Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (33 page)

The limited scope of the deities we create and embrace is very similar to the limited imagination of 1950s science fiction movies. To today’s audience, it seems laughable and rather quaint that all their fantasies and projections about the future reflect the limited technology and knowledge of the 1950s. “What else could they base them on?” you might ask. Philosophers even have a term to describe this limitation. It is called
epistemic constraint
. Fair enough, but then the same criticism can be leveled at the deities who populate the world’s religions. How can we go beyond our own limited imaginations? Very few depict God as an infinite, abstract spirit, unknowable and unimaginable to creatures such as ourselves. Rather, they fill in the blanks with what they can imagine—just like the 1950s science fiction movies. The difference is, a half a century later we all know those movies were nonsense.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no published empirical survey of the content of prayer. Our experience and informal surveys suggest that beyond pure unqualified thanksgiving, the most common category found in human dialogue with a deity falls in the realm of “If you let my child live/give me this promotion at work/let my team prevail in the World Series, I will quit my drinking/stop having this affair.” Clearly, the tendency for social exchange runs deep in the human mind. What is surprising is how indiscriminate it is.

It is a rare human who, believing in God, says, “I can’t possibly understand you or your plan. The best I can offer is a humble ‘Thank you.’ Other than that, I’ll sit back and let events unfold as you will them to. I will not disrespect you or shame myself by offering anything in trade for my wants, even though I accept that they are under your control. How could I be petty or presumptuous enough to believe that the rate at which I consume alcoholic beverages or mistresses will be a bargaining chip with you or affect your cosmic plan?”

Television, Religion, Politics, and the Movies

L
ast week I spent some time talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. For some reason, the conversation got a bit more serious than it had before. I was conscious of trying to keep the exchange as lighthearted as possible, but I obviously failed.

“Don’t you have faith?” she asked me, with genuine surprise in her voice.

For a moment I was absolutely stumped. I did a quick inventory of what I believed about my friends (including her), my job, my politics, my family, my favorite baseball team, and concluded that I was indeed a person of great faith. And I said so.

As you might imagine, this did not satisfy her. In fact, it provoked her. She thought I was being sarcastic. Perhaps even knowingly offensive.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Don’t you believe in God? In Jesus Christ?”

“No to both,” I replied. “Is that what you mean by faith?”

She gave me her best “talking to an idiot” face and the conversation soon came to an end.

When did the word
faith
become co-opted by the forces of religion? Is there no such thing anymore as faith in secular matters? Obviously, I had failed to read the October 27, 2006,
Harvard Crimson
, in which Steven Pinker pointed out that the word
faith
had officially become a euphemism for
religion
. Pinker noted that “an egregious example is the current [Bush] administration’s ‘faithbased initiatives,’ so named because it is more palatable (and perhaps more legal) than religion-based initiatives.”

Faith, at least the religious variety, has a number of curious properties. As far as I know, no form of secular faith follows any of these rules. The process is described in detail by Richard Dawkins in his book
A Devil’s Chaplain
.
¹
According to Dawkins, the more outrageous the belief, the “better” the faith. To have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow hardly raises eyebrows or marks one as a noteworthy person in the faith department. But to believe in a God who walks on water or comes back from the dead (or flies through the clouds or passes through walls, for that matter) is the kind of faith that will turn a few heads. In short, less evidence makes for better faith. Outrageous is good. Less is more in the faith business. Dawkins wonders whether “some religious doctrines are favored not
in spite of
being ridiculous but precisely
because
they are ridiculous.”

My friend certainly took pride in her faith. She didn’t just experience it quietly. Compared to me, she embraced all kinds of supernatural possibilities, and she was damn proud of them. She was also a bit surprised (and measurably disappointed) that I did not share her unsupported belief system. She and I will continue to talk about food, wine, and mutual friends, but “bigger issues” will probably now be on the taboo list. I am not a person of faith.

