If God didn’t exist, he’d need to be invented.
—Voltaire1
Ironically, one of the least empathetic men in history, Mobutu Sese Seko, preserved the jungle that now serves as the playground of the world’s only bonobo sanctuary. It was the last piece of jungle in the capital city of Kinshasa. At Lola Ya Bonobo (Lingala for “bonobo paradise”), a large number of apes live on the lush grounds of the former Congolese dictator’s weekend retreat. It is here that the man with the leopard skin hat, who extracted anywhere between five and ten billion dollars from this poor nation, feasted on delicacies flown in from Europe while plotting the public hangings of his rivals.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a huge country—the size of Western Europe—that encompasses the bonobo’s native habitat. The species is gravely endangered, however, with only an estimated 5,000 to 50,000 bonobos left. Even the latter figure is still less than the number of seats in a typical sports stadium. Unfortunately, wild bonobos are being killed for bush meat, while any babies found clinging to the victims are kept alive, since they fetch thousands of dollars on the black market. The selling of bonobos is illegal, though, so these baby apes are often confiscated and brought to Claudine André, the Belgian founder and director of the sanctuary. At Lola, the orphans are raised in a nursery by Mamans, local women who watch over them and give them the bottle. After a few years, the youngsters join the groups out in the forest, which roam on their own even though they remain dependent on human provisioning. It is here that we conduct our studies of empathy, since we can get much closer to these apes than to those in the wild. Fieldworkers are lucky to see their bonobos regularly, and sustained observation of social interactions is nearly impossible in dense foliage.
One of my co-workers, Zanna Clay, patiently waits for spontaneous conflicts among the bonobos, collecting them on video so that we can analyze their aftermath. Inevitably, these incidents cause distress in one or both parties. How do bystanders react? They reassure anyone who has lost a fight by means of genito-genital rubbing, a brief mount, or a manual massage of the genitals. What chimps do with platonic touching calls for sexual engagement among bonobos. The principle, however, is exactly the same in both species: the apes down-regulate each other’s anxieties. This is such a basic emotional response that we notice it even among orphans in the nursery, who have barely had any social models to learn it from. And they, too, often do so in a sexual manner.
At other times, however, bonobos behave more like chimps, embracing or grooming each other. Take the return of Makali, an adult male, who was injured in a fierce group attack. His hand was badly bitten. Afterwards, Makali hid from the group for several nights, biding his time in the forest instead of joining the rest in their sleeping quarters. When he finally did show up, he quietly sneaked into a group lounging in a shady area. He was immediately surrounded by curious juveniles. Some seemed to mimic the awkward way in which he held up the limb with its infected wound. They reached for it, but Makali systematically avoided their grabby little hands. With a pained expression on his face, he held his hurt finger in front of him, bending his wrist downward. The adults were more diplomatic, initiating contact with grooming. He was first approached by a dominant male, who planted a kiss on his neck, after which he was groomed by one of the females. Whereas the juveniles had come up to him in gangs, the adults seemed to await their turn, arriving one by one. The first to handle his injury was the alpha female, Maya. She groomed him briefly, then took his hand and carefully licked the open wound. He let her do so. This seemed to mark his acceptance back into the group, leading one of his main attackers to enter the scene. Normally, Makali had an entirely antagonistic relationship with this male. But after briefly staring at the injury, he groomed Makali, something no one remembered ever having seen before.2
These are the normal love-hate cycles of social life. The same alternation between conflict and reunion marks human families, marriages, and every typical primate group. It is good to keep in mind, though, that these bonobos are far from typical. They have suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of humans, losing their mothers to poacher snares or bullets at a tender age. That they are capable of reconciling after fights at all, and of calming down upset companions, is truly remarkable. Zanna has noticed that bonobos born in the Lola groups (the apes are allowed to breed, and some orphans have become mothers) are far more skilled at conflict resolution and more inclined to show sympathy than their orphaned peers. This advantage of mother-rearing fits what we know about emotion regulation, also in humans. Romanian orphans, for example, are marked by long-lasting emotional devastation. This makes it all the more astonishing that the orphans at Lola have built a decent social life together. It is a testimony of their resilience and of the great human care they have received. After having lost everything at the hands of hunters, they were lovingly fed and cuddled by humans, who became substitute mothers. They had to mentally distinguish between the contrasting manifestations of this bipedal ape, capable of such cruelty and such kindness at the same time. It seems a confusing lesson to learn early in life.
Having grown up in a nursery, the bonobos remain fascinated by bottles and employ them to demonstrate their empathy. One adult female picks up an empty plastic bottle, fills it up with muddy water from the river, and sits down in front of two juveniles, one of whom is her own child. She then moves the bottle gently to the mouth of one and tips it so that the water flows between his pouted lips, filling up his lower lip. Once his mouth is full, the female tips the bottle slightly back and keeps it in place while waiting until he has gulped. Then she gives him some more, until she turns her attention to the other juvenile, who pouts as soon as she looks at her, knowing it is her turn. The female puts the bottle near her mouth, too, and starts over. I have never seen this procedure, full of gentle attention to the other’s swallowing abilities, from any other ape. Possibly, the female is reenacting the role of Maman, and the juveniles play along.
Since the whole river runs right next to them, it can’t be about needing a drink.
Life and Death
Awareness of death is often mentioned as a reason why we humans developed religion. Our sense of mortality is mentioned in one breath with the question whether we may be the only ones to have it. I have no clear answer, except that when it comes to the mortality of others, there is no reason to assume ignorance in our fellow primates. Like the Lola bonobos, apes are plenty familiar with death and loss. Sometimes they are themselves the killers, as on the day the bonobos dispatched a Gaboon viper, a highly poisonous snake. The snake aroused fear; everyone jumped back at its every move. They carefully poked at it with a stick, until Maya threw it in the air and slammed it against the ground. Strikingly, after the snake had been killed, no one gave any indication of expecting it to come back to life. Dead is dead. The juveniles happily dragged its lifeless corpse around as a toy, slinging it around their necks, even prying open its mouth to study its huge venomous fangs.
