Could our proclivity for participating in religious rituals have a similar explanation? The fact that our rituals are passed on through culture, not genes, doesnât rule out this prospect at all. We know that specific languages are passed on through culture, not genes, but there has also been genetic evolution that has tuned our brains for ever more adept acquisition and use of language.3 Our brains have evolved to become more effective word processors, and they may also have evolved to become more effective implementers of the culturally transmitted habits of folk religions. We have already seen how hypnotizability could be the talent for which the whatsis center imagined in chapter 3 has been shaped. Sensitivity to ritual (and music) could be part of that package.
There is really no reason to suppose that animals have a clue about why they do what they instinctually do, and human beings are no exception; the deeper purposes of our âinstinctsâ are seldom transparent to us. The difference between us and other species is that we are the only species that cares about this ignorance! Unlike other species, we feel a general need to understand, so even though nobody had to understand or intend any of the design innovations that created folk religions, we should recognize that people, being naturally curious and reflective, and having language in which to frame and reframe their wonders, would have been likelyâunlike the birdsâto ask themselves what these rituals were all about. Not everybody. The itch of curiosity is not strong in some people, apparently. Judging by the variation observable around us today, it is a fair bet that only a small minority of our ancestors ever had the time or inclination to question the activities they found themselves engaging in with their kinfolk and their neighbors.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors in Paleolithic times may well have lived a relatively easy life, with abundant food and leisure time (Sahlins, 1972), compared with the hard work that was required to scratch out a living once agriculture was invented, more than ten thousand years ago, and populations grew explosively. From the beginning of this, the Neolithic period, until very recently indeed on the biological timescaleâthe last two hundred generationsâlife for just about all our ancestors was, as Hobbes famously said, nasty, brutish, and short, with few brief pockets of spare time in which to getâ¦theoretical. So it is probably safe to imagine that pragmatism compressed their horizons. Among the gems of folk wisdom found around the world is the idea that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. A corollary not often noted is that sometimes it might therefore be safer to substitute a potent myth for incomplete knowledge. As the anthropologist Roy Rappaport put it in his last book:
â¦in a world where the processes governing its physical elements are in some degree unknown and in even larger degree unpredictable, empirical knowledge of such processes cannot replace respect for their more or less mysterious integrity, and it may be more adaptiveâthat is, adaptively trueâto drape such processes in supernatural veils than to expose them to the misunderstandings that may be encouraged by empirically accurate but incomplete naturalistic understanding. [1999, p. 452]
The practical demands of coming up with a way of putting together all the puzzling bits and pieces of life on the fly are not the same as the practical demands of science, and as Dunbar (2004, p. 171) observes, âThe law of diminishing returns means that there will always be a point after which it is just not worth investing more time and effort into figuring out the underlying reality. In traditional societies, anything that does the trick will do.â
So we can expect that our ancestors, no matter how curious they were by temperament, did more or less what we all still do today: rely on âwhat everyone knows.â Most of what you (think you) know you just accept on faith. By this I do not mean the faith of religious belief, but something much simpler: the practical, always revisable policy of simply trusting the first thing that comes to your mind without obsessing over why it does so. What are the odds that âeverybodyâ is just wrong to think that yawning is harmless or that you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom? (Remember those âgood healthy tansâ we used to covet?) Unless somebody publishes a study that surprises us all, we take for granted that the common lore we get from our elders and others is correct. And we are wise to do so; we need huge amounts of common knowledge to guide our way through life, and there is no time to sort through all of it, testing every item for soundness.4 And so, in a tribal society in which âeveryone knowsâ that you need to sacrifice a goat in order to have a healthy baby, you make sure that you sacrifice a goat. Better safe than sorry.
This feature marks a profound difference between folk religion and organized religion: those who practice a folk religion donât thinkof themselves as practicing a religion at all. Their âreligiousâ practices are a seamless part of their practical lives, alongside their hunting and gathering or tilling and harvesting. And one way to tell that they really believe in the deities to which they make their sacrifices is that they arenât forever talking about how much they believe in their deitiesâany more than you and I go around assuring each other that we believe in germs and atoms. Where there is no ambient doubt to speak of, there is no need to speak of faith.
