by Robin Hanson
Imagine a preacher addressing a congregation about the virtue of compassion. What’s the value of attending such a sermon? It’s not just that you’re getting personal advice, as an individual, about how to behave (perhaps to raise your chance of getting into Heaven). If that were the main point of a sermon, you could just as well listen from home, for example, on a podcast.52 The real benefit, instead, comes from listening together with the entire congregation. Not only are you learning that compassion is a good Christian virtue, but everyone else is learning it too—and you know that they’re learning it, and they know that you’re learning it, and so forth. (And if anyone happens to miss this particular sermon, don’t worry: the message will be repeated again and again in future sermons.) In other words, sermons generate common knowledge of the community’s norms. And everyone who attends the sermon is tacitly agreeing to be held to those standards in their future behavior. If an individual congregant later fails to show compassion, ignorance won’t be an excuse, and everyone else will hold that person accountable. This mutual accountability is what keeps religious communities so cohesive and cooperative.
For better or worse, this dynamic works even for controversial norms. If a preacher rails against contraception or homosexuality, for example, you might personally disagree with the message. But unless enough people “boo” the message or speak out against it, the norm will lodge itself in the common consciousness.53 Thus, by attending a sermon, you’re learning not just what “God” or the preacher thinks, but also what the rest of your congregation is willing to accept.
BADGES
Given all the benefits to being part of a community, it’s useful for members to be able to distinguish insiders from outsiders. How else will they know who’s likely to be a good cooperator? This problem becomes especially acute as communities grow in size and complexity. In a small forager band with only a handful of neighboring bands, everyone tends to know everyone else by face or by name, and rarely comes in contact with a complete stranger. But in large agrarian empires or industrial civilizations, full of migrant traders and workers, it’s really useful to be able to evaluate strangers on sight.
Thus there’s a role for badges: visible symbols that convey information about group membership.54 In a religious context, badges may include special hairstyles, clothing, hats or turbans, jewelry, tattoos, and piercings. Even dietary rules and other mandated behaviors, like midday or pre-meal prayers, can function as badges, since they allow others to see who’s a member of which religion.
Religious badges are reinforced at home and church, but they have the most value (as badges) out in public, in the market or town square. The baker who wears a yarmulke at his bakery, for example, is sending two different (but related) messages to two different audiences. To other Jews, he’s saying:
FYI, I’m Jewish—so we share many of the same norms and values. You can trust me. Also note that I’m endorsing our tribe conspicuously, in public. I’m fully committed to Judaism; it’s an inescapable part of my identity.
Here he’s using his badge as a demonstration of loyalty, hoping to earn more trust from fellow Jews. But he’s also sending a message to gentiles:
My actions here reflect not only on me as an individual, but on Jews everywhere. If I behave badly, my Jewish peers are liable to punish me for tarnishing our collective reputation. Knowing this, you can more readily trust that I’ll behave according to accepted Jewish standards of conduct.
In this way, a badge is similar to a brand. When Nabisco puts its logo on a new product, the consumer is assured of a certain quality, because Nabisco would suffer a loss of reputation if the new product were terrible. And if a truly bad product does happen to land on grocery store shelves, Nabisco will probably issue a recall. Similarly, Christians who swear on the Bible are less likely to perjure themselves, for fear they’ll be “recalled” or otherwise punished by their community.
SUPERNATURAL BELIEFS
Finally, we return to supernatural beliefs. And now, instead of seeing them as mere superstitions, we’re ready to understand how they might serve useful functions in the context of a community struggling to cooperate.55
As we’ve pointed out in previous chapters (particularly Chapter 5 on self-deception), the value of holding certain beliefs comes not from acting on them, but from convincing others that you believe them. This is especially true of religious beliefs. They aren’t particularly useful or practical for individuals in isolation, and yet we experience large social rewards for adopting them and/or punishment for not adopting them. This is what it means for a belief to be an orthodoxy. Whether you accept it can make the difference between the warm embrace of fellowship and the cold shoulder of ostracism. Faced with such powerful incentives to believe, is it any wonder our brains fall in line?
But why do communities care what we believe? Why do our peers reward or punish us?
Consider the belief in an all-powerful moralizing deity—an authoritarian god, perhaps cast as a stern father, who promises to reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. An analysis of this kind of belief should proceed in three steps. (1) People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers. (2) It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience. (3) Finally, as we saw in Chapter 5, one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. This is how it ends up being in our best interests to believe in a god that we may not have good evidence for.
For similar reasons, it’s also useful to believe that God is always watching—and that He knows everything, even our “private” deeds and innermost thoughts, and will judge us with perfect justice. The more fervently we profess belief in such a god, the more we’ll develop a reputation for doing right at all times, even when other people aren’t watching.56 This kind of reputation is especially attractive in those we seek as leaders, since they have a lot of room to behave badly behind closed doors.
