Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (59 page)

For the most part, our penchant for storytelling is a beneficial thing. Because the world we live in does have lots of recurring and sequential patterns, like sunsets and seasons and birth and death, knowing these regularities helps us to better survive and reproduce. Hunters and gatherers were able to systematically track game and store the resources of good times in anticipation of bad times. Agriculturalists were capable of subsisting on the land they settled because they could understand and manage the seasonal flooding of a river, the water needs and life cycles of plants, and the motivations of enemies to plunder the crops. We moderns can enjoy machines that work for us because we can represent the patterns we find in nature, manipulate their causes in our imagination, and create new applications that help us function in the world.

But we humans also expect to find patterns and underlying principles where there are none. Flip a coin that comes up ten heads in a row and most people believe there’s a better than even chance that the next flip will be tails. “There’s a sucker born every minute,”quipped P. T. Barnum, who might have been talking about people in a casino who rush into the seat of any player who has had a long string of bad luck at the slot machine. Even apparent lack of regularity tends to be overgeneralized into a causal pattern: “Lightning never strikes twice in the same place,” goes the age-old untruth.

This built-in “flaw” of our causal understanding is rarely catastrophic, and is usually far outweighed by the benefits. That’s pretty standard for most of our evolutionary endowments. For example, we humans are also prone to bad backs and to choking when we eat and speak. Thank goodness, though, for upright posture, which frees our hands and widens the horizon of sight. Good, too, that we have speech, which vastly expands our field of communication and the sharing of thoughts. The creations of evolution resemble more the works of an amateur tinkerer than a trained engineer. Perfect may be better than good in an ideal world. But in the real world, good only has to beat out less good by a little to get to the top of the heap.

And so we tell ourselves stories. We look for and impose purpose on the events of our life by weaving them into a meaningful narrative with the hand of intentional design. Our constantly cause-seeking brain makes it hard to believe that “stuff just happens,” especially if the stuff happens to us. This view is backed up by a recent experiment in which people were asked what patterns they could see in arrangements of dots or stock market information.
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Before asking, the experimenters made half their participants feel a lack of control, either by giving them feedback unrelated to their performance or by having them recall experiences where they had lost control of a situation. The results were remarkable. When people felt a lack of control they would fall back on preternatural and supernatural explanations. That would also suggest why religions enjoy a revival during hard times.
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The greater the impact of events on our lives, the greater the drive to impose meaning on those events. Terrible, senseless accidents can never just be senseless accidents, our mind’s voice tells us. When psychologist Jesse Bering and his students carried out interviews with atheists, it became clear that they often tacitly attribute purpose to significant or traumatic moments in their lives, as if some agency were intervening to make it happen.
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It seems that’s just the way our brains are wired: Atheists can muzzle some if its expression, but even they can’t seem to completely stop it in themselves.

A parent may spend years trying to find some significance in his child’s untimely death. An earthquake victim is likely to want a story to explain why she survived and those around her didn’t. And there are those ready to help find a story: After a massive earthquake in Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir, jihadi groups riding Pakistani military vehicles blasted over loudspeakers what their banners read: “This happened because you have turned from God’s path. We can help you find the true path.” In early 2010, the Rev. Pat Robertson similarly declared that the massive Haitian earthquake happened because Haitians had long ago sworn “a pact with the devil.”
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SUPERNATURAL AGENTS

Religions invariably center on supernatural agent concepts, such as gods, angels, ancestor spirits, demons, and jinns. Granted, nondeistic “theologies,” such as Buddhism and Taoism, doctrinally eschew personifying the supernatural or animating nature with supernatural causes.
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Nevertheless, people who espouse these faiths routinely entertain belief in an array of minor “buddhas” that behave “counterintuitively” in ways that are inscrutable to factual or logical reasoning. Buddhist Tibetan monks and Japanese samurai warriors ritually ward off malevolent deities by invoking benevolent spirits and conceive altered states of nature as awe inspiring.

Mundane concepts of
agent
(intentional, goal-directed actors) are central players in what psychologists refer to as “folk psychology,” specifically the “theory-of-mind module” (or ToM). ToM is a species-specific cognitive system devoted to “mind reading,” that is, making inferences about the knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people. Recent brain-imaging (fMRI) studies show that people’s statements about God’s level of involvement in social events, as well as the deity’s purported emotional states, reliably engage ToM-related prefrontal and posterior regions of the brain that appeared latest in human evolution.
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One plausible hypothesis is that notions of
agent
evolved hair-triggered in humans to respond “automatically” under conditions of uncertainty to potential threats (and opportunities) by intelligent predators (and protectors).
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From this evolutionary vantage, the proper evolutionary domain of
agent
encompasses animate objects, but its actual domain inadvertently extends to moving dots on computer screens, voices in the wind, faces in clouds, eyes in the shadows, and virtually any complex design or uncertain circumstance of unknown origin.
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For example, in Miami many people claim to have spotted the Holy Virgin in windows, curtains, and television afterimages as long as there was hope of keeping young Elián González from returning to godless Cuba. On the day of the World Trade Center attacks, newspapers showed photos of smoke billowing from one of the towers that “seems to bring into focus the face of the Evil One, complete with beard and horns and malignant expression, symbolizing to many the hideous nature of the deed that wreaked horror and terror upon an unsuspecting city.”
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A number of studies reveal that children and adults spontaneously interpret the contingent movements of dots and geometric forms on a screen as interacting agents, whether as individuals or groups, with distinct goals and internal goal-directed motivations.
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In the 1940s, Heider and Simmel made a silent cartoonanimation in which two triangles and a circle move against and around each other and a diagram of a house. People who watched almost always made up a social plot in which the big triangle was seen as an aggressor.
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Young children spontaneously overattribute agency to all sorts of entities (clocks, clouds), and may thus be predisposed to construct agent-based representations of many phenomena.
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Why? Because, from an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to be safe than sorry regarding the presence of agents under conditions of uncertainty. Such reliably developing programs provide efficient reactions to a wide—but not unlimited—range of stimuli that would have been statistically associated with a presence of dangerous agents in ancestral environments. Mistakes, or “false positives,” would usually carry little cost, whereas a true response could provide the margin of survival. This was true at least until these supernatural agents were selected by cultural evolution to begin demanding costly actions, under threat of divine punishment, or offers of sublime rewards, or until they evoked hostility in the followers of another god.