The scene reminded me of a chimpanzee hunt I once observed. Following the apes around in the Mahale Mountains, in Tanzania, we heard a sudden commotion high up in the trees. Chimpanzees have a special scream when they have captured prey. The existence alone of such a vocalization indicates their willingness to share meat, because otherwise they’d be wiser to stay silent. The screams attracted many others. Several males had caught a red colobus monkey, the sort of prey chimps have trouble capturing on their own. It is usually a team effort. Staring up through layers of branches and leaves, I saw that the hunters were starting to eat while the monkey was still alive. Since chimps are no “professional” predators, they never evolved the effective killing techniques of the cat family, and—as is also true of humans—their treatment of prey reflects poorly on their empathic capacities. Many chimps gathered in a feeding cluster, including females with swollen genitals, who tend to enjoy priority. It was all very noisy and chaotic, but everyone ended up with a piece of monkey meat. The next day, I noticed a female chimp walking by with a juvenile jockey riding on her back. Her daughter happily swung something fluffy in the air, which turned out to have belonged to the poor monkey. One primate’s tail is another’s plaything.
One morning, Geza Teleki followed a party of chimps, hearing raucous vocalizations in the distance. Six males were wildly charging about, uttering “wraaah” calls that echoed off the valley walls. In a small gully lay the motionless body of Rix sprawled among the stones. Although Teleki had not seen the body drop, he felt he was witnessing the initial reaction to this male’s neck-breaking fall out of a tree. Several individuals paused to stare at Rix’s corpse, after which they vigorously charged away from it, hurling big rocks in all directions. Amid the noise, chimps were embracing, mounting, touching, and patting one another with big, nervous grins on their faces. Later on, the chimps spent considerable time staring at the body. One male leaned down from a limb, watched the body, and whimpered. Others touched or sniffed Rix’s remains. An adolescent female gazed at his body without interruption for over one hour, motionless and in silence. After three hours of activity, one of the older males finally left the clearing, walking downstream. Others followed one by one, glancing over their shoulder toward the corpse as they departed.3
Dorothy, a thirty-year-old female chimpanzee, died of heart failure at a sanctuary in Cameroon. Staff brought her out in a wheelbarrow to display her body. The normally rowdy chimps gathered around, staring at the corpse and holding on to each other. They were as silent as people at a funeral.
Reports of how apes respond to death are becoming more numerous. In 2009, a photograph went viral of the death of Dorothy, whose corpse aroused intense (but eerily silent) attention from her sanctuary community. In the Blair Drummond Safari Park, in Scotland, the death of an elderly female, named Pansy, was carefully analyzed from video. In the ten minutes before her death others groomed or caressed Pansy a dozen times, and Pansy’s adult daughter remained with her throughout the night. Reactions to her death ranged from testing her mouth and limbs, perhaps to see whether she was still breathing or able to move, to a male who slammed her body. This behavior has also been seen after other deaths. It comes across as insensitive, but may be a way of trying to rouse the dead. Apes often react with a combination of frustration about the lack of response and testing whether a response can be provoked. Most of the gathering individuals are subdued, however, as if they realize that something terrible has happened. From their observations of Pansy’s final hours, the investigators concluded that “chimpanzees’ awareness of death has been underestimated.”4
An adolescent female, Oortje, literally dropped dead at the Arnhem Zoo. I knew Oortje as a happy character, playful and gentle with flapping ears (her name means “little ear”). She had been very quiet the last few weeks, however, and had started coughing. Her condition deteriorated despite antibiotics. Kept in its winter quarters, the colony was divided into two groups, which could hear but not see each other. In the middle of the day, one adult female was seen staring into Oortje’s eyes from up close. Without any apparent reason, this female burst out screaming in a hysterical voice while hitting herself with spasmodic arm movements, as frustrated chimps often do. The female seemed profoundly upset about something she had detected in Oortje’s eyes. Oortje herself had been silent until this point, but now feebly screamed back, then tried to lie down, fell off the log on which she had been sitting, and remained motionless on the floor. A female in the other hall uttered screams similar in sound to those of the first, even though she could not possibly have seen what happened. After this, twenty-five chimps in the building turned completely silent. Autopsy showed that Oortje had suffered a massive infection of her heart and abdomen.
In general, the reactions of apes to the death of companions suggest that they have trouble letting go (mothers may carry dead infants around for weeks, until the corpse is dried out and mummified), test the corpse, try to reanimate it, and are both upset and subdued. They seem to realize that the transition from alive to dead is irreversible. Some of the reactions resemble the way humans attend to their dead, such as the touching, washing, anointing, and grooming of bodies before we put them into the ground. Humans go further, though, in that they often give the dead something on their “voyage,” such as the Egyptian pharaohs whose tombs were filled with ample amounts of food, wine and beer, hunting dogs, cats, pet baboons, and even full-sized sailing vessels. Humans often look at death as a continuation of life. There is no indication that any other animal does so.
Apes do seem to worry about the possible death of others. If bonobos get caught in poacher snares intended for bush pigs and duikers, they usually manage to free themselves, but there are enough wild bonobos with missing fingers or hands for us to conclude that they aren’t always so lucky. Upon hearing sudden screams in the swamp forest, fieldworkers found a male, Malusu, crouching with a metal snare around his hand, dragging a sapling to which the snare was attached. The sapling impeded his locomotion. Other bonobos unfastened the snare from the lianas, and tried to remove it from Malusu’s hand. He kept getting stuck, however, and was left behind while the others traveled to the dry forest where they usually slept. The next morning, these bonobos did something never observed before: they returned over a one-mile distance straight to the same spot where they had last seen Malusu. Once there, they slowed down and searched around. Given their knowledge of snares, the bonobos may have made the connection with the loss of a group member. They failed to find Malusu, but a month later he rejoined the community. Despite a permanently mangled hand, he had survived his ordeal.5
It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that it is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss the other? Do they recall how he or she was during life? While such questions are impossible to answer, we are not the only ones fascinated and intimidated by death.
