I’m not so sure. I think the by-product explanation of religion captures a major part of the truth: humans conjure gods, spirits, and sprites to fill explanatory voids. (This is not to deny the possibility of gods, spirits, or sprites; it is to deny that one culture’s supernatural story can be more valid than another’s.) But does this mean that religion is, in evolutionary terms, useless or worse? A growing number of evolutionists think not.
In his trailblazing book Darwin’s Cathedral, the biologist David Sloan Wilson proposes that religion emerged as a stable part of all human societies for a simple reason: it made them work better. Human groups that happened to possess a faith instinct so thoroughly dominated nonreligious competitors that religious tendencies became deeply entrenched in our species.
Wilson argues that religion provides multiple benefits to groups. First, it defines a group as a group. As the sociologist Émile Durkheim wrote, “Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices . . . which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.” Second, religion coordinates behavior within the group, setting up rules and norms, punishments and rewards. Third, religion provides a powerful incentive system that promotes group cooperation and suppresses selfishness. The science writer Nicholas Wade expresses the heart of Wilson’s idea succinctly: the evolutionary function of religion “is to bind people together and make them put the group’s interests ahead of their own.”
Atheists are often dismayed that intelligent believers can entertain patently irrational beliefs. From the atheist’s perspective, the earth’s faithful are like billions of foolish Don Quixotes jousting with windmills—all because, like Quixote, they can’t see that their favorite storybooks are exactly that.
But Wilson points out that “elements of religion that appear irrational and dysfunctional often make perfectly good sense when judged by the only appropriate gold standard as far as evolutionary theory is concerned—what they cause people to do.” And what they generally cause people to do is to behave more decently toward members of the group (coreligionists) while vigorously asserting the group’s interests against competitors. As the German evolutionist Gustav Jager argued in 1869, religion can be seen as “a weapon in the [Darwinian] struggle for survival.”
As Jager’s language suggests, none of this should be construed to suggest that religion is—on the whole—a good thing. There are good things about religion, including the way its ethical teachings bind people into more harmonious collectives. But there is an obvious dark side to religion, too: the way it is so readily weaponized. Religion draws coreligionists together, and it drives those of different faiths apart.
SACRED HISTORIES
Supernatural myths aren’t the only stories that play a binding role in society. National myths can serve the same function. I recently asked my first-grade daughter, Abigail, to tell me what she learned in school about Christopher Columbus. Abby has an excellent memory, and she recalled a lot: the names of the three ships, the fact that Columbus discovered America by sailing the ocean blue in 1492, and that Columbus proved that the earth was round, not flat. It’s the same thing they taught me in elementary school thirty years ago, and what my parents learned before me.
A depiction of Columbus arriving in the New World by Dióscoro Puebla (1831–1901).
But what Abigail was taught is mostly fiction, not history. It is a story that is simply wrong in most details and misleading in the rest. On the small side of things, in 1492 most educated people shared Columbus’s confidence that the earth was round. On the large side of things, Abby was not told that Columbus first landed in the West Indies, where he wrote of the Arawak Indians, “They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.” Columbus and his followers went on to do just that, killing and enslaving the Arawak with real avidity and sadistic creativity. Within sixty years or so, the Arawak were wiped out. Abby also wasn’t told that this was just the first stage of a centuries-long effort to strip the North American continent of Indian life.
Revisionist historians such as Howard Zinn and James Loewen have argued that American history texts have been whitewashed so thoroughly that they don’t count as history anymore. They represent determined forgetting—an erasure of what is shameful from our national memory banks so that history can function as a unifying, patriotic myth. Stories about Columbus, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving, George Washington’s inability to lie, and so on, serve as national creation myths. The men at the center of these stories are presented not as flesh-and-blood humans with flaws to match their virtues, but as the airbrushed leading men of hero stories. The purpose of these myths is not to provide an objective account of what happened. It is to tell a story that binds a community together—to take pluribus and make unum.