The past five chapters have argued that, cognitively speaking, our species is a mess. Part of the problem lies in our mental apparatus itself. It’s hard to fault our species for this. That would be like criticizing someone for being short or having brown eyes. There’s no sense picking on the phenotype. For better or worse—and there is surely a case to be made for both—this is the hand our species was dealt.

But it’s another matter to blame those individuals or institutions who exploit faulty perceptions or beliefs for power or profit. There is a huge opportunity to cash in on fear, pain, loneliness, and grief, and there is no shortage of practitioners in this department. How can we look at the history of our species over the past two thousand years and not conclude that religion is to blame for what is worst about us? From the Crusades to the atrocities of 9/11, religion always seems to be at the core of our greatest violence.

Yet we may be missing the bigger picture when we blame religion. Religion is not an external institution that has been imposed upon us to our detriment. It is misguided to claim, “If only this destructive thing could be expunged from our culture, we would be free to pursue higher, more peaceful callings.” The truth is, if religion were not here today, we would be busy inventing it by tomorrow. The problem lies within the structure of our minds, not within the institutions they create. It may seem at times that these institutions are external to us, acting independently to subvert our progressive or peaceful instincts. But this view misses the underlying issue. Just as rap music or violent TV shows are not a root cause of societal ills, neither is religion. They are all products of the human mind and—especially in the case of religion—their occurrence is all but inevitable.

Granted, a particular pope or imam or TV evangelist may do some particularly nasty work, but the basic potential for violence and destruction of outsiders/nonbelievers is the deeper issue, and it predates any of history’s villains. In some cases, removal of a particular leader may cause a movement to misfire, but its essential nature remains unchanged. There is an endless supply of replacement figures who are capable of energizing true believers toward destructive and violent ends. Undoubtedly, some of these leaders will be more charismatic than others, but it is unlikely that the basic process can be altered. In fact, this is doubly dangerous when martyrdom is a backbone of such belief systems. Killing a dangerous leader can ultimately strengthen his position.

The problem becomes worse year after year because of the growth of technology. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the fanaticism of present Islamic fundamentalism is any greater than that of thirteenth-century Christianity. What differs is the technology available to these two groups with which they can punish unbelievers. It is simply easier today to bring death and destruction on a mass scale. That they would do so without a second thought is fundamental to their religious fanaticism. There is no reason to believe that anything fundamental to human nature has changed. The fervor with which a neighboring village will be wiped out is driven by the same mental circuitry that leads one nation (or religion) to unleash its wrath on another. If the Crusaders had had mass media, airplanes, and dirty bombs available to them, rest assured they would have used them with gleeful abandon. And know also that they would have believed they were doing God’s work and done so with that singularity of purpose that only religious conviction can provide.

So, in short, don’t blame religion. Blame the cognitive architecture that gives rise, over and over again, to religion. We can deal with it each year or each decade, but it will continue to surface until there are some basic changes in our species, or in how reflexively we respond to those hardwired impulses.
That
is the agenda of this book. If I tell you that the leader of a theocratic state who was threatening to rain down nuclear destruction on all infidels has finally been assassinated and you reply, “Thank God,” what have we gained?

Obviously it is not permissible in North American society to be openly critical of someone’s religious views. This is true both in casual conversation as well as in the mass media.

To some extent, this is understandable. For one thing, America was founded upon an ideal of religious tolerance and we seem particularly touchy about anything that might call our views into question, even 230-plus years after the American Revolution was fought. But the problem seems to run a lot deeper than national history. What remains verboten is not simply restricting what someone can believe or which church he or she can join. Rather, it seems as if the very topic of religious belief has become taboo. Shortly after taking over the
CBS Evening News
, Katie Couric instituted a segment titled “Free Speech.” The idea was to have prominent speakers briefly address some aspect of the topic in order to inspire discussion or, perhaps, trigger pride in how we as Americans carried on our business. In any case, one of the celebrities approached for the assignment was outspoken social critic Bill Maher, host of a weekly show on HBO called
Real Time with Bill Maher
.

