Is lust for power a basic human attribute?

Aug 17, 2008 Alun Politics No Comments David Sloan Wilson, Evolution, Pascal Boyer, Religion, Ron Ferguson, Social Evolution, Steven Jay Gould, Walter Burkert

Lust for Power rather than Lust.
Photo (cc) Rachel a.k.

Ron Fer­guson has been writ­ing at the Her­ald, For good or ill, reli­gion is a basic human need. I dis­agree with most of it. Some lines like:

The attempts to provide evol­u­tion­ary reas­ons for the wide­spread per­sist­ence of reli­gion are uncon­vin­cing. Dog­matic reduc­tion­ism — “there is noth­ing bey­ond the nat­ural, phys­ical world”, in Dawkins’s words — doesn’t sat­isfy the deep­est long­ings of the human heart.

sug­gest to me someone who hasn’t read much or per­haps any evol­u­tion­ary explan­a­tions of reli­gion, but has read what other people — who may or may not have read such art­icles — say about these explan­a­tions. I can dis­pute Ferguson’s claims on sci­entific or philo­soph­ical grounds, but theo­lo­gical grounds too.

If we accept that reli­gious insight is needed to under­stand reli­gion, then the fact that at most one reli­gion is true becomes a prob­lem. How do we explain all these false reli­gions? Are they the product of a trick­ster god? If they are products of a trick­ster god then there’s no way to know that your deeply cher­ished beliefs are not a cos­mic jape. If they’re not the product of a super­nat­ural force then they are nat­ural and poten­tially explic­able. This means that people like David Sloan Wilson, Wal­ter Burk­ert, Pas­cal Boyer, people actu­ally work­ing on explan­a­tions of reli­gion have some­thing say on the subject.

It’s a very basic error and I think it high­lights a prob­lem with the study of the evol­u­tion of reli­gion. A lot of people pro­fess­ing to be talk­ing about the ori­gins of reli­gion really aren’t inter­ested in the debate. Instead it’s about con­tem­por­ary polit­ics. Ron Fer­guson, former min­is­ter at Saint Mag­nus Cathed­ral, Orkney, is say­ing ‘don’t listen to Dawkins’ because of what Dawkins means for the author­ity of the church now. Lest you think this is spe­cific­ally a prob­lem with the­ists I should add I’m not con­vinced that Dawkins is that bothered about the ori­gins of reli­gion either. If he were then he would have con­duc­ted his ‘Chinese junk’ thought exper­i­ment which he intro­duced in 1998 in his fore­word to ‘The Meme Machine’ and then returned to in ‘The God Delu­sion’. Again I’d argue that Dawkins is far more con­cerned at the polit­ical influ­ence reli­gion has today.

So how do you explain reli­gion? I was going to say that you have to adopt a judge­ment­ally neut­ral view. When zoolo­gists exam­ine lions they don’t load moral judge­ments of their inhu­mane method of slaughter into their work. Sim­il­arly the social bene­fits or det­ri­ments of reli­gion shouldn’t be an issue when examin­ing the facts of ori­gin and growth of reli­gion. How­ever this is where the sep­ar­ate mages­teria model pro­posed by Steven Jay Gould breaks down. It is a view of many reli­gions that the reason why their reli­gion exis­ted and grew is that a super­nat­ural being made it so. So, for example, David Sloan Wilson who is extremely care­ful to try and avoid offend­ing believ­ers non­ethe­less still does so when he pro­poses an explan­a­tion for Calvin­ism which doesn’t include a God, as explained by ardent Prot­est­ant kfeich at Lib­ra­r­yThing:

Why would we want to spend time dis­cuss­ing a book by an athe­ist whose basic pre­sup­pos­i­tion about real­ity (There is a God) is faulty? Most, if not all, sub­sequent pro­pos­i­tions and con­clu­sions would there­fore be estranged from the truth.

scroll down to mes­sage 64

Most Chris­ti­ans I’ve met wouldn’t be so dog­matic in their refusal to accept there can be non-religious explan­a­tions for things. I’ve yet to see ser­i­ous agit­a­tion that many pop­u­lar cook­books refuse to say that the dish will be deli­cious only if it is part of God’s plan.

