This week, we YouTubed an interview with Dr. Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair -  a Norwegian evolutionary psychologist (also available in podcast format). Though our conversation was largely centered on behavioral differences between men and women, there were some pieces from the conversation that were quite interesting, and constitute a larger theme that has come up in several interviews that we’ve conducted this week. Kennair mentioned that the goal of religion is to create in and out groups - and that humans coming together into a single group would require something totally external to everyone like an alien invasion. 

We didn’t pull on this thread during our conversation, but wanted to elaborate on it after a week of interviews that brushed up against it, in some form or another. Here’s our analysis:

MSD: Dr. Kennair boils religion down to in- and out- groups but it seems to me like religion has a few other purposes, historically. For instance, there’s a sense of stability offered — the rule of law in the case of Abrahmic traditions. Codes of conduct in other cases. There’s also the possibility that religion was developed by statesmen/priest-class individuals to justify power grabs.

AB:   Sure, it just happens to be the codified preferences of a culture that swept across the modern world some 6,000 years ago. But I imagine that the formulation of these rules, even at the very origin of the rulebook, would have been a mechanism for isolating one group from another. Either by way of preference or necessity, I don’t know.

MSD:  Do you think that the isolation of groups like this was in some way designed to buffer male-on-male violence?  It’s interesting that a lot of traditional religious code doesn’t involve women at all.

AB: I’m not an expert about this, but I have a feeling that female power - outside of the occasional amazonian or Isle of Lesbos situation - was likely to be in the form of soft power. Judeochristian religion, though, doesn’t strike me as something that really frowns upon violence. Does it?

MSD: Not in- versus out- group violence, but it seems to minimize in-group violence, with the exception of rule-breakers, right?

AB:  In our conversation with Shamus Mac this weekend (not yet released episode), he proposed that the state was actually an extension of religion, which wasn’t against violence so much as it was against others having access to violence. Organized religion simply held the monopoly on force, and so was able to decide who got dispatched, when. 

Which I’m not totally convinced by, but I do wonder why these large religions were so successful in building their membership rosters for thousands of years.

MSD:  I think Shamus is correct in noting that there wasn’t really a separation of church and state in most states, historically. This covers everything from the European middle ages back through ancient Egypt.  

AB: Sure, and the ingroup-outgroup mindset must have had something to do with that, right?

Say you’re a peasant in the middle ages, and someone is reading out of a book in a kooky language and telling you that they’ve got all the rules that are going to prevent you from burning violently for all of eternity. You’re probably pretty excited at what they’ve got on offer. But then they tell you that in the kooky book, it says you have to go to some distant land and destroy the people there, because they… what, they don’t agree with you? Their existence makes you more likely to violently burn for all eternity?

MSD:  Are you talking about the crusades or something? The Mongolian invasion of the West?

AB: I’m being flippant, but I imagine that this could be stretched to apply to most in/out group scenarios for most of human history. There’s some organizing principle, which is then used to dispatch a collection of people whose goal is to destroy someone else.

MSD:  I think that in many, if not most animals where there is sexual competition among males, there is an inherent will to “destroy someone else.” At least among males. Is it possible that the state/religion just channels this away from the in-group with conquest?

AB: Don’t you think it predates the existence of the state? Even bacterial colonies seem to be able to recognize self vs. non-self. That would make this one of the most evolutionary ancient practices on the entire earth. Instead, religion becomes a manifestation of a much older paradigm. 

MSD:  Bacteria of the same species? The weird thing here is the humans are all of the same species.

AB: Yeah, totally, bacteria from the same culture tube allowed to develop as two separate biofilms, will repel one another when they come into contact. 

MSD:  Wow. I didn’t realize that. So this evolutionary paradigm seems to align with Dr. Kennair’s assertion that the overarching purpose of religion is to fortify in-groups. What about the possibility that it’s developed top-down by the priest/ruling-class to centralize power and control access to resources?

AB: Well, he said to *create* ingroups. I agree that it’s there to fortify them, but from my perspective, it’s working with something that’s way older than humans, primates, even animals. And the idea that religion’s a top-down power structure to centralize control? I’m more inclined to see it as a natural outgrowth of progressively larger and larger societies. As far as I can tell religion and agriculture came about at the same time in human history, which suggests that it’s a mechanism for creating incentives. Farming is hard work when you’re doing it for yourself. Farming and giving up most of what you harvest in order to feed the slaves building the pyramids probably requires a stronger nudge. 

