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In one of my earliest posts (see here), I argued that the only time that peace is likely to reign on earth is if we were to be attacked by Martians (or other aliens). In other words, once the dangerous and loathsome ‘other’ is defined outside the circle of mankind, this would allow us to temporarily forget our differences and band together against a common enemy. Until then and as long as some of today’s dominant religions continue to wield influence on human minds, expect endless future bloodshed.
Pascal Boyer, who teaches in both the anthropology and psychology departments at Washington University in St. Louis, has written extensively about the evolutionary roots of religion (cf. Boyer, 2001). He has convincingly argued that religion is an exaptation, namely a by-product of evolution. Specifically, he proposes that religion utilizes in its service cognitive mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. Coalitional thinking is one such example in that humans have evolved the cognitive and perceptual penchant to view the world via the ‘us versus them’ mindset, which religion is famously good at exploiting.
Chapter 8 of my 2011 trade book, The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature, is titled “Marketing Hope by Selling Lies.” In it, I discuss how various purveyors of hope including religion, the self-help industry, and various forms of medical quackery, are all highly successful because they seek to assuage if not offer “solutions” to our deepest Darwinian-rooted fears and anxieties. Of relevance to today’s discussion on religion and coalitional thinking, I reproduce here a quote by Leon Uris from his book The Haj (p. 14), which I originally quoted in the latter chapter:
“So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.”
The last sentence of the latter quote is rooted in an Islamic principle wherein the world is divided into dar al-harb (house of war) and dar al-Islam (house of Islam) (cf. Lewis, 1998, p. 121-122). Now there is some coalitional thinking!
Of course, this ability to recursively split the world into binary camps is not restricted to Arab and/or Islamic societies. It is a universal penchant that is operative irrespective of one’s cultural, ethnic, or religious heritage. More than a decade ago, I lived in an area of Montreal known as Outremont. The neighborhood is famous for being home to a long-standing Hasidic community. To the uninitiated, the Hasidim constitute a rather homogeneous sect of orthodox Jewry but this is far from being true. Even within the ultra-orthodox supra-community of Hasidim, there are strong preferences for one’s children to marry within one’s sect. The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.
Bottom line: While religion might offer some people important pragmatic benefits (e.g., providing limitless hope), this comes at a cost. Regrettably, many religious traditions exacerbate our innate proclivity to divide the world into two clearly demarcated camps, and in doing so, this fans the flames of intolerance and hate. That said, this does not imply that all religions are equally hostile toward the ‘other,’ and in this sense all religions are not slightly different flavors of vanilla.
Readers interested in some of my other Psychology Today articles dealing with religion (or at times atheism) may wish to visit the following links: article 1, article 2, article 3, article 4, article 5, article 6, article 7, article 8, article 9, article 10, article 11, article 12, article 13, article 14, article 15, article 16, article 17, article 18, article 19, article 20, article 21, article 22, article 23, article 24, article 25, and article 26. Apparently, more than 10% of all of my posts (this is my 229th) have dealt with religious-related matters!
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