The Trouble with Testosterone

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  IV. The Emergence of the Godspoken

  In A Hunger Artist, Kafka describes the travails of the protagonist, who is brought into the town square in a cage in order to carry out a forty-day fast for the edification of the populace. One initially assumes this to be one of Kafka’s stranger parables, but there were, in fact, professional fasters of this sort throughout medieval Europe, the perfect entertainment for those perhaps bored with their season tickets to the bearbaiting. A remarkable thought—you could get paid to starve, something with a parallel in the present discussion. In many cultures, the advantages of intermixing obsessive-compulsive and religious rituals can even be taken a step further, beyond the realm of the lay practitioner. We live in the age where the religious leader and the psychotherapist often occupy roughly equivalent niches in their respective sectarian and nonsectarian ecosystems. We are rife with the images of such religious leaders as dispensing solace and insight—counseling the young couple before their marriage, comforting the mourner, ministering to our pains. But that is only one face of religious leadership. They can also be the purveyors of damnation, or the warriors at the front of columns of crusaders. And in many settings, it is the religious leaders who are simply the best at carrying out the rituals—the most fervent, energetic, or inventive. This is extraordinary—with any luck, you might make a living being obsessive-compulsive.

  Mark Tansey, Doubting Thomas, 1986; private collection, Los Angeles, courtesy Curt Marcus Gallery, New York

  As before, this is often most readily appreciated by considering what is, for most readers, a more alien case. The life of the orthodox Hindu Brahman is consumed not only with his own arduous daily rituals, but with freelance work doing cleansing and numerological rituals for others. For example, the observant Hindu is expected to recite the Gayatri mantra 2,400,000 times in his lifetime. It is common for aging gentlemen, perhaps feeling the shadows lengthening and lacking the fortitude for repetition, to hire a Brahman to finish their homework for them, reciting the remaining mantras. Or for those in a hurry, one may hire 24 or, for the truly wealthy, 240 Brahmans to do all 2,400,000 mantras nonstop in one major blowout numerologyfest.

  The examples closer to home are subtler and harder to recognize for their familiarity, but still represent the same. Consider the traditional Catholic practice of paying a stipend to a priest to have a Mass said for someone, or the endless circumstances in which a religious leader is brought in to ritualistically ensure a successful baseball game, high school commencement, or session of Congress.

  This economic arrangement can even take on a quality of second-order derivatives, where a religious leader can be hired to ritualistically check that someone else is carrying out a ritual properly. For example, for a food to be labeled as kosher by the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, the factory or slaughterhouse where it is produced must hire a specially trained rabbi. It is not this individual’s job to actually partake in the food preparation. Instead, his task is purely an observational one, assuring that the rituals of preparation of, for example, no-cholesterol tofu hot dogs, are carried out in a way that would bring an approving smile to the lips of the Patriarchs.

  One may protest that the more conventional versions of being hired to perform religious rituals (i.e., the ones we are more familiar with in our own culture) do not really represent “hiring”—it is rare for a religious leader to charge for doing a graduation invocation, instead viewing it as part of the job. But that is precisely the point. It is the job, often full-time, with either the direct hiring by a community of a minister or rabbi, complete with contract and health insurance, or the indirect hiring of a priest through contributions to the Catholic Church. And in the cold terms of economic anthropology, the evolution of this sort of stratification requires the peasantry not only to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, but to earn the bread for someone else as well, while the priestly class is busy with hand washing.

  This idea is captured with an unexpected brilliance in what was to me an otherwise forgettable science fiction novel, Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide (New York: Tor Books, 1991). In a multiplanetary and oppressive empire, there is a planet whose culture is dominated by a hereditary priestly caste, who are “godspoken.” These religious leaders, intellectually gifted but useless, live sumptuously off the servile offerings of the peasants, passing their days in complex, exhausting rituals of purification and numerology. Late in the book, an insidious plot is revealed—this priestly caste was a genetic experiment of the evil overlords of the galactic empire. Long ago, they had recognized the highly developed intellect of the people of this planet and feared that, someday, they might prove to be able leaders of a revolution. As an effective preventative measure, the overlords introduced a genetically engineered virus that infected a subset of the population and transferred into them the gene for OCD. That subset, counting and washing and chanting, soon had evolved these rituals into religious ones, foisted them off onto the uninfected population at large with claims that their frantic imperatives were signs of being spoken to by god, and passed on the gene to their descendants. A parasitic priestly caste had emerged and the planet no longer constituted a revolutionary danger—the godspoken were too busy with the holy task of counting the number of lines in the planks of wood on their floors (a common compulsion among them), and the peasantry was too busy doing the cooking and laundry for them.

