The Great Basin Shoshone Indians of the western United States live in an extremely seasonal desert environment whose summers are dry and hot (day temperatures over 90° or even 100° Fahrenheit), winters are cold (temperatures often below freezing all day), and most of the low precipitation (under 10 inches per year) falls in the winter as snow. The main foods consumed during the winter, which is the season of food scarcity, are stored pine nuts and mesquite starch. In the fall people concentrate at pine groves to harvest, process, and store large quantities of nuts within a short time. Groups of between 2 and 10 related families then spend the winter in a camp at a nut grove with a source of water. In the spring, as warming temperatures bring a resumption of plant growth and animal activity, the camps break up into nuclear families that spread out over the landscape to higher and lower elevations. The widespread and varied food resources during the summer enable the Shoshone to expand greatly their diet: they forage for seeds, roots, tubers, berries, nuts, and other plant food; they gather grasshoppers, fly larvae, and other insect food; they hunt rabbits, rodents, reptiles, and other small animals, plus deer, mountain sheep, antelope, elk, and bison; and they fish. At the end of the summer they gather again at their pine groves and group winter camps. In another desert environment, this one in southern Africa, the !Kung similarly follow an annual cycle dictated by water availability and food resources dependent on water. They concentrate at the few permanent waterholes during the dry season, and spread out over 308 less reliable or seasonal water sources during the wet season.
Responses to danger
Finally, now that we’ve discussed traditional dangers and responses to those dangers, let’s compare actual measures of danger (in whatever way it is measured) with our responses (i.e., how much we worry about dangers, and how extensively we defend ourselves against them). A naive expectation might be that we are completely rational and informed, and that our reactions to various dangers are proportional to their seriousness as measured by the number of people that each type of danger actually kills or injures each year. This naive expectation isn’t upheld, for at least five sets of reasons.
First, the annual number of people killed or injured by a certain type of danger may be low precisely because we are so aware of it and go to such great efforts to minimize our risk. If we were fully rational, perhaps a better measure of danger than the actual annual number of deaths inflicted (easy to count up) would be the annual numbers of deaths that would have been inflicted if we hadn’t taken counter-measures (hard to estimate). Two examples stand out among those that we have discussed in this chapter. Few people in traditional societies normally die of famine, precisely because so many of a society’s practices are organized so as to reduce the risk of dying of famine. Few !Kung are killed each year by lions, not because lions aren’t dangerous, but instead because they are indeed so dangerous that the !Kung take elaborate measures to protect themselves against lions: don’t leave camp at night, constantly scan the environment for tracks and signs of lions while out of camp during the day, constantly talk loudly and travel in groups while women are out of camp, watch out for old or injured or hungry or solitary lions, and so on.
A second reason for the mismatch between actual danger and our acceptance of risk is a modified version of the Wayne Gretzky principle: our willingness to expose ourselves to danger increases steeply with the potential benefits from the dangerous situation. The !Kung drive lions off carcasses with meat on which to feast, but they don’t drive lions off resting places without carcasses. Most of us wouldn’t enter a burning house just for the fun of it, but would do so to rescue our child trapped in the house. Many Americans and Europeans and Japanese are now making agonizing reappraisals of the wisdom of building nuclear power stations, because on the one hand Japan’s Fukushima nuclear station accident emphasizes the dangers of nuclear power, and on the other hand those dangers are offset by the benefits of reducing global warming by reducing coal, oil, and gas power generation.
Third, people systematically misestimate risks—at least in the Western world, where psychologists have made extensive studies of the phenomenon. When Americans are asked about dangers today, they are likely first to mention terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear accidents, even though those three dangers combined have killed far fewer Americans over the last four decades combined than do cars, alcohol, or smoking in any single year. When Americans’ rankings of risks are compared with actual annual deaths caused (or with probability of death per hour of the risky activity), it turns out that people greatly overrate the risk of nuclear reactor accidents (ranked as the number-one danger by American college students and women voters), and also overrate the risks of DNA-based technologies, other new chemical technologies, and spray cans. Americans underrate the risks of alcohol, cars, and smoking, and (to a lesser extent) of surgery, home appliances, and food preservatives. Underlying these biases of ours are that we especially fear events beyond our control, events with the potential for killing lots of people, and situations involving new, unfamiliar, or hard-to-assess risks (hence our fear of terrorists, plane crashes, and nuclear reactor accidents). Conversely, we are inappropriately accepting of old familiar risks that appear to be within our control, that we accept voluntarily, and that kill individuals rather than groups of people. That’s why we underrate the risks of driving cars, alcohol, smoking, and standing on step-ladders: we choose to do those things, we feel that we control them, and we know that they kill other people, but we think that they won’t kill us because we consider ourselves careful and strong. As Chauncey Starr expressed it, “We are loath to let others do unto us what we happily do to ourselves.”