Most of us know of atoms and germs only by hearsay, and would be embarrassingly unable to give a good answer if a Martian anthropologist asked us how we knew that there are such thingsâsince you canât see them or hear them or taste them or feel them. If pressed, most of us would probably concoct some seriously mistaken lore about these invisible (but important!) things. Weâre not the expertsâwe just go along with âwhat everybody knows,â which is just what the tribal people do. It happens that their experts have got it wrong.5 Many anthropologists have observed that when they ask their native informants about âtheologicalâ detailsâtheir godsâ whereabouts, specific history, and methods of acting in the worldâtheir informants find the whole inquiry puzzling. Why should they be expected to know or care anything about that? Given this widely reported reaction, we should not dismiss the corrosive hypothesis that many of the truly exotic and arguably incoherent doctrines that have been unearthed by anthropologists over the years are artifacts of inquiry, not pre-existing creeds. It is possible that persistent questioning by anthropologists has composed a sort of innocently collaborative fiction, newly minted and crystallized dogmas generated when questioner and informant talk past each other until a mutually agreed-upon story results. The informants deeply believe in their godsââEverybody knows they exist!ââbut they may never before have thought about these details (maybe nobody in the culture has!), which would explain why their convictions are vague and indeterminate. Obliged to elaborate, they elaborate, taking their cues from the questions posed.6
In the next chapter, we will look at some striking implications of these methodological issues, once we have sketched more of an account to serve as our test bed. For the moment, it may help if you try to put yourself in the shoes of an anthropologistâs informant. Now that the modern world with its particular complexities is descending on tribal people, they have to make wholesale revisions in their views of nature, and, not surprisingly, this prospect is daunting to them. I daresay if Martians arrived with marvelous technology that struck us as âimpossibleâ and told us that we had to abandon our germs and atoms and get with their program, only the most nimble-minded of our scientists would make the transition swiftly and gladly. The rest of us would cling to our dear old atoms and germs as long as we could, matter-of-factly telling our children about how water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atomsâat least thatâs what weâve always been toldâand warning them about germs, just to stay on the safe side. What looms large in every personâs life is the problem of what to do now, and there are few discomforts more stressful than the quandary of not knowing what to do, or what to think about, when baffling novelty strikes. At times like that, we all seek refuge in the familiar. The tried-and-true may not be true, bu
t at least it is tried, so it gives us something to do that we know how to do. And usually it will work pretty well, about as well as it ever did in any case.
3 Creeping reflection and the birth of secrecy in religion
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
âAbraham Lincoln
Those to whom his word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasnât anyone else around when Mohammed got the word, either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Christian Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy, had exclusive audiences with God. We have to trust them as reportersâand you know how reporters are. Theyâll do anything for a story.
âAndy Rooney, Sincerely, Andy Rooney
Everyday folk physics and folk biology and folk psychology work very well as a rule, and so does folk religion, but occasional doubts surface. The exploratory reflections of human beings have a way of snowballing into waves of doubt, and if these threaten our equanimity, we can be expected to seize upon any responses that happen to shore up the consensus or damp the challenge. When curiosity stubs its toe on an unexpected event, something has to give: âwhat everybody knowsâ has a counterexample, and either the doubt blossoms into a discovery, which leads to the abandonment or extinction of a dubious bit of local lore, or the dubious item secures itself with an ad hoc repair of one sort or another, or it allies itself with other items that have in one way or another put themselves out of the reach of gnawing skepticism.7
This winnowing has the effect of sequestering a special subset of cultural items behind the veil of systematic invulnerability to disproofâa pattern found just about everywhere in human societies. As many have urged (see, e.g., Rappaport, 1979; Palmer and Steadman, 2004), this division into the propositions that are designed to be immune to disconfirmation and all the rest looks like a hypothetical joint at which we could well carve nature. Right here, they suggest, is where (proto-) science and (proto-) religion part company. Not that the two types of lore arenât often thoroughly mixed together in many cultures. Detailed natural history of the local region, with the habits and properties of all the different species acutely observed, is typically intermingled with myths and rituals involving these speciesâwhich deities inform which birds, which sacrifices need to be offered before hunting which prey, and so forth. The dividing line may, moreover, be blurred in practice, with one father telling his son how the starling gives an alarm call to its kin that is overheard by the wild boar whereas another father tells his son that he doesnât know how the boar learns from the starlingâperhaps a god carries the messageâand this son may tell his own son a story about a god who protects starlings and boars but not antelopes.
