We Need Behavioural Ecology to Explain the Institutional Authority of the Gods
Knight, C. (2004). We need behavioural ecology to explain the institutional authority of the gods. Commentary on Atran and Norenzayan: Religion’s evolutionary landscape. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27(6): 30.
Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) rightly criticize cognitive theories for failure to explain sacrifice and commitment. But their attempt to reconcile cognitivism with commitment theory is unconvincing. Why should imaginary entities be effective in punishing moral defectors? Heavy costs are entailed in enforcing community-wide social contracts, and behavioural ecology is needed to explain how and why evolving humans could afford these costs.
Cognitive theorists have been persuasive in attributing certain universals of religious belief to innate cognitive mechanisms. But, as Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) point out, such approaches “fail to tell us why, in general, the greater the sacrifice – as in Abraham offering up his beloved son – the more others trust in one’s religious commitment” (sect. 1, para. 5). It is heartening to note an emerging consensus that religion is susceptible to Darwinian explanation and that costly signalling theory (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997) must play a central role (Irons 1996; Knight 1998; Sosis & Alcorta 2003). However, I dispute the claim that commitment theories cannot account for the cognitive peculiarities of religious belief. One of the first attempts to apply Zahavi’s theory to the origins of religion specified a counterintuitive display (“wrong sex, wrong species, wrong time”) as central to humanity’s foundational rituals of initiation (Knight et al. 1995).
Supernatural agents, A&N claim, arise spontaneously as our mind-reading proclivities impute agency to features of the surrounding world. Somehow, these imaginings then endow themselves with moral authority and institutional support. Observing that “human society is forever under threat of moral defection,” A&N argue that society is saved by the omniscience and omnipresence of a supreme deity who “can ultimately detect and punish cheaters” (sect. 7). As a materialist, I can only ask: Is this serious? How can an imaginary entity explain anything at all – let alone group-level cooperation between potential rivals? How can a fantasy law-enforcer be either omniscient or omnipotent in real life? Unfortunately, such conceptual slippage between idle fantasies and stable representations of institutional authority is the problematic kernel of these authors’ entire argument.
Evolutionary psychology of the kind espoused by A&N defines itself in opposition to sociological determinism in the tradition of Marx and Durkheim. Rejecting narrowly psychological explanations, scholars in the older tradition widely agreed that the gods are fundamentally contractual phenomena. To many scholars it still seems self-evident that divinity – like monetary value – is not a natural but an institutional fact (Searle 1996). Although maintained by flesh-andblood human agents, the contractual foundations of large-scale moral communities are artificial in the sense that traffic lights and highway codes are. A&N show little interest in hunter-gatherers, preferring to focus on priests, kings, and others whose rituals of religious submission they liken to the “displays of social hierarchy and submission typical of primates” (sect. 1.4). Overlooked here is that the totemic magico-religious codes of egalitarian hunter-gatherers not only resist but actively reverse the dynamics of primate dominance (Boehm 1999). Totemic agency in such contexts is a conceptualisation of contractual agency (Knight 1991; Knight et al. 1999). Contrary to A&N, the foundational contracts – as mental representations – cannot simply enforce themselves. Differentiated by age and sex, self-organised coalitions of human beings must be committed to and able to afford the heavy costs of enforcing the law.
A&N avoid the puzzle of how and why anyone has the time and energy to enforce community-wide contracts. Instead, they fall back on illustrations of supposedly autonomous religious genesis which are in fact confounded by pre-existing institutional influences. Take, for example, Mother Theresa as discerned in a cinnamon bun. The mystics who experienced this vision were already “devout American Catholics” (sect. 2). It was clearly this prior institutional setting that endowed the fantasy with whatever moral significance and transmissibility it possessed. The need, then, is to account for the range of institutional frameworks capable of upholding the authority of the gods. In this connection, A&N are surely correct in suspecting that their mentalist approach must somehow extend outwards to embrace such collective determinants of religious commitment as communal song and dance. But whereas Durkheim and Rappaport explicitly accord causal primacy to such public ritual, A&N appear unable to specify the causal relationships between this and other selected facets of religion accorded prominence in their evolutionary landscape.
The challenge, surely, is to explain the evolutionary emergence of institutionalised religion as a whole. There exists a body of Darwinian theory which might measure up to this task (Sosis & Alcorta 2003). Behavioural ecology models the fitness costs and benefits not of mental entities considered in the abstract but of competing behavioural strategies played out in the real world. It studies cognition in its proper context, relating it to foraging, reproductive, alliance forming, and other biological strategies. Unlike abstract cognitivism, behavioural ecology cares whether individuals are male or female; sexually available or non-available; genetically close or distant; parentally dependent or independent; and competitive, cooperative, or both at once. Sexual signals are viewed as central to mating strategies, hence to social structure – and hence ultimately to cognition as well (Knight 1991; Power & Aiello 1997). No biologist would explain elephant or gorilla cognition by invoking narrowly defined “elephant” or “gorilla” evolutionary psychology. It is likewise inadmissible to address the evolution of distinctively human cognition or communication in a vacuum, in isolation from the study of how displays and associated strategies evolve in other species.
Given that potentially religious fantasies may arise through hairtrigger stimulation of distinctively human mind-reading proclivities, we would expect a utilitarian process of natural selection to favour those who maximise efficient mind reading, setting a ceiling on the affordable proportion of cognitive errors. Where we find not cognitive efficiency but extravagant displays of sheer fantasy, theory would lead us to suspect the operation not of utilitarian but of signal selection, whether sexual or otherwise (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997). What is unclear in the target article is how these contrastive evolutionary trajectories are supposed to interrelate. Darwinian signal evolution theory (e.g., Krebs & Dawkins 1984) would link the tension between rational intellect and emotional commitment with the contrast between conspiratorial whisperings of the kind rendered possible between trusting allies – and high-cost signalling of the kind necessary to overcome entrenched mistrust (cf. Knight 1998). Unfortunately, the mentalist perspective of A&N precludes any study of the role played by competitive or cooperative strategies in determining how signals evolve. As a result, the evolutionary landscape offered by these authors as a metaphorical replacement for empirical research on fossils, artefacts, genes, and climates is conceptualised by them as emanating from inside the head.