Not in God's Name (5 page)

This solves the Darwinian dilemma of how non-genetically related individuals can co-operate to form groups. If you do to others what you expect them to do for you – share food, give warning of impending danger and the like – then the group will function effectively and survive. If not, you will be punished by reprisals and possible exclusion from the group. Biologists call this
reciprocal altruism
. Some deny that this is altruism at all. It is ‘self-interest rightly understood’, or what Bishop Butler called ‘cool self-love’. But the terminology is neither here nor there. This is the simplest basis of the moral life. If you start with benevolence, then apply the rules of reciprocity, you create a basis of trust on which groups can form. For this you do not need religion. All social animals work this out, because those who do not, do not survive.

It depends, though, on repeated face-to-face encounters. I have to be able to remember what you did to me last time if I am to trust you now. This requires a fair amount of memory, which explains why animal groups like chimpanzees and bonobos are small. Some biologists think that humans developed language so that they could better co-ordinate their activities. It also allowed them to gossip, sharing information about which individuals were trustworthy and which were not. It even allowed them to ‘stroke’ one another verbally rather than physically, thus strengthening the emotional bonding between them.

One ingenious biologist, Robin Dunbar, worked out that there
is a correlation among species between brain size and the average size of groups. On this basis he calculated that for humans, the optimal size is 150. That is why the first human groups, even after the domestication of animals and the invention of agriculture, were quite small: the tribe, the village, the clan. Associations larger than this were federations of smaller groups.

How then did humans develop much larger concentrations of population? How did they create cities and civilisation? Reciprocal altruism creates trust between neighbours, people who meet repeatedly and know about one another’s character. The birth of the city posed a different and much greater problem:
how do you establish trust between strangers?

This was the point at which culture took over from nature, and religion was born – that is, religion in the sense of an organised social structure with myths, rituals, sacred times and places, temples and a priesthood. Recall that we are speaking in evolutionary not theological terms. Regardless of whether we regard religion as true or false, it clearly has adaptive value because it appeared at the dawn of civilisation and has been a central feature of almost every society since.

The early religions created moral communities, thus solving the problem of trust between strangers
. They sanctified the social order. They taught people that society is as it is because this is the will of the gods and the basic structure of the universe. The fundamental theme of the early religions in Mesopotamia and Egypt was the tension between cosmos and chaos, order and anarchy, structure and disarray. The universe began in chaos, a formless ocean or unformed matter, and if the rules are not followed, it will become chaos again. As Shakespeare put it in Ulysses’ speech in Act 1, scene 3 of
Troilus and Cressida
, the finest-ever account of the cosmological mind:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office and custom, in all line of order.

There is an order in heaven and earth, and if its rules are broken, ‘hark, what discord follows!’ The sea will flood the earth. Social distinctions will dissolve. Law will be replaced by anarchy. Children will no longer obey their parents. All that will be left is violence:

Then every thing includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

There is no biological mechanism capable of yielding order on such a scale. Ants manage it because, within groups and roles, they are clones of one another. They operate by kin selection. Humans are different from one another. That is what makes co-operation between them so difficult, and so powerful when it happens. This is when something new and distinctively human emerges. Learned habits of behaviour take over from evolved instinctual drives. Rituals make their appearance. Socialisation becomes a fundamental part of the education of the young. There are roles, rules, codes of conduct. The habits necessary to the maintenance of the group become internalised. We are the culture-creating, meaning-seeking animal. Homo sapiens became Homo religiosus.

Such, at any rate, is the argument put forward by a group of evolutionary scholars, among them David Sloan Wilson, Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan. They point, among other things, to the research of Richard Sosis into 200 communes founded in the nineteenth century. Communes are good examples of co-operation without kinship. Sosis found that 6 per cent of secular communes
were still in existence twenty years after their founding, as compared with 39 per cent of religious ones. In a follow-up study he found the more demanding the religious group, the longer its lifespan.
²
Religion creates and sustains communities.

It also creates trust. Nicholas Rauh studied social life in Delos, the centre of Roman maritime trade in pre-Christian times. What allowed merchants to develop the mutual trust that made long-distance trade possible? They created religious fraternities and invoked the watchful gods as witnesses to their agreements. ‘This divine function more than anything else provides the common denominator for the features encountered in both Greek and Roman marketplaces.’
³

In the run-up to the 2008 American presidential election, a Gallup poll in 2007 showed that over 90 per cent would vote for a candidate who was Catholic or Jewish as opposed to 45 per cent who would vote for an atheist.
⁴
Nor was this unique to America. In a worldwide survey of 81 countries conducted between 1999 and 2002, two-thirds of participants said they trusted religion, a half trusted their government and a third trusted political parties.
⁵

Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: ‘Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.’
⁶
This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.

