From a bean-counter’s point of view, the ‘correct’ strategy in such circumstances is to count how many beans you gain by committing yourself, compare that to how many you gain by cheating, and see which pile of beans is biggest. From Nesse’s point of view, that approach doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. The whole calculation can be sidestepped, at a stroke, by the strategy of overcommitment. ‘Stuff the beans: I guarantee that I will commit myself to you, no matter what. And you can trust me, because I will prove to you, and keep proving it every day that we live, that I am committed at that level.’ Overcommitment beats the bean-counters hands down. While they’re trying to compare 142 beans with 143, overcommitment has wiped the floor with them.
Nesse suggests that such strategies have had a decisive effect in shaping our extelligence (though he doesn’t use that word):
Commitment strategies give rise to complexities that may be a selective force that has shaped human intelligence. This is why human psychology and relationships are so hard to fathom. Perhaps a better understanding of the deep roots of commitment will illuminate the relationships between reason and emotion, and biology and belief.
Or, to put it another way: perhaps that’s what gave us an edge over the Neanderthals. Though it would be difficult to find a scientific test for such a suggestion.
When humans overcommit in this manner, we call it ‘love’. There is far more to love than the simple scenario just outlined, of course, but one feature is common to both: love counts not the cost. It doesn’t care about who gets the most beans.3 And by refusing to play the bean-counters’ game, it wins outright. Which is a very religious, spiritual and uplifting message. And sound evolutionary sense. What more could we ask?
Quite a bit, actually, because now it all starts to get nasty. The reasons, however, are admirable. Every culture needs its own Make-a-Human kit, to build into the next generation the kind of mind that will keep the culture going – and, recursively, ensure that the next generation does the same for the one that comes after that. Rituals fit very readily into such a kit, because it is easy to distinguish Us from Them by the rituals that We follow but They don’t.4 It is also an excellent test of a child’s willingness to obey cultural norms by insisting that they carry out some perfectly ordinary task in an unnecessarily prescribed and elaborate manner.
Now, however, the priesthood has got its ideological toe in the cultural doorway. Rituals need someone to organise them, and to elaborate them. Every bureaucracy builds itself an empire by creating unnecessary tasks and then finding people to carry them out. A crucial task here is to ensure that members of the tribe or village or nation really do obey the norms and carry out the rituals. There has to be some sanction to make sure that they do, even if they’re free-thinking types who’d rather not. Because everything is founded on an ontically dumped concept, reference to reality has to be replaced by belief. The less testable a human belief is, the more strongly we tend to hold on to it. Deep down we recognise that although not being testable means that disbelievers can’t prove we’re wrong, it also means that we can’t prove we’re right. Since we know that we are, that sets up a tremendous tension.
Now the atrocities begin. Religion slides over the edge of sanity, and the result is horrors like the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it for a moment. The priesthood of a religion whose central tenet was universal love and brotherhood systematically inflicted appalling tortures, sick and disgusting things, on innocent people who merely happened to disagree about minor items of belief. This is a massive contradiction and it demands explanation. Were the Inquisitors evil people who knowingly did evil things?
Small Gods, one of the most profound and philosophical of the Discworld novels, examines the role of belief in religions, and Discworld undergoes its own version of the Spanish Inquisition. One twist is that on Discworld, there is no lack of gods; however, few of them have any great significance:
There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshipped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don’t demand much in the way of miracles.
They are the small gods, the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.
Because what they lack is belief.
Small Gods is the story of one rather larger god, the Great God Om, who manifests himself to a novice monk called Brutha, in the Citadel at the heart of the city of Kom in the lands between the deserts of Klatch and the jungles of Howondaland.
Brutha’s attitude to religion is a very personal one. He runs his own life by it. In contrast, Deacon Vorbis believes that the role of religion is to run everybody else’s life. Vorbis is head of the Quisition, whose role is ‘to do all those things that needed to be done and which other people would rather not do’. Nobody ever interrupts Vorbis to ask what he is thinking about, because they are scared stiff that the answer will be ‘You’.
The Great God’s manifestation takes the form of a small tortoise. Brutha finds this hard to believe:
I’ve seen the Great God Om … and he isn’t tortoise-shaped. He comes as an eagle, or a lion, or a mighty bull. There’s a statue in the Great Temple. It’s seven cubits high. It’s got bronze on it and everything. It’s trampling infidels. You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise.
Om’s power has waned because of a lack of belief. He tests his strength by silently cursing a beetle, but it makes no difference and the insect plods away unperturbed. He curses a melon unto the eighth generation, but with no evident effect. He inflicts a plague of boils on it, but all it does is sit there, slowly ripening. He vows that when he returns to his rightful state, the Tribes of Beetle and Melons will regret not responding. For on Discworld, the size of a god is determined by the strength, and amount, of belief in him (or her, or it). Om’s church had become so corrupt and powerful that the fearful belief of the common people had been transferred to the church itself – it’s very easy to believe in a red-hot poker – and only Brutha, simple soul, still truly believes. No god ever dies, because there is always some tiny pocket of belief remaining somewhere in the world, but a tortoise is pretty much as low as you can get.