We once tested the permanency of death on the Arnhem chimpanzees by showing them their former friends and rivals. A wonderful film, The Family of Chimps, had captured the apes’ personalities and intelligence as no documentary had ever done before. It was a television hit all over the world.6 I had left the Netherlands before the movie was made, and watched it the first time with tears in my eyes because of the loving attention with which all of my old friends had been portrayed. The film showed Nikkie as the alpha male of the colony, but in the years that followed two males moved closer to a coalition against him. Nikkie must have been on edge as never before, because one morning, hearing screaming and hooting behind him, he raced full speed out of the building, straight toward the moat surrounding the island. A year earlier, Nikkie had managed to cross this moat thanks to a layer of ice. Perhaps he thought that he could repeat this feat. This time, however, he failed and drowned. The newspapers dubbed it a “suicide,” but it more likely was a panic attack with fatal outcome.
With Nikkie’s death, the closeness between the two other males evaporated. Rivalry took its predictable place. Dandy became the new alpha, but the ghost of Nikkie still lingered, as revealed by the colony’s reaction to The Family of Chimps. One evening, more than two years after its making, the winter hall was turned into a theater. With all the lights dimmed, the movie was projected onto a blank wall. The apes watched in complete silence, some with their hair fully on end. When, in the movie, a female was attacked by pubertal males, several indignant barks were heard, but it remained unclear whether the apes recognized the actors. Until, that is, Nikkie appeared in full glory on the wall. Dandy bared his teeth and ran screaming to the male who had supported him against Nikkie, literally jumping into his lap. The two males embraced each other with big, nervous grins on their faces.
Nikkie’s “resurrection” had revived their old partnership.
Dancing in the Rain
Proposed origins of religion are a dime a dozen. Fear of mortality is just one of them; there are plenty more. According to one theory, which sounds as if it was invented in a bar, intoxication is at its root. Wine and beer have traditionally been thought to fortify the body, but they also feed the imagination. In an act of self-aggrandizement typical of drunks, our ancestors began to picture themselves as invincible and look beyond their immediate existence. This mind-altering connection is still visible in the role of “spirits” (the term alone!) in religious rituals, such as those of the Greek Dionysus wine cult, Catholic mass, which features wine as Christ’s blood, and the Kiddush, a Jewish blessing recited before drinking: “Blessed are You our God, creator of the fruit of the vine.” Mentioned 231 times in the King James Bible, wine is central to many religions for its miraculous quality of releasing the human spirit.
The health benefits of fermented beverages, and concern about our bodily condition in general, were very much part of early religions. Without recourse to effective medicine, everyone could die of a minor infection. People turned to religion to find solace and pray for cures. They may have been right to do so, given the well-established epidemiological connection between religiosity and health.7 Religion seems to promote well-being in body and mind. Let me hasten to add, though, that there is little agreement about how it does so. Even if many religions have rules governing diet, drugs, marriage, and hygiene, this doesn’t seem the reason. Research points, instead, to church attendance as a major factor, which suggests a social dimension. It is well known that social connectedness strengthens the immune system, and church attendance surely helps in this regard. If so, it may not be religiosity per se that protects against disease, but rather human contact. For all we know, the same benefits may apply to members of a book club or birding society. Churches, however, produce more shared commitment, which does add to a sense of belonging. Émile Durkheim, the French father of sociology, emphasized the collective rituals, sacred music, and singing in unison that make religious practice an irresistible bonding experience. Others have depicted God as an attachment figure, who offers safety and comfort in stressful situations. In addition, many religions add female statues marked by a gentle, nonjudgmental facial expression. These maternal sources of solace—from Mary in Christianity to Demeter in Greece and Guanyin in China—are designed to lighten our load of sorrow the way mothers do for their children.
But origin stories of religion don’t end here. There is also the awe and wonderment at natural events beyond our control. That this may not be uniquely human is illustrated by the charging displays of chimpanzees at waterfalls or during downpours. The first time I witnessed this, I had trouble believing what I saw. The chimps at the Arnhem Zoo sat around miserably with their “rain faces” (an expression of disgust with eyebrows pulled down and lower lip stuck out) under the tallest trees, doing their best to stay dry. When the rain intensified, however, and reached under the trees, two adult males got up, with bristling hair, and started a display known as the bipedal swagger (which, one can imagine, made them look human in a thuggish sort of way). With big, rhythmic, swaying steps, they walked around, leaving their shelter, getting completely wet. They sat down again when the rain eased. Having seen the same behavior several times since, I agree with those who call it a “rain dance,” because that’s exactly what it looks like. Jane Goodall described a chimpanzee male acting similarly near a roaring waterfall:
As he gets closer, and the roar of the falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This “waterfall dance” may last ten or fifteen minutes.8
Goodall went on to wonder whether these displays could become ritualized into some animistic religion, and what would happen if chimps could share these feelings with each other. Would it lead to collective worship of the elements? An entirely different take on the same behavior, however, would be that the apes believe, for whatever reason, that they can influence the course of nature. Perhaps a fortuitous event, such as the ceasing of rain in the middle of a charging display, created the superstitious belief that if they display hard enough, they can stop precipitation. For those who regard such mistaken associations as dim-witted, it is good to realize that there is little doubt which ape is the most superstitious of all, and it’s not the chimpanzee.
Young chimps are smarter than children. At least, this was the shocking conclusion from an experiment in which scientists demonstrated a simple procedure to both chimps and children. A scientist poked a stick into holes in a large plastic box, going through a series of holes until candies rolled out. Only one hole mattered, however—the other holes had nothing to offer. If the box was made of black plastic, it was impossible to tell that some of the poking was just for show. With a transparent box, on the other hand, it was obvious where the candies came from. Handed the stick and the box, young chimps mimicked the necessary moves, while ignoring all empty holes, at least if the box was transparent. They had paid close attention. The children, however, mimicked everything the scientist had shown, including moves without any purpose. They did so even with the transparent box, approaching the problem more like a magical ritual than as the goal-directed task that the apes had seen in it.9
Our species is incredibly superstitious; it develops lots of habits unworthy of a rational animal. We knock on wood when we don’t want to tempt fate, we wear a worn-out T-shirt for luck during our team’s matches, some soccer players won’t enter the field without wearing their underwear inside out, and baseball players go through a dozen rituals before they even pick up a bat. Turk Wendell always chewed four pieces of black licorice while pitching. He’d spit them out at the end of every inning, after which he would return only after having brushed his teeth. We’re also sensitive to numbers, with the Chinese systematically avoiding 4 and Westerners fearing 13. When I came to the United States, I was struck by the omission of the thirteenth floor in buildings, but am now so used to it that I was shocked in the reverse cultural direction when recently, on a large Dutch cruise ship, they recommended lifeboat 13 for my safety. The composer Arnold Schönberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia to such a degree that it may have spelled his death. He was especially afraid of multiples of 13, and then, right before his sixty-seventh birthday, a friend pointed out that numbers could also be added up. What are friends for? Staying in bed the whole day, Schönberg almost got through his birthday, but his heart stopped beating a quarter before midnight on 13 July 1951. A Friday, moreover.
