Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows

The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We read:

Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase conflict with other groups, according to an article in a special issue of Science.

“Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war,” says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research.
“Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation. But they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.”

As evidence for their claim that religion increases trust within groups but may increase conflict with other groups, Atran and Ginges cite a number of studies among different populations. These include cross-cultural surveys and experiments in dozens of societies showing that people who participate most in collective religious rituals are more likely to cooperate with others, and that groups most intensely involved in conflict have the costliest and most physically demanding rituals to galvanize group solidarity in common defense and blind group members to exit strategies. Secular social contracts are more prone to defection, they argue. Their research also indicates that participation in collective religious ritual increases parochial altruism and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks.

They also identify what they call the “backfire effect,” which dooms many efforts to broker peace. In many studies that Atran and Ginges carried out with colleagues in Palestine, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan, they found that offers of money or other material incentives to compromise sacred values increased anger and opposition to a deal.

… This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: “Modern multiculturalism and global exposure to multifarious values is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements to revive primary group loyalties through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity.”

We’ve been making this point here for years: religion is a strongly adaptive feature of human social and cognitive architecture, an innate propensity for which is almost certainly the result of the action of group-level selection in our evolutionary history. As I’ve argued in these pages, I suspect (with sadness, given that I’m an unbeliever myself) that secularism is strongly maladaptive for human groups (see this post, and the comment thread here, for example).

The authors of the linked article nevertheless express hope that a better understanding of this dynamic may enable negotiators to work around it:

But Atran and Ginges also offer some insights that could help to solve conflicts fueled by religious conviction. Casting these conflicts as sacred initially blocks standard business-like negotiation tactics. But making strong symbolic gestures such as sincere apologies and demonstrations of respect for the other’s values generates surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations, they point out.

I doubt it. Have, for example, the West’s repeated prostrations before the global Ummah brought us anything but contempt? Have they brought us any closer to harmony in the Middle East? It hardly seems that way. Nor have well-intentioned pow-wows between the leaders of incompatible faiths ever achieved much of anything at all, so far as I can make out — as predicted by Pollack’s Law of Interfaith Dialogue (as first articulated back in May 2010):

To the extent that dialogue between any two religions is necessary, it is unproductive, and to the extent that it is productive, it is unnecessary.

I see no reason to imagine this principle will be superseded anytime soon.

Fortunately, there are still a few pockets of resistance.

Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.

It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules.

This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.

Now [Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge] say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.

The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.

This insight seems applicable to much more than the dancing robots shown in the linked article. For example, the movement of the center of gravity of social and cultural trends over time surely involves some “quorum sensing” on the part of individuals, followed by “attempts to synchronize with this global average”.

In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this:

Just read white birth rates overtaken by other races in the U.S.? Please let that be somebody’s idea of a sick joke! #rightorwrong

…followed by this:

Nothing against anybody else but this is kind of..our country. Yes or no?

… and, fatally, this:

I’m not a racist who believes in white privelege [sic] but I do believe very strongly in white power.

Stick a fork in him.

I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.

Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.

Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?

After all that we have seen with our own eyes there ought not to be a grownup person who is not contemptuous of the gibberish about an ideal society and does not look for the lineaments of a commissar in the features of an idealist loudmouth.

The trouble is that the young who nowadays want to make history are not interested in history. They are unbelievably ignorant of much that has happened in this terrible century. They will follow anyone who wants to clear the ground for a new world by sweeping away all that exists.

- Before the Sabbath, p. 105

After much back-and-forth I wrote:

Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, philosophy, logic, and even psychology. You and I can discuss it at any length we like, and it’s stimulating and interesting to do so, but ultimately what we decide here doesn’t really matter. We have our opinions, but the only opinion that carries any weight is the Court’s, and even that one looks to be fairly closely divided on this issue.

Supreme Court appointments matter. It’s one of the big reasons why the the next Presidential election matters so much.

I almost added the following, but thought I’d post it here instead:

Most of the bickering about these Constitutional-limitation issues is a matter not of Constitutional “truth”, but of temperament, and of axiomatic differences about the proper form and scope of government. To paraphrase G.C. Lichtenberg, the Constitution is like a mirror: if a Utopian looks in, you can’t expect a realist to look out.

The United States Federal Government is the largest and most complex apparatus of state power that has ever existed. It rules over hundreds of millions of people and the largest economy in history, and it wields military strength that dwarfs any other that the world has ever seen.

“That may be true,” you say, “but why bring it up?”

I bring it up because we individual citizens are small, and the bigger the Federal government is, the smaller we each become in relation to it. Actions of the Federal government must be broad enough in scope to apply with the same fairness and aptness to the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii as they do to me. I am one voice in hundreds of millions, and my local concerns will compete with those of all those other, far-flung corners of the Union — places whose social, political, religious and economic contexts and concerns may differ from my own community’s in a thousand ways.