At the margin, these beliefs cause believers to behave more morally than they would otherwise. And from the point of view of a perfectly selfish organism, this extra “good” behavior is an unfortunate cost. The ideal situation would be for the brain to be able to have its cake (convincing others that it fears God’s wrath) and eat it too (go on behaving as if it didn’t fear God at all). But human brains aren’t powerful enough to pull off such perfect hypocrisy, especially when others are constantly probing our beliefs. So the next best thing is often to internalize the belief, while remaining inconsistent enough to occasionally give in to temptation.
This helps make sense of the belief in moralizing god(s), but leaves us with a great many other supernatural beliefs to explain. Some of these beliefs clearly help reinforce facets of each religion’s social system. The belief that Muhammad was the final prophet, for example, conveniently closes the book on disruptive new revelations. In Christianity, the belief that priests are (or aren’t) necessary to intermediate between God and the laity helps determine their role in the church body. It’s easy to see the virtues of such beliefs: they’re politics by way of theology.
Still other beliefs, however, seem entirely arbitrary, and yet they’re as hotly debated as any other beliefs. For example, in some Christian denominations, baptism is believed to be necessary for salvation, whereas in others, it’s more like an optional bonus. Meanwhile, endless arguments rage over arcane doctrinal minutiae, such as the exact nature of the Trinity or whether a cracker literally turns into the flesh of Jesus during communion.57 What are we to make of these seemingly inconsequential beliefs?
Perhaps they function as badges—markers of loyalty to one particular religion or branch instead of another.58 A good badge allows us to answer the central question about loyalty: Are you with us or against us? This is why issues of doctrine are especially pronounced when discussing religion across a divide (atheist vs. theist, Catholic vs. Protestant, etc.). What you believe
tells people which tribe you’re in, whose side you’re on. And thus these beliefs, too, play a political role, rather than a merely philosophical role.
In this way, many orthodox beliefs are like the hat and hairstyle requirements we mentioned earlier. They can be entirely arbitrary, as long as they’re consistent and distinctive. It doesn’t really matter what a sect believes about transubstantiation, for example, or the nature of the Trinity. In particular, it doesn’t affect how people behave. But as long as everyone within a sect believes the same thing, it works as an effective badge. And if the belief happens to be a little weird, a little stigmatizing in the eyes of nonbelievers, then it also functions as a sacrifice.
There’s an analogy here with spectator sports. Precisely because there are no selfish material reasons to prefer the Giants over the Dodgers, your support of a specific team serves as an excellent signal of loyalty to the local community.59 It’s unlikely that your home team is objectively better or more entertaining than any other team, but it is your team, after all, and that makes a world of difference. And the more support you show for it—including rabid, stigmatizing behaviors like wearing face paint to a game—the more support you’ll get from fellow fans.
In the same way, the craziness of religious beliefs can function as a barometer for how strong the community is—how tightly it’s able to circle around its sacred center, how strongly it rewards members for showing loyalty by suppressing good taste and common sense. The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity. And while many people (perhaps even many of our readers) would enjoy being part of such a community, how many are willing to “pay their dues” by adopting a worldview that conflicts with so many of their other beliefs, and which nonbelievers are apt to ridicule?
These high costs are exactly the point. Joining a religious community isn’t like signing up for a website; you can’t just hop in on a lark. You have to get socialized into it, coaxed in through social ties and slowly acculturated to the belief system. And when this process plays out naturally, it won’t even feel like a painful sacrifice because you’ll be getting more out of it than you give up.
CELIBACY AND MARTYRDOM
Most of the religious behaviors we’ve been discussing in this chapter are adaptive—or at least, that’s what we’ve been arguing. They help us get along and get ahead within religious communities, and often in the broader context of life and reproduction. But what are we to make of the most extreme religious behaviors, like celibacy and martyrdom? These are in no way biologically adaptive to the individual. So might these behaviors be explained by the individual’s religious beliefs—for example, a belief in the afterlife and its promise of eternal rewards?
Certainly the beliefs might give individuals a small psychological push toward such self-destructive behaviors, but there’s another, much larger force we need to consider: social status. Prestige, glory, and the admiration of one’s fellows. We’ve seen how small sacrifices, like weekly church attendance, can function as a gambit: a sacrifice in one domain (time and energy) in the hope of securing a larger gain in some other domain (trust). Similarly, we might view martyrs and priests as following the same instincts that, under normal circumstances, serve them, and all the rest of us, quite well.60
An analogy that’s often used by biologists to describe such instincts is hill-climbing. Individual brains are built to go “up” in pursuit of higher and higher social status (or any other measure of reward). So we scramble our way toward the top of whatever hill or mountain we happen to find in our local vicinity. Sometimes, we consider going down to find a better route up, or wandering randomly in hope of finding an even higher peak off in the distance. But mostly we just climb skyward as if on autopilot. And in most landscapes, these instincts serve us very well. But if we happen to find ourselves in a nonstandard landscape, one that our brains weren’t designed for, the same instincts can lead us to bad outcomes.
