The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  One interesting fact on the effect of religion on cooperation emerges from comparing small religious organizations—“sects”—with small nonreligious communes. There is a striking tendency for the religious to outlast the secular (at least in the United States). In each year, the religious sect is four times as likely to survive into the next year as the secular. So religion provides some kind of social glue that makes organizations based on them more likely to endure than those based on nonreligious themes. Living in a cohesive and mutually supporting organization would be expected to have immune benefits as well, since one is less isolated and more likely, in a crisis, to be able to draw on the resources of others. As we have noted, the placebo effect is based partly on its expected association with caring acts by others.

  Another interesting difference between the two kinds of communes is that the more costly the requirements imposed on group members in a commune (regarding food, tobacco, clothing, hairstyle, sex, communication with outsiders, fasts, and mutual criticism), the longer the survival of a religious commune, though there is no association between cost and survival in the nonreligious. This raises two questions: Why should cost be positively associated with commune survival, and why should this hold only for religious ones? According to cognitive dissonance theory, greater cost needs to be rationalized, leading to greater self-deception, in this case in the direction of group identity and solidarity. Why do religions provide more fertile ground for this process than secular communes? Perhaps because religions provide a much more comprehensive logic for justifying beliefs and actions. In religious communes, men’s participation in group prayer predicts their degree of sociality in an experimental economic game.

  RELIGION: A RECIPE FOR SELF-DECEPTION

  Whether religion is entirely devoted to self-deception from its very foundation to its every last branch seems unlikely, but the fact that this is even a theoretical possibility suggests the degree to which religion has been infected by forces of self-deception. Even a casual glance at most religions suggests that there is far more nonsense than revealed truth. Some of the key features of Western religions (and some Eastern ones) are the following.

  A Unified, Privileged View of the Universe for Your Own Group

  Most religions propose this view. Either you are the founding people and all others degenerate dogs, or else yours are the “chosen people” either by ethnicity (Jewish) or by attachment to this or that prophet (Jesus, Muhammad). Of course, any general system of thought that places you at the center is useful to you in interactions with others. In defense of religion’s inadequacies, it should be remembered that for many thousands of years, there was nothing else other than religion. Certainly no organized science, no Newton or Darwin, but still this alone can’t justify the strong egocentric biases of religion.

  There May Be a Series of Interconnected Phantasmagorical Things

  For example, there may be an afterlife; a giant spirit who controls all but is amenable to human persuasion on the most trivial matters; a prophet capable of performing miracles, whether parting the seas, raising the dead, or feeding the masses; a prophet who is born without a human father, only God himself, and who stays dead for only three days; and so on. Once you have signed on to a few of these notions, there are hardly any boundaries left, and very small details can turn out to be critical features of dogma.

  The supreme spirit (or God) is typically given a masculine name that on biological grounds seems most dubious. Besides imparting an image of God as a fearsome tyrant, there is no such thing as an all-male species in nature. Not a single one. Only females can reproduce by themselves, females preceded males in evolution, and to this day they are still the critical sex as far as biological work is concerned. God should be interpreted as mostly female, and I will do so throughout. A male God has many unfortunate features, including the heartlessness and aggression associated with men and their divorce from reproduction, producing a series of horrors—pedophilia in all-male “celibate” castes; hostility toward women’s interests, especially efforts to control their reproduction and sexuality (banning sexual activity, abortion, in vitro fertilization, etc.); honor killings; indeed every kind of anti-female horror including mass rape during warfare in the name of God.

  The Deification of a Prophet

  The deification of Jesus is unlike the treatment of prophets in either Islam or Judaism. His birth by unheard-of means, miracles ascribed, and of course, his very brief death, so that now he is one-third of the show: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The basic story was put together after his death in the years that Christianity was a small, persecuted sect. To believe in his divinity became the key test, one that automatically shrank and exalted the group. The bigger you make Jesus, the smaller you make God. Not only are other gods no longer real but also God herself has lost a good part of her powers to a (dead) human being.

  It is also ironic that the more you deify the prophet, the less attention you pay to his actual teachings, since the key distinction then becomes whether you believe in his divinity, not whether you believe in any of his teachings. “I believe, Jesus, I believe in you as the Lord, my personal savior.” Yes, but do you believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, that blessed are the peacemakers, that you should treat all others as you wish to be treated yourself, and so on? I doubt it. Deification of Jesus also makes more likely patently absurd beliefs, such as intercessory prayer, since Jesus now joins God as someone you can beg favors from (and the Catholics add yet another layer, Jesus’s mother, the Virgin Mary), no matter how many laws of nature need to be violated in the process. Among prophets, Jesus was an extreme case—hung on a cross until he gave up his life—but do not imagine that the earlier prophets in the same tradition were welcomed (whether Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or whoever). During their time, they were often persecuted and rebuked, only later restored in memory to prophetic status.

