In Gods We Trust - Part II - The Supernatural, Quasi-Propositions, and Ritual

A comment by A VOICE on my last post has led me to understand just how badly it represented Scott Atran's book,  In Gods We Trust, The Evolutionary Landscape of Religiton. 

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Evolution and Cognition Series)

It will take many posts, I now realize, to rectify the situation.  I'll start with this one.

In his comment, A VOICE quite rightly comments: "Given the survival value of making sense out of what went on around humans and what they could do in response, I would think it not unusual for man qua man to eventually wonder about the meaning of his own existence, and from there the why of it all."

Yup, I blew it. 

Atran more or less takes as a given that "man qua man" will "wonder about the meaning of his own existence".  That comes with "metarepresentation", which I touched on in far too cursory a manner. 

The puzzle is more why such individual propensities should nearly universally ramify into collective beliefs in supernatural worlds and beings; into community rituals and practices (often involving chants/music and magic charms/places); and into the requirements of such sacrifices as scarification/circumcision, animal slaughter or tithing. These elements co-occur too widely in cultures around the world, throughout history, to be merely coinicidental clusters.  There is something to be explained here. 

What Atran is saying (and I'm afraid I will be putting words into his mouth, to some extent) is that the very abilities that make us human, that separate us from other species, and thereby make us successful as evolutionary players, introduce unique threats to our survival.  He is principally talking about "metarepresentation".  If we can imagine the future and play out alternative courses of action in our minds we can organize and compete to a degree of complexity and on a scale impossible for other species.  On the other hand that same facility allows us to imagine our own deaths, become paranoid, envy, deceive and plot against each other.

The real world does not provide us with any way of collectively preventing these destructive elements from tearing us apart.  Any ideologies derived from the real world can be changed as we discover new facts.  Any proposition about the real world is refutable.  It is necessary for groups of people to share beliefs which will guide their lives collectively, which are stated in quasi-propositions and which are, therefore, irrefutable.

I'm not stating this so well.  Let me quote Atran on a point that, if not exactly the same, is related (pp. 267-268):

By now it should be clear that supernatural agency is the principal conceptual go-between and main watershed in our evolutionary landscape.  Secular ideologies are at a competetive disadvantage in the struggle for cultural survival as moral orders.  If some truer ideology is likely to be available somewhere down the line, then, reasoning by backward induction, there is no more justified reason to accept the current ideology than convenience -- either one's own or worse, someone else's.  To ensure moral authority transcends convenient self-interest, everyone concerened -- whether King or beggar -- must tryly believe that the gods are ever vigilant, even when one knows that no other person could possibly know what is going on.  This is another way that the conceptual ridge of our evolutionary landscape connects with the ridge of social interaction, in particular with the evolutionary imperative to cooperate in order to compete.

This gives rise to the need for ritual and revelation (p. 173):

Religion arises when (1) hard-to-fake emotions (2) all with thought content whose truth implications are logically and factually impossible to evaluate (3) but that together convincingly evoke commitment to cultural mores.  Religious beliefs and experiences cannot be consistently validated by social consensus either through deductive or inductive inference.  Validation occurs only by satisfying the very emotions that motivate beliefs and experiences.

Intense religious episodes -- severe limitation, sudden conversions, mystical revelations -- combine aspects of personal memory for stressful events (e.g. an unforgettably traumatic, life-orienting occurrence) and socially widespread cognitive schema (scripted coactivation of publicly accessible categories and connecting pathways) to ensure life-long effect.  The culturally manipulated, or God-given, sentiment of religious experience affectively stirs and assuages the same existential anxieties that incite religious belief in the first place.  Even more frequent, less emotionally intense rituals -- daily prayer, weekly services, yearly festivals -- affectively manipulate and rhytmically coordinate actors' minds and bodies into convergent expressions of public sentiment: a sort of N-person courtship.

Humans, it appears, are the only animals that spontaneously engage in creative, rhythmic bodily coordination to enhance possibilities for cooperation (e.g., singing and swaying as they work together). Rituals intensify these natutral movements to emotionally validate, and sanctify, any number of different cultural sets of moral sentiments.  These religious sentiments feel right and good, and the religious quasi propositions that express them become truly held.  No human society has long survived without such seemingly arbitrary but sanctified sentiments.

It will perhaps have occurred to you that aspects of what Atran says above apply to cultural institutions other than religions -- to nations, and constitutions, and anthems, and pledges of allegiance, for example.  Atran's book is rich with implications which reach far beyond his immediate subject.  I spent a couple of months reading it in little bursts.  It was fruitful, if not easy reading.  I hope to say much more about it in future posts.