I’d be sur­prised if Ron Fer­guson were that dog­matic because of how he sees his place in rela­tion to the longer his­tory of Orkney. In his art­icle he con­nec­ted the Middle East­ern mys­tery cult he fol­lows with the pre­his­toric rituals of peoples thou­sands of years before then. This only works if you sense of con­tinu­ity of people and place. For Fer­guson the Orkneys weren’t ori­ent­al­ised, it was Chris­tian­ity which became Orca­dian. This makes cur­rent Chris­tian­ity the latest phase in a long tra­di­tion of intro­spect­ive meth­ods to under­stand the uni­verse. It also clearly requires a spe­cific view of real­ity, and it’s not one I can share. I’m really not sure to what extent if any mod­ern reli­gion is analgous to ancient reli­gion. Mod­ern Chris­tian­ity is strik­ingly dif­fer­ent to ancient Chris­tian­ity. In Cath­oli­cism the mar­tyrs who gave their lives to keep their faith in the Roman Empire, were wast­ing their time accord­ing to the cur­rent Pope who refused to do the same in Nazi Ger­many. Prot­est­ants seem to veer­ing towards ven­er­a­tion of the Bible as an author­ity, an author­ity which the earli­est Chris­ti­ans lacked. The Greeks them­selves didn’t have a word for reli­gion, so in some ways the study of it in its earlier stages is an ana­chron­ism. Con­tinu­ity of belief is an art­icle of faith for most reli­gions. We believe now what they believed then because the truths of reli­gion are time­less. But that’s a huge assump­tion which doesn’t hold for reli­gion in his­tor­ical peri­ods. I can’t see how that assump­tion could be jus­ti­fied when look­ing at earlier beliefs.

So if mod­ern reli­gion does not map eas­ily onto past beliefs, how do I cur­rently see reli­gion evolving? I think it grows from the per­sonal exper­i­ence of intent.

Per­son­ally I’m an epi­phen­om­en­al­ist, but while I don’t believe I have free will I cer­tainly feel as though I have free will. Indeed I feel that it was the lack of any plaus­ible mech­an­ism for free will, and the demostra­tion of com­plex and chaotic beha­viour that per­suaded me free will is, in mater­ial sense, mean­ing­less. Did I have any choice but to believe it if I had no free will? At this point your head may be spin­ning with try­ing to work out the sen­sa­tion of being an insensate auto­maton, but you’re not. This is import­ant. The sen­sa­tion of think­ing, regard­less of whether or not it’s free will, is the strongest sen­sa­tion you have. Everything you know about the uni­verse is based in the sen­sa­tion that there is a you to sense it. This is first order intentionality.

Some­thing else you know is that other minds exist. You see it from the actions of people. You can also see it in the actions of anim­als. I don’t mean that if you get too close and most anim­als can be scared off. That could be a purely mech­an­ical rela­tion­ship. Instead I mean there are times you can recog­nise pur­pose in some­thing else’s actions. Some­times you see the goal achieved and you can work out what the pur­pose was. Some­times you don’t but that doesn’t mean that you always con­clude thate there was no pur­pose. This is second order inten­tion­al­ity. The thing about second order inten­tion­al­ity is that you’re often not fussy about what you give it to. Humans and anim­als seem reas­on­able but it’s also com­mon for people to yell at inan­im­ate objects. Alan Tur­ing pro­posed that when people can­not dif­fer­en­ti­ate between a human and a com­puter inter­act­ing with them, then a machine can be con­sidered arti­fi­cially intel­li­gent. Given the abuse I’ve heard poured at Mr Clippy I’d argue the oppos­ite. The vis­ceral reac­tion, the anger and the venom aimed at a com­puter means it passes a test for Arti­fi­cial Stu­pid­ity or pos­sibly Arti­fi­cial Malevol­ence, which requires at least some form of per­ceived mind regard­less of whether or not the com­puter really has a mind. This abil­ity to assign intent where there may or may not be any can be applied to other objects. Put­ting inten­tion­al­ity into nature can have all sorts of side-effects. I’ll pull together three.

Cos­mo­visión

I wish I knew who first described reli­gion as Man’s attempt to com­mu­nic­ate with the weather. The ran­dom pat­terns could make it a can­did­ate for assigned inten­tion­al­ity. It would cer­tainly provide a puzzle which needs explain­ing. It’s likely that explain­ing ran­dom pat­terns is some­thing we’re really good at. The evid­ence comes from pigeons.

Feed­ing pigeons. Photo (cc) dham­mza.

Super­sti­tion in the Pigeon is a genu­ine schol­arly art­icle by B.F. Skin­ner. In it he recounts exper­i­ments which he believed showed pigeons were cap­able of super­ti­tious beha­viour. Basic­ally if you put a pigeon in a cage with a but­ton which, when pressed, will oper­ate a grain dis­penser — the pigeon will learn to use it. Where it gets inter­est­ing is when you change the but­ton so that when it’s pressed it’s purely ran­dom as to whether grain is dis­pensed or not.