Some house cats seem to think that they will get fed if they scratch the couch, and some dogs turn circles in the kitchen because in the past they have received food while doing so. There are also negative associations. One of our cats, Loeke, had surgery near his anus and was in such pain each time he defecated that he started to “blame” the litter box. He’d approach the box only if he couldn’t wait any longer, almost stalking it, then racing into and out of it with a speed as if the thing might attack him. We were very patient, and cleaned up a lot of mess for half a year, to get him over his phobia. Such spurious associations were labeled “superstitions” by B. F. Skinner. In experiments on pigeons, he had employed an apparatus that delivered food pellets at regular intervals without any relation to the birds’ behavior. Spontaneously, the pigeons began to connect the appearance of food with actions they had just performed, so that soon some of them turned little rounds and others pushed their head all the time into the same cage corner. Whether this sort of behavior is truly equivalent to human superstition is debatable, however.
We take superstitions so seriously that they sometimes hamper progress. A classical example is the lightning rod of Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States. He first used a kite to demonstrate that lightning is electricity, then invented a way of conducting its energy into the ground to avoid damage. Since lightning often struck church towers, the ideal place to put his metal rods was on top of them. But Franklin’s focus on churches set him up for a collision with the view of lightning as proof of God’s displeasure. Mounting his device on the house of God was like defying his will. Stealing God’s Thunder is the apt title of one book about Franklin.10 His rods were highly effective, though. Fewer churches were destroyed around Boston, where most of the devices were mounted, than anywhere else. Nevertheless, some found the whole idea of escaping the hand of God sacrilegious. When Massachusetts was in 1755 hit by a major earthquake, a pastor accused Franklin of having invited the quake by his heretical arrogance.
Superstition blurs the line between reality and imagination as does religion and a belief in God. At one level, God’s existence is an absolute certainty for many, but at another level it always remains open to criticism. Religion is called “faith” precisely because it trusts things unseen. We humans have a knack for this, as was shown in the above imitation experiment with the boxes. While the apes took the task at face value, ignoring unnecessary moves, children put their trust in the experimenter, copying every action. They invested the procedure with mysterious significance. Naturally, psychologists were unhappy with the implication that this made the apes more rational. They were quick to speak of “over-imitation” by the children, seeing this as a good thing. In fact, it’s brilliant! Given the superior knowledge of adults, children should copy them without questions. Blind faith, it was concluded, is the more rational strategy.
This doesn’t mean that imagination and make-believe are out of the question for our primate relatives. There are reports of human-reared apes, such as Washoe, who carefully bathed her doll, and another ape, Viki, who pretended dragging an imaginary toy around by an imaginary string that she would unhook if it got “stuck.” I have already mentioned the bonobo female who fed juveniles from a bottle even though there was no need for it, perhaps imagining she was a Maman. In wild chimpanzees, there are observations of care for imaginary young. Richard Wrangham observed a six-year-old juvenile, Kakama, carry and cradle a small wooden log as if it were a newborn. Kakama did so for hours on end, one time even building a nest in a tree and gently placing the log into it. The fieldworker was reluctant to draw conclusions from what he had seen, but had to admit it was a young male playing with a doll. Kakama may have been anticipating a sibling, because his mother was pregnant at the time. I myself have seen juvenile chimps act the same, tenderly holding a piece of cloth or a broom. A wild gorilla was seen to pull up a mass of soft moss, which she carried and held like an infant under her breast, seemingly “nursing” it.11
Perhaps apes, too, can create a new reality that exists alongside the old one. In the old reality, a wooden log is just a log, whereas in the new one, it’s a baby. This capacity for dual reality is so highly developed in our own species that a sugar pill improves our health even if the nurse takes it out of a bottle with “placebo” clearly written on it. On one level, we know the pill is fake; on another, we still believe it will work. In the same way, we fall for romances, rivalries, and deaths in movies while at the same time well aware that the actors are just acting. We are great at suspending one reality for a new one. It is part of the success of Hatsune Miku, a popular Japanese pop star who draws masses of rocking youths even though she is a mere hologram. She is a computer-generated 3-D projection with a female persona and a synthesized voice, who dances and sings to a live band, towering high above her audience since she is not limited by human size. Her concerts sell out in a matter of minutes. The public sings along with her and responds to her sexy moves as if she were real.
To insist, as neo-atheists like to do, that all that matters is empirical reality, that facts trump beliefs, is to deny humanity its hopes and dreams. We project our imagination onto everything around us. We do so in the movies, theater, opera, literature, virtual reality, and, yes, religion. Neo-atheists are like people standing outside a movie theater telling us that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t really go down with the Titanic. How shocking! Most of us are perfectly comfortable with the duality. Humor relies on it, too, lulling us into one way of looking at a situation only to hit us over the head with another. To enrich reality is one of the most delightful capacities we have, from pretend play in childhood to visions of an afterlife when we grow older.
Some realities exist, others we just like to believe in.
No Thought of the Morrow
Borie, an old chimpanzee with a suspected ear infection, made an odd request. While visiting her in the sleeping quarters, she kept waving her hand in the direction of a table. The table was empty, except for a small plastic baby mirror. After a few minutes of this, we thought that Borie might want the mirror and gave it to her.
She took it in one hand and picked up a straw with the other, angling the mirror such that she could look at her ear while poking the straw into it. While cleaning her ear, she carefully followed progress in the mirror as if this had been her intention all along. However simple the task may seem, it required some brain power. First of all, Borie needed to know that she could see herself in a mirror, which is knowledge few animals possess. Mirror self-recognition is well documented in apes, however. Second, she must have planned her move all along, because otherwise why did she put the mirror to immediate use?
