Us and Them: The Blog

Pure rites and dirty deeds

Before they set out on their mission, the September 11 hijackers purified themselves, body and soul. According to instructions found after the attacks, they were told to shower, and ``shave excess hair from the body and wear cologne.'' They also were to read the Koran, ponder their spiritual life, and pronounce blessings over their clothes, knives, passports and other effects.

Why did they do this? Why, more generally, do religiously-motivated rites and enterprises often have a component of hand-washing, house-cleaning, clothes-laundering, and so on?

It's easy to imagine a simple-minded association: Bodily cleanness promoting the spiritual kind. But perhaps there's another explanation.

Perhaps the point of religious purification is merely to separate the believer from everyday hunches and impulses about his behavior.

Such a separation from common sense could, of course, cause a believer to be more attentive to moral principles and their associated emotions. But that's not the only possible consequence. A break with ordinary moral rules-of-thumb could be a license to ignore everyday politeness and everyday desires for safety -- not to speak of morally charged feelings like empathy, guilt and fear.

The grubby, dusty, incoherent moral life of an ordinary household's ordinary Tuesday is much disparaged by many religions. But that life leaves most people with the feeling that they should behave decently to others. That they should not kill strangers. That they have a right, if not a duty, to preserve their own lives. Soldiers have to be trained to set these hunches aside. So did the hijackers, to judge by another passage in their instructions:

Remind your soul to listen and obey and remember that you will face decisive situations that might prevent you from 100 percent obedience [...]

Religions demand that people do many things that don't automatically ''feel right.'' Perhaps cleaning up, with its attendant physical feeling of ``I'm all right,'' helps suppress psychic feelings of ``I'm doing something weird, even wrong.'' Feelings that can arise if one is called to murder innocent people. Or suppress one's natural human sexuality. Or refuse food made the ``wrong'' way. Or engage, on a Sunday morning, in a rite described as literally eating God's flesh and drinking his blood.

What brings all this to mind is this report in The Economist, about a new study (pdf) by Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth. Schnall is interested in the interaction of physical and moral emotion -- for example, the way, as Paul Rozin showed years ago, that physical disgust makes people more prone to moral disgust.

In that vein, Schnall and her students posed ethical questions to people split into two groups. One consisted of people who'd been told to wash their hands before the session. Those people were more accepting of violations of what I've called common-sense morality (among Schnall's examples were using a kitten for sexual purposes, or taking money found in a lost wallet) than were the unwashed group. The same contrast emerged even if the distinction wasn't about a physical act. A group primed with words like ``pure'', ``washed'' and ``pristine'' also proved more accepting of moral violations than did a group primed with neutral words instead.

Physical cleanliness, of course, protects a person from disgust with himself. Schnall's evidence suggests that this protection can extend from the physical to the psychic realm. Showered, shaved, sweet-smelling in their cologne and blessed shirts, the 9/11 hijackers illustrate exactly why this fact of human nature is no blessing.

Flexibility

Fascinating report in the papers today about how much of the American population has changed religious affiliation. Some 28 percent of adults say they have changed their religious affiliation -- and that counts only serious switches, like Orthodox Christian-to-Catholic, not intramural stuff like Lutheran-to-Methodist.

On the one hand, it's a reminder that religious identity, like any other, can be altered or shed -- incredible as that may seem to people who have not known a society in which religion was not the guideline for distributing opportunity, safety and trust. Identity that seems ineluctable in one place is escapable in another.

On the other hand, the only reason that the news is of interest is precisely because religion still matters so much to Americans. It suggests a curious effect of religious liberation on a history of religious fervent: We now live in a country where, it seems, people feel free to give any answer they please to the religious question -- but where there still is a widespread consensus that the question must be answered.

Maybe Hitchens is right . . .

Maybe religion does ruin everything. Certainly more people the world over in endangered by religious belief than by its opponents, a point this sad story illustrates.

Forbidden question #2: Does the concept of `belief' make sense?

It is often said that terror of this kind is possible only when one has first “dehumanized” some group of people—aristocrats, Jews, the bourgeoisie. In fact, what motivated the spectacle was exactly the knowledge that the victims were people, and capable of feeling pain and fear as people do. We don’t humiliate vermin, or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first.

So says Adam Gopnik, in his recent essay on the French Revolution's Reign of Terror (full text available here).

The more I think about this, the more I think Gopnik is on to something profound.

The world is chock-full of formal and informal practices that mark some kind of person as unworthy of human treatment. They're often gratuitous and sometimes even hinder those who enforce them, yet perpetrators go to a great deal of trouble to keep enacting ritual dehumanizations. I'm thinking of Nazi officials who not only dispossessed Jews of valuables, but also took the time to smash their children's toys; lynch mobs that delayed killing their victims so they could be whipped and ridiculed first; the Jacobins (Gopnik's example) who made families watch as one member after another went to the guillotine; prisons that give medical care to condemned men, so they don't escape the pain and fear of formal execution).

