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Cameras versus the Antichrist
Cameras versus the Antichrist
Americans who are well-off think about cameras. Americans who are not think about religion. According to a recent article by David Leonhardt, the Google searches of people living in the easiest American counties to live in, as measured by such criteria as income, education levels, and life expectancy, spend a lot of time thinking about cameras. By contrast, in the toughest American counties to live in on those same measures, Google searches indicate that people are concerned with dieting, religion, and guns.
The religious interests of these Americans in the hard-scrabble locations did not trend toward gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Among the top ten search terms correlating with residing in these areas was “Antichrist” (at number two), “hell,” and “rapture.” The religion they are concerned with appears to be one about moral judgment, censure, and punishment, as opposed to concentrating on such topics as God’s goodness, grace, or beneficence.
The Usual Suspects
Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner suggest that human minds are not disposed to view morally charged happenings -- either good fortune or bad fortune -- as simply the result of chance. Humans, very nearly automatically, presume that some agent or other bears responsibility for such outcomes. Consequently, the absence of a responsible agent inspires a search for one. That is why people so readily sue others when misfortune befalls them, why counselors so readily suspect clients’ relatives when those clients are unhappy, and why people in other times and places so readily blamed witches for inexplicable calamities. When morally significant developments in individuals’ lives have no obvious source, superhuman agents are the usual suspects. With adversities that are so huge or so wide-spread to be beyond the capacities of humans, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, superhuman agents are the inevitable suspects.
HADD versus MADD
Cognitive scientists of religion, such as Justin Barrett, have speculated that the mind possesses a Hypersensitive Agent Detection Device (HADD). They suggest evolution favors minds keen to distinguish agents in their surroundings in order both to obtain dinner and to avoid being someone else’s dinner. The argument is that the costs of numerous false positives, that is, mistakenly regarding various sounds or motions in the environment as evidence of an agent, are not remotely commensurate with the cost attached to even a single false negative, if it involves failing to spot a predator. These theorists propose that such hair-trigger agent detection disposes us to ponder invisible agents when we cannot quickly write some stimulus off, yet no one else is available to pin it on.
Alternatively, Gray and Wegner maintain that what humans are equipped with is a moral agent detection device (MADD). Humans are not particularly inclined to pin unexplained events on imperceptible agents, unless those events possess a moral valence. Contrast the cases of when a refrigerator falls off a truck in the middle of superhighway and is safely removed by the authorities as opposed to when a refrigerator falls off a truck in the middle of superhighway and causes the car behind the truck to wreck killing a new mother and her child. Gray and Wegner argue that the conviction that some agent must be at work arises when the unexplained event carries moral importance, when someone either benefits or, especially, when someone suffers. That is because humans’ conceptions of moral events require an agent responsible for what has transpired. Gray and Wegner note that this view leads to some unexpected predictions, including that greater adversity and suffering will likely lead to persisting recognition of the gods.