On the other hand, my state’s government is far smaller, and my county and municipal governments smaller still. Being so much smaller means that they can focus with much sharper resolution on the particular issues that confront their little subset of the nation’s geography and population — and that those citizens will far better able to make their voices heard above the din.

People will generally be happier, will have more control over the affairs of government that daily affect their lives, and will better able to create a shared public life as a community, the more that the mass of government power lies as closely to their local community as possible. After all, the central principle of our Republic is that power flows from the people upward, not from the Federal government downward. The apex of collective power in Washington should be the small end of the pyramid, not its base.

Moreover, in a Republic of semi-autonomous States, each becomes its own laboratory of innovation. Given that there are many ways to solve the myriad problems of governance, decentralization of power makes possible the exploration and comparison of different solutions, with every State free to adopt those that seem best suited to their local temperament, and to serve as an example to others.

If you want further justification for this view, then consider that men are fallible, and prone to the abuse of power. Wisdom then suggests that the less centralized and concentrated the power, the narrower will be the possible scope of its abuse — and the closer those entrusted with such power are to those to whom they are answerable, the warier they will be of the consequences.

These, then, are some of the reasons why we conservatives prefer the bridle to the spur when it comes to aggrandizations and consolidations of Federal power. I won’t attempt to articulate the opposing view, but comments are welcome, as always.

Read them here and here.

The comment-box is open.

The insurance mandate is nothing like requiring people to buy broccoli — a comparison Justice Antonin Scalia suggested in his exasperated questioning of Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. Congress has no interest in requiring broccoli purchases because the failure to buy broccoli does not push that cost onto others in the system.

Really? The point here is whether the individual mandate is as unique as the government would like the Court to think it is. But given that poor diets lead to poor health, and so to higher consumption of health-care services, why couldn’t the government, emboldened by a favorable ruling on the individual mandate, next make the case that failure to consume one’s vegetables increases the health-care cost burden on everyone else?

The point, as Justice Kennedy noted, is that to allow Washington this expansion of coercive power changes the relationship between the individual citizen and the federal government so profoundly, and is so conducive to further intrusive infringement of federal authority on individual liberty, that there is both an extraordinary burden of justification and a need for a clearly articulated limiting principle. It seems that the Solicitor General fell well short of both in yesterday’s arguments.

The argument by the Times seems to be: we want this, we need this, so the Court should just get out of the way. The editorial begins:

In ruling on the constitutionality of requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance, the Supreme Court faces a central test: whether it will recognize limits on its own authority to overturn well-founded acts of Congress.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. (Gotta love that question-begging “well-founded”, too.)

Others might say that the “test” the Court faces is whether it will in fact do what it was created to do: recognize limits on the enumerated powers of the executive and legislative branches to usurp the rights of the States and of individual citizens.

We’ll have to wait and see; this could still go either way. But we can be a little more hopeful, I think, after yesterday’s session.

Not like that nasty Rush Limbaugh, who went right beyond the bounds of civil discourse a few weeks ago by calling Sandra Fluke, who at the time had just petitioned Congress to compel others to subsidize her sex life, a “slut”. How dare he? That’s just beyond the pale, and there was a good deal of stern tut-tutting from the Left about what is and isn’t permissible in a decent society. The President himself, Barack Obama, even called Ms. Fluke to tell her how badly he felt for her.

Now you may have heard that Dick Cheney, former U.S. Representative, White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, and Vice President, is recovering from a heart transplant.

Here’s a tweet posted this morning by Andy Borowitz:

All kidding aside about Dick Cheney, he really is a cocksucker.

As far as I know, this hilarious observation has caused no storm of outrage. Mr. Borowitz is of course free to say whatever he likes — and I realize that he is simply an entertainer, playing to an audience, and that japes like this are how he earns a crust. (The same, of course, could be said about Rush Limbaugh.) I repost his tweet here only to make clear that what you can and can’t get away with in the nation’s media depends very much on who you are, and on whether you insult approved targets — and there is no class of people more acceptable for all levels of vile derision than conservative white male demons like Dick Cheney. Imagine, if you can, Bill O’Reilly making the same tweet about Michelle Obama on the occasion of her recovery from life-threatening surgery, and the liveliness that would ensue.

As I tried to make clear [in a recent podcast], we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes must change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Of course, millions of Muslims are more secular and are eager to help create a global civil society. But they are virtually silent because they have nothing to say that makes any sense within the framework of their faith. (They are also afraid of getting killed.) That is the problem we must keep in view. And it represents an undeniable difference between Islam and Christianity at this point in history. There are also many nefarious people, in both Europe and the U.S., who are eager to keep well-intentioned liberals confused on this point, equating any criticism of Islam with racism or “Islamophobia.” The fact that many critics of Islam are also racists, Christian fascists, or both does not make these apologists any less cynical or sinister.