When you do this then the pigeon still presses the but­ton, with inter­mit­tent suc­cess. What it doesn’t know is that the suc­cess is purely ran­dom. It acts as though it thought it got action right on the occa­sions when food came out. Per­haps it cocked its head to left before press­ing the but­ton. Now the pigeon repeats that action with vari­ations, until the next ran­dom pay­out rein­forces that beha­viour and leads to fur­ther elab­or­ate actions by the pigeon. I think it’s a bit of a leap to con­clude that the pigeon is super­sti­tious, but it’s clearly respond­ing to some con­di­tion­ing. The same can be observed in humans too.

I sup­pose I could have given fruit machines as an example of con­di­tion­ing people to ran­dom rewards instead, but there’s some­thing pleas­ing about cit­ing a man who taught pigeons to dance, play table ten­nis and guide mis­siles. The pigeon guided mis­sile had only one flaw.

Our prob­lem was no one would take us seriously.

The response to ran­dom events could there­fore appear to be ran­dom and arbit­rary in humans. I’d sug­gest that arbit­rary is fair, it will not be related to suc­cess of a tech­nique, but it will not be ran­dom. It will be a learned beha­viour and so vary between eth­nic groups. If you like we’re all talk­ing to the weather, but non­ethe­less we talk to it in the local lan­guage. I like the Span­ish term used by a lot of archae­oastro­nomers, cos­mo­visión, to describe the way peoples see the world. Stripped to its basic mean­ing it’s how people per­ceive the uni­verse, regard­less of whether this world-view is sci­entific or not. Dif­fer­ent peoples have dif­fer­ent cos­mo­visións and so their world-view is an eth­nic marker.

The marker is not purely dec­or­at­ive. Once you make some arbit­rary assump­tions about how the uni­verse works, some com­bin­a­tions of actions are more coher­ent than oth­ers. Some actions by people from another eth­nic group may even be act­ively dis­rupt­ive. Cos­mo­visión will be used in many import­ant activ­it­ies. It is vital to sow the seeds cor­rectly, to har­vest and win­now in the same way. The pro­tec­tion of the food sur­plus must be done in the right man­ner. Fail­ure in any of these could have fatal con­sequences. The view from within the group is that this vis­ion of reailty, and so is the same for all mem­bers of that group. There­fore we should see cos­mo­visións emerge as detect­able group char­ac­ter­ist­ics. This is old hat to archae­olo­gists and his­tor­i­ans who already know that if we were Vik­ings we’d build our houses this way, or com­mem­or­ate our dead that way.

Social Power

Largely unre­lated to cos­mo­visión is the devel­op­ment of power. My view of cos­mo­visión could be described as memetic, extel­li­gent or based in TXM. My view of power in con­trast owes more to struc­tur­a­tion the­ory, which I’m told is incom­pat­ible with memet­ics. The light­weight sum­mary of struc­tur­a­tion the­ory is as follows:

Social action is per­formed by agents work work within struc­tures. The struc­tures con­fine and con­strict what actions are open to the agents. At the same time agents by their actions make and main­tain these struc­tures. The rela­tion­ship between agents and struc­tures can get very com­plex, and it’s widely viewed that agents will seek to max­im­ise their pos­i­tion within struc­tures which cre­ates the longev­ity of some struc­tures. For example its the view of quite a few politi­cians that demo­cracy in the UK is broken. The power is held by people voted in by an over­whelm­ing minor­ity and so the bal­ance of power does not reflect the views of the coun­try. The Lib­eral Demo­crats and many Labour politi­cians in the 1980s were keen on a form of Pro­por­tional Rep­res­ent­a­tion to elect gov­ern­ments. The Lib­eral Demo­crats, who remain out of power, still are but there’s not really the same desire of PR from Labour. No-one who thinks they can win the whole game under the cur­rent struc­ture is likely to will­ingly change the struc­ture to share power. Power struc­tures should be self-reinforcing which, if you’ve read 1984, is really scary. If any power struc­ture which increases the power of individual(s) with in it will auto­mat­ic­ally self-reinforce, then it would also sug­gest that there should be a uni­ver­sal tend­ency to more from egal­it­arian soci­et­ies to socially strat­i­fied soci­et­ies. Again his­tory shows then when an eco­nomic sur­plus is pos­sible strat­i­fic­a­tion follows.

Mor­al­ity

Mor­al­ity is not neces­sar­ily related to either of the facets above, which might seem pre­pos­ter­ous to any­one with a mod­ern view of reli­gion. Indeed one of the reas­ons fun­da­ment­al­ists give for the import­ance of reli­gion is that it is a moral found­a­tion. Plato dis­agreed.

