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.

The authors investigated infant sensitivity to fairness and willingness to share using two experiments. In the first, infants watched a film showing someone dispensing milk and crackers to two people sitting at a table. In one scene there was a fair or equal distribution and in another the distribution was unfair or unequal. This is a standard “violation of expectations” or VOE paradigm in which infants look significantly longer at something that surprises them. The second experiment was a straightforward sharing task in infants were given two toys so they could express a preference for one. They were then asked to share a toy. The infants could choose to share the preferred toy, the other toy, or none.

In the first test, the infants looked significantly longer at the lopsided outcome. This suggests that the unfair distribution sequence violated their expectations of third-party fairness. In the second test, 68% of the infants shared at least one toy. Of these sharers, 32% shared the preferred toy and 37% shared the other toy. Remarkably, the altruistic sharers also looked at the unfair film longer than their non-sharing counterparts. Natural sharers appear to expect fairness in others and are surprised when it isn’t forthcoming.

The authors were testing the hypothesis that fairness and sharing appear early (and reliably) in development as a result of selection: “At an evolutionary level such preferences may have been crucial for our hominin ancestors to enable and maintain cooperation in small groups, and later, in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, to introduce norms (e.g., how to share spoils after a group hunt) that fostered group cohesion, and to motivate group members to enforce those norms.” These traits, in other words, would have been adaptive in both ancestral and later environments.

These findings support the hypothesis. By 15 months of age, infants have at least a rudimentary sense of fairness and expect resources to be shared equally. A basic sense of altruism is already prevalent at this early stage of development. This suggests to the authors that “infants evaluate events along morally relevant dimensions” before they receive cultural training reinforcing these tendencies.

Infants are not little devils and indeed appear to be part angel. But as all parents know, they can be a bit of both at times. Because neither purity nor impurity accurately describes infants, the best representation might be this:

Reference:

Schmidt, Marco, & Sommerville, Jessica (2011). Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants PLoS ONE, 6 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023223

Until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to promises per se or their critical importance to the evolution of conscience. Nietzsche, not surprisingly, understood its importance and addressed the issue in Genealogy of Morals (II:1): “To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set for itself in the case of man?” 

In Making Sense of Nietzsche, Richard Schacht highlights the importance of this question — and its answer:

What engages his attention here is the fundamental issue of what the possibility of promising (and keeping one’s promises) presupposes, and the ramifications in human life in the establishment of this possibility. Its establishment, Nietzsche contends, required the development of a kind of memory going beyond the (basically animal) capacity to absorb and retain things experienced.

This immediately calls to mind chimpanzees. Many have observed they are always “in the present,” trapped as it were by memories that can only be cued by external events or environments. The ability to self-cue memories without such prompts — to cease being creatures of the moment — was a fundamental cognitive shift or what I would call a phase change involving consciousness. By this view, which makes considerable transcend-sense, promissory ability is the prerequisite for “moral” ability.

These ostensibly disparate movements had much in common. Suffering and death are central concerns. Given these concerns, it is not surprising that all devise methods for transcending suffering and death. Such transcendence, whether in this world or life or the next, becomes an ethical matter and moral issue.

Why did these related ideas appear in several places in such short order? Because these traditions arose in widely disparate places and originated among people who were not in contact with one another, we know it was not a matter of cultural diffusion or idea migration. There are several competing (and complementary) hypotheses, most of which revolve around change, dislocation, and anomie.

The few thousands of years preceding the Axial Age were an especially turbulent time in human history; warfare, urbanization, disease, and famine were operating full-tilt and on a scale never before seen. People everywhere were at a loss and legitimacy was in short supply. Under such conditions, it would be surprising if something like the Axial movements did not appear. During times of immense and protracted crisis, intellectuals will often generate new and paradigm shifting ideas.

But before such breakthroughs can occur, the ground must be prepared. Although Axial movements were innovative, they did not simply appear sua sponte. To the extent they were reformist or reactionary, they were backward looking and dependent on the past for comparative appeal. In “Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns,” renowned ancient historian Thorkild Jacobsen summarizes that past by dividing it into three thematic and millennial epochs:

Fourth Millennium BCE — Famine

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

The fear at the very roots of existence that long ago, down through the fourth millennium, gave to the religious response in Mesopotamia its major direction would seem to have been a simple one: fear of starvation. Early Mesopotamian economy was unquestionably a remarkable achievement, able for the first time to provide sufficient food so that large numbers of humans could congregate in cities. But it was also a precarious and uncertain economy, for it was based on artificial irrigation, the most touchy and tricky basis imaginable, nervously reacting to vagaries of nature and man alike.

And the character of their religion as we know it bears this out. The powers to whom they turned were powers in and behind their primary economics on which life depended: fishing, herding, agriculture, as even the briefest look at the character of the chief gods of their cities will show. [T]heir cults were to insure the presence of these essential powers for fertility, produce, and food.

Third Millenium BCE — War

“Preserve Us From Evil”

As the settled areas of the country grew and joined, the protection that had been afforded by relative isolation was no longer there and fear of enemy attack, death or slavery, became a part of life ever present in the depth of consciousness. The intensity of the danger and of the fear it engendered can be gauged by the great city-walls that arose around the towns in this period and the staggering amount of labor that must have gone into them.

For a shield against danger men looked to the now vitally important institutions of collective security, the great leagues and their officers, and particularly to the new institution of kingship as it took form and grew under the pressures of these years. The new concept opening up, as it did, a possibility of approach to the element of majesty in the divine, was early applied to the gods and it profoundly influenced the religious outlook. The gods, seen as kings and rulers, were no longer powers in nature only, they became powers in human affairs — in history.

Second Millennium BCE — Guilt

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses”

[W]ith the beginning second millennium the personal fortunes of the individual worshiper, his fears of personal misfortune, anxieties in illness and suffering, begin to be voiced adding a personal dimension to the relation with the divine. [Because of famine and war, it appears this personal] god has abandoned the worshiper and lost interest in him. He realizes that the blame lies with himself-pleading, however, that no man is perfect and asks to be shown his faults, his transgressions, that he may confess them before his god and be forgiven. And the god is moved by his contrition and takes him back into favor.

There is here the beginnings of a searching of the heart: the insight gained in the preceding millennium that the divine stands for, and upholds, a moral law is now bearing fruit in a realization of individual human responsibility, but also of innate human inability to live up to that responsibility. [T]he question of man’s acceptability before his god — the problem of the righteous sufferer — led on to realization of man’s finiteness and the altogether finite character of his insights and his moral judgments.

During the first millennium BCE Mesopotamian religions stagnated, perhaps because for thousands of years they had always been concerned with that which was immanent or present in this world. If the divine was present in the world, few (other than the rich and powerful) seemed to be feeling it. It was time for something new. The stage was thus set for Axial transcendence.

References:

Strathern, Alan (2009). Karen Armstrong’s Axial Age: Origins and Ethics The Heythrop Journal, 50 (2), 293-299 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00413.x

Jacobsen, Thorkild (1963). Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107 (6), 473-484

Supernatural punishment theory is anchored in two sources: lab research and game theory. Although it frequently references ancestral environments, these environments are rarely if ever specified. When and where did humans begin believing in moralizing and punishing supernatural agents?

There are some hints. In their comment to Schloss and Murray’s target article, Aguair and Cronk observe that judgmental gods or policing spirits are historically recent: “Considerable evidence exists that such beliefs are rare among hunter-gatherer, smallscale, and egalitarian societies, and common among food producing, large-scale, and hierarchical societies.” Azim Shariff similarly comments: “If beliefs in omniscient and punitive gods were genetic adaptations rooted in our Pleistocene past, we would expect these beliefs to be psychological universals, or, at the very least, more prevalent in hunter-gatherer societies. Neither is true.”

In several of its guises, supernatural punishment theory is genealogical. It attempts, in other words, to explain what is known today as “religion” and account for it in evolutionary terms. While this is a perfectly reasonable endeavor, methodological care must be taken: “a purpose or point now found to be characteristic of morality and its institutions must not be uncritically read back into history as providing the key to understanding its origin” (Brandhorst 2010:24).

Friedrich Nietzsche, a genealogist of considerable skill, was sharply critical of ahistorical functionalism and utilitarian essentialism:

How have the moral genealogists reacted so far in this matter? Naïvely, as is their wont: they highlight some “purpose” in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innocently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and have finished.

[T]he origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate.

No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite) you have not thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,—for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. — Genealogy of Morals (II:12)

We cannot simply assume that because supernatural watchers-punishers exist and have utility in post-Neolithic or complex societies, the same was true during the Paleolithic. Although the ethnographic and ethnohistoric hunter-gatherer record is an imperfect guide, it strongly suggests that supernatural watching-punishing is a recent invention.

References:

Schloss, Jeffrey P., & Murray, Michael J. (2011). Evolutionary Accounts of Belief in Supernatural Punishment: A Critical Review. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1 (1), 46-99 : 10.1080/2153599X.2011.558707

Brandhorst, Mario (2010). Naturalism and the Genealogy of Moral Institutions. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 40, 5-28

Although death industry marketing surely plays a role in some of this spending, it cannot account for most of it. Something else is going on and what that something is has ancient roots. In all likelihood, the earliest mortuary practices — in the form of deliberate burials which first appear in the archaeological record some 100,000 years ago — suggest (but do not require) soul beliefs.