Fourth, some individuals accept, or even seek and enjoy, danger more than do other individuals. Such people include recreational skydivers, bungee-jumpers, compulsive gamblers, and race-drivers. Databases compiled by insurance companies confirm our intuitive sense that men seek out danger more than do women, and that male risk-seeking peaks in one’s twenties and then declines with age. I recently returned from a visit to Africa’s Victoria Falls, where the enormous one-mile-wide Zambezi River drops 355 feet into a narrow crack drained by an even narrower gorge into a pool (appropriately called the Boiling Pot) through which plunges the river’s entire volume. The roar of the falls, the blackness of the rock walls, the mist filling the entire crack and gorge, and the churning of the water below the falls suggest what the entrance to hell must be like, if there is a hell. Just over the Boiling Pot, the gorge is traversed by a bridge across which pedestrians can walk between the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe, whose border is formed by the river. From that bridge, tourists so inclined bungee-jump into the black, roaring, spray-filled gorge. As I watched the scene, I could not bring myself even to walk towards the bridge, and I reflected that I couldn’t have bungee-jumped there even if I were told that that was the only way to save the lives of my wife and children. But we were later visited by one of my son’s 22-year-old classmates, a young man named Lee, who did bungee-jump into that gorge, by plunging head-first off the bridge with a rope tied to his ankles. I was astonished at Lee’s voluntarily paying to do something so terrifying that I would have paid all my life’s savings in order to avoid doing it—until I reflected on some equally horrible experiences that I had chosen to undergo as a student cave-explorer at that same age of 22, when I was equally risk-seeking.
Finally, some societies are more tolerant of accepting risks than other, more conservative societies. Such differences are familiar among First World societies and have been observed among Native American tribes and among New Guinea tribes. Just to mention one current example: during recent military operations in Iraq, American soldiers have been described as more risk-taking than French and German soldiers. Speculative explanations for this difference include the lessons learned by France and Germany from the slaughter of almost 7,000,000 of their citizens during the two world wars in often foolishly risky military operations; and the founding of modern American society by e
migrants from other lands who were willing to accept the risks of uprooting themselves to move to a strange new homeland, leaving behind risk-averse countrymen in their land of origin.
Thus, all human societies face dangers, although different types of dangers lie in store for peoples at different localities or with different lifestyles. I worry about cars and step-ladders, my New Guinea lowland friends about crocodiles and cyclones and enemies, and the !Kung about lions and droughts. Each society has adopted a spectrum of measures for mitigating the particular hazards that it recognizes. But we citizens of WEIRD societies don’t always think as clearly as we should about the dangers that we face. Our obsession with the dangers of DNA technologies and spray cans would better be focused on the homely hazards of cigarettes and cycling without helmets. Whether traditional peoples make similar misestimates of their lives’ dangers remains to be studied. Are we WEIRD moderns especially prone to misestimate risks because we get most of our information second-hand from television and other mass media that emphasize sensational but rare accidents and mass deaths? Do traditional peoples estimate risks more accurately because they instead learn only from the first-hand experiences of themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors? Can we learn to think more realistically about dangers?
PART FIVE
RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND HEALTH
CHAPTER 9
What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion
Questions about religion Definitions of religion Functions and electric eels The search for causal explanations Supernatural beliefs Religion’s function of explanation Defusing anxiety Providing comfort Organization and obedience Codes of behavior towards strangers Justifying war Badges of commitment Measures of religious success Changes in religion’s functions
Questions about religion
“In the beginning, all people lived around a great ironwood tree in the jungle, speaking the same language. One man whose testes were enormously swollen from infection with a parasitic worm spent his time sitting on a branch of the tree, so that he could rest his heavy testes on the ground. Out of curiosity, animals of the jungle came up and sniffed at his testes. Hunters then found the animals easy to kill, and everyone had plenty of food and was happy.
“Then, one day, a bad man killed a beautiful woman’s husband, in order to get the woman for himself. Relatives of the dead husband attacked the murderer, who was defended in turn by his own relatives, until the murderer and his relatives climbed into the ironwood tree to save themselves. The attackers tugged on the lianas hanging from one side of the tree, in order to pull the tree’s crown down towards the ground and get at their enemies.
“Finally, the lianas snapped in half, causing the tree to spring back with tremendous force. The murderer and his relatives were hurled out of the tree in many directions. They landed so far away, in so many places, that they never found each other again. With time, their languages became more and more different. That is why people today speak so many separate languages and cannot understand each other, and why it is hard work for hunters to catch animals for food.”