It is often thought that animals are captives of the here and now, but Borie must have been waiting to direct us to what she needed. Planning is in fact well developed in the apes. Other examples include wild chimps collecting a bundle of tall grass stems, which they carry in their mouths for miles until they arrive at the termite hills where the stems serve as fishing tools. Similarly, zoo chimps may gather armfuls of straw from their night cage before going outside where it is cold. But the best-known case for planning is undoubtedly provided by Santino, a male chimp at a Swedish zoo. Every morning, before the visitors arrived, he’d leisurely collect rocks from the moat around his enclosure, stacking them up into neat little piles hidden from view. This way, he’d have an arsenal of weapons when the zoo opened its gates. Like so many male chimps, Santino would several times a day rush around with all his hair on end to intimidate the colony. Throwing stuff around would be part of the show, including projectiles aimed at the public. Whereas most chimps find themselves empty-handed at the critical moment, Santino had prepared his rock piles for this purpose. He had done so at a quiet moment, when he was not yet in the adrenaline-filled mood to produce his usual spectacle.12
Experiments on planning go back to Wolfgang Köhler, who in the 1920s presented apes with a banana hanging from the ceiling while providing them with boxes and sticks. As we have seen, elephants are also capable of solving this problem. More recently, apes have been given a choice of tools that they couldn’t use right away, but might be able to employ later on. The apes preferred these tools over immediate rewards, patiently holding on to them in anticipation of future payoffs.13 In one innovative test, scientists wanted to see whether the apes could imagine a solution they’d never seen before. They presented them with a transparent container that was too narrow for the ape to reach into. An unshelled peanut was put at the bottom. Unable to access the peanut, and having no tools, what could the ape do but stare at it? But the ape had a solution. He went to the faucet, collected a mouthful of water and spit it into the container. One mouthful of water wasn’t enough, though, so the ape had to walk several times back and forth between the faucet and the container to be able to retrieve the floating peanut with his fingers. One ape was even more creative, achieving the same goal via urination.14
Knowledge of the future and awareness of death could potentially combine into a sense of mortality. But even if our primate relatives share some of our imagination and future orientation, it remains unclear whether they ponder their own death. An illustrative case involves Reo, a chimpanzee at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. When Reo was in the prime of his life, he became paralyzed from the neck down as the result of a spinal inflammation. He could eat and drink, but couldn’t move his body. His weight continued to drop, and he developed extensive bedsores while veterinarians and students cared for him around the clock for six months. Reo recovered, but the most interesting part is how he reacted to his bedridden predicament.
One thing very clear to everyone involved in his care was that Reo’s attitude to things did not change throughout his period of complete paralysis. He often teased young students by spitting water at them—just as he had done before his illness. His outlook on life was the same after he fell ill as it was before; we did not notice any perceptible change even as he lay there thin as a rake and covered in sores. Bluntly put, he did not seem worried about his future. He did not become depressive, even though the situation looked, to us, extremely grave.15
Our vaunted imagination is like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it causes desperation in a situation in which an ape might remain unworried, but it also gives hope as it allows us to envision a better future. We look so far ahead, in fact, that we realize that our life will come to an end. This realization thoroughly colors our existence, leading to a permanent search for meaning as well as bitter jokes along the lines of “Life’s a bitch, and then you die!” Would we have developed a belief in the supernatural without this cloud hanging over us? A partial answer comes from research showing that the more aware people are of their own mortality, and the more they think about it, the more they believe in God.16 They feel the rocking of the boat, so to speak, and, like most voyagers on stormy seas, appeal to a higher power.
But before we conclude that thanatophobia sets us apart, a major qualification is in order, one that I have to think of each time I see Bosch’s Garden. Most of the time, instead of considering our death, we put thoughts of it on hold. No sane persons literally deny their mortality, of course, but many of us act as if we’ll live forever. Bosch’s painting presents one giant warning against this illusion. The Garden brims with middle-aged singles preoccupied with their little pleasures. “With no thought of the morrow,” as one expert put it, “their only sin the unawareness of sin.”17 Despite participating in a massive gathering, the naked figures seem lonely and inward looking, not unlike contemporary teenagers, who remain glued to their individual smartphones while moving around in bands. The hedonists of The Garden’s central panel neither raise children nor produce anything of value, locked up as they are in their existential cocoons except for the occasional erotic fling that requires a partner. If this is a paradise of lust, it is one empty of purpose and accomplishments. They appear oblivious to the larger world, including the death and destruction that will inevitably befall them. They act like immortals. We the viewers, on the other hand, see the horrifying right-hand panel and know what’s around the corner.
The Garden’s many pleasure-seekers live in their own cocoons. This couple’s bubble has been interpreted as made of cracked glass to symbolize the fragility of love. But the cracks rather seem to be veins in an amniotic sac, which shields them from the outside world. The man on the right, on the other hand, is looking through a glass tube (an alchemical allusion) at a rat. The symbolism is uncertain, but I can’t help seeing a behavioral scientist.
When a radio show invited the Turkish writer Elif Şafak to give us her “sixty second idea to change the world,” she took her inspiration from the Sufi recommendation to taste death before you die.18 Buddhism knows the same emphasis, seeing it as liberating to accept your own death. Since the modern world is based on a negation of death, Şafak said, we all need to visit a salon, like a hair salon, where for one hour we taste death, our own death. This will produce a milder heart and a greater appreciation of life, she claimed. Although we realize that we’re mortal, we have trouble building this knowledge into our lives. Listening to her proposal, I thought it was great for the middle-aged, but unneeded for anyone my age. Members of my generation have either seen our parents die or are prepared for this to happen any moment. We have lost siblings, friends, spouses, perhaps even children. We have friends afflicted with Parkinson’s, cancer, Alzheimer’s, or some other dreadful disease. The older we get, the more we experience the physical ravages of our own aging, and become acutely aware that our time on earth is limited.