Others like Richard Schweder and Jonathan Haidt have shown how the rich repertoire of religious ethics, with its dimensions of respect for authority, loyalty and a sense of the sacred, furnish a more comprehensive or ‘thick’ morality than the relatively pared-down features of secular ethics, based on fairness and the avoidance of harm. It is not that religious people are more moral than their secular counterparts, but rather that their moralities tend to have a thicker and richer texture, binding groups together, not merely regulating the encounters of randomly interacting
individuals. As Haidt puts it: ‘Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.’
⁷
Many believe that the word ‘religion’ comes from the Latin
religare
, meaning ‘to bind’.

Indeed, as the research of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has shown, in his and David Campbell’s book
American Grace
, it is specifically in religious communities in the United States that you find the strongest reservoirs of social capital, willingness to help strangers, to give to charity for both religious and secular causes, and to be active in voluntary associations, neighbourhood groups and so on. His view is that this has to do not with religious belief as such, but rather with membership in a religious community.

Add to this the demographic research of Eric Kaufmann, already referred to in the previous chapter, that throughout the contemporary world, the more religious the group the higher its birth rate, and we see the power of religion to sustain community over time. The converse is also true. Michael Blume notes:

Although we looked hard at all the available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.
⁸

So religion performed, and continues to perform, a task fundamental to large groups. It links people, emotionally, behaviourally, intellectually and spiritually, into communion and thus community. It follows, incidentally, that the first fully articulated religions were integrally linked with politics, a word that itself derives from
polis
, meaning ‘city’. Religion was the metaphysical grounding of the social structure, and thus the basis of political order. The head of state
was
the head of the religion. The king, ruler or pharaoh was either a god or a son of the gods or the chief intermediary with the gods. Civilisation had to
undergo a revolution before it learned to separate the two. That was where Abrahamic monotheism came in, but that is a story for a later chapter.

We can now answer the question of the relationship between religion and violence, as well as that of the dual nature of human beings, capable of great good but also of great evil. We are good and bad because we are human, we are social animals and we live, survive and thrive in groups. Within groups we practise altruism. Between them we practise aggression. Religion enters the equation only because it is the most powerful force ever devised for the creation and maintenance of large-scale groups by solving the problem of trust between strangers.

Violence has nothing to do with religion as such. It has to do with identity and life in groups. Religion sustains groups more effectively than any other force. It suppresses violence within. It rises to the threat of violence from without. Most conflicts and wars have nothing to do with religion whatsoever. They are about power, territory and glory, things that are secular, even profane. But if religion can be enlisted, it will be.

If, then, violence has to do with identity, why not abolish identity? Why divide humanity into a Them and Us? Why not have just a common humanity? This, after all, was the utopian hope of prophets like Zechariah who imagined a time when ‘The Lord will become king over all the world. On that day the Lord will be one, and his name will be one’ (Zech. 14:9). A world without identities would be a world without war.

There have been three major attempts in history to realise this dream, and it is immensely important to understand why they failed. The first was Pauline Christianity. Paul famously said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female’ (NIV, Gal. 3:28). Historically, Christianity has been the most successful attempt in history to convert the
world to a single faith. Today a third of the population of the world is Christian. But nations continued to exist. So did non-monotheistic faiths. Another monotheism arose, Islam, with a similar aspiration to win the world to its understanding of the will of God. Within Christianity itself there was schism, first between West and East, then between Catholic and Protestant. Within Islam there were Sunni and Shia. The result was that war did not end. There were crusades, jihads, holy wars and civil strife. These led some people to believe that religion is not a way of curing violence but of intensifying it.

The second attempt was the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means. He also revived the prophetic dream of Isaiah, turning it into a secular programme for ‘perpetual peace’ (1795). Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
– ‘All men become brothers.’

This too did not last. The age of reason was succeeded by Romanticism and the return of the old gods of nation and race. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries three substitutes for religion emerged as the basis for new identities. One was the nation state. A second was the ideological system. The third was race. The first led to two world wars, the second to Stalin’s Russia, the Gulag and the KGB, and the third to the Holocaust. The cost of these three substitutes for religion was in excess of a hundred million lives. After that, no one who argues that abolishing religion will lead to peace can be taken seriously.

The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is the
effort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, postmodernism; and in religion, ‘spirituality’. Its idol is the self, its icon the ‘selfie’, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.