/ academe
Religion as accidental byproduct
“What I’m interested in is the other story — what all religions have in common,” he said. “These universals of religion come from aspects of peoples’ brains that everybody shared and that emerged early in development.”
From documenting our propensity to believe in teleological (purpose-based) explanations for natural phenomena to the widely held belief that humans possess a soul, a myriad of psychological studies — conducted both here at Yale and at peer universities — now suggest that our brains may be hard-wired to believe in religion.
“The universal themes of religion are not learned,” Bloom said. “They emerge as accidental by-products of our mental systems.”
Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos explained that speculations about the evolutionary origins of religion as a byproduct of other processes are plausible but still remain very uncertain. “All human cultures have religious belief,” she said. “Religions often involve costly commitments and public displays of one beliefs. It’s clear that these capacities are adaptive, so it makes sense to consider the possibility that religion emerged as a byproduct.”
Some researchers see religion as the byproduct of the evolution of other cognitive processes, such as the ability to reason about the actions of agents. Others consider religious beliefs to be an exaptation — a trait that may have begun as an accidental byproduct — but became useful in its own right, she said.
Bloom himself falls into this latter camp of theorists. “My own work suggests that [religion] is a byproduct of how we naturally think about people — and to a large extent, an accidental byproduct,” Bloom said.
See today’s YDN.
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Aetiology of this sort makes the impression made by the man who hands you a helmet as he pushes you down the stairs. If he does so because he thinks brutality amusing, that makes him a masochist; but here he puts down the religious, even if inadvertently, not because he thinks the reduction amusing but because he thinks God is. The Most High is now an ‘accidental byproduct’, the neurological equivalent of Aaron’s golden calf but without the necklaces.
This is not your father’s Ivy League condescension. Today’s sociobiologists have a Procrustean way of so reducing the range of human experience they can tuck it into a rather narrow Freudian bed. C. S. Lewis, writing of his conversion, said that “amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.” W. H. Auden said of his conviction that Jesus is Lord: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.” One wonders if the sociobiologist has ever actually listened to a believer speak honestly of what it’s like to live the faith moment by moment. Who in the Sam Hill could possibly read George Herbert’s poems as exercises in self-absorption? If prayer is just talking to ourselves, I’m not interested. And God knows there are lots of Christians even in California who would just as soon watch the Green Bay Packers on Sunday mornings. — PCE
Amy Hungerford, Professor of English, teaches Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in the first of two lectures (I’ll post the second later in Lent). If you strictly go in for page turners, romance and that sort of thing—if Melville and Faulkner and The Iliad are not among your favorites—then you may not have the eye for McCarthy’s vision. But if you are a member of the Church—that support group for adult children of Adam and Eve—and remember that the first fratricide was Cain; if you hear the slogan “Yes, we can!” and are skeptical of hubris wherever it may be found—then Blood Meridian can take you to the north plains of the human soul. In such parts, the hunger is as dangerous as anything on the Texas frontier.
A space for honor, excellence, and the pursuit of glory
All that remains to be proved is the value of sport to American society as a whole. The conclusion follows naturally from an understanding of America as the bourgeois nation par excellence. The great spiritual threats to bourgeois society are apathy, enervation and acquiescence to mediocrity. Sport is uniquely suited to combat these evils, because it carves out a space for honor, excellence and the pursuit of glory.
At the same time, the modern form of sport subsumes the honor ethic under an institutional structure that does not consider the things of this world to be of ultimate significance. Sport thereby avoids the tribulations of pagan society in favor of the modern Protestant order. Religious devotion to a football team coexists with American Christianity because the fan knows that the former is temporary, but he awaits the eternal satisfaction promised by the latter. Sport is simultaneously an antidote to the worst of the bourgeois order, and a great bulwark thereof.
The supposed insignificance of sport to education is thus shattered. Sport is much more of an educational enterprise than the utopian dreaming of those obsessed with changing the world. Sport recognizes that a thing can possess excellence without possessing perfection, and that there is some good in its preservation.
Athletes of Yale, stand tall. You have the admiration of this second-string second baseman on the club baseball team. The wider student body will sip lattes, wear eclectic scarves, and disdain your allegiance to the institutions of the bourgeois order, but they are mere ingrates. For all the while, in a small way, you have been holding up civilization unawares.
Peter Johnston is a senior in Saybrook College at Yale University. Read the whole column in today’s YDN.
More Alvin Plantinga, this time on solipsism. A two-minute clip.
Corpus Yalensis
Yale, this second half of the twentieth century, is a corpse; which is to say, it resembles the real Yale in no more than accidental qualities, and even deserves the name “Yale” only analogically.
The destruction of the College in New Haven dedicated to the preparation of Christian men for ministry is in no way mitigated by the survival of its name. Nonetheless, that Yale is no more, and that what is called Yale merely inhabits the same buildings and takes the same symbols and trappings, has, to the extent that it has been recognized, been more celebrated than mourned. This itself is further tragedy.
But blindness to tragedy is to be expected from a population that has no sense for the reality of institution. Mourning requires recognition of tragedy, and recognition of tragedy requires apprehension of the real. Even Nietzsche, in his own peculiar way himself in touch with reality, saw that the force of tragedy was its horrible arresting insight into the essence of things. Those that lack such insight, or who, through unbelief in essences, deny that such insight is possible, cannot be expected to recognize even such a tremendous tragedy as the loss of a human monument to God.
That was, to be sure, the essence of Yale, an institution consecrated to divine service. It was because such an essence was signified by the name “Yale” that the utterance of the name alone could inspire a sort of awe. And it is little wonder that the power of the name fades with the aspirations which were its source.
The properly acculturated historian of ideas will explain the “evolution” of Yale by pointing out—quite believably—that the institution simply had to change when people stopped believing the old ideas, and started believing new ones. But such an interpretation implies that Yale is as much a real and unified institution under the new ideas as under the old. This it most manifestly is not; it seems that one of the disregarded and yet to be replaced old ideas included the very belief in the possibility of real and unified institutions. Institution requires purpose, discipline, and a source of authority. These things are not recognized by the new institution, which is as a result not any sort of institution at all, and cannot begin to educate its RstudentsS out of their ignorance of institution.
It seems this very ignorance at least explains why, for instance, the majority of women and men in the College today are so basically unfit for the institution of marriage. Fitness for marriage requires at the least a recognition of its significance, a recognition which must be supported by belief in the reality of moral institutions. But here, unchecked and untrained by the guidance of substantive institutions, moral weakness and ignorance are abundant to the point of celebration. Students attempt to dignify sexual degradation by organizing in its name; others, their moral convictions beaten out of them, stand by permissively. Is it any wonder that so many of the students courageous enough to recognize that something is wrong seek refuge in the relative strength of that most basic of children’s institutions, the fraternity?
In the midst of this devastated landscape, the individual can only begin again and try to be a student. But for what could the student muster a student’s enthusiasm? For God? Apparently we are supposed to believe that we have been persuaded of His death. For country? For our State it is difficult to pretend enthusiasm, and those few who manage border on the excess of fascism. For Yale? She is destroyed, her spirit separated from her body. Those who remember her life are left to wonder whether her spirit could survive the separation, and, if so immortal, whether the body will admit to resurrection.
Joshua Hochschild, Yale ‘95 (Jonathan Edwards). First published in the Yale Free Press, 1994, and in the Yale Journal, 1996.
I don’t think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was. Even the mass media placed a greater emphasis on presenting a broad range of human achievement. I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important. Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace. Of course, I’m not forgetting that politicians can also be famous, but it is interesting how our political process grows more like the entertainment industry each year. When a successful guest appearance on the Colbert Report becomes more important than passing legislation, democracy gets scary. No wonder Hollywood considers politics “show business for ugly people.”
Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial. I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo’s incomparable fresco of the “Creation of Man.” I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam’s finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.
When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn’t trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote? Don’t get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity. But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.
Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to Stanford graduates, 2007, here
The world’s leading church historian, Mark Noll, first gave this talk at a Saint Francis adult forum not long ago. Noll recently left the faculty at his alma mater, Wheaton College, for the University of Notre Dame.
