Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

But there is a problem: a corpse is a potent source of disease, and we have evolved a strong compensatory innate disgust mechanism to make us keep our distance. Pulled by longing and pushed back by disgust, we are in turmoil when we confront the corpse of a loved one. Small wonder that this crisis should play so central a role in the birth of religions everywhere. As Boyer (2001, p. 203) stresses, something must be done with a corpse, and it has to be something that satisfies or allays competing innate urges of dictatorial power. What seems to have evolved everywhere, a Good Trick for dealing with a desperate situation, is an elaborate ceremony that removes the dangerous body from the daily environment either by burial or burning, combined with the interpretation of the persistent firing of the intentional-stance habits shared by all who knew the deceased as the unseen presence of the agent as a spirit, a sort of virtual person created by the survivors’ troubled mind-sets, and almost as vivid and robust as a live person.

What role, if any, does language play in this? Are we the only species of mammal that buries its dead because we’re the only species that can talk about what we share when we confront a fresh corpse? Do the burial practices of Neanderthals show that they must have had fully articulate language? These are among the questions we should try to answer. The world’s languages are well stocked with verbs for the basic varieties of belief-desire manipulation: we pretend and lie,

but also bluff and suspect and flatter and brag and tempt

and dissuade and command and prohibit and disobey, for instance. Was our virtuosity as natural psychologists a prerequisite for our linguistic ability, or is it the other way around: did our use of language make our psychological talents possible? This is another controversial area of current research, and probably the truth is, as it so often is, that there was a coevolutionary process, with each talent feeding off the other. Plausibly, the very act of verbal communication requires some

appreciation of third-order intentionality: I have to want you to recognize that I am trying to inform you, to get you to believe what I’m saying

(Grice, 1957, 1969; Dennett, 1978; but see also Sperber and Wilson, 1986). But, like the fledgling cuckoo, a child can get under way quite cluelessly, achieving successful communication without having any reflective appreciation of the structure that underlies all intentional communication, without even recognizing, really, that she is communicating at all.

Once you’ve started talking (with other people), you will be bathed in new words, some of which you more or less understand; some of these objects of perception, such as the words “pretend” and “brag” and “tempt,” will help draw and focus your attention on cases of pretending and bragging and tempting, giving you plenty of inexpensive practice in folk psychology. Whereas chimpanzees and some other mammals may also be “natural psychologists,” as Nicholas Humphrey (1978) has called them, since they lack language they never get to compare notes or discuss cases with other natural psychologists. The articulation of the intentional stance in verbal communication not only heightens the sensitivity, discrimination, and versatility of individual folk psychologists, but also magnifies and complicates the folk-psychological phenomena they are attending to. A fox may be cunning, but a person who can flatter you by declaring that you are cunning as a fox has more tricks up his sleeve than the fox does, by a wide margin.

Language gave us the power to remind ourselves of things not currently present to our senses, to dwell on topics that would otherwise be elusive, and this brought into focus a virtual world of imagination, populated by the agents that mattered the most to us, both the living but absent and the dead who were gone but not forgotten. Released from the corrective pressure of further actual encounters in the real world, these virtual agents were free to evolve in our minds to amplify our yearnings or our dreads. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or—if the absent one was somewhat frightening in reality—more terrified. This still doesn’t get our ancestors to religion, but it gets them to persistent—even obsessive—rehearsal and elaboration of some of their habits of thought.

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