MSD: Gotcha. So we’re circling around the idea that in-groups are the norm in biology; they don’t need to be created.

So you see religion as a product of in-groups, not a creator of them as Dr. Kennair asserts. 

I can see that. If farming appeared around the same time as religion, and then the pyramids and slavery and invasion came later, that would suggest that the state/priest-class used naturally occurring religion to motivate public participation in conquest.

AB: Sure, and conquest doesn’t even have to be nefarious, just resource and territory driven. If agriculture causes your population to grow, that will create a feedback loop where you don’t really have an option but to secure more land because your population keeps growing, and you know what happens when the food runs out. 

MSD: So then what’s wild about the present moment is that agriculture and population are at an all-time max. But war is at an all-time min. In-groups are shrinking but multiplying. Political alliance seems to be the new religion, at least in this country.

AB: it’s definitely weird, I’m going to see if I can dig up the data on just how much the number of wars has fallen. Two things. Number one, there were some pretty deadly wars recently, and the continued conflicts in the Middle East and Africa have killed millions in the last few decades. Countries like the US, China, and Russia are most likely still wrestling for control behind the scenes, so it’s hard for me to say that everything’s peachy.But there has been a decrease in overt violence, which might have something to do with the fact that violence stops economic growth, and in a global economy it’s impossible to stop someone else’s economic growth without seriously impacting your own? It’s not like the US is going to start a war and China and win. 

MSD:  Yes, for sure. The global scale of interaction seems to imply a very new paradigm. What happens among those two bacterial colonies once they occupy the entire petri dish? It seems like there’s two options: one kills off the other, or they get shuffled together productively.  Perhaps even become indistinguishable eventually. Do you then think that in- and out- group conflict will become a marginalized force simply as a function of necessary cooperation? (if they don’t simply slaughter the other).

AB: So, with the bacteria it’s pretty weird, and I think this is where the analogy breaks down - they don’t actually ever grow into each other, or kill each other off. They just don’t grow in the space that’s right between the colonies. I’m not sure anyone has studied exactly how that works.

For humans, it’s an open question if we’re going to manage to cooperate, or if we’ll just push things to the brink until populations collapse and we have to spend all our energy getting back to this point. Whatever happens, I’m pretty sure that it’s a Groundhog Day situation. If we can’t figure out how to make it through this phase of growth right now, we’re going to get stuck here until we do.

MSD: I absolutely agree.  Dr. Kennair seems to see us stuck here into perpetuity. Or we get invaded by aliens. Even then, I wonder if after fighting off the aliens, we wouldn’t settle back into in- and out- group behavior.

AB: If you look at the kind of art that humans make, that certainly seems like the default assumption, that intergroup conflicts will dominate the future. But from my perspective that seems like an easy way out, a method for letting people off the hook for learning to be better, to manage conflicts more gracefully, and to refuse to be eaten up by this group dynamics stuff. 

MSD: Cue Us and Them.  The first step in any conflict seems to be getting parties to agree on a shared value. In this case, the moderation of mal-adaptive, violent, us-and-them dynamics. The ability to simultaneously align with those we love and identify with but at the same time not so savagely berate and malign outsiders. How can that be incentivized?

AB: That’s a good question… People that I talk to about this are always really preoccupied with the idea that their opponent might not be a good person, and so tolerating their perspective would by proxy make them a not-good-person. 

Which is a little perplexing to me, because I can count on the fingers of one hand how many really bad people I’ve met. Most are just kind of clueless and inconsiderate. 

Jeeze I really have no idea how to incentivize people to stop ganging up on other people, I’m at a loss. You got some gold for me? 

MSD: Yeah. I think you have to take each situation on its own terms and use comedy, rhetoric, and vivid examples to show them how gross their affect actually is. A long, multi-front campaign that each leader, creator, artist, friend, parent has to embrace.

AB: Ooh, I like that - more art that lets humans think about the kinds of problems they’d be able to focus on if they stopped paying so much attention to inter-group conflict.

MSD: Yeah, I wonder what sort of dramas could be unleashed that didn’t resort to zero-sum dynamics between groups. This will take some reflection.

AB: We’ve got some other conversations brewing on this - but I think the next round should be with folks that are really strongly preoccupied with group politics. At least to see if we can find common ground.

-DS-