The Science of Discworld II

by Terry Pratchett

  When discussing religious beliefs, there is always the danger of upsetting people. The same goes when discussing football, of course, but people take their religion nearly as seriously. So let us begin by acknowledging, as we did towards the end of The Science of Discworld, that ‘all religions are true, for a given value of true’. We have no wish to damage your beliefs, if you have them, or to damage your lack of beliefs if you don’t. We don’t mind if we cause you to modify your beliefs, though. That’s your responsibility and your choice: don’t blame us. But we’re shortly going to have a go at science, and then we’re going to have a go at art, so we don’t think it’s fair that religion should get away scot-free. Anyway, whatever your beliefs, religion is an essential feature of the human condition, and it’s one of the things that made us what we are. We have to examine it, and ask whether Discworld puts it in a new light.

  If you are religious, and you want to feel comfortable about what we’re saying, you can always assume that we’re talking about all the other religions, but not yours. Some years ago, during Ecumenical Week, Rabbi Lionel Blue was giving the “Thought for the Day’ on BBC Radio 4, as part of a series on tolerance. He was the first speaker in the series, and he ended with a joke. ‘They shouldn’t have asked me to start the series,’ he said, and then explained how the later speakers from other religions would differ from him, and how he would be tolerant about that. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘they worship God in their way … whereas I worship Him in His.’

  If you see that this is a joke, as the good rabbi did, but also understand that outside that cosy context this is not, in a multicultural world, a good way to think, let alone speak, then you’re already getting to grips with the ambivalent role that religion has played in human history. And with the mental twists and turns required to live in a multiculture.

  The big problem with religion, for a dispassionate observer, has nothing to do with belief versus proof. If religion were susceptible to scientific-style proofs or disproofs, there wouldn’t be a lot to argue about. No, the big problem is the disparity between individual human spirituality – the deep-seated feeling that we belong in this awesome universe – with the unmitigated disasters that organised, large-scale religions have at various times, including in all probability yesterday, inflicted on the planet and its people. This is upsetting. Religion ought to be a force for good, and mostly it is … But when it isn’t, it goes spectacularly and horribly wrong.

  In both Pyramids and Small Gods, we see that the real problem in this connection is not religion as such, but priests. Priests have been known to seize upon the spiritual feelings of individuals and twist them into something terrible; the Quisition in Small Gods was hardly an invention. Sometimes it had been done for power, or for money. It’s even been done because the priests really believe that this is what the god of choice wants them to do.

  Again, on an individual level many priests (or equivalent) are perfectly nice people who do many positive things, but collectively they can have some very negative effects. It is this mismatch that will form the core of our discussion, because it tells us interesting things about what it is to be human.

  We are very tiny, fragile creatures inside a huge, uncontrollable universe. Evolution has equipped us not just with eyes to see the universe, but minds to hold little models of it within us; that is, to tell ourselves stories about it.

  We have learned, over the millennia, to exert more and more control over our world, but we see evidence every day that our ability to control our own lives is extremely limited. In the past, disease, death, famine and ferocious animals were part of everyday existence. You could control when you planted your crops, but you couldn’t control when the rains came, and you might just get jumped by a pride of lionesses while you were bending down to pull up weeds.

  It is very uncomfortable to have to cope unaided with that kind of world, and many people still have to do so. Everyone feels much happier if they believe that there are ways to control rain and lionesses.

  Now, the human mind is an inveterate pattern-seeker, one that finds patterns even where none exist. Every week millions of perfectly sane people look for patterns in lottery numbers, oblivious to the absence of any meaningful structure in random numbers. So it’s not really necessary for the belief in an ability to control rain or lionesses to correspond to an actual ability to do so. We all know that even when things are under control, they can still go wrong, so our faith in our beliefs seldom gets seriously challenged, whatever happens.

