The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (61 page)

But for traditional peoples, even more than for us moderns, there are limits to their effectiveness, and large areas beyond their control. Crop yields are affected by unpredictable droughts, rainfall, hail, wind storms, cold temperatures, and insect pests. There is a large role of chance in the movements of individual animals. Most illnesses lie beyond traditional control because of the limits of traditional medical knowledge. Like the Israeli women who recited psalms but couldn’t control the paths of the rockets, much also remains beyond the control of traditional peoples after they have done their best. They, and we, rebel against remaining inactive and doing nothing. That makes them and us anxious, feeling helpless, prone to make mistakes, and unable to put out our best efforts. That’s where traditional peoples, and still often we today, resort to prayer, rituals, omens, magic, taboos, superstitions, and shamans. Believing that those measures are effective, they and we become less anxious, calmer, and more focused.

One example, studied by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski, comes from the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea, where villagers catch fish in two types of locations requiring different fishing methods: in the
sheltered, calm inner lagoon, where one dumps poison into a patch of water and then just picks up the stunned or dead fish; and in the open sea, spearing or netting fish while paddling a canoe through waves and surf. Lagoon fishing is safe, easy, and offers predictable yields; open-sea fishing is dangerous and unpredictable, with large bonanzas if a shoal of fish happens to be running at that particular time and place, but with little profit and much personal risk if one doesn’t happen to encounter a shoal that day. The islanders perform elaborate magical rituals before embarking on open-sea fishing in order to secure safety and success, because much doubt remains even after they have laid the best plans based on experience. But no magic is associated with lagoon fishing: one merely sets out and does it, without uncertainty or anxiety about the predictable result.

Another example is provided by !Kung hunters, whose expertise seems to leave nothing to chance. Little !Kung boys start playing with tiny bows and arrows from the time that they can walk, and begin hunting with their fathers when they reach adolescence. At evening campfires men recount over and over their previous hunts, listen to each other’s stories about who saw what animals where in recent days, and plan the next hunt accordingly. During the hunt itself they remain attuned to sights and sounds of animals and of birds whose behavior may betray the presence of animals, as well as scrutinizing tracks to learn what animal passed by, and where it is likely to be found and to be heading now. One might imagine that these masters of desert hunting skills would have no need for magic. In fact, though, when hunters set out in the morning, there is always a big element of anxiety-provoking uncertainty about where prey will happen to be on that particular morning.

Some !Kung men deal with their anxiety by consulting oracle disks supposed to prophesy what direction will be most promising, and what prey they should be prepared for. Those disks are sets of five or six thin circles of antelope leather graded in diameter from two to three inches, each with its own name and with a recognizable top and bottom. Each man owns a set. A man stacks the disks on the palm of his left hand with the largest disk on top, shakes and blows on the disks, asks a question in a loud ritualized voice, then throws the disks on a garment spread on the ground. A diviner interprets the pattern of disks on the ground according to features that include whether or not they overlap, and which disks land
top up or bottom up. The interpretation of the pattern seems to follow few fixed rules, except that disks 1 through 4 landing upside down predict the successful killing of a game animal.

Of course the disks don’t tell the !Kung anything that they don’t already know. !Kung men understand so much about animal behavior that their hunting plan has a good chance of proving successful, whatever the pattern of the disks. Instead, the disk pattern seems to be interpreted imaginatively like a Rorschach test, and serves to psych men up for a day of hunting. The disk ritual is useful in helping them reach agreement about pursuing one direction; choosing one direction, any direction, and sticking to it are preferable to becoming distracted by arguments.

For us today, prayer and ritual and magic are less widespread, because science and knowledge play a larger role in the success of our endeavors. But there remains much that we still can’t control, and many endeavors and dangers where science and technology don’t guarantee success. That’s where we, too, resort to prayers, offerings, and rituals. Prime examples in the recent past have been prayers for safe completion of sea voyages, bountiful harvests, success in war, and especially healing from disease. When doctors can’t predict a patient’s outcome with high probability, and especially when doctors admit that they are helpless, that’s when people are especially likely to pray.