To continue the analogy, we might model the landscape of a religious community as a volcano—a cone-shaped mountain with a perilous crater at the top. Every day, as a worshipper, you seek to climb higher, which often (counterintuitively) requires you to make sacrifices. Each sacrifice earns you more trust and respect from your peers, taking you further up the slope. It may get steeper and the air more rarefied. With each step, you run the risk of slipping back down or getting clawed down by rivals. But you steel yourself to press onward. You make ever larger sacrifices, which continue to work out in your favor—until one day, without realizing it, you push yourself too far. Your brain, expecting a simple mountain, took a step that felt like “up.” But in reality, the mountain was a volcano, and your final step sent you tumbling over the edge and into the crater.
It’s important to note that these hill-climbing accidents aren’t at all unique to religious landscapes. In dietary landscapes, we seek tasty fats and sugars, which were almost always “up” (in health terms) for our ancestors—until one day we’re stricken with diabetes or a heart attack. In military landscapes, we learn to show bravery, earning ever more respect from our comrades—right up until we take a bullet. Drug addicts seek ever-more-pleasurable highs until they overdose. And in literal mountaineering, risk-taking explorers might search for higher and higher peaks to climb, each summit bringing more glory—until one day their reach exceeds their grasp and they plummet to an untimely death.
In all of these cases, instincts that are adaptive in one context can lead us fatefully astray in another. But we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the instincts are necessarily maladaptive, or that the people acting on them are hopelessly foolish or deluded. They’re just chasing their highs, same as the rest of us.
16
Politics
In the preceding chapters, we’ve mainly used the word “politics” to refer to small-scale “coalition politics,” like the kind of maneuvering that takes place in a band of hunter-gatherers or a modern workplace. In such situations, rival coalitions compete for control, and individuals seek to ally themselves with powerful coalitions (or at least avoid visibly opposing them). And since this often involves unsavory tactics like bootlicking, backstabbing, and rumor-mongering, we try hard not to appear as if we’re “playing politics”—though we’re happy, when we can, to accuse our rivals of such behavior.
However, the word “politics” is often used with an entirely different connotation. In some prestigious walks of life, such as art, literature, and philosophy, many people aren’t at all embarrassed to be “political”; in fact, they often talk as if it were their highest aspiration. Far from the grubby, low-stakes game of office politics, this is the politics of citizenship, activism, and statecraft: helping steer a nation in pursuit of the common good. This noble image of politics has been around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. Aristotle’s book Politics, for example, was intended (in the words of one scholar) “to bring to our attention the splendor of politics and of the moral virtue that people show in politics.”1
But does the grand political arena really bring out our moral virtue? Contrast Aristotle’s conception of politics with what we see on the TV show House of Cards. No doubt its scenarios are exaggerated to make for gripping entertainment, but we all recognize its portrayal of the dark underbelly of national politics: the back-room dealings, bad-faith promises, and bald-faced lies. “Laws,” it’s often remarked, “are like sausages: it’s better not to see them being made.”
Rather than focusing on the behavior and motives of career politicians, however, in this chapter we’re going to examine how ordinary citizens participate in formal democratic politics. This includes voting and registering with political parties, of course, which are some of the activities for which there’s especially good data. But we also, in our role as citizens, follow the news, deliberate the i
ssues, and debate with our friends. We put up lawn signs and fix bumper stickers to our cars. Sometimes we attend political protests or get involved in political campaigns.
The question, as always, is why.
THE POLITICAL DO-RIGHT
To help illuminate our political motives, let’s consider an archetype for the ideal politically engaged citizen: the conscientious, civic-minded Do-Right.
True to their name, Do-Rights are engaged with politics for all the “right” reasons. They’re not after their own selfish ends; they simply want to make a difference for others, to improve society for current and future citizens. They’re not starry-eyed idealists, but rather hard-nosed pragmatists who are willing to make hard choices and compromise when necessary to achieve the best outcomes. There’s nothing at all performative about their actions in the political sphere; they’re not angling for credit or personal glory. Instead, they’re earnestly, single-mindedly focused on doing what’s best for their country.
Now, given that humans are competitive social animals, it would be surprising if we chose this one arena—national politics—to suddenly live up to our altruistic ideals. Nevertheless, some facets of our behavior appear to support the Do-Right picture of our political motives.
For one thing, the literature on voting makes it clear that people mostly don’t vote for their material self-interest, that is, for the candidates and policies that would make them personally better off.2 Jonathan Haidt provides some examples in The Righteous Mind: