Falls, where the enormous one-mile-wide Zambezi River drops 355 feet into a narrow crack drained by an even narrower gorge into a pool (appropriately called the Boiling Pot) through which plunges the river’s entire volume. The roar of the falls, the blackness of the rock walls, the mist filling the entire crack and gorge, and the churning of the water below the falls suggest what the entrance to hell must be like, if there is a hell. Just over the Boiling Pot, the gorge is traversed by a bridge across which pedestrians can walk between the countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe, whose border is formed by the river. From that bridge, tourists so inclined bungee-jump into the black, roaring, spray-filled gorge. As I watched the scene, I could not bring myself even to walk towards the bridge, and I reflected that I couldn’t have bungee-jumped there even if I were told that that was the only way to save the lives of my wife and children. But we were later visited by one of my son’s 22-year-old classmates, a young man named Lee, who did bungee-jump into that gorge, by plunging head-first off the bridge with a rope tied to his ankles. I was astonished at Lee’s voluntarily paying to do something so terrifying that I would have paid all my life’s savings in order to avoid doing it—until I reflected on some equally horrible experiences that I had chosen to undergo as a student cave-explorer at that same age of 22, when I was equally risk-seeking.
Finally, some societies are more tolerant of accepting risks than other, more conservative societies. Such differences are familiar among First World societies and have been observed among Native American tribes and among New Guinea tribes. Just to mention one current example: during recent military operations in Iraq, American soldiers have been described as more risk-taking than French and German soldiers. Speculative explanations for this difference include the lessons learned by France and Germany from the slaughter of almost 7,000,000 of their citizens during the two world wars in often foolishly risky military operations; and the founding of modern American society by emigrants from other lands who were willing to accept the risks of uprooting themselves to move to a strange new homeland, leaving behind risk-averse countrymen in their land of origin.
Thus, all human societies face dangers, although different types of dangers lie in store for peoples at different localities or with different lifestyles. I worry about cars and step-ladders, my New Guinea lowland friends about crocodiles and cyclones and enemies, and the !Kung about lions and droughts. Each society has adopted a spectrum of measures for mitigating the particular hazards that it recognizes. But we citizens of WEIRD societies don’t always think as clearly as we should about the dangers that we face. Our obsession with the dangers of DNA technologies and spray cans would better be focused on the homely hazards of cigarettes and cycling without helmets. Whether traditional peoples make similar misestimates of their lives’ dangers remains to be studied. Are we WEIRD moderns especially prone to misestimate risks because we get most of our information second-hand from television and other mass media that emphasize sensational but rare accidents and mass deaths? Do traditional peoples estimate risks more accurately because they instead learn only from the first-hand experiences of themselves, their relatives, and their neighbors? Can we learn to think more realistically about dangers?
PART FIVE
RELIGION, LANGUAGE, AND HEALTH
CHAPTER 9
What Electric Eels Tell Us About the Evolution of Religion
Definitions of religion Functions and electric eels The search for causal explanations Supernatural beliefs Religion’s function of explanation Defusing anxiety Providing comfort Organization and obedience Codes of behavior towards strangers Justifying war Badges of commitment Measures of religious success Changes in religion’s functionsQuestions about religion
“In the beginning, all people lived around a great ironwood tree in the jungle, speaking the same language. One man whose testes were enormously swollen from infection with a parasitic worm spent his time sitting on a branch of the tree, so that he could rest his heavy testes on the ground. Out of curiosity, animals of the jungle came up and sniffed at his testes. Hunters then found the animals easy to kill, and everyone had plenty of food and was happy.
“Then, one day, a bad man killed a beautiful woman’s husband, in order to get the woman for himself. Relatives of the dead husband attacked the murderer, who was defended in turn by his own relatives, until the murderer and his relatives climbed into the ironwood tree to save themselves. The attackers tugged on the lianas hanging from one side of the tree, in order to pull the tree’s crown down towards the ground and get at their enemies.
“Finally, the lianas snapped in half, causing the tree to spring back with tremendous force. The murderer and his relatives were hurled out of the tree in many directions. They landed so far away, in so many places, that they never found each other again. With time, their languages became more and more different. That is why people today speak so many separate languages and cannot understand each other, and why it is hard work for hunters to catch animals for food.”
That story is told by a tribal people in northern New Guinea. The story exemplifies a widespread class of myths called origin myths, familiar to us through accounts of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel in the Bible’s book of Genesis. Despite those parallels with Judeo-Christian religions, traditional New Guinea societies, like other small-scale societies, lacked churches, priests, and sacred books. Why is that tribal belief system so reminiscent of Judeo-Christian religions in its origin myth, yet so different in other respects?
Virtually all known human societies have had “religion,” or something like it. That suggests that religion fulfills some universal human need, or at least springs from some part of human nature common to all of us. If so, what is that need, or that part of human nature? And what really defines “religion”? Scholars have been debating these and related questions for centuries. For a belief system to constitute a religion, must it include belief in a god or gods or some supernatural forces, and does it necessarily include anything else? When, in human evolutionary history, did religion appear? Human ancestors diverged from the ancestors of chimpanzees around 6,000,000 years ago. Whatever religion is, we can agree that chimps don’t have it, but was there already religion among our Cro- Magnon ancestors and our Neanderthal relatives of 40,000 years ago? Were there different historical stages in the development of religions, with creeds like Christianity and Buddhism representing a more recent stage than tribal belief systems? We tend to associate religion with humanity’s noble side, not with its evil side: why, then, does religion sometimes preach murder and suicide?
These questions posed by religion are especially interesting in the context of this book, devoted to exploring the whole spectrum of human societies, from small-scale or ancient to populous or modern. Religion is an area where traditional institutions still thrive within otherwise modern societies: the world’s major religions today arose between 1,400 and over 3,000 years ago, in societies much smaller and more traditional than the ones that still espouse those religions today. Religions nevertheless vary with the scale of society, and that variation cries out for explanation. In addition, most readers of this book, and I, question our personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof) at some point in our lives. When we do, understanding of the different things that religion has meant to different people may help us find answers that fit us as individuals.
For individuals and for societies, religion often involves a huge investment of time and resources. To
