Science of Good and Evil Read online

  This historical development supports what is known as the rational choice theory of religion.14 Fundamental to this theory is that the beliefs, rituals, customs, emotions, commitments, and sacrifices associated with religion are best understood as a form of exchange relations between humans and God or gods. In this model, humans are assumed to be rational, making mental calculations to maximize resources and rewards. Where resources and rewards are available through secular avenues, religion is not needed. Where resources and rewards are scarce (for example, rain for crops) or nonexistent (for example, immortality) through secular sources, then religion becomes the accepted venue for the exchange of goods and services. Sociologists Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge present examples from various religions that reveal that the greater the number of gods in the religion the lower the price of exchange (the less that has to be given for the product or service received). They have also found that the more dependable and responsive the gods are in delivering goods and services the higher the price people are willing to pay. Finally, they found that religious rituals and the confidence of fellow believers serve to reinforce the confidence people have that their gods will deliver the goods and services, that such confidences are enhanced through miracles and mystical experiences associated with religions, and that religious organizations require commitment from believers in order to sustain their power as the primary source for such exchanges.

  With the exception of the American experiment of separating church and state, politics and religion have always been tightly interdigitated. The reason has to do with the even more important role that religion has played in the development of morality. That is, in addition to the sanction of political power, religion has also served as an institution of social order and behavior control. The reinforcement of positive moral sentiments (and the punishment of negative ones) became a central role of religious leaders and organizations; they codified subjective social and moral norms and, with the invention of writing, literally canonized them in sacred scrolls and texts. From Moses proclaiming that God dictated to him the Ten Commandments, to Joseph Smith claiming that the angel Moroni delivered to him the golden plates, to L. Ron Hubbard’s pulp science fiction repackaged as sacred religious texts said to be inspired by advanced alien intelligences, most religions tend to decree divine inspiration in order to enhance social and political power.

  Such elaborate behavior controls yoked to religious rituals are not needed in bands and tribes, whose numbers are small enough that other less formal methods are more effective. In his three decades of research in New Guinea, for example, Jared Diamond says he has “never heard any invocation of a god or spirit to justify how people should behave toward others.” Social obligations, he explains, depend on human relationships. “Because a band or tribe contains only a few dozen or a few hundred individuals respectively, everyone in the band or tribe knows everyone else and their relationships. One owes different obligations to different blood relatives, to relatives by marriage, to members of one’s own clan, and to fellow villagers belonging to a different clan.” Conflicts are directly resolved within these small bands because everyone is related to one another or knows one another. Members of the band are distinctly different from nonmembers on all levels. “Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you try to kill him or else to run away; our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be suicidal,” Diamond reflected.15 Populations in the many thousands of people, however, made such informal behavioral control mechanisms ineffectual. This led to the wedding of God and mammon.

  This historical trajectory makes good sense in an evolutionary model. In bands and tribes the declaration of love for one’s neighbors means something rather different than it does in chiefdoms, states, and empires. In the Paleolithic social environment in which our moral sentiments evolved, one’s neighbors were family, extended family, and community members who were well known to all. To help others was to help oneself. In chiefdoms, states, and empires the biblical admonition “Love thy neighbor” meant only one’s immediate in-group. Out-groups were not included. In a group selection model of the evolution of religion and morality, those groups who were particularly adept at amity within the group and enmity between groups were likely to be more successful than those who haphazardly embraced total strangers. This evolutionary interpretation also explains the seemingly paradoxical nature of Old Testament morality, where on one page high moral principles of peace, justice, and respect for people and property are promulgated, and on the next page raping, killing, and pillaging people who are not one’s “neighbors” are endorsed. In terms of evolutionary group selection, religious violence, genocide, and war are adaptive because they serve to unite in-group members against enemy out-groups.