The only way to know which way is up, ethically speaking, is to honestly assess what people want and what they believe. We must confront the stubborn reality of differing intentions: In every case it is essential to ask, “What would these people do if they had the power to do anything they wanted?”

This is a good beginning, and with it Dr. Harris parts ways with most of the political left. But it leaves us with the question: what to do? Here we hear only a familiar refrain: “These attitudes must change.”

Were I having a drink or three with Dr. Harris, I’d ask him:

“That’s it? ‘These attitudes must change’? But do you have any reason to think they will change? What if they don’t?”

They certainly haven’t shown any sign of doing so; the stubborn fact is that where there is any sizable Muslim population, a sizable subset of them will unapologetically harbor exactly the virulent Islamic beliefs and dispositions that Dr. Harris refers to here. “300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think a person should be put to death” for drawing pictures of the Prophet, many of whom are willing to so something about it? What is the wisest posture for Western nations with large and growing Muslim populations to assume with regard to this fact? Surely it cannot be enough just to say “These attitudes must change”, and hope for the best.

I do respect Sam Harris — I admire his intelligence and forthrightness, and his readiness to consider every issue on its own merits. I often find myself agreeing with him, as I do with most (though not all) of this latest essay. I’d like to know how he would answer my question.

Read it here.

There are lots of rants I could link to here, but instead I’ll direct you to two (mostly) sensible posts by Jacob Sullum at Reason. They are here and here.

[W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position — which is what’s at issue here — deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty. I expect there are respectable arguments for subsidizing contraception (though I am skeptical that there are arguments sufficiently respectable to win me over), but Ms. Fluke made no such argument. All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

There’s one place where I part company with Rush, though: He wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut” because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut” connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute” (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist”. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement”. Is there a single word for that?

But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful — his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket? That seems like a pretty clear call to me.

Our second link was to Professor Landsburg’s next post (brilliantly titled “Contraceptive Sponges — how I wish I’d thought of that one), in which he examines, quite fairly and dispassionately, I think, the arguments for and against publicly subsidized contraception. All in all, there was nothing in either of these to object to in a society that claims to value healthy debate, I think.

But in today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto informs us that the president of Rochester University, Joel Seligman, was “outraged” to read Professor Landsburg’s opinion, and expressed his anger in an official denunciation on University letterhead.

We should hardly be surprised any more (after, for example, the pillorying of Lawrence Summers for expressing a perfectly reasonable hypothesis) to see such a response from the administration of an American university these days; departures from liberal orthodoxy are clearly unwelcome. (It seems fiitting, too, that this item should come along just a day after this comment in one of our recent posts on this topic.) No big deal here, really, as far as the tenured Professor Landsburg is concerned — though, as Mr. Taranto points out, this will give untenured faculty pause next time they think about weighing in on a public controversy with a heterodox political opinion. Mr. Taranto quotes Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, who in a post of his own wrote:

“Seligman’s statement will have, and might as well have been intended to have, a chilling effect on the speech of faculty who are less eminent than Steven Landsburg.”

Professor Landsburg responded with another post, published yesterday, in which he reposts both a statement he made to the press (apparently an academic supporting Rush in this brawl was so newsworthy that he was besieged with press inquiries) and his letter to Joel Seligman.

All in all, worthwhile reading, I think, and I applaud Professor Landsburg for his even-handed and thoughtful approach throughout, which should be a model for us all (myself included).

P.S. After writing this post I went over to Lawrence Auster’s place to see if he had responded to our One-Eyed Man’s comments, and saw that he was all over this UR story as well.

1) Society is a collection of equal persons, all having the right to equal freedom.

2) But remaining traditional social arrangements still render women — half the human race — significantly less free than men.

3) Therefore the attainment of sexual equality — equality between the sexes with regard to everything in life, particularly with regard to sex itself — is society’s highest priority.

4) In order for the sexes to be equal with regard to sex, women should be at no more risk of pregnancy and its inconveniences than men are.

5) In order for women to be at no more risk of pregnancy than men are, society (whether in the form of Georgetown University, or some health insurance company, or the taxpayers) must provide all women in America with free birth control.

Our resident gadfly The One-Eyed Man predictably took issue with this, and commented:

I have read a lot of commentary about this issue, and I had yet to hear that contraception ought to be included as a basic element of health insurance because of the absurd notion that “women should be at no more risk of pregnancy and its inconveniences than men are” – until [Auster] came along. If he wants to argue against the mandate, then he ought to try to refute the case for it, instead of fabricating a straw man.

Lawrence Auster has now posted a response, over at his place. Read it here.

When it comes to calling the kettle black in this wise, however, the Left is a very, very sooty pot — and they reserve a special place in their hearts, and their foul mouths, for black and female conservatives. Michelle Malkin is a prominent member of the latter group, and has been a target, over the years, of some of Liberal America’s vilest imprecations.

She reminisces here.