  The idea that there is a Rain Goddess who decides when it will rain, or a Lion God who can either keep you safe from lion attacks or unleash them upon you, therefore has irresistible advantages. You can’t control rain, and of course you can’t control a Rain Goddess either, but, with the proper rituals, you can hope to influence her decisions. This is where the priesthood comes in, because they can act as an intermediary between everybody else and the gods. They can prescribe the appropriate rituals – and, like all good politicians, they can claim the credit when things work out and blame someone else when they go wrong. ‘What, Henry was eaten by a lion? Well then, he must not have shown proper respect when making his daily sacrifice to the Lion God.’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Well, if he had shown proper respect, he wouldn’t have been eaten.’ Ally that to the priests’ soon-acquired power to throw you to the earthly representatives of the Lion God if you disagree, and you can see that the Cult of the Lion God has an awful lot going for it.

  People look at the universe around them, and they feel overawed. It’s so big, so incomprehensible – yet it seems to dance to a tune. People who grow up in a culture – especially one with a lengthy history and a well-developed set of techniques for making buildings, planting crops, hunting animals, building boats – immediately recognise that they are faced with something that is far greater than they are. Which immediately raises all the big philosophical questions: where did it come from, what’s it for, why am I here? And so on.

  Imagine how it must have seemed to Abraham, one of the founding fathers of Judaism. He was probably a shepherd, and he probably lived in and around Ur, one of the first true city-states. He was surrounded by the icons of simple-minded religions: gold-plated idols, masks, altars. He was wildly unimpressed by them. They were trivial things, small-minded. They did not begin to measure up to the awesomeness of the natural world, and its stunning power. Additionally, he was aware that ‘something’ much bigger than him was running that world. It knew when to plant crops and when to reap them, how to tell whether rain was on the way, how to build boats, how to breed sheep (well, he would have known that bit), how to have a prosperous life. Even more: it knew how to pass all this knowledge on to the next generation. Abraham knew that his own tiny intelligence was nothing compared to this majestic something. So he reified it, and gave it a name: Jehovah, which means ‘that which is’. So far, so good, but then he made a simple but intellectually fatal error. He fell for the trap of ‘ontic dumping’.

  Nice phrase. What does it mean? Ontology is the study of knowledge. Not knowledge itself, just its study. One important way to firm up new knowledge is to invent new words. For instance, when you make an arrow, someone has to produce the sharp pointy thing that sits at its business end. They chip it from flint or cast it in bronze; either way, you can’t go on forever referring to it as ‘the sharp pointy thing on the end of an arrow’. So you cast around for a metaphor, and you remember that the thing that sits at the business end of a person or animal is called its head. So you invent the term ‘arrow-head’.

  You have now dumped the knowledge of what the flint or bronze gadget is into a name. We say ‘dumped’, because for most purposes you don’t need to recall where the name came from. Arrowhead (no hyphen) has now become a thing in its own right, not a property possessed in relation to an arrow.

  The human mind is a storytelling device, a metaphor machine: ontic dumping comes naturally to creatures like us. It’s how our language works, how our m
inds work. It’s a trick we use to simplify things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. It is the linguistic analogue of a political hierarchy as a way for one person to control millions. As a side effect, ontically dumped words wallow in associations. We are seldom conscious of these, except when we occasionally stop and ask something like ‘What on Earth does “gossamer” mean?’ Then we rush off to the dictionary and discover that it probably (no one ever knows these things for sure) comes from ‘goose summer’. What’s that got to do with fine threads that float on the breeze? Well, in a summer when geese abound, a good summer, you find a lot of these fine spider-silk threads hanging in the air …

  Subconsciously, though, we are all too aware of the dark associations several layers down in the ontic-dumping hierarchy. So words, which ought to be abstract labels, are smeared all over with their own (often irrelevant) stories.

  Abraham, then, was overawed by ‘that which is’, and he ontically dumped it into a word, Jehovah. Which quickly became a thing, indeed, a person. That’s another of our habits, personifying things. So Abraham made the tiny step from ‘there is something outside us that is greater than ourselves’ to ‘there is someone outside us who is greater than ourselves’. He had looked on the burgeoning extelligence of his own culture, and before his eyes it turned into God.

