by their constant interaction caused all things to subsist, arose out of a primaeval cosmic unity. Neither of these two forces were conceived of in China in personalized terms, as in Mesopotamia, and there did not develop in China the concept of a cosmic struggle between the powers of light and darkness, resulting in the final triumph of the forces of light.

Whatever dualism existed in Chinese thought was a dualism of complementary forces which worked to produce cosmic harmony, and not a dualism of antagonistic forces bent on each other’s destruction.

Although some scholars of ancient Chinese religion cite ancestor worship as being older than cosmological monism, I suspect the reverse is true. This way of conceptualizing the workings of the cosmos is quite characteristic of hunter-gatherers and shamanic naturalism; the idea is ancient and when it appears (however transformed) in post-Neolithic traditions, it is akin to a “survival.” We see examples of this in the North American Trickster traditions. The culture-hero or trickster, who is often considered to be the creator, embodies both good and bad; the two are inextricably intertwined and one cannot exist without the other.

As far as cosmologies go, dialectical monism strikes me as being more sophisticated — and consonant with evolutionary biology — than the reductive dualism which divides all things into binaries and assigns values to each. This kind of normative or Manichean dualism is of course most prominent in the monotheistic traditions.

Reference:

Smith, D. (1957). Divine Kingship in Ancient China Numen, 4 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3269343

Source: John Young, UK (Creative Commons)

That’s balut, a dish of southeastern Asia. It’s made by boiling a fertilized duck egg. If you’re like me—an American raised on hamburgers and chicken casseroles—your first reaction on seeing balut might not be to salivate. In fact, you might feel disgust. But to people in many cultures, balut is delicious.

Disgust is a powerful emotion that serves a protective purpose. It is closely related to our fear of contagion and has been subject to intense evolutionary selection pressure. This is why we’re disgusted by things that might make us sick, such as rotten food and filth. We are less likely to get sick if we avoid things we find disgusting.

But what disgusts us is also subject to our cultural environment. We’re more likely to find familiar foods delicious and unfamiliar foods disgusting, which is why your reaction to the balut pictured above was probably different depending on whether it’s something you’ve eaten a hundred times before or something totally new.

Disgust is not, however, limited to biological domains: aversion spills over into other aspects of our lives. It is but a short symbolic step from intuitive microbiology (“Gross, don’t touch that!”) to moral intuition (“Gross, don’t do that!”). This explains why we find violations of moral rules, such as unfair division of money, disgusting.

Just as our tastes in food vary across cultures, our moral “tastes” vary in the same way. A recent study suggests that we can feel disgust not only for others’ foods and behaviors, but for their beliefs as well.

In the lab where I work, Ryan Ritter and Jesse Preston studied “belief disgust” using a novel experimental method. Under the guise of a consumer marketing survey, participants drank what they thought were two slightly different versions of a beverage—really the same drink each time, an especially sour lemonade. After tasting each beverage, participants gave their reactions to it, rating how sour, sweet, bitter, delicious, and disgusting it was. In between drinks, supposedly to give them time to cleanse their palates, participants completed a handwriting task. And this is where it gets interesting.

For the handwriting task, each participant copied a passage from one of three texts: The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Qur’an, or Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Because all the participants were Christian, the second two passages (Qur’an and Dawkins) are strong endorsements of ideas antithetical to their own beliefs. The dictionary passage, in contrast, is neutral with respect to their religious beliefs.

The researchers wanted to know if Christians would feel more disgust after reading the outgroup passages than the neutral passage. This is where the beverage tasting is important. If participants rated the second beverage as more or less disgusting than the first, this would be evidence that the passage affected feelings of disgust (since the beverages were identical).

In the Dawkins and Qur’an conditions, participants rated the second drink as more disgusting than the first. In the dictionary condition, however, the second drink was actually rated as slightly less disgusting than the first.

In a second experiment, when participants were given a chance to clean their hands (with a wipe) after using them to write the outgroup texts, there was no difference in disgust between the two drinks. This experiment also used a Bible passage instead of the dictionary passage. Without the hand cleaning, there was no difference between the drinks; however, when participants cleaned their hands after writing the Bible passage, the second drink was actually less disgusting than the first.

From a research perspective, these are exciting results. They show that foreign ideas can trigger the powerful (and largely subconscious) emotion of disgust. They also suggest that moral disgust can be alleviated or “purified” by simple acts such as handwashing. This may speak to the origin of certain rituals, many of them religious.

From a personal perspective, these results are disconcerting. If our intuitive response to outgroup beliefs is disgust (a powerful moral emotion), reducing prejudice and increasing cooperation between groups seems a difficult task.

Then, again, maybe this is good news. Now that we know more about causes of cultural conflict, we may be able to use this knowledge to design interventions with the goal of reducing intuitive (or irrational) disgust responses. After all, if we can learn to eat the foods of other cultures, could we not also learn to “digest” their ideas?

– Guest Post by Erika Salomon, A Theory of Mind

Reference:

Ritter, Ryan, & Preston, Jesse Lee (2011). Gross gods and icky atheism: Disgust responses to rejected religious beliefs. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology : 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.05.006