Two specific examples illustrate for us the association between rituals or prayers on the one hand, and uncertain outcome on the other hand. Gamblers in a game of chance often follow their own personal rituals before throwing the dice, but chess-players don’t have such rituals before moving a piece. That’s because dice games are known to be games of chance, but there is no role of chance in chess: if your move costs you the game, you have no excuses, it was entirely your own fault for not foreseeing your opponent’s response. Similarly, farmers wanting to drill a well to find underground water often consult dowsers in western New Mexico, where the area’s local geological complexity results in big unpredictable variation in the depth and quantity of underground water, such that not even professional geologists can predict accurately from surface features the location and depth of underground water. In the Texas Panhandle, though, where the water table lies at a uniform depth of 125 feet, farmers merely drill a well to that depth at a site nearest to where the water is
needed; no one uses dowsers, although people are familiar with the method. That is, New Mexico farmers and dice players deal with unpredictability by resorting to rituals just as do Trobriand ocean fishermen and !Kung hunters, while Texas Panhandle farmers and chess-players dispense with rituals just as do Trobriand lagoon fishermen.

In short, religious (and also non-religious) rituals are still with us to help us deal with anxiety in the face of uncertainty and danger. However, this function of religion was much more important in traditional societies facing greater uncertainty and danger than do modern Westernized societies.

Let’s now turn to a function of religion that must have expanded over the last 10,000 years: to provide comfort, hope, and meaning when life is hard. A specific example is to comfort us at the prospect of our own death and at the death of a loved one. Some mammals—elephants are a striking example—appear to recognize and mourn the death of a close companion. But we have no reason to suspect that any animal except us humans understands that, one day, it too will die. We would inevitably have realized that that fate lay in store for us as we acquired self-consciousness and better reasoning power, and began to generalize from watching our fellow band members die. Almost all observed and archaeologically attested human groups demonstrate their understanding of death’s significance by not just discarding their dead but somehow providing for them by burial, cremation, wrapping, mummification, cooking, or other means.

It’s frightening to see someone who was recently warm, moving, talking, and capable of self-defense now cold, motionless, silent, and helpless. It’s frightening to imagine that happening to us, too. Most religions provide comfort by in effect denying death’s reality, and by postulating some sort of afterlife for a soul postulated as associated with the body. One’s soul together with a replica of one’s body may go to a supernatural place called heaven or some other name; or one’s soul may become transformed into a bird or another person here on Earth. Religions that proclaim an afterlife often go further and use it not just to deny death but also to hold
out hope for something even better awaiting us after death, such as eternal life, reunion with one’s loved ones, freedom from care, nectar, and beautiful virgins.

In addition to our pain at the prospect of death, there are many other pains of life for which religion offers comfort in various ways. One way is to “explain” a suffering by declaring it not to be a meaningless random event but to possess some deeper meaning: e.g., it was to test you for your worthiness for the afterlife, or it was to punish you for your sins, or it was an evil done to you by some bad person whom you should hire a sorcerer to identify and kill. Another way is to promise that amends will be made to you in the afterlife for your suffering: yes, you suffered here, but never fear, you will be rewarded after your death. Still a third way is to promise not only that will your suffering be offset in a happy afterlife, but also that those who did you evil will have a miserable afterlife. While punishing your enemies on Earth gives you only finite revenge and satisfaction, the eternal exquisite tortures that they will suffer after death in Dante’s Inferno will guarantee you all the revenge and satisfaction that you could ever long for. Hell has a double function: to comfort you by smiting your enemies whom you were unable to smite yourself here on Earth; and to motivate you to obey your religion’s moral commands, by threatening to send you too there if you misbehave. Thus, the postulated afterlife resolves the paradox of theodicy (the co-existence of evil and a good God) by assuring you not to worry; all scores will be settled later.

This comforting function of religion must have emerged early in our evolutionary history, as soon as we were smart enough to realize that we’d die, and to wonder why life was often painful. Hunter-gatherers do often believe in survival after death as spirits. But this function expanded greatly later with the rise of so-called world-rejecting religions, which assert not only that there is an afterlife, but that it’s even more important and long-lasting than this earthly life, and that the overriding goal of earthly life is to obtain salvation and prepare you for the afterlife. While world rejection is strong in Christianity, Islam, and some forms of Buddhism, it also characterizes some secular (i.e., non-religious) philosophies such as Plato’s. Such beliefs can be so compelling that some religious people actually reject the worldly life. Monks and nuns in residential orders do so insofar as they live, sleep, and eat separately from the secular world,
although they may go out into it daily in order to minister, teach, and preach. But there are other orders that isolate themselves as completely as possible from the secular world. Among them were the Cistercian order, whose great monasteries at Rievaulx, Fountains Abbey, and Jerveaulx in England remain England’s best-preserved monastic ruins because they were erected far from towns and hence were less subject to plunder and re-use after they were abandoned. Even more extreme was the world rejection practiced by a few Irish monks who settled as hermits in otherwise uninhabited Iceland.