While soul beliefs and deliberate burials are one thing, burials with elaborate grave goods and extended mourning rituals are another. One of the earliest and most spectacular examples of such a burial comes from Sunghir, Russia and is approximately 26,000 years old.

Illustration © Libor Balák

These burials included 13,000 ivory beads and because experiments show it takes about one hour to make each bead, 13,00o hours were invested in the beads alone. When the other grave goods are added, there may be 15,000 hours invested in these burials. In terms of today’s dollars (the average US wage is $17/hour), these burials cost $255,000, quite an expenditure for nomadic hunter-gatherers.

While this may seem extraordinary and probably was, more recent hunter-gatherers have also been known to invest heavily in mortuary and funerary rituals. In “Historical Mourning Practices Observed among the Cree and Ojibway Indians,” Paul Hackett notes that the Cree and Ojibway observed two primary mourning practices: “The first involved the abandonment or destruction of possessions,” including those of the deceased, close relatives, or both. The second “required the cessation of hunting for a prolonged period, almost invariably a year.”

While the first could be costly depending on the number and type of possessions abandoned or destroyed, the second could be a matter of life and death for people whose livelihoods depended on hunting. In many cases, these practices resulted in severe hardship for the mourners. Hackett notes that such practices were not unique to the Cree and Ojibway, and their wide distribution among Native American hunter-gatherers “suggests that they were of considerable antiquity, perhaps dating to the pre-Columbian period.” Considering the burials at Sunghir, it may be the case that hunter-gatherers around the world have practiced similar mourning rituals for tens of thousands of years.

One apparently unique feature of hunter-gather mortuary practices is the avoidance or non-curation of bones. Both the remains and possessions of the deceased were invested with spirits and power, both of which were to be treated with respect and then abandoned or kept at a distance. If proper ceremony was not observed, these items could result in misfortune.

These practices stand in sharp contrast to those observed in the earliest agricultural communities, with the Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk (7400-6200 BC) in southern Turkey being a prime example. At Catalhoyuk, treatment of the deceased was a two stage process. In his somewhat speculative survey of burials at Catalhoyuk, Macqueen observes that the body was exposed for defleshing, and after the bones had been bleached, they were buried (with grave goods) in the floors of homes. Rather than avoid skeletons as do nearly all hunter-gatherers, the farmers and herders of Catalhoyuk desired their proximity, going so far as to live and sleep with them.

While this may seem macabre to some, it makes considerable sense given the altered dynamics of property and power in agricultural communities. As Ian Hodder explains in “Daily Practice and Social Memory at Catalhoyuk,” these spatial and temporal dynamics are dramatically different from those found in hunting and gathering societies:

The key themes of the Neolithic of the Near East, such as sedentism, aggolomeration, and domestication, as well as more specific themes such as the treatment of the dead and veneration of ancestors, all involve changes in temporality, memory, and relationships with the past.

It is often argued that early forms of power in the Neolithic of the Near East and Europe were linked to delayed return systems, links to ancestors, repetitive practices at monuments to the dead, and the construction of greater temporal depth to activities (as in the construction of lineages).

The Neolithic transition from foraging to agriculture brought with it many changes, including in mortuary practices and mourning rituals. While some have speculatively argued that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers engaged in a form of ancestor worship and that ancestors functioned as supernatural surveillance agents, there is scant evidence of this. Ancestor cults are latecomers in the history of supernatural belief and practice.

References:

Hackett, P. (2005). Historical Mourning Practices Observed among the Cree and Ojibway Indians of the Central Subarctic Ethnohistory, 52 (3), 503-532 DOI: 10.1215/00141801-52-3-503

Macqueen, J. (1978). Secondary Burial at Catal Huyuk Numen, 25 (3) DOI: 10.2307/3269537

Hodder, I., & Cessford, C. (2004). Daily Practice and Social Memory at Çatalhöyük American Antiquity, 69 (1) DOI: 10.2307/4128346

This is all very interesting and it surely says something about the way guilt-oriented religions work. Of course not all religions revolve around the notion of guilt, and its Abrahamic concomitant: sin. Because the study participants were Australian and 65% of Australians are Christians of one variety or another, most have been taught that guilt and pain are connected. The study, therefore, may have done nothing more than measure the internalization and efficacy of such teachings.

