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.