Pieter Brueghel the Elder made this point as explicitly and morbidly as possible in a single painting. We see wagonloads full of skulls, while people of all backgrounds—from farmers to bishops to noblemen—are taken indiscriminately to the other side. The dead advance on the living like an unstoppable army, herding them into huge traps while fires rage in the distance. There is a hanging on the horizon, a dog eats a dead woman’s face, and a man with a millstone around his neck is being held above the water. Dinner guests around a table resist in vain, by drawing a sword or running from the advancing corpses, while in the lower right-hand corner an oblivious lover plays the lute to a woman behind whom a skeleton cheerfully plays along. Brueghel’s sickening army of death and destruction dates from 1562, half a century after The Garden, from which it took its hell-on-earth inspiration. It is appropriately entitled The Triumph of Death.
The modern equivalent of this painting is the British artist Damien Hirst’s display entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. The work presents the body of a tiger shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine; the shark is so large and has such a wide open mouth full of teeth that it brings the prospect of death quite close. When the shark landed in New York, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was characterized as “simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank.”19 But the artwork has also been described as an outrageously expensive fish without chips.
Death is so hard to accept that we try not to think about it, and act as if the deceased will be traveling to a better place, where we will one day meet her or him. Elaborate burials go back to our Cro-Magnon ancestors, who sent off the dead with adornments such as ivory beads, bracelets, and necklaces. No people would leave so many valuables in a grave unless they believed in an afterlife. We are the only species to follow these rituals and enjoy the solace they provide, yet I am still not entirely convinced that we are the only ones with an inkling of our own death. Being a young adult male, Reo may not have been the best example. Impending death is rarely met with acceptance at that age. In many species, aging individuals appear quite a bit wiser than the young, and losing one’s vitality slowly over the years may be experienced quite differently from the sudden immobilization that befell Reo. When an old ape notices that trees are harder and harder to get into or an elephant has ever more trouble keeping up with the herd, might these individuals not apply what they have learned about life and death to their own bodies?
It’s hard to know, yet impossible to rule out.
Freud’s Cold Feet
To delineate religion to everyone’s satisfaction is hopeless. I was once part of a forum at the American Academy of Religion, when someone proposed we start off with a definition of religion. However much sense this made, the idea was promptly shot down by another participant, who reminded everyone that last time they tried to define religion half the audience had angrily stomped out of the room. And this in an academy named after the topic! Let us therefore simply say that religion is the shared reverence for the supernatural, sacred, or spiritual as well as the symbols, rituals, and worship that are associated with it. This definition lacks a distinction between spirituality and religion, although by insisting on “shared” reverence, it excludes individual approaches and considers only group phenomena. Thus defined, religion is a human universal.
The only exceptions ever mentioned are the Pirahã. But the claim that these Brazilian forest people lack religion (they have been called an “atheist tribe”) doesn’t survive scrutiny of the original sources. Daniel Everett, the American ex-missionary who lived among the Pirahã, explains how these people talk to and dance for spirits. They wear necklaces made from seeds, teeth, feathers, and beer-can pull tabs, which are “decorative only secondarily, their primary purpose being to ward off the evil spirits that they see almost daily.”20 Not only do they see spirits; they channel them while talking in falsetto voices. The Pirahã are so terrified of evil spirits, though, that they refuse to mention them by name. Even after having just channeled them, they deny their presence (“I don’t know, I didn’t see it”). Their fear makes it nearly impossible for Westerners to figure out what the Pirahã actually believe in, but there is no doubt that they believe in something. It just isn’t what we are used to.
If religion is so widespread, the next question is why it evolved. Biologists always wonder about survival value. What sort of advantage does religion confer? This question has been addressed by comparing early Christians with the Roman population around them. When two plagues swept through the empire, each one killing one-third of the population, the Christians fared better than the Romans. The Christians brought food and water to those too sick to care for themselves, attending to their needs in the name of Christ, whereas the Romans fled from their dearest, abandoning them even before they had expired in an attempt to avert contagion. Even though Christians risked contamination, a study of tombstone inscriptions revealed that they enjoyed a higher life expectancy.
But is this the right comparison? The first flaw is that the Romans were plenty religious themselves, eager to placate and please their gods and goddesses, such as Mars and Venus. We’re therefore not really comparing people with and without religion. The second flaw is that the early Christians were not your typical population: they were a persecuted minority, hence part of a close-knit community fighting a common enemy. This must have given them a common purpose, which may have had beneficial health effects. Unfortunately, trying to pinpoint the success of religion is like asking what good it is to have language. I am sure language has its benefits, but since all humans have one we simply lack comparison material. With religion, we’re in the same boat. The only thing we do know is that attempts to abolish or discourage religion have had disastrous consequences.
This was true of Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in Communist China, and Pol Pot of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, all of whom tortured, killed, and starved millions of their own people. The Khmer Rouge banned all religion, while offering the following chilling slogan to the condemned masses: “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.” These ideologies didn’t produce particularly healthy societies and were a fiasco from a biological standpoint. On the other hand, their antireligious attitude was part of a larger picture. All three countries had gone through an overthrow of the existing order, which may have required them to curb the power of established religion. I would not necessarily blame their atrocities on atheism per se, therefore. In the same way, killing in the name of God, such as during the Crusades or by the Spanish Conquistadores, was often a front for political or colonial ambitions. Columbus’s lust for gold matched his love of God. To single out religion as the cause is therefore problematic. The bottom line is that humans are capable of unbelievable cruelty, whether in the name of God or while denying his existence.
Perhaps the question can be answered on a smaller scale, as in a study of the longevity of nineteenth-century communities in the United States. Communities based on a secular ideology, such as collectivism, disintegrated much faster than those based on religious principles. For every year that communities lasted, religious ones were four times as likely to survive than their secular counterparts.21 Sharing a religion dramatically raises trust. We know the huge bonding effect of coordinated practices, such as praying together and carrying out the same rituals. This relates to the primate principle that acting together improves relationships, ranging from monkeys’ preferring human experimenters who imitate them to varsity rowers’ gaining physical resistance (such as a higher pain threshold) from exercising as a team rather than on their own.22 Joint action may stimulate endorphin release, as has also been suggested for other bonding mechanisms, such as joint laughter. These positive effects of synchronization help explain the cohesiveness of religions and their effect on social stability.