That story is told by a tribal people in northern New Guinea. The story exemplifies a widespread class of myths called origin myths, familiar to us through accounts of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel in the Bible’s book of Genesis. Despite those parallels with Judeo-Christian religions, traditional New Guinea societies, like other small-scale societies, lacked churches, priests, and sacred books. Why is that tribal belief system so reminiscent of Judeo-Christian religions in its origin myth, yet so different in other respects?
Virtually all known human societies have had “religion,” or something like it. That suggests that religion fulfills some universal human need, or at least springs from some part of human nature common to all of us. If so, what is that need, or that part of human nature? And what really defines “religion”? Scholars have been debating these and related questions for centuries. For a belief system to constitute a religion, must it include belief in a god or gods or some supernatural forces, and does it necessarily include anything else? When, in human evolutionary history, did religion appear? Human ancestors diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees around 6,000,000 years ago. Whatever religion is, we can agree that chimps don’t have it, but was there already religion among our Cro-Magnon ancestors and our Neanderthal relatives of 40,000 years ago? Were there different historical stages in the development of religions, with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism representing a more recent stage than tribal belief systems? We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side: why, then, does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide?
These questions posed by religion are especially interesting in the context of this book, devoted to exploring the whole spectrum of human societies, from small-scale or ancient to populous or modern. Religion is an area where traditional institutions still thrive within otherwise modern societies: the world’s major religions today arose between 1,400 and over 3,000 years ago, in societies much smaller and more traditional than the ones that still espouse those religions today. Religions nevertheless vary with the scale of society, and that variation cries out for explanation. In addition, most readers of this book, and I, question our personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof) at some point in our lives. When we do, understanding of the different things that religion has meant to different people may help us find answers that fit us as individuals.
For individuals and for societies, religion often involves a huge investment of time and resources. To mention just a few examples, Mormons are expected to contribute 10% of their income to their church. It’s estimated that traditional Hopi Indians devote an average of one out of three days to religious ceremonies, and that one-quarter of the population of traditional Tibet consisted of monks. The fraction of resources in medieval Christian Europe devoted to building and staffing churches and cathedrals, supporting the many orders of monasteries and nunneries, and underwriting crusades must have been large. To borrow a phrase from economists, religion thus incurs “opportunity costs”: those investments of time and resources in religion that could have been devoted instead to obviously profitable activities, such as planting more crops, building dams, and feeding larger armies of conquest. If religion didn’t bring some big real benefits to offset those opportunity costs, any atheistic society that by chance arose would be likely to outcompete religious societies and take over the world. So why hasn’t the world become atheistic, and what are those benefits that religion evidently brings? What are the “functions” of religion?
To a believer, such questions about religion’s functions may seem nonsensical or even offensive. A believer might respond that religion is nearly universal among human societies simply because there really is a God, and that the ubiquity of religion no more requires discovering its supposed functions and benefits than does the ubiquity of rocks. If you are such a believer, let me invite you to imagine, just for a moment, an advanced living creature from the Andromeda galaxy, who races around the universe at a velocity far exceeding the speed of light (considered impossible by us humans), visits the universe’s trillions of stars and planets, and studies the diversity of life in the universe, with metabolisms variously powered by light, other forms of electromagnetic radiation, heat, wind, nuclear reactions, and inorganic or organic chemical reactions. Periodically, our Andromedan visits Planet Earth, where life evolved to utilize energy only from light and from inorganic and organic chemical reactions. For a brief period between about 11,000 BC and September 11, AD 2051, Earth was dominated by a life form that called itself humans and that clung to some curious ideas. Among those ideas: that there is an all-powerful being, called God, which has a special interest in the human species rather than in the millions of trillions of other species in the universe, and which created the universe, and which humans often picture as similar to a human except for being omnipotent. Of course the Andromedan recognized those beliefs to be delusions wo
rthy of study rather than of credence, because the Andromedan and many other living creatures had already figured out how the universe really had been created, and it was absurd to imagine that any all-powerful being would be especially interested in or similar to the human species, which was much less interesting and advanced than billions of other life forms existing elsewhere in the universe. The Andromedan also observed that there were thousands of different human religions, most of whose adherents believed their own religion to be true and all the other religions to be false, and that suggested to the Andromedan that all were false.
But this belief in such a god was widespread among human societies. The Andromedan understood the principles of universal sociology, which had to provide an explanation for why human societies persisted despite the huge drain of time and resources that religion imposed on individuals and societies, and despite religion’s motivating individuals to inflict on themselves painful or suicidal behaviors. Obviously, the Andromedan reasoned, religion must bring some compensating benefits; otherwise, atheistic societies not burdened by those time and resource drains and those suicidal impulses would have replaced religious societies. Hence if you, my readers, find it offensive to inquire about the functions of your own religion, perhaps you would be willing for a moment to step back and inquire about the functions of New Guinea tribal religions, or to place yourself in the frame of mind of the Andromedan visitor and inquire about human religions in general.