The Folly of Fools (45 page)

One such effect is the bizarre recent claim from the Holy Roman Catholic Church that male celibacy does not contribute to priestly pedophilia, but homosexuality does. Certainly the latter should bias molestation toward male children, but what could be more conducive to sex with children than a complete prohibition on sex between adults? And what is more conducive to abusing boys than an all-male priesthood that presumably attracts men who like men? What continually haunts me when I think about such matters is the function of all this nonsense. Who benefits from an all-male priesthood? As for the priests’ being nonreproductive, at least this guards in principle against narrow kin interests. There are very few genetic dynasties in the Catholic Church (contrast North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, India, Haiti, and the United States), so the Church is likely to be corrupt but not nepotistically so.

But why all-male? This makes celibacy easier, but all-male priesthoods coexist with priestly reproduction in Islam, Judaism, and many Protestant sects, among others. And why the association with distortions against women’s interests? Is female reproduction to be subordinated to male interests for group benefit or male benefit—and at what cost to females? The Catholic Church outlaws all control by a woman over her own reproduction short of abstinence from sex at the very moment that she is most eager for it. She is not allowed to prevent conception if copulation occurs, and she is not allowed to terminate a pregnancy, however induced (rape and incest included). This appears to be a simple strategy for maximizing group reproduction, or at least male group interest. Female interests appear to count for little.

POWER CORRUPTS

As we have seen, power corrupts: the powerful are less attentive to others, see the world less from their standpoint, and feel less empathy for them. The converse is that the powerless are more apt to see things from the other person’s standpoint, to be committed to the principle of fairness, and to identify with people like themselves. The religious effects are that humility, fairness, forgiveness, and neighborly love are more apt to be virtues preached among the powerless. It is no accident that in both Christianity and Islam, this dynamic has been played out. The Christian gospels were all written while the church was a small, underground, persecuted sect. Islam’s more peaceful injunctions came when it was an oppressed minority, its more assertive when it reemerged with military power.

It has been said that when after three centuries Constantinople elevated Christianity to the state religion, it went in one century from being the persecuted church to the persecuting church. This is a recurring theme in monotheistic religions: with state power comes a new source of bias. They change from emphasizing the universal principles of brotherhood that would especially benefit the oppressed and those needing alliances with other groups to emphasizing principles of dominance and imperialism—the lesser orders should remain so and unbelievers and outsiders may be attacked more or less at will. Racism is a valuable handmaiden. If the others are biologically inferior, is it then not God’s will that they should be supplanted by their superiors? How else is evolution supposed to work?

Islam provides a nice example of these forces, because we know the order in which the Sura of the Koran were written, its verses—that is, the actual words of the prophet—recorded while he lived. (In contrast, all of Jesus’s teachings were written long after he died.) Just like Jesus, Muhammad began as a marginal prophet of the marginalized, but unlike Jesus, he ended up as the head of a reinvading army of true believers. Muhammad began his ministry in Mecca, where he formed a small sect, often persecuted and vulnerable, so he preached an ideology of peace, respect for other groups, humility, and universal brotherhood. He then moved to Medina, where he initially faced the same situation and talked the same talk, but he then came to power in Medina and was able to head an invading army back to Mecca, which he promptly took over. During all this time, his Sura became more self-assertive and less tolerant the more powerful he became, sometimes urging attack on the infidels by the faithful. Similarly, in the Jewish tradition, it is King Josiah who is said to have both consolidated monotheism and been the first bloodthirsty advocate of it.

Consider a much more recent example from the Catholic Church. Pope Paul XXIII and Vatican II inspired in the Latin American Church a new “liberation theology” in the 1980s closer to the humble, persecuted church (prior to Constantin), the time when Jesus’s teachings were actually written down. This liberation theology explicitly favored “the preferential option for the poor” and urged their organization into self-supporting communes. This entire movement was crushed by the US military, explicitly so, and of course by the Catholic Church itself, always eager to bend theology to local power. Assassinations were the preferred means of enforcing orthodoxy, especially in El Salvador, whether of nuns traveling innocently on the road or of the Archbishop (Romero) while saying Mass, or of a courageous Jesuit priest who cried out in prophesy, “Very soon the Bible and the gospel will not be allowed in our country. We’ll get the covers and nothing more.” If Jesus were to reappear, he would be arrested as subversive, said the priest a few weeks before his own assassination. Thus is religion degraded by very regressive forces.

RELIGIONS IMPOSE MATING SYSTEMS

Religions tend to impose their own mating systems, and these in turn affect degrees of relatedness within and between religions. Religions typically ask (or require) of their adherents that they marry within the religion or subreligion: Catholic with Catholic, Protestant with Protestant, Shia with Shia, Jewish with Jewish, and so on.

The pressure to breed within the group leads to a degree of inbreeding, that is, nonrandom mating with those to whom one is (at least marginally) more closely related. We are not here talking about close inbreeding—parent /offspring, brother/sister—but typically more distant, first cousin to second cousin and beyond. But repeated generation after generation, inbreeding inflates degrees of relatedness between group members (that is, genetic similarity because of common ancestry). At the same time, it creates a chasm in relatedness to other groups—one is
less
related than one otherwise would be.

Two important kinds of migration are important here. People may outbreed—that is, marry outside their group—and people may convert, or join another group.

When a man (for example) outbreeds and his children are raised outside his original group, his out-migration is experienced as a “selective death” to his original group. Whatever genetic traits he has are lost to that group, including his outbreeding tendencies. To put a fine point on it, if he is on average less ethnocentric, less self-loving, and less narrow in outlook than members of his original group, his out-migration lowers the frequency of these traits in that group as surely as if he had died young.