Many commentators see revisionists like Zinn and Loewen not as myth busters, but as spinners of countermyths, in which Western society is trashed and indigenous societies are absurdly romanticized. They point out that societies everywhere—including the New World and African societies decimated by Westerners—have long histories of war and conquest. For them, the big difference between the conquering Western powers and their victims was technological. For example, if the rapacious Aztec Empire had developed the means to sail to Europe in order to sack and pillage, they may well have done so. People have been pretty nasty throughout history, and over the past half millennium or so, Westerners have just been better at being nasty than anyone else.
But this more balanced, if bleak, view of human history isn’t taught in our schools either. Throughout most of our history, we’ve taught myths. The myths tell us that not only are we the good guys, but we are the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were.
IMAGINING THE UNIMAGINABLE
Theirs was a May-December affair. Tom was only twenty-two. He was tall and lean, boyish of face and build. Sarah was buxom and quick to laugh. She looked much younger than her forty-five years. If not for the silver streaks in her dark hair, she might have passed for Tom’s sister. When Tom graduated college, Sarah decided to take him to Paris as a reward. “Let me be your sugar momma,” she said, laughing.
They spent ten days in the city, gawking at the Eiffel Tower, the wonders of the Louvre, and the massive spectacle of Notre Dame. On their next-to-last night, they ate dinner and drank red wine at an almost absurdly charming bistro in the Latin Quarter. Tom and Sarah noticed the other patrons’ stares. People were always staring. As they strolled hand in hand down Parisian boulevards, they felt the strangers’ eyes appraising them, judging them, tsk-tsking behind their backs. They knew what people were thinking: that it was not right, that she was old enough to be his mother.
Maybe the Parisians weren’t thinking this at all. Maybe the Parisians were just staring because they were an attractive couple and clearly much in love. Maybe Tom and Sarah were paranoid. But if so, they had reason to be. The lovers had paid dearly for their bliss. After learning of the affair, Sarah’s mother had vowed not to speak to her until she got therapy. Sarah’s coworkers whispered nastily about her in the office lounge. For his part, Tom had tearful fights with his father over the affair. When he told his fraternity brothers about Sarah, they laughed nervously, thinking it was a bad joke. But when Sarah started spending nights in Tom’s room, the brothers held an emergency meeting and tried to expel Tom from the house.
Truth be told, the lovers enjoyed being judged. That was half the fun of it. They liked thinking of themselves as rebels with the courage to live in contempt of convention. They sat in the bistro finishing their wine and asking each other their favorite rhetorical questions: Who were they harming? Why were people so nosy and jealous? Why was their morality so narrow and timid?
They walked back to their hotel along the Seine, drunk on wine and rebellion. Entering their room, Tom hung the Ne pas déranger sign on the doorknob. Then, bouncing and rolling across the room’s surfaces, Tom and Sarah made love with an athletic inten
sity bordering on violence.
Afterward, Tom collapsed on Sarah. She cuddled his panting head to her breast and stroked his curly hair and murmured sweetly in his ear. When Tom regained his breath, he rolled to his own pillow and said, “So what should we see tomorrow, Mom?”
Sarah lay her head on his shoulder and plucked playfully at the sparse hairs on his chest. Giggling, she tickled him. “Maybe we’ll just stay in bed tomorrow!” Tom giggled back at her, saying, “Mo-om! Sto-op!”
First, I’m sorry I did that to you—questionable taste, I agree. Second, I have my reasons, which I’ll get to now.
If you are like most people, you probably couldn’t help imagining this fictional Parisian love affair. If you have visited Paris, images of the famous city invaded your brain. If you have never visited the city, views from movies, paintings, and postcards still crowded into your head, along with generic images of lovers enjoying a meal in a charming restaurant. When the action turned to joyful lovemaking between two attractive people, your interest in the story might have picked up. You might have imagined what Tom and Sarah looked like unclothed and how they moved together. After all, such moments—or the promise of them—may be the main staple not just of romance novels and porn but of all story types.