Durkheim dubbed the benefits derived from belonging to a religion its “secular utility.” He was convinced that something as pervasive and ubiquitous as religion must serve a purpose—not a higher purpose, but a social one. The biologist David Sloan Wilson, who analyzed the data on early Christians, agrees in that he sees religion as an adaptation that permits human groups to function harmoniously: “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve alone.”23
Religious community building comes naturally to us. In fact, given how commonly religion is pitted against science, it is good to remember the tremendous advantage religion enjoys. Science is an artificial, contrived achievement, whereas religion comes as easily to us as walking or breathing. This has been pointed out by many authors, from the American primatologist Barbara King, who in Evolving God relates the drive to religion to our desire to belong, to the French anthropologist Pascal Boyer, who views religion as an intuitive capacity:
Scientific research and theorizing has appeared only in very few human societies. . . . The results of scientific research may be well-known, but the whole intellectual style that is required to achieve them is really difficult to acquire. By contrast, religious representations have appeared in all human groups that we know, they are easily acquired, they are maintained effortlessly and they seem accessible to all members of a group, regardless of intelligence or training. As Robert McCauley points out, . . . religious representations are highly natural to human beings, while science is quite clearly unnatural. That is, the former goes with the grain of our evolved intuitions, while the latter requires that we suspend, or even contradict most of our common ways of thinking.24
Contrast the ease with which children adopt religion with the long and laborious road young people travel to achieve a Ph.D. around the age of thirty. McCauley, a philosopher colleague of mine at Emory, told me that if he had to choose which of the two would survive if society collapsed, he’d put his money on religion rather than science: “Religion overwhelmingly depends upon what I’m calling natural cognition, thinking that is automatic, that is not conscious for the most part.” McCauley contrasts this with science, which is “conscious, usually in the form of language. It’s slow, it’s deliberative.”25
Imagine, we put a few dozen children on an island without adults. What would happen? William Golding thought he knew, giving us savagery and murder in Lord of the Flies. This may have been a great extrapolation from life at English boarding schools, but there is no shred of evidence that this is what children left to their own devices will do. When four- to five-year-old children are left alone in a room, they tend to negotiate with each other by means of moral terminology such as “That’s not fair!” or “Why don’t you give her some of your toys?”26 No one knows what children would do if left alone for a much longer time, but they would definitely form a dominance hierarchy. Young animals, whether goslings or puppies, quickly battle it out to establish a pecking order, and children do the same. I remember the pale faces of psychology students steeped in academic egalitarianism, upset at seeing young children beat up on each other on the first day of preschool. We are a hierarchical primate, and, however much we try to camouflage it, it comes out early in life.
The children on the island might also enter the symbolic domain. They’d probably develop language in the same way that Nicaraguan deaf children, in the 1980s, began communicating in a simple sign language that outsiders couldn’t follow. Many other aspects would develop as well, such as culture. The children would transmit habits and knowledge and show conformism in the tools they made or how they greeted each other. They’d also have property rights and tensions over ownership. Finally, they would undoubtedly develop religion. We don’t know what kind, but they would believe in supernatural forces, perhaps personalized ones, like gods, and develop rituals to appease them and bend them to their will.
The one thing the children would never develop is science. By all accounts, science is only a few thousand years old, hence it appeared extremely late in human history. It is a true accomplishment, a critically important one, yet it would be naïve to put it on the same level as religion. The war between science and religion is, to put it in biblical terms, one between David and Goliath. Religion has always been with us and is unlikely to ever go away, since it is part of our social skin. Science is rather like a coat that we have recently bought. We always risk losing it or throwing it away. The antiscience forces in society require constant vigilance, given how fragile science is compared with religion. To contrast the two as if they are on equal footing and in competition is a curious misrepresentation explainable only by reducing science and religion to sources of knowledge about the same phenomena. Only then could anyone argue that if one of the two is right, the other must be wrong.
When it comes down to knowledge of the physical world, the choice is obvious. I can’t fathom why in this day and age, with everyone walking around with laptops and traveling through the air, we still need to defend science. Consider how far biomedical science has come, and how much longer we live as a result. Isn’t it obvious that science is a superior way of finding out how things work, where humans come from, or how the universe arose? I am among scientists every day, and there is nothing more addictive than the thrill of discovery. True, plenty of mysteries are left, but science offers the only realistic hope of solving them. Those who present religion as a source of this kind of knowledge, and stick to age-old stories despite the avalanche of new information, deserve all the scorn they invite. But I also consider this particular collision between science and religion a mere sideshow. Religion is much more than belief. The question is not so much whether religion is true or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place if we were to get rid of it the way an Aztec priest rips the beating heart out of a virgin. What could fill the gaping hole and take over the removed organ’s functions?
I once saw an off-Broadway play entitled Freud’s Last Session, in which the coughing and cigar-smoking psychoanalyst confronted C. S. Lewis, who had become a devout Christian, challenging the younger man’s convictions. It was a dazzling display of skepticism, which made my subsequent reading of the real Freud a bit sobering. Even though Freud dismissed religion in no uncertain terms as a human creation and a mere “illusion,” he was unwilling to recommend its abandonment. Freud waited until the end of The Future of an Illusion to let us feel the coldness of his feet:
If you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defense.27
Was not the entire communist experiment an attempt at a godless society, and did it not follow Freud’s predictions to the letter? With its sing-alongs, marching, reciting of pledges, and waving in the air of Little Red Books, the movement deliberately mimicked religion. Dogmatism, rigidity, and unholy fervor were on full display and grew with the decades, until communism collapsed under its own weight and lack of success. Having witnessed the early stages of this experiment, Freud may have guessed its futility.
Another curious attempt at going godless took place in 1793, when the altar in the Notre Dame cathedral was replaced with a model mountain on top of which stood a temple dedicated to philosophy. Next to it burned the “Torch of Truth.” The Cult of Reason abolished Sunday as the seventh day of rest (replacing it with the tenth day), secularized the names of all saint’s days, and squashed any hope of an afterlife by printing “Death is an eternal sleep” above the gates of cemeteries. The cult had its own goddess, a classically dressed lady who was carried through the streets of Paris followed by a throng of palm-leaf-waving acolytes. The procession brought her to the “mountain” in the cathedral, where she was seated between the busts of Voltaire and Rousseau. The cult ended abruptly when its leaders were executed by Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre then started his own Cult of the Supreme Being, with himself as high priest. Immortality of the soul was quickly reinstated, which was a good thing, given how many innocents Robespierre sent to the guillotine. This cult, too, enjoyed only a short life—as short as that of its high priest.