There is a chance, however, that the study measured something more fundamental. Before considering what this might be, let’s consider two famous paintings, the first by Francisco de Goya (“A Procession of Flagellants”) and second by George Catlin (“The Cutting Scene: Mandan Ceremony”):

Here we have two very different groups — medieval Christians on the one hand and historic Mandans on the other — engaged in activities that appear to be similar and rooted in ritualized pain. The similarities, however, end here. The Mandan ritual has nothing to do with guilt, immorality, atonement, penitence, or sin. Mandans who skewered their chests and suspended themselves were seeking power and visions — through pain they could contact the spirit world and negotiate with it.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that this practice, which is historically ancient and known to have been practiced by hunter-gatherers around the world, was transformed by later traditions and that Christian and Islamic penitence — of the flagellating kind, taps into these ideas. It seems also that shame, which in pre-state societies is the primary method of social control, was eventually transformed into the twinned ideas of guilt and sin. The latter, of course, are also techniques of control.

Some worship at the altar of gold (the gold standard to be exact), whereas others sacrifice to the god of free markets and cast aspersions at devils like government or regulation.  Freedom itself — that greatest of blessings bestowed by a loving God — supposedly exists only where markets are private and unregulated.

Although there are secular versions of this story, and non-religious economists or politicians who proclaim it, even the secularized version(s)  feel oddly religious and zealous (e.g., Ron Paul).  What accounts for this?

Because these ideas are rooted in the classical economics of Adam Smith (and others such as David Ricardo), the connection is not accidental.  In a short paper (Economics as a Moral Science) that Harvard economist Ben Friedman recently delivered at the American Economic Association meeting, he examines the religious influences on Smith’s thinking:

The commonplace view today is that the emergence of “economics” out of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century was an aspect of the more general movement toward secular modernism in the sense of a historic turn in thinking away from a God-centered universe, toward what we broadly call humanism.

To the contrary, I suggest that the all-important transition in thinking that we rightly identify with Adam Smith and his contemporaries and followers, the key transition that gave us economics as we now know it, was powerfully influenced by then controversial changes in religious belief in the English-speaking Protestant world in which they lived. Further, those at-the-outset influences of religious thinking on what became known as economics not only fostered the subsequent spread of Smithian thinking, especially in America, but shaped the course of its reception.

The ultimate result was a variety of fundamental resonances between economic thinking and religious thinking that continue to influence our public discussion of economic issues, and our public debate over economic policy, today.

As Exhibits A through E through for this continuing influence and the confluence of religion-economics in America, we need look no further than Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, or Mike Huckabee — all of whom have a mystical reverence for free markets.  Moving from the banal to the brilliant, classical acolytes include Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

As for Adam Smith, he was a Jeffersonian type deist.  He rejected Christianity, believing instead in some kind of creator who initiated things but had no further interaction with the universe.  Smith’s famous “invisible hand” metaphor is a logical consequence of this idea.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.  The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

I was reminded of this rage last night while watching a fascinating CNN documentary shot by Norwegian journalist/filmmaker Paul Refsdal, who was granted exceptional access to the Taliban.  At one point, a Taliban member states that Islam is perfection because “it has an answer for everything — social, cultural, religious, and legal,” or something to that effect.

Now there is a comment on morals for a certain group of people living in the 21st century.  Much like “Answers in Genesis,” I find such submission, driven by disgust that leads to rage, chilling.

Recent evidence indicates that priming participants with religious concepts promotes prosocial sharing behaviour. In the present study, we investigated whether religious priming also promotes the costly punishment of unfair behaviour. A total of 304 participants played a punishment game. Before the punishment stage began, participants were subliminally primed with religion primes, secular punishment primes or control primes.

We found that religious primes strongly increased the costly punishment of unfair behaviours for a subset of our participants—those who had previously donated to a religious organization. We discuss two proximate mechanisms potentially underpinning this effect.

The first is a ‘supernatural watcher’ mechanism, whereby religious participants punish unfair behaviours when primed because they sense that not doing so will enrage or disappoint an observing supernatural agent. The second is a ‘behavioural priming’ mechanism, whereby religious primes activate cultural norms pertaining to fairness and its enforcement and occasion behaviour consistent with those norms.

We conclude that our results are consistent with dual inheritance proposals about religion and cooperation, whereby religions harness the byproducts of genetically inherited cognitive mechanisms in ways that enhance the survival prospects of their adherents.

As the authors note, similar studies have been done.  One caution about these kinds of studies: the kinds of “supernatural watchers”  characteristic of post-Neolithic religions are vastly different from the kinds of supernatural agents characteristic of pre-Neolithic shamanisms.

Given this cultural historical fact, we need to be careful about discussing these effects in (biological) evolutionary terms.  This is especially so when the test subjects are undergraduates deeply embedded in a cultural matrix that patterns their responses to religious primes.