The doings of Cro­nus, and the suf­fer­ings which in turn his son inflic­ted upon him, even if they were true, ought cer­tainly not to be lightly told to young and thought­less per­sons; if pos­sible, they had bet­ter be bur­ied in silence. But if there is an abso­lute neces­sity for their men­tion, a chosen few might hear them in a mys­tery, and they should sac­ri­fice not a com­mon [Eleusin­ian] pig, but some huge and unpro­cur­able vic­tim; and then the num­ber of the hear­ers will be very few indeed.


…the nar­rat­ive of Hep­h­aes­tus bind­ing Here his mother, or how on another occa­sion Zeus sent him fly­ing for tak­ing her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer –these tales must not be admit­ted into our State, whether they are sup­posed to have an alleg­or­ical mean­ing or not. For a young per­son can­not judge what is alleg­or­ical and what is lit­eral; any­thing that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unal­ter­able; and there­fore it is most import­ant that the tales which the young first hear should be mod­els of vir­tu­ous thoughts.

Plato’s Repub­lic.

If you’re famil­iar with the Greek myths then it’s per­haps no won­der that Plato didn’t see the Gods as great moral guides. The same objec­tion can be made of other Gods. Richard Dawkins has been accused of being offens­ive when talk­ing about the actions of the Abra­hamic god. Appar­ently the notion of drown­ing all the new­born chil­dren on the planet for the greater good is, in con­trast, per­fectly accept­able. The issue is not whether or not your god is a guide to mor­al­ity, but rather that clearly soci­et­ies lived with con­cepts of mor­al­ity which were not derived from reli­gious examples.

Mutual rein­force­ment

Com­bine some of these fea­tures together and inter­est­ing things start to hap­pen. For instance you could derive mor­al­ity from cos­mo­visión. It might seem obvi­ous to some people if this is the way the world is then that is the way we should be. I don’t think it is obvi­ous. Many anim­als bring home injured prey for their young to play with, but I wouldn’t advoc­ate bring­ing home a rab­bit to vivi­sect for fun and edu­ca­tion. Non­ethe­less this is/ought fea­ture is com­mon. Homo­sexu­al­ity is said to be wrong because it isn’t nat­ural. Any­one who points out that if you go out and look there are plenty of homo­sexual rela­tion­ships in the animal king­dom and that actu­ally it’s not nat­ural to dress up in man­made fibres and have your own cable tel­ev­an­gel­ism chan­nel is thought to be miss­ing the point.

From mor­al­ity you can derive power. Again this does not neces­sar­ily fol­low. There are plenty of tales of people eschew­ing the trap­pings of wealth. On the other hand in the hand the idea you are doing right makes you an attract­ive per­son to fol­low, which why affairs for politi­cians are such a prob­lem, but you knew that. Non­ethe­less to be a power­ful per­son it is expec­ted that you are also a moral per­son. This might seem non­sensical when you look at the sort of people who get power. Non­ethe­less they gen­er­ally have jus­ti­fied their blood­lust on the grounds that it’s the right or neces­sary thing rather than say­ing “What’s the point of being in charge of an army if I don’t use it?”

Bizar­rely you can in turn use power to show your prowess in cos­mo­visión. It gen­er­ally isn’t neces­sary to demon­strate any coher­ence with real­ity for your ideas. Your own power can jus­tify your pos­i­tion of real­ity. For instance your favour­ite reli­gious leader must be right about the uni­verse, else he wouldn’t have gained so much power would he? This isn’t a purely reli­gious per­spect­ive. The suc­cess of fin­an­cial traders in the city is very sim­ilar to what would be expec­ted by chance. Nev­er­the­less the suc­cess­ful traders are given the big­ger bonuses because their suc­cess is used as evid­ence that they know what they’re doing rather than simply being lucky enough to occupy the upper quart­ile of a stat­ist­ical scat­ter. Fail­ure later on isn’t due to chance either, but to Fred­die los­ing his grip/hunger/focus etc.

These rela­tion­ships can all be reversed too so suc­cess in cos­mo­visión, pre­dict­ing the world’s beha­viour more accur­ately, can be used to gain power. Have enough power can you can define what is moral. As for mor­al­ity, if what you know of how the world should be is con­tra­dicted by real­ity, then you can show when real­ity is wrong. You now have a found­a­tions for a mutu­ally rein­for­cing meta-structure, bind them together in a social nar­rat­ive which explains the intent observed in nat­ural forces and you have a reli­gion. Except there is a problem.

