Is religion a natural instinct that, when kicked out the door, comes back (as Groucho Marx would say) innuendo? Are even cocksure secularists furtively religious and superstitious in spite of themselves, primed by evolutionary imperatives to pay unwitting tribute to spirits and gods?
The answer, according to the British evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson, is a resounding, Darwinian yes. His iconoclastic book (if your icon is a New Atheist) argues that religious beliefs are not just illusory byproducts of our big, fanciful brains, expendable once scientific understanding is there to replace them.
On the contrary, they have been drilled into us by natural selection. Religious reflexes do all of us some good, including atheists—or vaguely agnostic skeptics like myself. They can enhance our control of wayward impulses and our alertness for behavior that threatens group well-being. So we can forget about simply flushing them out of our minds, which is what the New Atheists have been praying for. Faith of some sort, Johnson suggests, guides us as much as reason. Religion is, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of: It’s doing what comes naturally.
It’s not breaking news that secularists trying to stamp out religious urges are pretty much in the position of puritans with respect to sexual urges. They keep succumbing to those urges themselves. Secular modernity has been manufacturing shiny new idols ever since the French Revolution, when pretty girls in white vestments, representing rationality triumphant, were solemnly venerated at Festivals of Reason.
During the 20th century, militantly antireligious regimes lost no time in coming up with their own inerrant scriptures, their iconic pictures of an exalted, redemptive leader on every wall, and a large, stupefying assembly of myths and devils. And Freudian psychology, dismissing religion as a collective neurosis, had its own totems and taboos, and soon splintered into rival dogmatic sects.
In contemporary America, people who think they’ve left religion behind run and work out religiously and adopt diets of drastic renunciation (vegan, organic, macrobiotic, gluten-free, raw, etc.) that outmatch the most austere monastic regimens. They frequent holistic healers and spiritually aware therapists. They meditate, do yoga, and wonder if they’re losing their mindfulness.
“Supernatural beliefs,” Johnson remarks, “cannot be in decline any more than any other ingrained characteristic of human nature. All that is happening is that cultural vehicles for those beliefs are manifesting themselves in new and different ways.” He mentions the popular appetite for “science fiction, fantasy, ghost stories, conspiracy theories, extraterrestrial intelligence . . . and new age religions,” and the way that the animist and magical-thinking impulses of our Paleolithic ancestors reappear in our own superstitious habits. We attrib-ute agency, including malice, to inanimate objects, look for fateful meanings and messages in coincidences, and engage in preparatory rituals, or favor lucky shirts or numbers, hoping they will bend the odds in our favor.
Since I’ve long believed that most people are drawn to myths, not facts, and revere or revile symbols and archetypes, not muddled realities, I have no problem with Johnson’s basic notion that we are bound to crave intimations of some supernatural something. What is more questionable (but still very interesting) about this book is the crucial role that it assigns to what both Enlightenment-schooled humanists and the gentler sort of religious believers like least about traditional religion: harsh and hellish supernatural punishments.
Religion, Johnson concedes, is a complex and highly variable phenomenon across the world, but if it has a universal essence, it’s fear and trembling. What was so vital to social cooperation that it got into our genes is the nervous feeling that Somebody Up There might not like us.
Drawing on game theory and controlled experimental ordeals arranged by social scientists, Johnson tells us that human beings are, like other animals, deeply motivated by fear, by a sense of danger. We are wired to perceive threats, and even to misperceive and exaggerate them, because through eons of evolution the cost of ignoring a possible threat was very high, while missing out on a possible reward was usually not fatal.
As early human societies increased in population and complexity, selfish or disruptive behavior threatening group interests became harder to detect. It had to be policed where there were no police. Studies show that people behave less selfishly when they think they are being watched; they even behave better when there is a picture of an eye on the wall of the room that they’re in. A God who saw through walls and pretenses was an eye that could never be evaded—although, Johnson adds, the idea of karma in Eastern religions worked just as well. The point is payback. Supernatural punishment of some sort appears, Johnson says, in virtually all cultures: “Without it, religion does not work.”
And without religion, he implies, modernity does not work. Religions offer “an intimate relationship with God. . . . People don’t love big government and surveillance cameras.” So there has been, since the 1970s, a resurgence of religious belief—
in particular, fundamentalism—which the French scholar Gilles Kepel has called “the revenge of God.” Kepel, in Johnson’s paraphrase, regards this turn to religion as “a reflection of widening and deepening discontent with the modern world and its politics” that can be seen nearly everywhere.
In Johnson’s view, this is inevitable. The old or new atheist vision of modernity—a scientifically guided, religion-free world—is a mirage. Science can study religion, accommodate it, explain things without it, but not replace it: “The human mind,” in the words of Edward O. Wilson, “evolved to believe in gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”
So far, so good. But I suspect that what fundamentalism has in common with modern utopian and ultra-nationalist political movements and with New Age mystiques and quasi-religious practices like meditation and vegetarianism is a quest for purity, not a yen for supernatural punishment. Modernity is complex, confused, urban, erotic, anxious: In its neon-lit light, ancient pieties can look pure. The same goes for peasants, primeval nature, and primitive tribes, Tibetan Buddhists, and ethereal diets. Or radiant, rational, religion-free futures.
So I think Johnson oversells his wrathful gods. Even in terms of social utility, as enforcers of human cooperation, they may not be indispensable and they can be counterproductive. He admits that the pagan Greek and Roman gods, who were capricious and of doubtful moral character themselves, had virtually no bearing on the virtue of their worshippers. A sense of tradition, civic duty, honor, and shame sufficed to keep most people in line. The same can be said of many other societies, ancient and modern.
“Religion,” Johnson has to admit, “may or may not be the best way to engineer social cooperation. Like most things, it has pros and cons.” The cons are considerable. Many intensely religious societies (as he himself notes) have had persistently high crime rates. And others have directly encouraged horrific violence in the form of sectarian conflicts, persecutions, inquisitions, jihads, and severe, supernaturally sanctioned punishments. In the last sentence of his book, Johnson tells us that “in order to help self-interested and fallible humans get along, the gods have had to be cruel to be kind.” Maybe—but sometimes they have been cruel just to set a bad example. Fiercely punitive gods tend to create fiercely punitive people in their image. Sanctimonious sadism isn’t rare in human life.
In any case, even as a backhanded, evolutionary endorsement of religion, this book, with its stress on supernatural surveillance and retribution, won’t please most believers, who are moved by other things that faith offers: a sense of transcendence, a feeling of reconciliation with nature and God and others, communion, and compassion. And, at least, a strong hint of cosmic truth. Having quoted Voltaire’s famous remark that if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him, Johnson just adds, in effect, that the invention has been genetically patented.
Still, God Is Watching You does raise some provocative questions about whether you can have a stable and durable society that disposes of shame and severe punishments, tolerates defiantly antisocial expression and behavior, and quarantines religion as a private enthusiasm, like golf or crossword puzzles. It gives us the old-time religion in a new light and warns us that, whatever we think of the god-fearing ghosts that haunt us, they may be here to stay.
Lawrence Klepp is a writer in New York.