  And that made so much sense. It explained so much else. Instead of the world being like it was for reasons he couldn’t understand – even though that greater something clearly understood it perfectly well – he now saw that the world was like that because God had made it that way. The rain fell not because some tawdry idol rain-god made it fall; Abraham was too smart to believe that. It fell because that awesome God whose presence could be seen everywhere made it fall. And he, Abraham, couldn’t hope to understand the Mind of God, so of course he couldn’t predict when it would rain.

  We have used Abraham here as a placeholder. Choose your religion, choose your founder, adapt the story to fit. We’re not saying that we know that the birth of Judaism happened the way we’ve just explained. That was just a story, probably no more true than Winnie-the-Pooh and the honey. But just as Pooh in the rabbit-hole teaches us about greed, so Abraham’s ontic dumping points to a plausible route whereby sane, sensitive people can be led from their own private spiritual feelings to reify a natural process into an unfathomable Being.

  This reification has had many positive consequences. People take notice of the wishes of unfathomable, all-powerful Beings. Religious teachings often lay down guidelines (laws, commandments) for acceptable behaviour towards other people. To be sure, there are many disagreements between the different religions, or between sects within a given religion, about points of fine detail. And there are some quite substantial areas of disagreement, such as the recommended treatment of women, or to what extent basic rights should be extended to the infidel. On the whole, however, there is a strong consensus in such teachings, for example an almost universal condemnation of theft and murder. Virtually all religions reinforce a very similar consensus of what constitutes ‘good’ behaviour, perhaps because it is this consensus that has survived the test of time. In terms of the barbarian/tribal distinction, it is a tribal consensus, reinforced by tribal methods such as ritual, but none the worse for that.

  Many people find inspiration in their religion, and it helps instil a sense of belonging. It enhances their feeling of what an awesome place the universe is. It helps them cope with disasters. With exceptions, mainly related to specific circumstances such as war, most religions preach that love is good and hatred is bad. And throughout history, ordinary people have made huge sacrifices, often of their own lives, on that basis.

  This kind of behaviour, generally referred to as altruism, has caused evolutionary biologists a great deal of head-scratching. First, we’ll summarise how they have thought about the problem and what kinds of conclusion they have reached. Then we’ll consider an alternative approach, originally motivated by religious considerations, which looks to us to be far more promising.

  At first sight, altruism is not a problem. If two organisms cooperate, by which in this context we here mean that each is willing to risk its life to help the other,1 then both stand to gain. Natural selection favours such an advantage, and reinforces it. What more explanation is needed?

  Quite a lot, unfortunately. A standard reflex in evolutionary biology is to ask whether such a situation is stable – whether it will persist if some organisms adopt other strategies. What happens, for example, if most organisms cooperate, but a few decide to cheat? If the cheats prosper, then it is better to become a cheat than to cooperate, and the strategy of cooperation is unstable and will die out. Using the methods of mid-twentieth-century genetics, the approach pioneered by Ronald Aylmer Fisher, you can do the sums and work out the circumstances in which altruism is an evolutionarily stable strategy. The answer is that it all depends upon whom you cooperate with, whose life you risk your own to save. The closer kin they are to you, the more genes they share with you, so the more worthwhile it is for you to risk your own safety. This analysis leads to conclusions like ‘It is worth jumping into a lake to save your sister, but not to save your aunt.’ And certainly not to save a stranger.

  That’s the genetic orthodoxy, and like most orthodoxies, it is believed by the orthodox. On the other hand, though: if someone has fallen into a lake, people do not ask ‘Excuse me, sir, but how closely related are you to me? Are you, by any chance, a close relative?’ before diving in to rescue them. If they are the sort of people who dive in, they do so whoever has fallen into the lake. If not, they don’t. Mostly. A clear exception arises when a child falls in; even if they can’t swim its parent is then very likely indeed to plunge in to the rescue, but probably would not do so for someone else’s child, and even less so for an adult. So the genetic orthodoxy does have a certain amount going for it.