  Sometimes a Book Is Treated as Received Wisdom Direct from God

  This allows plenty of room for interpretation. Sometimes every word is literally true, even if this results in numerous contradictions within the book itself, never mind the larger world. Other times, metaphor is permitted, and indeed encouraged, giving plenty of latitude for how this divinely generated document is interpreted. The key is that you—or your group—control the document and the interpretation. If God literally created the world in seven days about six thousand years ago, then all of astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology must be nonsense. Did God really give “the land of Israel” in perpetuity to a people who wrote a book a few thousand years ago saying he did?

  Faith Supersedes Reason

  Sometimes anti-logic is directly pushed, as in the notion that “by faith ye shall know them”—indeed, an attachment to reason may be evidence of sacrilege. The degree to which we believe something now becomes a determinant of its truth value. Once again, this joins a long line of features that tends to remove all rational boundaries from religious thought, permitting any and every deceptive ploy and self-deceptive concept.

  We Are Right

  And here comes the critical, all-encompassing self-deception: we are the measure of what is good, we represent the best, we have the true religion, and as believers we are superior to those around us. (We have been “saved”; they have not.) Our religion is one of love and concern for the world, our God a just God, so our actions can’t be evil when they are done in God’s name.

  Given the ease with which religion slides toward self-deception, what are the larger forces that might propel a religion toward more or less self-deception? One important factor is the degree to which the religion is associated with the powerful in a society. Another important force has to do with religious fragmentation. Because religions almost always preach within-religion mating, fragmentation is expected to lead to intergroup conflict over minor religious distinctions. I will argue that parasite load—average pressure on a society every generation from coevolving parasites—may be an important force fragmenting religio
ns and thus encouraging parochial self-deception. The evidence for an association with parasite load is strong, but the evidence for a connection to self-deception not nearly so strong. First, let us turn to the positive association between religion and health.

  RELIGION AND HEALTH

  Religious behavior and practice appear to be positively correlated with health, a well-established fact with dozens of careful studies in support, on both sick people and well. Longitudinal studies suggest that variables such as degree of attendance at religious service are positively associated with survival years into the future.

  Part of this effect may result from the tendency of religions to establish rules related to health: avoid tobacco and alcohol, pork, top predators such as sharks and lions (which tend to concentrate toxins as they move up the food chain), and generally risky or unwise behavior, such as gambling. One long-term study of US Christians showed that degree of religious attendance in 1965 predicted a change to more positive health behaviors thirty years later.

  Under Islam, some behavior is prohibited, some encouraged, and some required. The forbidden (haram) tend to relate directly to health:• Gambling

  • Alcohol

  • Eating pigs or dogs

  • Eating dead meat

  • Eating meat of animals not slaughtered the Islamic way (cutting throat at aorta and bleeding animal)

  • Eating predatory fish

  • Eating shellfish

  • Usury (charging interest on money)

  • Saying oiff to parents (an expression of impatience or annoyance), or yelling at them

  • Suicide

  All of the prohibitions regarding eating probably reduce parasite acquisition. Predatory fish are like sharks and lions in other religions—top predators that may be forbidden because they strongly concentrate toxins. Bleeding presumably reduces exposure to blood parasites. Only avoiding usury and saying oiff may not be directly related to personal health.

  It is perhaps interesting to note that of the requirements in Islam (wajeb), three have positive connections to health (among other effects):• Daily prayer (five times per day)

  • Cleanliness (must be clean to pray: use only running water or sand)

  • Fasting

  • Alms to poor

  • Pilgrimage to Mecca (if possible)

  • Testifying (“there is only one God and Muhammad is his prophet”)

  The latter three are clearly social: two showing off, and one helping a group member, all with unknown possible immune effects.

  But the relation between religion and health goes deeper than health-related behavior. Some effects may come from the benefits of positive belief itself—for example, on immune function—as well as benefits that flow from being a member of a mutually supporting group, including musically supported activities that raise group consciousness, a very common feature of religion. As we have seen (Chapter 6), music has positive immune effects, while noise has negative ones. The exalting, positive music of so many religions is probably on the high end for positive immune effects (in contrast to, say, jazz or rap). Even confessing sins to God and disclosing trauma may have beneficial immune effects. The private confessional in the Catholic Church facilitates this, as do numerous public rituals of confession common to Amerindian religions. It seems likely that private, verbal confession in prayer has similar immune benefits, an example of a personal benefit to private religious behavior because it mimics a social interaction.