Brutha is going to become the Eighth Prophet of Om. (His grandmother would have made it two generations before, but she was a woman, and narrative imperative forbids female prophets.) Vorbis’s job is to ensure that all Omnians remain true to the teachings of the Great God Om, which is to say, they do what Vorbis tells them. The presence on the Discworld of the god itself, causing changes to all the old teachings and generally making trouble, is not greatly to Vorbis’s taste. Neither is the presence of a genuine prophet. Vorbis is faced with the inquisitor’s spiritual dilemma, and resolves it in the time-honoured manner of the Spanish Inquisition (which, basically, is to tell oneself that torturing people is fine because it’s for their own good, in the long run).
Brutha has a much simpler vision of Omnianism: it is something for individuals to live by. Vorbis shows Brutha a new instrument that he has had made: an iron turtle upon which a man or woman can be spreadeagled, with a firebox inside. The time it takes for the iron to heat up will give them plenty of time to reflect on their heresies. In a flash of prophecy, Brutha realises that its first victim will be himself. And in due course, he finds himself chained to it, and uncomfortably warm, with Vorbis watching over him, gloating. Then the Great God Om intervenes, dropped from the talons of an eagle.
One or two people, who had been watching Vorbis closely, said later that there was just time for his expression to change before two pounds of tortoise, travelling at three metres per second, hit him between the eyes.
It was a revelation.
And that does something to people watching. For a start, they believe with all their heart.
The Great God Om now is truly great. He rises over the Temple, a billowing cloud shaped like eagle-headed me
n, bulls, golden horns, all tangled and fused into one another. Four bolts of fire whir out of the cloud and burst the chains that fastened Brutha to the iron turtle. The Great God declares Brutha to be Prophet of Prophets.
The Great God gives Brutha the opportunity to make some Commandments. The Prophet declines, having decided that ‘You should do things because they’re right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time’. And he tells Om that there will be no Commandments unless the god agrees to obey them, too.
Which is a new thought, for a god.
Small Gods has many wise words to say about religion and belief, and it makes the point that in their own terms the Inquisitors believe they are doing good. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov has a scene in which the Grand Inquisitor encounters Christ, and explains his point of view, including why Christ’s renewed message of universal love couldn’t have come at a worse time and will only cause trouble. Just as the presence of Brutha, a genuine prophet, was not at all to the liking of Deacon Vorbis.
The Spanish Inquisitors’ justification of their actions was philosophically convoluted. The purpose of their tortures was straightforward: it was to save a sinner from eternal damnation. The tortures of Hell would be far worse than anything that the Inquisitors could inflict in this world, and they would never stop. So of course they were justified in using any means whatsoever to save the poor soul from destruction. They therefore believed that their actions were justified, and in accordance with Christian principles. Not to act would have been to leave the person concerned in danger of the terrible fires of Hell.
Yes, but what if they were wrong in this belief? This is the convoluted bit. They weren’t quite sure about their religious position. What were the rules? If they failed to convert one tortured heretic, would the Inquisitors burn forever? If they converted one heretic, would their souls be guaranteed a place in Heaven? The Inquisitors believed that by inflicting pain and terror without knowing the rules, they risked their own mortal souls. If they were wrong, it was they who would be immersed in the eternal flames. But they were willing to risk this enormous spiritual danger, to take upon themselves all of the consequences of their actions, should they turn out to be wrong. See how incredibly magnanimous they were being, even as they burned people alive and hacked them limb from limb with red-hot knives …
Clearly something is wrong. Dostoyevsky solves his own narrative problem by having Christ respond the way his own teachings would lead him to: he kisses the Inquisitor. This is an answer, of a kind, but it doesn’t satisfy our analytical instincts. There is a logical flaw in the Inquisitors’ position: what is it?
It’s very simple. They have thought about what happens if their belief that their actions are justified is wrong – but only within the frame of their religion. They have not asked themselves what their position would be if their religious beliefs are false, if there is no Hell, no eternal damnation, no fire and brimstone. Then their justification would fall to bits.
Of course, if their religion is wrong, then its doctrine of brotherly love could also be wrong. It doesn’t have to be: some parts might be fine, others nonsense. But to the Inquisitors it is all of one piece, it stands or falls as a whole. If they are wrong about their religion, then there is no sin, no God, and they can cheerfully torture people if they want to. It really is a nasty philosophical trap.
This is the kind of thing that happens when a big, powerful priesthood latches on to what started as one person’s awe at the universe. It is what happens when people construct elaborate verbal traps for themselves, trip over the logic, and fall headlong into them. It is where Holy Wars come from, where neighbour can inflict atrocity on neighbour merely because this otherwise reasonable person goes to a church with a round tower instead of a square one. It is the attitude that Jonathan Swift caricatured in Gulliver’s Travels, with the conflict between the big-endians and the little-endians, over which end of an egg to slice into when eating it. It is, perhaps, why so many people today are turning to unorthodox cults in an effort to find a home for their own spirituality. But cults run the same risk as the Inquisition. The only safe home for one’s personal spirituality is oneself.