  Thus, to the extent that religious ritual offers a sanctuary for the obsessive-compulsive, the most structured and rewarded of such safety is found in the priestly class. An extraordinarily modern, familiar cast to the suffering of an obsessive-compulsive is found in the case of a sixteenth-century Augustinian monk named Luder, whose writings have survived into our time. Anxious and neurasthenic, troubled with a relationship with a stern and demanding father, plagued with a variety of seemingly psychosomatic disorders, the young man had been caught one day in a frightening thunderstorm while walking alone, suffered a panic attack, and vowed to become a monk if he was allowed to survive.

  True to his vow, he became a novitiate and threw himself into the rituals with a froth of repetition, self-doubt, and self-debasement. He described his dis-ease with the German word Anfechtung, which he defined as a sense of being utterly lost, a sense of anxious lack of mooring in every circumstance. He carried out each monkish ritual to perfection, urging himself to ever greater concern for detail, ever greater consciousness of God throughout the act, ever greater contrition for his own inadequacies . . . and would invariably find fault and have to start over again. The first Mass that he led was an agony of anxiety, as he was filled with fears of leaving out details, of saying something blasphemous. His spare hours of silent meditation were filled with obsessive, heretical thoughts, for which he confessed at length day after day. “I often repeated my confession and zealously performed my required penance,” he wrote. “But I was always doubting and said, ‘You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’ ” At one point, his father confessor, no doubt exhausted with having to hear hours of confessions each day from Luder, endless reportings of evidence of failings and God’s justifiable anger, finally turned to the young monk with an exasperated, shockingly modern insight—“It is not God who is angry with you. It is you who is angry with God.”

  History gives us a final hint of this monk’s affliction. He washed and washed, and it was all futile. “The more you cleanse yourself, the dirtier you get,” he summarized plaintively. The vein of obsessive-compulsive anxiety is readily apparent in this young man, who would come to be known by the more modern version of his name, Martin Luther.

  Scherer and Ouporov, The Birdman, 1995; courtesy the artists

  V. Who Invented Knocking on Wood?

  Why should life for a certain type of religious individual and for the obsessive-compulsive be so filled with ritual? This has already been discussed in the context of OCD as an anxiety disorder, and even in the need the rest of us have to count stairs duri
ng troubled times. There is an inchoate comfort, security, even pleasure, that we tend to take in patterns and in repetition. D’Aquili and Laughlin proposed what they called a “biogenetic structuralism,” speculating that our brains find there to be something intrinsically, electrophysiologically reinforcing about rhythmically repeated patterns. Their guess was that “repetitive auditory and visual stimuli can drive cortical rhythms and eventually produce an intensely pleasurable, ineffable experience in man.” I know of virtually no neurobiological evidence for that idea, yet alone for why we get comfort not only from a ritual involving repetition over seconds (such as the repeated chanting of a mantra), in which there might actually be some sort of entrainment of cortical activity, but also from rituals with a cycle of repetition spanning a thousand Sabbaths. The biology of the comfort of repetition can’t be quite that simple. Nevertheless, there is indeed a great and fundamental comfort that occurs when we encounter the familiar and repetitive, when we are reminded that we have trod this way before and that the ground is solid. It is a trait we share with many other species, a trait that becomes increasingly powerful in most of us as we age. (In Tracy Kidder’s Old Friends, there is a wonderful comment by a nursing home resident, referring to one consequence of his roommate’s quirks of aging, a comment to the effect of: To hear that story of Joe’s once or twice is entertaining, to hear it a dozen times gets irritating, but to hear it every day for the last five years is one of the greatest things I can imagine.)

  Thus, the need for ritual. But why should religion be filled not only with ritual, but so often with the same types of ritual—cleansing, food preparation, entering and leaving, numerology—as carried out by the OCD patient? For example, of the 613 rules concerning Orthodox Jewish life, most versions have approximately 100 of them concerned with food preparation. Why the similar foci of obsession in the two groups?

  There have been some psychoanalytic speculations about this. There have also been some from biologically oriented anthropologists and psychologists. These individuals view ritual not merely as the random seizing upon some pattern, but as reflecting an underlying biological reality. In that view, it is no surprise that, in worlds full of communicable disease and potentially contaminated food, secular and nonsecular ritualism is highly concerned with issues of personal hygiene and of ensuring that food is clean and safe to eat.

  These ideas are built around the notion that rituals of religion and of OCD are structurally similar because they arise from similar (psychoanalytic, ecological) roots. It strikes me that in many cases, there is a far simpler explanation, one that is, I believe, the only original idea in this piece. Religion does not just offer a refuge to OCD sufferers who learn to do the rituals that everyone else does, does not just particularly reward that with leadership positions among the individuals who excel in carrying out these rituals. It seems obvious—a lot of those rituals had to have been started by OCD individuals, their private attempts at structured anxiety reduction somehow turning into rules for everyone else. Insofar as a schizotypal individual, in the right place and time, might dramatically influence the very structure of a group’s theological beliefs, an OCD sufferer, with a similar stumbling onto the stage of influence, might change the way a people carry out the rituals of their daily belief.

