Years ago, I read John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor. Its point of departure is the niche phenomenon of mountaineers in extremis imagining the presence of a phantom additional climber on their rope (Dougal Haston’s experience on the Eiger is probably the best known; TS Eliot’s note in The Waste Land about polar explorers will be more familiar to the deskbound). It documents the much broader experience of ‘the 3rd man’ (curiously, it is always a man . . .) whose presence may be experienced in states of extreme physical exhaustion. Geiger concludes that these hallucinations may be induced by physical privation, a reduction of sensory stimulation or a relentless monotony (whiteout, droning, darkness). He goes on to suggest that our tendency to process this stimulus (or lack of it) into an apparition is located in an evolutionarily very recent development in modern humans’ neurology.
This last suggestion struck me as potentially extraordinary –
if these experiences of the other were enabled by the same brain circuits that,
for instance, produce trance states then it could be conjectured that modern
humans’ widespread expression of some form of religious experience has some
basis in evolution. Perhaps only as an
accidental by-product of some other development – but if, as a hunter-gatherer
(more about them later) you found yourself entering what you thought of as a
spirit world or experiencing ‘your’ spirit other, then it’s not difficult to
imagine a social context in which that experience enabled improved reproductive
chances (membership of the hunting band, entry into adulthood, a mate),
ensuring fitness-selection for religion.
All of which at the time seemed just like fascinating
conjecture, albeit potentially bad news for evolutionary scientists with
pronounced views on religion, but probably worse for believers with pronounced
views on Darwin. (Religion and evolutionary
psychology, among many other things, claim to be toolkits that account for the
totality of what it means to be human. Both systems are about making falsifiable
predictions; only one does so in order to be proved wrong).
Clearly what was needed is an evolutionary psychologist’s
view of the history and development of religion and religious experience. And Robin
Dunbar’s How Religion Evolved – And Why It Endures delivers exactly
that. It’s a book overflowing with ideas and insights into why we humans
(uniquely, it seems) experience religion – both inwardly via a ‘mystical stance’
approximately cognate with Geiger’s accidental latter-day Alpine shamen, and also
in socially organised ritual units. It’s
a breath-taking, fizzing, profoundly stimulating read.
In highly abbreviated summary – Dunbar (who doesn’t cite
Geiger, so is probably unaware of his book) does three big things:
He traces the neurological background of what he calls ‘the
mystical stance’, humanity’s apparently unique and recently evolved ability to
experience an altered state of awareness (whether an Amazonian shaman or St
Theresa in ecstasy rather than Haston on the Eiger, this manifests itself in
some very culturally specific ways).
Secondly, he analyses our ability to mentalise – effectively
to see the world through the mind of another and understand that the other’s
awareness of the world differs from our own (‘I think that you know that she
believes that . . .’ ) as the basis for a shared experience and understanding
of the demands of the beings encountered in the transcendent world.
But it’s Dunbar’s analysis
of our primate-grooming-group-derived social structures that really brings the
neurology and psychology into a thrilling, big-picture synthesis. He leads us through a fascinating history of social
group sizes, their functions and problems of cohesion and stability. Religious
congregations (and all friendship groups) are, weirdly, bound by the same
optimal limits as hunting bands, clans and tribes. (Sidenote – there’s a hint
that this comparison is based largely on western Christian lay structures; it
would be interesting to know how it replicates in monastic and common life groupings,
and in other global religious traditions).
He suggests the development of religious practice, from hunting-band
invocation of the hunted beast’s spirit to monotheistic moralising ideologies
concerned with supernatural reward and punishment arises from the need to manage
ever more complex economic and social groupings kick-started by the Neolithic
agricultural revolution. (Klaxon alert for
anyone projecting Edenic fantasies onto the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. H/G life
though not solitary was still pretty Hobbesian: you were far more likely to be
murdered by a fellow hunter than starve or be gored by a boar). He suggests that this culminates in the replacement
of local cults by highly organised law and faith-systems focused on ‘Moralising
High Gods’ around the middle of the 1st millennium BC (anyone
thinking of the denouement of Aeschylus’ Eumenides
is probably not wrong), whose structures are still with us today.
He also looks at the problem of charismatic leadership and banal
succession and proposes a scientific rationale for the chronically fissiparous nature
of new faiths obsessed by the narcissism of small differences (a trait
flatteringly imitated by the groupuscules of the materialist left).
All of which rather
begs the question – if religious groupings are part of mankind’s continuous
struggle to ameliorate the effects of economic growth and social complexity,
how will religion evolve in an economic system that is globalised and social
structures that are now virtual and hence effectively boundless? Dunbar is (probably rightly) reticent on this. But it’s of interest for two reasons.
One is that most major religions have elaborate ideas about the
end of human society in a catastrophe on a universal scale. It’s worth speculating whether our fears of
nuclear winter and / or climate catastrophe are performing the same cultural
and psychological function as the
millenarianism of earlier ages. With
the exception of a topical nod towards Extinction
Rebellion, Dunbar keeps his powder dry.
Some anthropologists suggest that all humans alive today are probably
descended from a very small number of people who passed through a narrow genetic
bottleneck some 70,000 years ago.
The cause of the bottleneck is uncertain but was probably a profound
catastrophe of environment or external change.
We cannot know whether those who survived did so through sheer random chance
or the possession of genetic traits that just happened to make them more likely
to do so. Given Dunbar’s analysis of
mentalisation as a necessary component of religious psychology it would perhaps
be reassuring to know that the ability to envision future catastrophe once has
already given us a better chance to survive it.
The second reason is that Dunbar rightly points out the
failure of 20th century political atheism to suppress religion (having
earlier identified Marx’s dictum about the narcotic social and political
function of religious practice as a misdiagnosis). But this misses the fact that communism was
failing to replace capitalism rather than religion per se. If the experience of the contemporary west is
anything to go by then religion is already well on its way to replacement as a
means of managing demographic and economic pressures (Dunbar’s essential point
about the evolution of organised religious practice) by post-industrial capitalism
and its dysfunctional golden-egg-laying geese-triplets science, technology and the society
of the spectacle. (An analysis that
some right-wing Catholic thinkers with their opposition to consumerist
liberties, are probably on to, albeit for the wrong reasons; prosperity-gospellers
should be more worried). If that’s
really the case, then Dunbar may be right in identifying XR as having a stake
in what will happen next, and climate fears really are occupying the same space
as religious preparation for the end-times once did. (‘We have to correct our way of living before
the end comes’ is the common currency of eschatological religion through the
ages, including that of Jesus).
Of course, one of the less remarked upon effects of the catastrophic
end of things that much religion more or less gleefully looks forward to is
that the end of all things means the end of religion (and science) too. Or at least the organised kind.
Hunting and gathering, anyone? Or would you prefer to glue yourselves to the
tarmac?