As he reported on the September 16, 2006, episode of his show, Maher’s experience was not quite what he had hoped. “I had them on a pedestal,” Maher said of CBS News, invoking images of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. However, it was a “deal breaker right from the start” when Maher told Couric’s producers that the topic he would like to discuss was “religion.” He was then given a list of “acceptable topics” about which he could practice free speech on her show. Maher’s audience, a decidedly liberal crowd, howled with derisive laughter when this was reported. But the story really does not end there.

Free speech is a marvelous ideal, but it is rarely unrestricted as a matter of law. Here in Canada, where I have written much of this book, there are restrictions on what can be said in different venues. Ernst Zundel, a latter-day Nazi working as a high school teacher in Alberta, was fired from his job for repeatedly teaching his students that there was no Holocaust in World War II. Zundel’s right to “free speech” stopped well short of distorting history and knowingly teaching it to his students as fact. Likewise, my colleagues and I do not have unlimited license to make sexist, racist, or other derisive remarks targeted at individuals or specific groups when we do our teaching. Nor would my university knowingly allow public speakers who appear on our campus to offer rants targeted at gender, sexual orientation, ethnic, or religious identity. This offense would be considered even more egregious if the speech were seen to instigate violence. Indeed, a “Let’s go kill the Jews (or Catholics or Muslims)” speech would be viewed as a “hate crime” in Canada and treated as far more than a misdemeanor. I am happy to live in a nation that restricts “free speech” in this manner. Plainly it is a trade-off, but ultimately I believe it enhances the quality of life my fellow citizens and I are likely to enjoy.

A second addendum to my Bill Maher story concerns what happened next on his broadcast. Maher got lots of support from his studio audience for lampooning the “acceptable topics for free speech” edict by CBS. That lay within the liberal bias of the audience. But what he did next did not. Maher then proceeded to do a rant about the inconsistencies of religious belief—presumably as he would have done had he been given carte blanche on the
CBS Evening News
. The routine was not well received. Some laughed or tittered, but the response stopped short of the kind of enthusiastic rapture that often greets his tirades. It was simply not OK to laugh at the idiocy of religious beliefs and the people who hold them. “The nature of God” was not an acceptable topic for satire.

On the opening episode of
Studio 60
, producer Aaron Sorkin offered a behind-the-scenes look at a
Saturday Night Live
-type television show, on which the (fictional) producer is fired after the network cuts a four-minute sketch called “Crazy Christians.”

“You can’t have free speech without offending some people,” he argues to no avail. The unanswered question is whether, on television anyway, such decisions are about money or cherished beliefs. Are network executives fearful that conservative religious groups will boycott a sponsor’s products, causing them to withdraw financial support? Or, like many of us, do they simply hold that religious beliefs are off-limits to criticism or disdain? If so, such restriction should be seen in context. It is not off-limits to make fun of ethnicity, sexual preference, physical appearance, or intelligence (too much or too little). Just don’t think of poking fun at someone’s commitment to the supernatural.

I applaud Bill Maher for having the courage of his convictions and using his own television show as a platform for atheism. Indeed, the points made by Maher struck me as a reasonable critique of one aspect of Caveman Logic. But the bigger issue here is that in the act of lampooning the CBS network for shying away from criticizing religiosity, Maher revealed the very reason they had done so. Most people, including liberals on social and political issues, are not atheists. Maher’s audience, which seems to venerate him, is solidly behind his liberality. Atheism is another matter. The audience was not ready to detach themselves from the cognitive distortions that fuel supernatural thinking. Worse yet, people can get really testy when you hold their beliefs, indefensible as they may be, up to ridicule. They may not stop watching your show or boycott your sponsor’s products, but they sure as hell won’t laugh along with your comments.