  Who was the Hindu somewhere back when who had this obsessional thing about the number 24, the Muslim stuck on 70? Who was the Jew who believed that God had an inordinate fondness for the number of days of the year plus the number of bones in the body? Who invented worry beads, or wrapping the threads of a prayer shawl a set number of times? Who was the individual, in culture after culture, whose private, tortuous sequence of self-cleansing was the one that somehow caught on and became the standard version for the orthodox? In the vast majority of cases, we are never going to have a clue, these individuals and their needs lost in history.

  There is something I find poignant about the idea that many religious rituals were once the private ones of individuals with OCD. There is a quality, noted by many clinicians, to the rituals of the OCD patient and that individual’s relationship to them. The careful, exhausting, all-consuming frenzy of patterns that obsessive-compulsives are enslaved to often represent the most personal, most secretive corner of their lives. If their rituals are grounded in ones that are already part of their culture, it is often vital that they add something extra, something private, something more exhausting and challenging and demanding to keep them one step further ahead of the inevitable dis-ease, ahead of their Anfechtung. If their rituals have been invented out of the air, they are filled with a private symbolism, forming a template of the person’s essence that can defy words, that can defy the patient’s understanding of why these patterns seem so fundamental to their Self. The rituals may be shown in public at times, the sufferer may not be able to suppress them, but this is an intensely private act that is being displayed.

  It is impossible to know in any given case how the transformation into the shared religious ritual occurs. During a time of trouble and community anxiety, perhaps others seize on the patterns displayed by this one influential individual, or perhaps she comes forward and offers it as a gift to the community—this is how I have pleased our God all these years. But the transformation occurs and that OCD individual is left with a yawning space of what is no longer her own. We are accustomed to the idea of the religious leader as sacrificing with a life of celibacy, abstinence, or poverty, with even life itself being sacrificed on a cross or in a conflagration. I suspect this transformation of ritual constitutes another case of such sacrifice: in the name of religious belief, in the name of concern in a time of trouble for the community to which one belongs, in the name of the good of the flock, the Secret is revealed, that private place of repetition and rule and pattern where, temporarily, the devil is held at bay and God knows you have done your best. It is given away to be franchised and distributed with what must seem like as much sanctity as an aerobic-exercise video. The ecosystem of belief provides some surprising niches of martyrdom.

  VI. Epilogue: The Specter of Ersatz Faith and Ersatz Loss of Faith

  I have gone on at great length to review these ideas that link the metamagical thought of the schizotypal to features of religious ideation, or that link the ritualistic imperatives of the obsessive-compulsive with features of religious ritualism. There are other, recent findings in neuropsychiatry that can be tossed into this arena as well.

  Alfredo Castañeda, Retrato del Combatiente Quintuple, 1989; courtesy Mary-Anne Martin/Fine Art, New York

  Consider the case of “superstitious conditioning,” a wonderfully apt phrase coined by B. F. Skinner in the early days of behaviorism. In many (although not all) realms, if you reward an organism for carrying out some behavior, you increase the likelihood of that organism behaving that way again. When done methodically, one can slowly “shape” an individual into carrying out an increasingly involved, complex task by progressively upping the ante as to what elicits a reward—there are endless examples of such conditioning, perhaps the most dramatic being the sort of training that goes into circus animals learning their tricks.

  What if you give a reward at random intervals, irrespective of what the animal or person is doing? The response on the part of the individual, naturally, is to think something along the lines of “What did I just do to get that great reward? I must have done something.” The individual repeats whatever behavior he was doing just before the reward came. He tries it again, tries a slight variant on it, prepares to try it another time, when . . . bingo, the next random reward shows up and his theory is resoundingly confirmed—“I knew it, do this behavior enough times and that causes the reward to happen.” You’ve just conditioned a superstitious behavior.

  Skinner showed this with his pigeons: reinforce some hungry pigeons with food at random intervals and you wind up with a bunch of animals exhibiting superstitious behaviors—in one cage will be a pigeon hopping vigorously on one leg, in the next, a pigeon alternately le
aning from side to side, in another, a bird earnestly spinning in circles—each one convinced that that behavior is responsible for the intermittent reward. I’ve seen scientists conditioned into superstitious behavior plenty of times as well. Try some new difficult laboratory technique, one that hardly ever works. Inevitably, one day, out of nowhere, it works like a charm. In reality, it is due to some thoroughly obscure variable, one that the scientist can’t even begin to guess at—the trace levels of some chemical in the water supply that day, or maybe sunspots, or perhaps fluctuations in the Tokyo stock exchange. But the scientist is so desperately pleased, so likely to leap on any and all random behaviors associated with this particular success, that all sorts of superstitious behaviors quickly get conditioned—since the scientist has no idea which behaviors were responsible for that unlikely success, they all get conditioned, virtually down to always wearing the same lucky pair of underwear on the day of the next experiment.