  Whatever the precise causes, the links between religion and health seem strong enough on their own to select directly for religious behavior and belief. As biologists, we need not view religion phobically, as some negative, nonliving force of unknown nature that has us in its viruslike grip. We might remember that before the advent of modern science, almost all medicine was practiced within religion, often by special castes, medicine men and women, faith healers, and so on. Some medicinal benefits were certainly real, for example, consuming plants for their real chemical effects, a behavior that reaches deep into our monkey past (although the causal connection was usually unknown to the actors), and some may merely be the blessed placebo effect, itself probably the dominant benefit throughout two thousand years of Western medical “science.” Belief kills and belief cures.

  One benefit of religion is that it does provide a framework for understanding and acting within our world, a framework we might expect to provide some psychological and mental benefits. Recent work in neurophysiology suggests one such benefit. Scientists concentrated on the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), a region involved in many processes, including self-regulation and the experience of anxiety. EEG neural activity in the ACC was recorded while people were taking the Stroop test (name the color in which words are written, though the words denote a different color). The stronger people’s religious zeal (as measured by a scale) or the more they professed a belief in God, the less their ACC fired in response to errors and the fewer errors they made. It was as if religion was providing them a buffer against error. There must be many such possible effects.

  PARASITES AND RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY

  Religions have repeatedly split into subreligions that are sometimes at one another’s throats. Religions occasionally join together, but this occurs much more rarely than splitting. There is thus a bias in the propagation of religions over time, with a tendency for major faiths to split into subgroups, which may split further, typically emphasizing relatively minor doctrinal differences on which to disagree: from universal truth widely shared to smaller within-breeding units at war with each other on the basis of intellectually false distinctions. If this is an important feature of splitting—corruption of the religion’s generality and logic—then we need to understand its origins.

  Recent work suggests that parasites and, in particular, parasite load may drive religions to split. These splits, in turn, entrain changes in doctrine to justify them, and thus tend to degrade the universal truth value of religion with parochial arguments whose true meaning is usually hidden. Parasite load is meant as an aggregate measure of the number of parasites and their degree of damage on a local population. Ideally, parasite load would be measured as something like the degree of overall mortality (or loss in reproduction) due to disease, but it is usually measured as a simple count of the major diseases present and the relative strength of their negative effects.

  The argument goes as follows: Where parasite load is low, an in-group and out-group member may be almost equivalent where risk of transmitting a new infection is concerned, namely, low. But where parasite load is high, an asymmetry emerges. An in-group member will in general have been exposed to the same set of parasites as the other members and will carry some of the same genes that give at least partial resistance to many of these parasites. But an out-group member will be subject to selection from a slightly different set of parasites and will carry a subset to which it may be partly resistant but in-group members are not. From the standpoint of each group, the other is a threat—you may transmit your parasites to one another far faster than the genes that would protect against them. Hence, individuals in both groups may be selected to avoid one another. In short, other things equal, high parasite load is expected to increase ethnocentrism, within-group love, and hostility toward strangers. By this argument, degree of self-deception across religions and cultures is expected to correlate positively with parasite load.

  What is the evidence? Two broad factors are of interest: religious and linguistic diversity. That is, how many languages and religions coexist per unit area? With high parasite load, we expect many of each, since splitting into smaller groups facilitates language formation. Regarding the evidence, there can be little doubt. Across the entire globe, religious and linguistic diversity map directly on parasite load, as does ethnic diversity—the higher the parasite pressure, the more religions, languages, and ethnic groups per unit area. The exact overlap between religion and language has not been described, but these results have been corrected for nu
merous possible confounding variables, and the associations remain strong and unambiguous. For language, the correlations are significant for all five of the great continents.

  Canada and Brazil are roughly the same size, yet Canada has 15 religions and Brazil, 159. Canada is located in the far north, where parasite load is low; Brazil is in the American tropics, high in parasite load. Likewise, Norway, in the far north, has thirteen religions, while Cote d’Ivoire is the same size but is located in the parasite-rich African tropics and has seventy-six religions. Of course, if there is a bias toward interactions based on shared language and religion, this ought usually to intensify within-group mating, with resulting ethnic differentiation (and hostility). It is certainly striking how often out-groups are characterized as if they were flea-ridden and scabrous, if not syphilitic.