  Figure 3. A Group of New Guinea Hunter-Gatherers Prepares for Battle

  Before state societies, “love thy neighbor” meant one’s immediate family, extended family, and community of fellow in-group members. “Out-groupers” were to be dealt with cautiously. Trust was tentative. Conflict was frequent. Death by war was common. (Courtesy of Film Study Center)

  Consider what Moses thought God meant by “neighbor” (in Lev. 19:18): “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Here “the children of thy people” are the neighbors one is not to kill (King James Version). In other translations, neighbors are “the sons of your own people” (Revised Standard Version) and “your countrymen” (Tanakh), in other words, thy fellow in-group members. By contrast, where Deut. 5:17 admonishes readers “Thou shalt not kill,” fifteen chapters later, in Deut. 20:10—18, the Israelites are commanded to lay siege to an enemy city, steal their cattle, enslave all citizens who surrender, and kill the men and rape the women who do not surrender:

  When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is peace and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourselves; and you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you. Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you, which are not cities of the nations here.

  But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God gives you for an inheritance you shall save alive nothing that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, as the LORD your God has commanded; that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices which they have done in the service of their Gods, and so to sin against the LORD your God.

  As believers in sham gods and worshippers of false idols, heathens are to be extirpated by those who follow the One True God. The first of the Ten Commandments, in fact, states that one is to put no other gods before the One True God.

  The rabbinical commentaries in the Talmud also support this in-group /out-group evolutionary model. The law (Mishnah) clarifies intentional and unintentional murder of an Israelite by an Israelite as such: “If he intended killing an animal but slew a man, or a heathen and he killed an Israelite … he is not liable” (Sanhedrin 79a). Further discussion of this law provides additional examples: “This excludes [from liability] the case of one who threw a stone into the midst of a company of Israelites and heathens. How is this? Shall we say that the company consisted of nine heathens and one Israelite? Then his non-liability can be inferred from the fact that the majority were heathens” (Gemara). So, thou shalt not kill a fellow Israelite, unless one is trying to kill a heathen, in which case the sacrifice was worth it. By contrast, the venerable rabbinical scholar Maimonides says that �
�if a resident alien slays an Israelite inadvertently, he must be put to death in spite of his inadvertence.” In other words, good intentions apply only to members of our in-group. The book of Judges (5:9) is even more extreme in its in-group inclusiveness and out-group exclusiveness: “A Noahide [non-Jew] who kills a person, even if he kills an embryo in the mother’s womb, is put to death. So too, if he kills one suffering from a fatal disease … he is put to death. In none of these cases is an Israelite put to death.” The notion of “God’s chosen people” resonates with evolutionary in-groupness.16

  Because our deep moral sentiments evolved as part of our behavioral repertoire of responses for survival in a complex social environment (and not simply as infinitely plastic socially conditioned moral codes relative to one’s culture), we carry the seeds of such in-group inclusiveness today. Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin tested this hypothesis in 1966 on 1,066 schoolchildren ages eight to fourteen, by presenting them with the story of the battle of Jericho in Josh. 6. Joshua told his people to rejoice because God granted them access to Jericho: “Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword … . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and or iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.” Tamarin wanted to test how biblical stories influenced children, particularly those stories that touted the superiority of monotheism, focused on the notion of the “chosen people,” and made acts of genocide heroic. After presenting the Joshua story, the children were asked: “Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?” Tamarin offered them three answers from which to choose: A, approval; B, partial approval or disapproval; and C, total disapproval. The results were disturbing: 66 percent of the children completely approved of the Israelites’ murderous actions, while only 8 percent chose B and 26 percent chose C. One youngster wrote: “In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the ‘Goyim.’”Change the in-group to an out-group, on the other hand, and approval ratings for genocide drop precipitously. Substituting “General Lin” for Joshua and a “Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago” for Israel, Tamarin found that only 7 percent of his Israeli subjects (a control group of 168 different children) approved of the genocide (with 18 percent in the middle and 75 percent disapproving totally).17

  The evolution of in-group morality, of course, is not restricted to any one religion, nation, or people.18 It is a universal human trait common throughout history, from the earliest chiefdoms and states to modern nations and empires. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Ynomamö people of the Amazon consider themselves to be the ultimate chosen people—in their language their name represents humanity, with all other peoples as something less than human. As the novelist and social commentator Aldous Huxley noted: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that the other set is human. By robbing them of their personality, he puts them outside the pale of moral oligation.”19 As we shall also see in the next chapter, the Nazis did this in spades. As many science fiction authors have suggested, perhaps an extraterrestrial threat to the entire planet Earth is what is needed to unite all humans into one giant in-group.