Real­ity strikes back

I said above that mor­al­ity can tell you when the world has gone wrong. In a ran­dom sys­tem this will work because sooner or later things will work. The rains fail because of immoral beha­viour. This can be fixed by a return to mor­al­ity and if this doesn’t work then clearly someone isn’t behav­ing in a moral way. For thou­sands upon thou­sands of years this line of logic has been unchal­lenge­able. Sci­ence has provided a means to chal­lenge it.

The reason why Sci­ence is a potent danger to Reli­gion is that it elim­in­ates the need for gods in its explan­a­tions. The cos­mo­visión strand can now be pro­fane. This will not elim­in­ate the need for a cos­mo­visión, nor for mor­al­ity or power struc­tures, but it will demol­ish the mater­ial which has bound these three strands into one. The social meta-narrative can­not stand. If you don’t need a god to describe what is, then no god-based mor­al­ity can be derived from a cos­mo­visión. Sim­il­arly if your cos­mo­visión and now mor­al­ity lack a god, then gods are unne­ces­sary for power. The basic needs which reli­gion con­trolled remain, Fer­guson is right about that, but the ties that bind are show to be window-dressing. Reli­gion must adapt or die.

Reli­gion evolves

Jon Per­son At Ground Zero. Photo (cc) Jon Per­son.
The descrip­tion is apt, and the nar­rat­ive of the pho­toset is fas­cin­at­ing.

The view of people like Stew­art and Cohen, or Dawkins is that Sci­ence, under­stood prop­erly, kills Reli­gion. It is pos­sible that this will hap­pen but the rise of people like Deepak Chopra sug­gests to me that there’s a part of the brain evolved to be gull­ible. His­tory also shows that Reli­gion is not one static thing. It adapts. The Chris­tian­ity of the USA is not the Chris­tian­ity of Mex­ico, nor Greece. The Chris­tian­ity of the early twenty-second cen­tury will not be the same as the Chris­tian­ity of the twenty-first, though I’ve no doubt it will claim to be. Any other social change would be sub­ject to debate by all soci­ety, and the beha­viour of a group of people whose actions will impact us all should be placed under the same scru­tiny. Fer­guson is not only ignor­ant when he says ‘Sci­entific mater­i­al­ism has little to say at the open grave, other than “get over it, pal”.’ but also ignores the follow-up ques­tion ‘…and what can we reli­ably know from reli­gion that isn’t just someone’s opin­ion?’ This is why reli­gious mat­ters must be scru­tin­ised just as any other social move­ments would be. Yet scru­tiny does not always have to be hostile.

I was look­ing for a photo to illus­trate the concept of reli­gion evolving. What I found was a wide range of pho­tos includ­ing one of a woman in hot­pants, who I pre­sume from her pose, had answered the photographer’s pray­ers. But the one which caught my eye was the one above of someone volun­teer­ing to help out after a tor­nado. I’ll admit it doesn’t seem to be about reli­gion evolving, but the descrip­tion is com­pel­ling. Here’s a part:

If I want God, I will pick up this rake and scrape this ground. What reli­gion is that? If I want to feel God, I will get a tear­ful hug from a lady I’ve never met just because I found her spoons. Tell me, what one true reli­gion is that? It is no reli­gion. Reli­gion is com­pletely and utterly irre­levent from my work, yet at the very same time I’m doing God’s will, get it? I’m doing all Gods’ wills.

Alas, a site I for­got to book­mark was a Chris­tian web­log I stumbled upon a couple of years ago. The entry was about the reward that God gave Chris­ti­ans for doing good — and about how it was irrel­ev­ant. They argued the point about Chris­tian­ity was that it taught you should do good. Not that you should do good because it it got you into heaven. That’s not a basic­ally good idea which is neg­ated by being framed in a reli­gious way. It’s simply a good idea. Equally bad ideas should not be pro­tec­ted because they’re reli­gious. Bigotry is bigotry even if it’s a bloke in a dress raging against transsexuals.

I doubt I’ll believe in a God, there simply isn’t the evid­ence, but that doesn’t pre­vent you from believ­ing that as a human you can be part of some­thing big­ger. When Ron Fer­guson looks back at what con­nects him with pre­his­toric peoples I think that he could take that belief as some­thing basic to all humans. Yet that some­thing is some­thing all humans can share and can be examined sci­en­tific­ally as it has meas­ure­able con­sequences. I could also be per­suaded that a belief that ser­viced our needs rather than our lusts might be a good thing. Yet without that ele­ment of lust, the sat­ing of the desire for power, could you call that belief a Religion?