This cognitive proclivity would favor emergence of malevolent deities in all cultures, just as a countervailing Darwinian propensity to attach to protective caregivers would favor conjuring up benevolent deities. Thus, for the Carajá Indians of Central Brazil, intimidating or unsure regions of the local ecology are religiously avoided: “The earth and underworld are inhabited by supernaturals…. There are two kinds. Many are amiable and beautiful beings who have friendly relations with humans … others are ugly and dangerous monsters who cannot be placated. Their woods are avoided and nobody fishes in their pools.”
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Similar descriptions of supernaturals appear in ethnographic reports throughout the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, and Oceania.

Our brains may be trip-wired to spot lurkers (and to seek protectors) where conditions of uncertainty prevail—when startled,at night, in unfamiliar places, during sudden catastrophe, in the face of solitude, illness, prospects of death, et cetera. Given the constant menace of enemies within and without, concealment, deception, and the ability to generate and recognize false beliefs in others would favor survival. In potentially dangerous or uncertain circumstances, it would be best to anticipate and fear the worst of all likely possibilities: The unseen presence of a deviously intelligent agent that might just want your head as a trophy. Unfortunately, a worst-case analysis fosters unnecessary wars.

As we saw in chapter 17, humans habitually “trick and tweak” their own innate releasing programs, as when people become sexually aroused by makeup (which artificially highlights sexually appealing attributes), fabricated perfumes, or undulating lines drawn on paper or dots arranged on a computer screen, that is, pornographic pictures.
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Horror movies, for example, play off hair-trigger agency detection to catch our attention and build suspense. Much of human culture—for better or worse—can be arguably attributed to focused stimulations and manipulations of our species’ innate proclivities.
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Such manipulations can serve cultural ends far removed from the ancestral adaptive tasks that originally gave rise to them, although manipulations for religion often centrally involve the collective engagement of existential needs (wanting security) and anxieties (fearing death).

THE APPEAL OF THE ABSURD (COUNTERINTUITIVE BELIEFS)

How do our minds make an
agent
concept into a god? And why do people work so hard against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?

Whatever the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions that fit most comfortably with our mental architecture. Thus,anthropologists and psychologists have shown that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are “minimally counterintuitive,” as anthropologist Pascal Boyer calls them:
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weird enough to get your attention and lodge in memory but not so weird as to be rejected altogether, like a burning bush that speaks, a frog that transforms into a prince, or a woman who turns into a block of salt.

Psychologist Ara Norenzayan, along with me and other colleagues, studied the idea of minimally counterintuitive agents.
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We presented college students as well as Maya Indians with lists of fantastical creatures and asked them to choose the ones that seemed most “religious.” The convincingly religious agents, the students said, were not the most outlandish—not the turtle that chatters and climbs or the squealing, flowering marble—but those that were just outlandish enough: giggling seaweed, a sobbing oak, a talking horse. Giggling seaweed meets the requirement of being minimally counterintuitive. So does a God who has a human personality except that he knows everything or a Spirit with a mind but no body.

What goes for single or simple religious beliefs and utterances goes also for more complex collections of religious beliefs.
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The Bible, for example, is a succession of mundane events—walking, eating, sleeping, dreaming, copulating, dying, marrying, fighting, suffering storms and drought—interspersed with just a few counterintuitive occurrences, such as miracles and appearances of supernatural agents. The same is true of the Koran, the Hindu Veda, the Maya Popul Vuh, or any other cultural corpus of religious beliefs and narratives.

Religious beliefs are counterintuitive because they purposely violate what studies in cognitive anthropology and developmental psychology indicate are universal expectations about the world’s everyday structure, including such basic categories of “intuitiveontology”—the ordinary ontology of the everyday world that is built into the language learner’s semantic system—as
person, animal, plant,
and
substance.
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Studies reveal that children across cultures do not violate such categorical constraints in learning the meaning of words. But in many religions, though never in reality, animals can conceive of the distant past and far future, plants can walk or talk, and mountains and lakes can have feelings, wishes, beliefs, and desires.