Gopnik's insight is that the focus of these procedures is not the supposed fact of the supposedly non-human nature of the victims. Rather, it's their transition from human-like-us to a lower, outsider status. That focus is also found in procedures that dehumanize people only temporarily, in order to rebuild them (cf. military training, fraternity hazings, training for new-minted physicians, ``rites of passage'' in tribal societies). In those cases, the ``re-humanizing'' ceremony, too, is about change. One you were in that category; now you are in this one.

People are fascinated, appalled, magnetized by such spectacles of exile from human status. We don't want to know how the heretics were costumed and abused in those autos-da-fe, yet we read on; we don't want to see the photos from Abu Ghraib, yet we can't turn away.

Indeed, the most common dehumanizing routines are so compelling that people use them in situations very far from politics, religion, rites of passage and so on. I don't have to go far in my circle of acquaintances to find lovers who declare that they're willing slaves to the beloved; couples who treat spanking as erotic, rather than punitive; apologetic people who gladly change their ways and make sacrifices to earn forgiveness.

Perhaps the power of these dehumanizing practices is so great that people circle back to them, wherever emotions are strong, even in contexts where they don't make much sense. Maybe that's why such practices are used to teach children how to behave.

Requiring obedience, physical punishment, imposing burdens in exchange for kindness, giving control and autonomy only as rewards for good conduct -- prisons and training camps use this stuff because it works. So do a lot of parents. (Do dehumanizing practices come from child-rearing? Is it because most people are parents that they understand how to shame, intimidate, shun and lord it over the neighbors, if they are declared to be of the wrong race or religion or nationality? Dunno. Seems worth asking.)

In any event, if Gopnik is right (and I think he is), then most of us have got dehumanization backwards. We've been speaking about the experience as if it were like air conditioning -- it's off until it's on, and after it's on, it's pervasive until it's somehow turned off.

But consider that the power of dehumanization is all about change: Not the supposedly stable and permanent categories, but the drama of movement from one to another. If that's so, then it's not belief that leads to abuse; it makes more sense to say abuse leads to belief. Did you help lynch the neighbors because you came to believe they are subhuman? Perhaps you now believe they are subhuman because you were involved in the lynching. More likely, what you believe about them varies a great deal in the course of a day, in ways that can be mapped but that don't boil down to a simple cause-and-effect in either direction.

Which brings me to today's forbidden question. It has been on my mind as I've been reading lately about the problem of how science and religion should interact. A lot of what I've read states, or assumes, that people have ``beliefs'' and that these beliefs make them do things. It's the air conditioner model again: If I convert to Christianity, I used to have those beliefs set to ``Off''; now they're ``On'' and because of that, I behave differently.

Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist, has lucidly explained why this seems a poor model of belief's relationship to behavior. (His brief essay is here, at the bottom of this web page from Edge.org

I found his critique convincing, by and large. It's not just that I notice a wide range of beliefs among members of ``the same'' religion; it's that I find a wide range of beliefs in each individual member, as their circumstances change. (A point Judith Shulevitz has explored with her customary acuity in this essay.)

The other day, for example, a psychologist friend described an experiment she'd recently run, which found that simple subliminal exposure to words like ``Darwin,'' ``natural selection'' and other evolutionary terms was enough to turn down the intensity of volunteers' self-reported religious convictions.

To speculate wildly, (what else are blogs for, anyway?) I wonder if future theories of mind will jettison the concept of ``beliefs.'' Perhaps instead psychologists will speak of persuasion and justification in an ever-changing sea of emotions and perceptions -- a world where people believe hundreds of things before breakfast, but not one in which there are static, unchanging things called Beliefs, which are either On or Off, Present or Absent, Perfect Copies or Junk.

Ethnic Violence Watch: Australia Riots

Not whites versus aborigines. It's whites versus ``Lebs'' -- short for Lebanese, ie people who look Middle Eastern or Muslim.

Could be a case of rival gangs at a beach town during the hot summer months. But with the world's largest Muslim nation -- Indonesia -- just to the north, this could be a much bigger problem.

Danger: Religion!

Of course parents worry about the effects of movies, computer games and pop music on their kids. Though causation is hard to prove, correlations -- for example, between watching violent shows and acting violent -- certainly capture people's attention.

In this paper, by Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society, the author uses the same statistical techniques on a different subject. He writes:

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies."

I admit, it's a pleasure to see conservatives' dubious statistical methods wielded against them. Loosely defining religious belief, choosing what and how to count, prefacing your numbers with a polemic about the menace posed by other people's way of life, not bothering to compare the correlation to other possible relationships among the measures: all of this is familiar from claims that sexy videos cause teen pregnancy or that ``Grand Theft Auto'' makes kids violent.