But what happened when you learned that the lovers were mother and son? Did your mind revolt? Did you find yourself trying to expel the images from your brain, the way a child might spit out a bite of cake that tasted delicious until she learned it was made from hated carrots?
My loathsome little story was inspired by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who exposes people to uncomfortable fictional scenarios like this one in order to study moral logic. (In addition to consensual incest, Haidt’s uncomfortable scenarios include a man who has victimless sex with dead chickens and a family that devours their beloved dog after he is killed by a car.) If the man and woman in this story were not related, you probably would have enjoyed imagining their lovemaking. But knowing the truth sours the fantasy. Even if the story clearly shows that the two are consenting adults enjoying an emotionally and physically satisfying relationship, most people are unwilling even to imagine that the relationship is morally acceptable.
This is remarkable, because people are willing to imagine almost anything in a story: that wolves can blow down houses; that a man can become a vile cockroach in his sleep (Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”); that donkeys can fly, speak, and sing R&B songs (Shrek); that “a dead-but-living fatherless god-man [Jesus] has the super-powers to grant utopian immortality” ; that a white whale might really be evil incarnate; that time travelers can visit the past, kill a butterfly, and lay the future waste (Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”).
I should say that people are willing to imagine almost anything. This flexibility does not extend to the moral realm. Shrewd thinkers going back as far as the philosopher David Hume have noted a tendency toward “imaginative resistance”: we won’t go along if someone tries to tell us that bad is good, and good is bad.
Here’s how Dostoyevsky didn’t write Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov kills the pawnbroker and her sister for kicks; he feels no remorse; he boasts to his family and friends about it, and they all wet themselves laughing; Raskolnikov is a good man; he lives happily ever after.
Or imagine a short story based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay “A Modest Proposal.” Swift suggests that all of the social ills of Ireland can be solved by starting a baby-meat industry. But imagine that the story is not a satire. Imagine a story in which the author fails to signal that it would be wrong for impoverished women to fatten infants at their breasts just so rich men could feast on baby chops and baby ragout.
Or imagine a story based on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who is said to have slaughtered slaves on his front lawn—men, women, and children—just because he found the shimmer of blood on grass delightful to gaze upon. The story celebrates Heliogabalus as an artistic pioneer who fearlessly pursued beauty in the face of arbitrary moral codes.
In the same way that we are unwilling to imagine a scenario in which it is okay for a mother and son to be lovers, most of us are unwilling to imagine a universe where the murder of slaves, babies, or pawnbrokers is morally acceptable.
Storytellers know this in their blood. True, they deluge us with breathtaking depravity, lewdness, and cruelty—think Lolita, think A Clockwork Orange, think Titus Andronicus (in this Shakespeare play, “two men kill another man, rape his bride, cut out her tongue, and amputate her hands; her father kills the rapists, cooks them in a pie, and feeds them to their mother, whom he then kills before killing his own daughter for having gotten raped in the first place; then he is killed, and his killer is killed”). And we love them for it. We are only too happy to leer on as the bad guys of fiction torture, kill, and rape. But storytellers never ask us to approve. Morally repellent acts are a great staple of fiction, but so is the storyteller’s condemnation. It was very wrong, Dostoyevsky makes clear, for Raskolnikov to kill those women. It would be very wrong, Swift makes clear, to raise babies like veal, no matter the socioeconomic returns.
VIRTUE REWARDED
The Greek philosopher Plato banished poets and storytellers from his ideal republic for, among other sins, peddling immoral fare. And Plato’s was just the first in a long string of panic attacks about the way fiction corrodes morality—how penny dreadfuls, dime novels, comics, moving pictures, television, or video games are corrupting the youth, turning them slothful and aggressive and perverted.