Would-be scientists know temptation: whenever your favorite theory yields a prediction that turns out wrong, why not let your hypothesis metamorphose a little into one that is conveniently untestable under just those conditions? Scientists are supposed to be leery of these migrations away from refutation, but itâs a hard lesson to learn. Sticking to your hypothesis and letting the facts decide is an unnatural act, and you have to brace yourself to perform it. Shamans have a different agenda: theyâre trying to heal and advise people in real time, and can gratefully hide behind mystery when the unexpected happens. (A cartoon shows a witch doctor standing dejectedly over the body of his late patient and saying to the grieving widow, âThere is so much that we still donât know!â)
The postulation of invisible, undetectable effects that (unlike atoms and germs) are systematically immune to confirmation or disconfirmation is so common in religions that such effects are sometimes taken as definitive. No religion lacks them, and anything that lacks them is not really a religion, however much it is like a religion in other regards. For instance, elaborate sacrifices to gods are everywhere to be found, and of course nowhere do the gods emerge from invisibility and sit down to eat the beautiful roast pork or drink the wine. Rather, the wine is poured into the ground or onto the fire, where the gods may enjoy it in unobservable privacy, and the partaking of the food is accomplished by either burning it to ashes or delegating it to the shamans, who get to eat it as part of their official duties as representatives of the gods. As Dana Carveyâs Church Lady would exclaim, âHow convenient!â As usual, we donât have to implicate the shamans, individually or even as a diffuse group of conspirators, in the devising of this rationale, since it could just emerge by the differential replication of rites, but the shamans would have to be pretty dense not to appreciate this adaptation, and even appreciate the need for deflecting attention from it. In some cultures, a more egalitarian convenience has emerged: everybody gets to eat the food that has somehow also been invisibly and nondestructively eaten by the gods. The gods can have their cake and we can eat it too. Isnât the transparency of these all-too-convenient arrangements risky? Yes, so it is almost always protected by a second veil: These are mysteries beyond all comprehension! Donât even try to understand them! And as often as not, a third veil is provided: it is forbidden to ask too many questions about all these mysteries!
What about the shamans themselves? Is their own inquisitiveness blunted by these taboos? Not always, obviously. Like every conscientious worker, shamans can be expected to notice or suspect shortcomings in their own performance and then experiment with alternative methods: âIâm losing customers to that other shaman; what is he doing that Iâm not doing? Is there a better way to do the healing rituals?â A familiar folk idea about hypnosis is that the hypnotist somehow disables the subjectâs sentries, the skeptical defense mechanisms, whatever they are, that inspect all incoming material for credibility. (Perhaps he puts the guards to sleep!) A better idea is that the hypnotist doesnât disable the sentries but, rather, co-opts them, turning them into allies, getting them to vouch for the hypnotist, in effect. One way to do that is to throw them some little facts (âYou are getting sleepy, your eyelids feel heavyâ¦â) that they can check for accuracy and readily confirm. If it isnât obvious to the subject that the hypnotist would know these facts, this creates a mild illusion of unexpected authority (âHow did he know that?â), and then the hypnotist, armed with the blessing of the sentries, can go to town.
This bit of more or less secret folk wisdom gets some support from experiments: the success a hypnotist has on a subject is significantly affected by whether the subject is told in advance that the hypnotist is a novice or an expert (Small and Kramer, 1969; Coe et al., 1970; Balaschak et al., 1972), and this tactic has been discovered and exploited again and again by shamans. Everywhere, they are assiduous, discreet gatherers of little-known facts about the individuals who may become their clients, but they donât stop there. There are other ways of demonstrating unexpected mastery. As McClenon(2002) notes, the ritual of walking unscathed on a bed of hot coals has been observed around the worldâin India, China, Japan, Singapore, Polynesia, Sri Lanka, Greece, and Bulgaria, for instance. Two other widespread practices by shamans are sleight-of-hand moves such as the concealment of animal entrails that can then be miraculously âremovedâ from the afflicted personâs torso in âpsychic surgery,â and the trick of being bound hand and foot and then somehow causing the tent to shake noisily. In the huge Design Space of possibilities, these three seem to be the most accessible ways of creating astonishing âsupernaturalâ effects to impress oneâs clients, since they have been rediscovered again and again. âThe close equivalences among cultures seem more than coincidental: shamans may use similar forms of conjuring without any formal training and without having had contact with others who use the same strategies,â McClenon asserts, so any ââdiffusion explanationâ seems implausibleâ (p. 149).
One of the most interesting facts about these unmistakable acts of deceit is that the practitioners, when pressed by inquiring anthropologists, exhibit a range of
responses. Sometimes we get a candid admission that they are knowingly using the tricks of stage magic to gull their clients, and sometimes they defend this as the sort of âsacred dishonestyâ (for the cause) of which the theologian Paul Tillich speaks (see appendix B). And sometimes, more interestingly, a sort of holy fog of incomprehension and mystery swiftly descends on the responder to protect him or her from any further corrosive inquiries. These shamans are not quite con menânot all of them, at any rateâand yet they know that the effects they achieve are trade secrets that must not be revealed to the uninitiated for fear of diminishing their effects. Every good doctor knows that a few simple tricks of self-presentation that compose a good âbedside mannerâ can make a huge difference.8 It isnât really dishonest, is it? Every priest and minister, every imam and rabbi, every guru knows the same thing, and the same gradation from knowingness to innocence can be found today in the practices of revival preachers, as vividly revealed in Marjoe, the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary film that followed Marjoe Gortner, a charismatic young evangelical preacher who lost his faith but made a comeback as a preacher in order to reveal the tricks of the trade. In this disturbing and unforgettable film, he shows how he makes people faint when he does the laying on of hands, how he rouses them to passionate declarations of their love for Jesus, how he gets them to empty their wallets into the collection basket.9
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