Small-scale societies place much less emphasis on world rejection, salvation, and the afterlife than do large-scale, more complex and recent societies. There are at least three reasons for this trend. First, social stratification and inequality have increased, from egalitarian small-scale societies to large complex societies with their kings, nobles, elite, rich, and members of highly ranked clans contrasting with their mass of poor peasants and laborers. If everybody else around you is suffering as much as you are, then there is no unfairness to be explained, and no visible example of the good life to which to aspire. But the observation that some people have much more comfortable lives and can dominate you takes a lot of explaining and comforting, which religion offers.

A second reason why large, complex societies emphasize comforting and the afterlife more than do small-scale societies is that archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that life really did become harder as hunter-gatherers became farmers and assembled in larger societies. With the transition to agriculture, the average daily number of work hours increased, nutrition deteriorated, infectious disease and body wear increased, and lifespan shortened. Conditions deteriorated even further for urban proletariats during the Industrial Revolution, as work days lengthened, and as hygiene, health, and pleasures diminished. Finally, as we shall discuss below, complex populous societies have more formalized moral codes, more black-and-white emphasis on good and evil, and bigger resulting problems of theodicy: why, if you yourself are behaving virtuously and obeying the laws, do law-breakers and the rest of the world get away with being cruel to you?

All three of these reasons suggest why the comforting function of religion has increased in more populous and recent societies: it’s simply that
those societies inflict on us more bad things for which we crave comfort. This comforting role of religion helps explain the frequent observation that misfortune tends to make people more religious, and that poorer social strata, regions, and countries tend to be more religious than richer ones: they need more comforting. Among the world’s nations today, the percentage of citizens who say that religion is an important part of their daily lives is 80%–99% for most nations with per-capita gross domestic products (GDP) under $10,000, but only 17%–43% for most nations with per-capita GDP over $30,000. (That doesn’t account for high religious commitment in the rich U.S., which I’ll mention in the next paragraph.) Even within just the U.S., there appear to be more churches and more church attendance in poorer areas than in richer areas, despite the greater resources and leisure time available to build and attend churches in richer areas. Within American society, the highest religious commitment and the most radical Christian branches are found among the most marginalized, underprivileged social groups.

It may initially seem surprising that religion has been maintaining itself or even growing in the modern world, despite the rise in two factors already mentioned as undermining religion: science’s recent usurpation of religion’s original explanatory role; and our increased technology and societal effectiveness reducing dangers that lie beyond our control and thus inviting prayer. That religion nevertheless shows no signs of dying out may be due to our persistent quest for “meaning.” We humans have always sought meaning in our lives that can otherwise seem meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent, and in a world full of unpredictable unfortunate events. Now along comes science, seeming to say that “meaning” isn’t meaningful, and that our individual lives really are meaningless, purposeless, and evanescent except as packages of genes for which the measure of success is just self-propagation. Some atheists would maintain that the problem of theodicy doesn’t exist; good and evil are just human definitions; if cancer or a car crash kills X and Y but not A and B, that’s just a random catastrophe; there isn’t any afterlife; and if you’ve suffered or been abused here on Earth, it won’t be fixed for you in the afterlife. If you respond to those atheists, “I don’t like to hear that, tell me it’s not true, show me some way in which science has its own way of providing meaning,” those atheists’ response would be “Your request is in vain, get over it,
stop looking for meaning, there isn’t any meaning—it’s just that, as Donald Rumsfeld said of looting during the war in Iraq, ‘Stuff happens!’” But we still have our same old brains that crave meaning. We have several million years of evolutionary history telling us, “Even if that’s true, I don’t like it and I’m not going to believe it: if science won’t give me meaning, I’ll look to religion for it.” That’s probably a significant factor in the persistence and even growth of religion in this century of growth in science and technology. It may contribute part—surely not all, but perhaps part—of the explanation for why the United States, the country with the most highly developed scientific and technological establishment, is also the most religious among wealthy First World countries. The greater gulf between rich and poor people in the U.S. than in Europe may be another part of the explanation.