1 There doesn’t seem to be a good word for ‘to be altruistic’. To altru?
2 In Fisher’s day, this simplification was a great idea, because it made it possible to do the sums. Nowadays, it’s a bad idea, for the same reason. You can do them, but you can’t put any faith in the answers.
3 Altruism, cooperation and love among humans are not the only examples of evolutionary overcommitment … as the Librarian well knows. A banana is much better suited to being eaten by an orangutan than it needs to be. The rest of the fruit kingdom doesn’t come close. What’s in it for other fruit, like the tomato, is that its seeds pass through the animal and are dispersed, complete with a built-in packet of fertiliser. A bean-counting tomato could reduce its level of suitability and still ensure that its seeds, rather than those of the competition, were propagated (the juiciest tomatoes used to be from the plants growing at the sewage farm …). But an over-committed banana avoids the need to test such fine points. By going over the top, losing its seed-producing capacity entirely and relying on humans to propagate it, it ensures that it wins so comfortably that no competitor even gets a look in.
4 … which can be applied so overpoweringly that the people who aren’t Us aren’t anything. See the Imperial China parody – the Agatean Empire – in Interesting Times, and a number of Roundworld cultures, too. Being Them is quite a step up by comparison.
TWENTY-ONE
THE NEW SCIENTIST
THERE WAS SOMETHING CALLED, as far as Ponder could work out, psyence. All his expertise as a reader of invisible writings was needed to get a grip on this idea – L-space was very hazy about the future of this world.
‘As far as I can tell,’ he reported, ‘it’s a way of making up stories that work. It’s a way of finding things out and thinking about them … psy-ence, you see? “Psy” means “mind” and “ence” means, er, esness. It works on Roundworld in the way magic does at home.’
‘Useful stuff, then,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyone doing it?’
‘Hex is going to try to take us to what appear to be practical examples of it,’ said Ponder.
‘Time travel again?’ said the Dean.
The white circle appeared on the floor …
… and on the sand, and vanished.
The wizards looked around.
‘All right, then,’ said Ponder. ‘So … dry climate, evidence of agriculture, fields of crops, irrigation ditches, naked man turning a handle, man staring at us, man screaming and running away …’
Rincewind stepped down into the ditch and inspected the pipe-like device the man had been turning.
‘It’s just a water-lifting screw,’ he announced. ‘I’ve seen a lot of them. You turn the handle, water is screwed out of the ditch, goes up the thread inside and spills out of the top. The screw makes a sort of line of travelling buckets inside the tube. There’s nothing special about it. It’s just basic … stuff.’
‘Not psyence, then?’ said Ridcully.
‘You tell me, sir,’ said Rincewind.
‘Psyence is quite a difficult concept,’ said Ponder. ‘But I think perhaps tinkering with this thing to make it more efficient might be psyence?’
‘Sounds like engineering,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘That’s where you try and make it in different ways to see if any of them are better.’
‘The Librarian did turn up one book, very grudgingly,’ said Ponder, pulling it out of his pocket.
It was called Basic Science for Schools, pub. 1920.
‘They’ve spelt it wrong,’ said Ridcully.
‘And it’s not very helpful,’ said Ponder. ‘There’s quite a lot of what looks like alchemy. You know, mixing stuff up to see what happens.’
‘Is that all it is, then?’ said the Archchancellor, leafing through the book. ‘Hold
on, hold on. Alchemy is, at bottom, all about the alchemist. His books tell him all the stuff he’s got to do in order make things work – what to wear, when to wear it, that sort of thing. It’s very personal.’
‘And?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘Hark at this,’ said Ridcully. ‘There’s no invocations, nothing to tell you what to wear or what phase of the moon it should be. Nothing important. It just says here “A clean beaker was taken. To this was added 20 grammes” – whatever they are – “of copper sulphate” …’ He stopped.
‘Well?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘Well, who did the taking? Who added the stuff? What’s going on here?’
‘Perhaps it’s trying to say that it doesn’t matter who does it?’ said Ponder. He’d already glanced at the book, and felt that the perfectly ordinary ignorance he’d had just before opening it had been multiplied several times by page ten.
‘Anyone can do it?’ shouted Ridcully. ‘Science is incredibly important but anyone can do it? And what’s this?’
He held the book open for all to see, his finger pointing at an illustration. It showed a drawing of an eye, side on, to one side of the apparatus.
‘Perhaps it’s a God of Science?’ Rincewind suggested. ‘Watching to see who keeps taking things?’
‘So … science is done by anyone,’ said Ridcully, ‘and most of the equipment is stolen and it’s all watched by a giant eyeball?’
The Science of Discworld II Page 24