But Plato was wrong, and so were his panicked descendants. Fiction is, on the whole, intensely moralistic. Yes, evil occurs, and antiheroes, from Milton’s Satan to Tony Soprano, captivate us. But fiction virtually always puts us in a position to judge wrongdoing, and we do so with gusto. Sometimes we find ourselves rooting perversely for dark heroes such as Satan or Soprano, or even the child molester Humbert Humbert in Lolita, but we aren’t asked to approve of their cruel and selfish behavior, and storytellers almost never allow them to live happily ever after.
One of the first novels in English was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). That subtitle could be tacked onto most stories that humans have dreamed up, from the first folktales to modern soap operas and professional wrestling. Story runs on poetic justice, or at least on our hopes for it. As the literary scholar William Flesch shows in his book Comeuppance, much of the emotion generated by a story—the fear, hope, and suspense—reflects our concern over whether the characters, good and bad, will get what they deserve. Mostly they do, but sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, we close our books with a sigh, or trudge away from the theater, knowing that we have just experienced a tragedy.
Madame Bovary disrobing for her lover, Léon. In 1857, Gustave Flaubert was tried on the charge that Madame Bovary was an outrage against morality and religion. Flaubert’s lawyer successfully argued that although the novel depicts immoral acts, it is itself moral. Emma Bovary sins, and she suffers for it.
By the time American children reach adulthood, they will have seen 200,000 violent acts, including 40,000 killings, on television alone —which is to say nothing of film or the countless enemies they have personally slaughtered in video games. Social scientists generally frown at this carnage, arguing that it leads to an increase in real-world aggression. They have a point (which we’ll examine more closely in the next chapter). But they also miss one. Fiction almost never gives us morally neutral presentations of violence. When the villain kills, his or her violence is condemned. When the hero kills, he or she does so righteously. Fiction drives home the message that violence is acceptable only under clearly defined circumstances—to protect the good and the weak from the bad and the strong. Yes, some video games, such as Grand Theft Auto, glorify wickedness, but those games are the notorious exceptions that prove the general rule.
The psychologist Jerome Bruner writes that “great fiction is subversive in spirit.” I disagree. It’s true that writers have frequently,
especially over the past century, set out to challenge (or outrage) conventional sensibilities. There is a reason for all those burned and banned books. But most of this fiction is still moral fiction: it puts us in the position of approving of decent, prosocial behavior and disapproving of the greed of antagonists—of characters who are all belly and balls. As novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and John Gardner have argued, fiction is, in its essence, deeply moral. Beneath all of its brilliance, fiction tends to preach, and its sermons are usually fairly conventional.
An Egyptian woman telling tales from “Arabian Nights.” It’s worth remembering that until recently, storytellers who attacked group values faced real risks. For tens of thousands of years before the invention of the book, story was an exclusively oral medium. Members of a tribe gathered around a teller and listened. Tribal storytellers who undercut time-honored values—who insulted group norms—faced severe consequences. (Imagine if our Egyptian storyteller decided to spin a yarn about the wine-soaked debauches of the Prophet, Muhammad.) As a result, oral stories generally reflect “a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind.”
In Charles Baxter’s influential book on the craft of fiction, Burning Down the House, he bemoans the “death of the antagonist—any antagonist” in modern fiction. He’s onto something. Over the past hundred years or so, sophisticated fiction has trended toward moral ambiguity. This is strikingly illustrated by the edgy protagonists of recent cable TV dramas such as The Shield, The Wire, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Deadwood. But I’m making a general argument, not an absolute one. I think that rumors of the death of the antagonist have been exaggerated. Take those edgy antiheroes from cable drama. Do they really muddle the ethical patterns I’m describing or—by setting virtue against vice inside the soul of Walter White or Tony Soprano—do they just put a fresh twist on old morality plays? In any case, I agree with the journalist Steven Johnson, who concludes that the most popular story forms—mainstream films, network television, video games, and genre novels—are still structured on poetic justice: “the good guys still win out, and they do it by being honest and playing by the rules.”
The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human Page 11