  Morality and the Magic Number 150

  Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals that evolved in both a physical and a social environment. As we have seen, morality is inextricably bound to religion, the first social structure to codify moral behaviors into ethical systems. Given the amount of time spent in the environment of our evolutionary history, we need to look more closely at the nature of human relationships in these small bands and tribes. In order to survive, these small hunter-gatherer bands would have had to employ considerable skills in cooperation and communication. Anthropologist Robert Bettinger demonstrates how, compared with individuals, “groups may often be more efficient” not only “in finding and taking prey, particularly large prey,” but also in coordinating the activities of individuals, who might otherwise unduly interfere with each other. Foraging groups “that pool and share resources have the effect of ‘smoothing’ the variation in daily capture rates between individuals.”20 That is, as the group grows larger, “lucky” individuals share their take with “unlucky” individuals, and everyone benefits. (Think again of those vampire bats who share regurgitated blood.) Cooperation would have been as powerful, if not more powerful, a drive in human evolution as competition. And communication is an essential tool of cooperation, so it makes sense that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, as well as their modern counterparts, would have employed language to solve the problems of survival in both the physical and the social environments.

  How large were these communities? Most modern hunter-gatherer bands and tribes range in size from 50 to 400 residents, with a medium range of 100 to 200 people. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, in his extensive studies of the Yanomamö people in the Amazonian rain forest, found the typical group to be roughly 100 people in size, with 40 to 80 living together in the rugged mountain regions, and 300 to 400 members living together in the largest lowland villages. He has also noted that when groups get excessively large for the carrying capacity of their local environment and level of technology, they fission into smaller groups.21 Such bifurcations are the result of exceeding the carrying capacity of both the physical and social environments. Psychologist Robin Dunbar suggests that these limits on social group size are related to the carrying capacity of human memory and thus have a deep evolutionary basis.22 It turns out that 150 is roughly the number of living descendants (children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren) a Paleolithic couple would produce in four generations at the birthrate of hunter-gatherer peoples. In other words, this is how many people they knew in their immediate and extended family, which is corroborated by archaeological evidence from the Near East showing that agricultural communities typically numbered about 150 people. Even modern farming communities, like the Hutterites, average about 150 people.

  When groups get large they split into smaller groups. Why? The answer is moral discipline and behavior control. According to the Hutterites, shunning as a primary means of social control does not work well in large groups. Sociologists know that once groups exceed 200 people, a hierarchical structure is needed to enforce the rules of cooperation and to deal with offenders, who in the smaller group could be dealt with through informal personal contracts and social pressure. Still larger groups need chiefs and a police force, and rule enforcement involves more violence or the threat of violence. Even in the modern world with a population exceeding six billion individuals, most of whom are crowded into dense cities, people find themselves divided into small groups. Studies on optimal group size (in terms of finding a balance between autonomy and control) by the military during the Second World War found that the average-size company in the British Army was 130 men, and in the U. S. Army it was 223 men. The 150 average also fits the size of most small businesses, departments in large corporations, and efficiently run factories. A Church of England study, conducted in an attempt to balance the financial resources provided by a large group with the social intimacy of a small group, concluded that the ideal size for congregations was 200 or less. The average number of people in any given person’s address book also turns out to be about 150 people.

  It would appear that 150 is the number of people each of us knows fairly well. Dunbar claims that this figure fits a ratio of primate group size to their neocortex ratio (the volume of the neocortex—the most recently evolved region of the cerebral cortex—to the rest of the brain). Extremely social primates (like us) need big brains to handle living in big groups, because there is a minimum amount of brain power needed to keep track of the complex relationships required to live in relatively pea
ceful cooperation. Dunbar concludes that these groupings “are a consequence of the fact that the human brain cannot sustain more than a certain number of relationships of a given strength at any one time [figure 4]. The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuine social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”23