Freud put his finger on an eternal pendulum swing in Western thought, which for centuries has moved back and forth between the mockery of religion as irrational and an “opium of the people,” as Karl Marx put it, followed by concern about what would happen if we were to erase it from our lives. The neo-atheists have by now rehashed all of the arguments amassed over the centuries against religion. Hitchens showed himself a true Marxist with his “religion poisons everything,” while Harris took over the Parisian Torch of Truth by yearning for a “religion of reason,” and Dawkins’s “delusion” hardly improves upon Freud’s “illusion.”28 Inevitably, however, we are now entering the cold-feet phase of the cycle. Apart from the question whether we’d even be capable of the self-amputation that atheists call for, the deeper issue is how to fill the God-sized vacuum if we succeed. Alain de Botton is an atheist who grudgingly admires religion for its understanding of universal human needs and weaknesses, while Philip Kitcher urges atheists and agnostics to go beyond disbelief. Criticizing religion is facile, Kitcher says, but any thinking human being about to join the atheist movement would want to know what it is for rather than what it is against:
Each of us needs an account of ourselves and what is valuable, something towards which we can steer and by which we can live. . . . [S]ecular thought shies away from the traditional question, raised by the Greeks at the dawn of philosophy, of what makes human lives, finite though they are, significant and worthwhile. . . . No advocacy of disbelief, however eloquent, will work the secular revolution until these facts are acknowledged. The temporary eradication of superstition, unaccompanied by attention to the functions religion serves, creates a vacuum into which the crudest forms of literalist mythology can easily intrude themselves. . . .29
A Watchful Eye
On a recent visit to Vancouver, the Canadian psychologist Ara Norenzayan gave me the title of his new book, which I promptly wrote down as “Big Dogs.” I may be slightly dyslexic, or perhaps it was a Freudian slip, my mind being more with animals than people. Ara had said “Big Gods.”
He studies the role of religion in everyday life. One experiment investigated how “priming” people with religious thoughts affected generosity. Priming is the planting of an unconscious bias, hereby letting subjects correct the grammar of a few sentences that included words like “God,” “prophet,” and “divine.” They encountered these words without any further information and had no idea what the experiment was about. After this, each subject found ten one-dollar coins on a table with the instruction to take as many as they liked, knowing that what they left behind would go to the next person. The outcome was spectacular. Unprimed subjects left on average only $1.84 for the other, but those primed with thoughts of God and religion left $4.22. About two-thirds of the primed group left more than half the coins behind. Curiously, religiosity didn’t seem to matter much. Asked about their religion, about half the subjects answered “none,” yet many of those performed like the rest.30
How to explain this effect? The thinking is that in large-scale societies, like ours, there is a need for supervision—imagined or real—to ensure a high level of cooperation. It is far too easy to get away with freeloading in an anonymous mass. The study participants probably conjured up a watching God in their heads, who approves of kindness and frowns upon cheating. “Watched people are nice people,” explained Ara. This could also account for the “Sunday effect” on devout Christians, who on Sundays donate more money to good causes and watch less porno on the Internet.31
Having a supernatural supervisor may be a recent phenomenon, however, because during our prehistory we didn’t really need one. In small groups, similar to primate groups, everyone knew everyone. Surrounded by kin, friends, and other community members, we had excellent reasons to follow the rules and get along with each other. We had personal reputations to uphold. It is only when our ancestors began to aggregate in ever larger societies, first with thousands of people, then with millions, that these face-to-face mechanisms fell apart. That is why Ara believes that with bigger groups came a need for bigger gods, who watch like hawks over everything we do. This nicely fits my own thinking that morality predates religion, certainly the dominant religions of today. We humans were plenty moral when we still roamed the savanna in small bands. Only when the scale of society began to grow and rules of reciprocity and reputation began to falter did a moralizing God become necessary.
In this view, it wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to, confirming Voltaire’s quip about our need to invent him. Think also of Socrates’s question to Euthyphro whether an action is moral because the gods love it or whether the gods love moral actions. The whole purpose of God is to do the latter. We endowed him with the capacity to keep us on the same straight and narrow that we’d been following ever since we lived in small bands.
For those who despair at the implication that without religion the world might lack prosociality, there are a few rays of sunlight. First of all, the original experiment was incomplete. It primed for religious concepts only, not for any alternatives. This deficit was corrected in a second experiment in which subjects encountered good-citizen terminology, such as “civic,” “jury,” and “court” before being tested. Lo and behold, they became as altruistic as those primed with religious terms, leaving on average $4.44 on the table. This outcome offers hope for secular societies. If appeals to community values, the social contract, and law enforcement are as effective as religion at inducing generosity, the positive effects of religion may be replicable after all.
Second, a recent study compared the reasons why believers and nonbelievers assist others. It found nonbelievers to be more sensitive to the situation of others, basing their altruism on feelings of compassion. Believers, in contrast, seemed driven by a sense of obligation and how they ought to behave according to their religion. The behavioral outcome was the same, but the underlying motivations seemed different.32 Clearly, there are many reasons for kindness, and religion is just one of them.
The secular model is currently being tried out in northern Europe, where it has progressed to the point that children naïvely ask why there are so many “plus signs” on large buildings called “churches,” and where people have no idea anymore of the biblical origin of their expressions, from “washing your hands of the matter” to “a drop in the bucket.” Civic institutions have taken over many of the functions originally fulfilled by the churches, such as care for the sick, poor, and old. Despite being largely agnostic or nonpracticing, the citizenry of these countries stands firmly behind this effort. It is a giant experiment, both economically and morally, that may tell us whether large nation-states can forge a well-functioning moral contract without religion. If one believes, as I do, that morality comes mostly from within, there is every reason to support this effort, but I also agree with Freud, Kitcher, and others that its success will require far more than God’s death certificate.