Robert Sapolsky Is A Pussycat

When I set out to read Robert Sapolsky, I was prepared not to like him.  Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neuroscience at Stanford, publishes widely, and belongs to a coterie of neoatheists that includes Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and cable TV host and filmmaker Bill Maher. Noteworthy is that Sapolsky is a recipient of The Emperor Has No Clothes Award given by the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

But Sapolsky’s book title alone softened me up.  The essay I was looking for, called “Circling the Blanket for God,” is included in a collection of essays bearing the title The Trouble With Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament (Simon and Schuster, 1997). By the end of my read, damn if I hadn't taken a shine to this iconoclast.

Relying heavily on the work of anthropologists and psychiatrists like Paul Radin, Jules Silverman, George Devereux and Alfred Kroeber, Sapolsky’s essay probes the neurobiological roots of religion -- in other words, he argues that our genes made us religious.  

Sapolsky traces the origins of religion in preindustrial societies to two forms of genetically determined psychiatric disorder and suggests why those two forms of disorder survived evolution. The two forms are schizotypal personality disorder, which is genetically related to schizophrenia and might be thought of as “schizophrenia lite,” and obsessive compulsive disorder.  

In our early history, persons with schizotypal personality disorder became the shamans, witches and witch doctors, visionaries and medicine men and women. These were the odd ducks of the tribe.  They were recognized to be half crazy, spirit-filled, possessed.  They heard voices, lived as hermits, became possessed by the spirits of bears, wolves, hyenas and other animals, spoke in tongues, and delivered messages from the gods.  Healed madmen and mad healers, they told fortunes, predicted the future and provided counsel in tribal affairs.

The metamagical thinking, wild behavior and prophetic speech of shamans was supplemented by a second and very different religious caste that enacted obsessive compulsive religious rituals on behalf of the tribe. These early religionists channeled their own obsessive compulsive disorder into the performance of precisely executed religious acts. Think the ritual consecration of bread and wine in the mass or the ritual washing of food preparation vessels by the Orthodox Jew. In doing so, they vicariously siphoned off some of the endemic obsessive compulsiveness of tribal members.  You didn’t need to worry so much about placating, appeasing or wooing the gods by means of the exactly correct performance of ritual if a uniformed someone anointed by the tribe was doing it on your behalf.

These two genetic types – call them shamans and priests – survived and flourished in the long evolutionary history of humanity because they provided an important service to human societies.  With them lies the evolutionary origins of all religious ideas, symbol systems, texts and rituals. And of course they are still everywhere among us.

Sapolsky thinks we have created gods and religion over the course of many millennia. We did it because we had existential problems to deal with.  As Voltaire said, if God did not exist, we would have had to invent him, and this wily maxim – for the eighteenth-century philosophe almost surely believed that we did create God – sums up Sapolsky’s main point.  Religion is a kind of very salutary opium.  It’s Linus’s comforting blanket.  It’s whistling in the dark.  It encourages good behavior and discourages bad behavior.  In making sacred the routine duties of life, it gives the quotidian a sense of meaning.  It got primitives through illness, death, tragedy, famine, war and the high-stakes chances of the hunt and the growing season.  Religion is the oil that enables the social engine to run smoothly and not overheat.

I regard all this as fair and plausible enough. Perhaps it, or something like it, is true. While I expected to find Sapolsky’s account of the origins of religion upsetting or disagreeable, I discovered that in the end it’s really old news. How Sapolsky anticipates a reaction of shock and horror from the people of faith who read what he has to say is curious. Divinity students and seminarians have been taught for generations that religion is a human construct. A deeper question is whether the human construct  we know as religion, in its myriad forms and manifestations, points to any reality beyond itself.

I Will Overlook Your Sophistry

The decade of the eighties had begun. I was 30, single, only a couple of years out of the ordination chute, a graduate student in religion and the new pastor of a historic church on the outskirts of Nashville.  All Saints Sunday was my third Sunday on the job and I chose to include in the morning service a litany of the saints that I had found in a packet of materials from the liturgical resources office of my denomination. The litany began with references to some of the more familiar saints in the Christian calendar – St. Mary the Virgin, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Paul, Justin Martyr, Perpetua and Felicitas, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  We remembered and gave thanks for their inspiring, exemplary lives. They had lighted the path of love, devotion and courageous discipleship for people of faith through the ages. No problem, no argument. So far, so good. But then the litany seemed to veer left. Suddenly congregants who allowed themselves to be guided by the printed order of service – many of whom, I fear, had not reviewed the program before the service began – found themselves giving thanks for the blessed memory and example of saints from our own century, witnesses and trailblazers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King.

As I was walking up the aisle toward the front door to greet the people who would be emerging from the church following the benediction, I felt pleased and proud. Here in the South, in a sanctuary built with bricks that were handmade by slaves, I had maneuvered an exclusively white religious community into raising its collective voice to affirm that Dr. Martin Luther King was a saint of God and an inspiring example for us all.

My mood of self-congratulation was soon arrested by a middle-aged man who approached me bristling. He grasped my hand, told me his name, and then said, “I deeply resent the reference to Martin Luther King as a saint in today’s service. He is a known Communist. I have been a member of this church with my family for many years, but this reference is extremely offensive to me and I will not be back.”

I had been warned about The Judge – for a circuit court judge he was – but in that moment the only details I could remember were that he was a retired United States Marine Corps officer and a judge of some kind with a decidedly conservative political bent, a temper that warmed easily, a deceased wife, a dashingly handsome son and a beautiful daughter.

The Judge walked away and my adrenaline rush dissipated. I then decided I was duty-bound to write him a letter. I would explain everything: where the material came from, the theological rationale for including King in the litany as a pioneer of social justice, the meaning of the term saint in Scripture and how the usage of hagios and its cognates had evolved in the history of Christendom and was then reformed and reclaimed to apply to all believers. Unfortunately, I not only composed the letter; I mailed it. Because I was right. And – the hardest thing to admit these years later – I needed The Judge to understand why he was wrong and I was right so he could bless me by conceding the point.

He never did any of that, and I was left to grow up as best I could. Before the end of the week, I had received his written reply. Perhaps someday I will find it, discolored by mold, in some obscure basement box of papers. On picking up the mail, I read the letter slowly and carefully. He retracted nothing, although his handwriting was composed and graceful, his tone courteous. “I will overlook your sophistry,” he wrote. That’s the only phrase from his letter that I distinctly remember.

Not long ago, I came across The Judge’s obituary. He lived into his mid-eighties. He had retired from the bench, taken diplomas in the culinary arts and bartending, become a hotelier in Florida and finally bought a hotel somewhere in the South Pacific. But they didn’t bury The Judge in the South Pacific.  They brought him back home to Middle Tennessee. His funeral was held in the church he said he’d not come back to.

If I could write The Judge another letter, I’d request clemency for youthful arrogance. I’d say it often takes time for some of us to get over the need to be right. I’d come clean about not knowing what I don’t know, then or now, my easy assumptions about the bigotry of others and the regrettable sense that I have little to learn from people who are not like me. If I wrote the letter well enough, using adverbs sparingly and eliminating all the sophistry I could wring from it, maybe The Judge would give a delayed ruling in favor. Or at least I like to think he might.