  Not much, though. Fisher’s mathematics is rather old-fashioned, and it rests on a big – and very shaky – modelling simplification.2 It represents a species by its gene-pool, where all that matters is the proportion of organisms that possess a given gene. Instead of comparing different strategies that might be adopted by an organism, it works out what strategy is best ‘on average’. And inasmuch as individual organisms are represented within its framework at all, which they are only as contributors to the gene-pool, it views competition between organisms as a direct ‘me versus thee’ choice. A bird that eats seeds is up against a bird that eats worms in a head-to-head struggle for survival, like two tennis-players … and may the best bird win.

  This is a bean-counting analysis performed with a bean-counting mentality. The bird with the most beans (energy from seeds or worms, say) survives; the other does not.

  From a complex system viewpoint, evolution isn’t like that at all. Organisms may sometimes compete directly – two birds tugging at the same worm, for instance. Or two baby birds in the nest, where direct competition can be fierce and fatal. But mostly the competition is indirect – so indirect that ‘compete’ just isn’t the right word. Each individual bird either survives, or not, against the background of everything else, including the other birds. Birds A and B do not go head-to-head. They compete against each other only in the sense that we choose to compare how A does with how B does, and declare one of them to be more successful.

  It’s like two teenagers taking driving tests. Maybe one of them is in the UK and the other is in the USA. If one passes and the other fails, then we can declare the one who has passed to be the ‘winner’. But the two teenagers don’t even know they are competing, for the very good reason that they’re not. The success or failure of one has no effect on the success or failure of the other. Nevertheless, one gets to drive a car, and the other doesn’t.

  The driving-test system works that way, and it doesn’t matter that the American test is easier to pass than the British one (as we can attest from personal experience). Evolutionary ‘competition’ mostly works like the driving test, but with
the added complication that just occasionally it really is more like a tennis match.

  From this point of view, evolution is a complex system, with organisms as entities. Which organisms survive to reproduce, and which do not, are system-level properties. They depend as much on context (American driving test versus British) as on the internal features of the individuals. The survival of a species is an emergent feature of the whole system, and no simple short-cut computation can predict it. In particular, computations based on the frequencies of genes in the gene-pool can’t predict it, and the alleged explanation of altruism by gene-frequencies is unconvincing.

  Why, then, does altruism arise? An intriguing answer was given by Randolph Nesse in the magazine Science and Spirit in 1999. In a word, his answer is ‘overcommitment’. And it is a refreshing and much-needed alternative to bean-counting.

  We have said more than once that humans are time-binders. We run our lives not just on what is happening now, but on what we think will happen in the future. This makes it possible for us to commit ourselves to a future action. ‘If you fall sick, I will look after you.’ ‘If an enemy attacks you, I will come to your aid.’ Commitment strategies change the face of ‘competition’ completely. An example is the strategy of ‘mutual assured destruction’ as a deterrent for nuclear war: ‘If you attack me with nuclear weapons, I will use mine to destroy your country completely.’ Even if one country has many more nuclear weapons, which on a bean-counting basis means that it will ‘win’, the commitment strategy means that it can’t.

  If two people, tribes or nations make a pact, and agree to commit support to each other, then they are both strengthened, and their survival prospects increase. (Provided it’s a sensible pact. We leave you to invent scenarios where what we’ve just said is wrong.) Ah, yes, that’s all very well, but can you trust the other to keep to the agreement? We have evolved some quite effective methods for deciding whether or not to trust someone. At the simplest level, we watch what they do and compare it to what they say. We can also try to find out how they have behaved in similar circumstances before. As long as we can get such decisions right most of the time, they offer a substantial survival advantage. They improve how well we do, against the background of everything else. Comparison with others is irrelevant.