On the other hand, his arrival in the new group has the opposite effect. It is experienced as a selective birth, as if someone had been born (at full reproductive age) with the same traits we just described. Returning to the composition of the original group, the key question is, how much in-migration occurs and under what conditions? If a man marrying a woman has his children accepted as being of her faith, then the same kind of traits lost through out-migration will tend to return through in-migration. But are the two processes equally strong? If there are more men leaving than arriving, then this group will become more inbred. I have not had the chance to pursue this subject in greater detail, but if I were interested in the genetics of religious diversity, I would pay attention to biases in between-group transfers, by sex and by magnitude.

As for genetics, inbreeding has well-known effects. Products of inbreeding show less internal variability than do products of outbreeding. This genetic similarity can have two detrimental effects. On the one hand, relatively rare negative traits that require two copies of the same gene for expression (for example, sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease) become more common. On the other, greater genetic variability has well-known benefits in defending against rapidly coevolving diseases, so that outbreeding becomes a genetic defense.

The second form of in-migration is simple conversion (initially unconnected to marriage), and religions differ in their rules regarding this. Thus, Christianity has usually been a proselytizing religion, continually seeking converts, wherever and however, as has Islam. Sunni and Shia Muslims may stretch from Senegal to Sudan to Lebanon to Pakistan to India to Indonesia, with similar opportunities for interbreeding all along the continuum within each group, but limited exchange between the two. With some notable exceptions, Judaism has not been a proselytizing religion, although Jews have been subject to forced conversion (for example, in Spain in the sixteenth century).

RELIGION PREACHES AGAINST SELF-DECEPTION

Many religions have teachings that are either explicitly or implicitly against self-deception. It is often argued that self-deception interferes with one’s ability to know not only oneself and others but also God herself. For one thing, there is a presumptive case for the utility and validity of general principles. What is true here should be true there. What applies to you should apply to me. The very universality argues against the usual biases of deceit and self-deception. If you are told to treat others as you wish to be treated, then you have a rule, which, if actually followed, would counter much of your unconscious self-deceptive tendencies in favor of self over others. Similar general rules could reduce self-deception further. Of course, as we have seen, the generality of these “general” principles is easily undercut by forces of fragmentation, in-group and out-group formation, and the rule of the powerful.

Religions also preach explicitly against self-deception. Consider Jesus’s famous teachings about not judging others (Matthew 7:1–5):

Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why do you behold the mote that is in your brother’s eye, but consider not the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will thou say to your brother, let me pull out the mote out of your eye; and behold, a beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then you shall see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother’s eye.

I translate this directly into the language of self-deception. Beware of self-righteousness, because it easily invites self-deception. You may be projecting onto others your own faults. And beware lest you come to be judged by the same criteria you are enforcing on them. Why do you see the minor fault in your neighbor but fail to see the major one in yourself? Instead of denying your own fault and projecting it onto others, admit your fault, the better to see whether any fault lies elsewhere. Otherwise, you are a hypocrite, criticizing the wrong person, in the wrong order.

Another argument against the speed—and injustice—with which we judge others comes from the case where Jesus is presented with a woman about to be stoned to death for committing adultery. His reaction? “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” And it is said that everyone left the room in reverse order of age, the oldest—who had the most sins—the first. In both of these cases, it is internal contradictions that drive the argument, precisely the reason that universally valid principles tend naturally to argue against self-deception.

Other teachings are less explicitly opposed to self-deception but have similar implications just the same. Here is one that is opposed to the in-group/out-group bias. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (really the good Arab or Palestinian), Jew after Jew passes by the badly injured fellow Jew. It is an outsider, an Arab, a Samaritan, who responds to the sufferer’s needs by binding his wounds, giving him water and food and finding him safe lodging. Who is the admirable person here, the heartless in-group member or the otherwise hated out-group one? Or what about Nicodemus, the man who came by night? It is precisely his willingness to meet Jesus at night, out of sight of others, that made him a hypocrite, one who eventually voted to condemn Jesus but then made sure to help bind the body for burial.

Another example is the structure of the Lord’s Prayer, which has interesting features where self-deception is concerned. First, it is short. Then it is divided into only three parts, the first an assertion of humility: “hallowed be thy name” and “thy will be done.” When landing at an airport, I often pray that “thy will be done” and add the hope that this does not include flipping the plane upside down on arrival but, if so,
thy
will be done. In other words, let us accept a larger plan than our own and not seek to change the plan through personal begging. Let us humble our own self-interest to the larger plan. In any case, if the plane is going to flip, the plane is going to flip; the only thing we can pray for is to be calm upon arrival.

The second part of the prayer has an interesting feature—you are allowed to beg for only two things on your behalf, and one of these is contingent. You can ask for your daily handout, what every creature needs: its daily bread. And then you may ask that your own sins be forgiven but
only insofar
as you forgive those of others. This is critical: no blanket amnesty. You must give to get; you must forgive to be forgiven. This binds you to a psychological commitment—one that ought to reduce self-deception on the spot.

Then comes the final part, where you ask not to be led into temptation—really an injunction against allowing yourself to be tempted—and to be protected from all evil (self-induced included). No intercessory prayer here. No “and may the president continue to make wise decisions and may God bless America,” so commonly heard in US churches (or, more absurdly, in President George W. Bush’s words, “may God continue to bless America,” as if an obligation had developed). Indeed, the ability on Sunday of so many Christian preachers to forget the only teachings by Jesus on prayer is astonishing, were it not for the power of deceit and self-deception.