The problem with these moral-panicky assertions is that a correlation between two measures does not establish that one causes the other. Nor does it prove that the connection is more than a coincidence. For example, two recently fallen Illinois politicians -- a governor charged with corruption and a Senate candidate who dropped out after some embarrassing sexual revelations -- were both named Ryan (they were not related). But being named Ryan, despite this correlation, is not a cause of political disaster, nor a sign of some other cause to be discovered.

The lack of significance of a simple correlation in itself is especially important to recall when the measurements you're linking -- with labels like ``religious belief'' or ``bad teen-age behavior'' -- can be defined in so many different ways.

Paul, whose real goal seems to be an assault on the anti-science movement to teach ``intelligent design'' in schools, is blasting at the other side with their own dubious instruments. For the weakness of his analysis, see this thorough explanation by Scott Gilbreath.

In sum, this is science being used as a cover for tribal feeling. ``Danger: Religion!'' is the title of a story by the British science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss, which is set in a time-travelling society whose vehicles are equipped with warning devices to prevent landing in epochs of religious belief. How you feel about the title will tell you how you'll feel about Paul's paper. What you think about it is a different matter.

The Present Shapes the Past . . .

So said the historian Marc Bloch. An important point if you want to contemplate how human kinds endure for centuries. What's the nature of our connection to those long-dead people we claim as forbears?

A good example comes from The Economist's review this week of a book about the day in 1453 when the Greeks lost Constantinople to the Turks under Mehmet the Conqueror. The anonymous Economister writes:

Were they “Greeks” and “Turks” in the modern sense? Of course not, because the nation-state had not been invented. On the attacking side, the best troops were Slavic; so, it seems, were at least half the genes of Mehmet; his feisty commander, Zaganos Pasha, was of Greek origin. The defenders included Venetians, Catalans and above all Genoese.

We moderns, alive now, are the ones who decide that today's Greeks and Turks are ``the same'' as the two sides that fought in 1453. To note the ``Greeks'' weren't Greek and the ``Turks'' not all Turkish is not to debunk cherished traditions. It is simply to note that our connection to the past is always made in the present. When people try to find great and eternal truths in that connection, then, they're chasing their own tales.

Science and Ethnicity Watch

Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending of the University of Utah recently wrote a paper in which they proposed (a) that Ashkenazic Jews are said to be smart because they ``really'' are; (b) that this is so because Ashkenazim spent nearly a thousand years in Europe in a social "niche" that required brains—traders and financiers in a society that forbade them to be farmers or soldiers; (c) that certain genes found among Ashkenazim are the cause of their high intelligence; and (d) that these same genes are also responsible for a cluster of hereditary diseases, including Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, and breast cancer, that are more common among Ashkenazim than they are in other groups.

You can quarrel with the paper's assumptions. For its points about intelligence, it relies on IQ tests, for instance, which is controversial -- and anyway how do we know what the Jews of 1400 would score on a test invented in the 1920's? But the paper's also an interesting example of how once-separate levels of analysis are being linked, as scholars created a new science of human kinds.

Anyway, my take on it is here, at Nextbook.com .

Short Take: Ethnic-Religious Violence in Thailand

Sri Lanka's ethnoreligious conflict, between the Hindu Tamils and the Sinhalese Buddhists, led to the invention of the suicide bomber. In Thailand, Seth Mydans reports today, the fighting is between Buddhists and Muslims.

Americans familiar only with this country's elite forms of Buddhism are sometimes surprised that this religion, like the others, has been invoked in mass hatred and killing. But human-kind feeling is its own kind of experience, with its own rules. To the extent that religion is used to tell Us from Them, the principles of that faith are irrelevant.

Communion

On my desk is a York Peppermint patty, handed to me yesterday on the street by a Christian.

I didn't know he was a Christian. He and his partner were standing by the subway entrance with boxes of candy, so I thought he worked for the York people. (Though he was dressed like a normal person, not like a Peppermint patty or a snack-loving Yeti, which would be more the corporate-publicity style.) With my free candy came a postcard-sized handout, which turned out to extol the blessings of Jesus, not York.

Human nature is like the musical scales, or chess, or language: Unchanging principles, out of which an infinite amount of change can be created. Handing out candy to help evangelize Brooklyn was someone's new idea. But it rests on an ancient principle of animal life: Obtain food. Food good. Pay attention to sources of food.

Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has done brilliant research on food, found that people, when eating, are more receptive and less judgmental about both ideas and other people. Human institutions anticipated modern psychology by millennia, of course. To transact business, arrange marriages, win friends, people all over the world sit down to eat together. Religions have made food central to their message since forever.

I don't like peppermint, actually. But I took it without thinking. Food good!