“My son didn’t die just for the sake of a cause, he died also for his cousins and friends. He died for the people he loved.” And my puzzling over that sentiment then became an overarching theme of study for this book.Read more at location 393
Some of my fellow nonreligious scientists believe that science is better able than religion to constitute or justify a moral system that regulates selfishness and makes social life possible. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit of historical or experimental evidence to support such faith in scienceRead more at location 457
Neither do I think scientists are particularly well suited to provide moral guidance to society.Read more at location 460
As Noam Chomsky put it in response to my criticism of “new atheists” who claim to replace faith-based morality with science-based morality: “On the ordinary problems of human life, science tells us very little, and scientists as people are surely no guide. In fact they are often the worst guide, because they often tend to focus, laser-like, on their professional interests and know very little about the world.”Read more at location 460
“Is it not that God and society are one and the same?” French sociologist Émile Durkheim famously conjectured.Read more at location 468
religions sanctify and incite fear (which is the father of cruelty) but also hope (which is the friend of happiness). Between the Hecatomb and Humanity, religion’s polar products, the destinies of civilizations continue to evolve.Read more at location 471
Humans and other primates have two preoccupations in life: health and social relations. Actually, they’re often the same: socialize to survive.Read more at location 473
This belief that our world was intended for the committed community is what I call the Cause. It is a mystical thing, a product of our biological evolution and history that gives spiritual purpose to our lives.Read more at location 476
this illusion came to drive humanity and make itself real in the creation of cultures and the religious rise of civilizationsRead more at location 477
It’s about attempting to demystify terrorism, lessen our fears, and reduce the dangers of violent overreactionRead more at location 479
These are tales and studies in the wild about how and why people come naturally to die and kill for the Cause—people almost never kill and die just for the Cause, but also for each other: for their group, whose cause makes their imagined family of genetic strangers—their brotherhood, fatherland, motherland, homeland, totem, or tribe.Read more at location 481
Now I see that friendship and other aspects of small-group dynamics, such as raising families or playing on a team together, trump most everything else in moving people through life. But I also see religion, and quasi-religious nationalist or internationalist devotion such as patriotism and love of humanity, as framing and mobilizing that movement with purpose and direction.Read more at location 487
But I think I’ve come to understand that without groups, and without sincere love of them by some, our species probably wouldn’t have survived.Read more at location 504
A person alone can analyze history but can’t make it without others.Read more at location 505
jihad fights with the most primitive and elementary forms of human cooperation, tribal kinship and friendship, in the cause of the most advanced and sophisticated form of cultural cooperation ever created: the moral salvation of humanity.Read more at location 510
Anthropologically and psychologically, terrorists usually are not remarkably different from the rest of the population. There are a few cruel kooks and some very bright individuals who go in for violent jihad, but most terrorists fall in between. Small-group dynamics can trump individual personality to produce horrific behavior in ordinary people,Read more at location 524
demographic and social tendencies exist: in age (usually early twenties), where they grew up and where they hang out (neighborhood is often key), in schooling (mostly nonreligious and often science oriented), in socioeconomic status (middle-class and married, though increasingly marginalized), in family relationships (friends tend to marry one another’s sisters and cousins).Read more at location 528
The key to this astounding and bewildering development, it appears, is mushrooming cultural cooperation and creativity within groups, in order to better compete against other groups.Read more at location 543
The story of humanity has been the religious rise of civilizations, however secular in appearance the recent chapters of the story appear.Read more at location 545
The formation of large-scale cooperative societies is an evolutionary problem, because evolutionary theories of reciprocity based on kin relations or quid pro quo (scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours) cannot account for the fact that people frequently cooperate with strangers of unknown reputation whom they will never meet again and whose loyalties they cannot control.12 But religious beliefs and obligations can reinforce cooperative norms by conferring on them sacredness, and with supernatural punishment or divine retribution for breaking with those cooperative norms. Supernaturals are the unimpeachable authors of what is sacred in society.Read more at location 546
Sociologists and anthropologists argue that sacred beliefs and values authenticate society as having existence beyond the mere aggregation of its individuals and institutions.Read more at location 554
A reason for these divine beings: to make large-scale cooperation possible between anonymous strangers.Read more at location 557
Historical and cross-cultural analyses indicate that the larger a society’s population, the more likely it is to have deities who are concerned with managing morality and mitigating selfishness.Read more at location 558
Religion, for example, is neither a naturally selected adaptation of our species nor innate in us. But we are biologically primed by evolution to be on the lookout for potential predators, and especially guard against intelligent and cunning agents like ourselves. So hair-trigger is this survival sensibility that we see enemies in clouds or hear them in the wind. It’s only a short step from imagining invisible agents to believing in their supernatural existence—a step motivated by fears of death and deception, and hopes of success and salvation. I’ll show evidence that this tricking and tweaking of our species’ innate and universal sensibilities is what creates religion from cognition.Read more at location 564
Imagined kinship—the rhetoric and ritual of brotherhood, motherland, family, or friends, and the like—is also a critical ingredient of nearly all religious and political success,Read more at location 569
From an evolutionary standpoint, imagined kinship isn’t all that different from pornography: It too involves manipulation of naturally selected proclivities for passionate ends that may be very far removed from evolutionary needs but create a cultural reality of their own.Read more at location 571
When imagined kinship combines with team spirit, amazing things are possible: like winning battles against all odds, achieving civil rights, or you and your buddies blowing yourselves—and your perceived enemies—to bits.Read more at location 572
Note: EFFETTO COLLATRRALE: PER FAR GRUPPO CON LA PARENTELA SI RICORRE ALLA DIVINITÀ CHE CONSENTRE GRUPPI PIÙ ALLARGATI E POTENTI Edit
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes the birth of the concept of the nation as basically a reformulation of religion and the imagined kinship of ethnicity.Read more at location 576
Secularized by the European Enlightenment, the great quasi-religious isms of modern history, as political philosopher John Gray calls them16—colonialism, socialism, anarchism, fascism, communism, democratic liberalism—harnessed industry and science to continue on a global scale the human imperative of cooperate to compete—Read more at location 577
Even the idea of human rights is an outgrowth of monotheism, brought down from heaven to everyone on earth (in principle) by Europe’s Enlightenment.Read more at location 582
As French political scientist Olivier Roy astutely notes, religion and politics are becoming increasingly detached from their cultures of origin, not so much because of the movement of peoples (only about 3 percent of the world’s population migrates),18 but through the worldwide traffic of media-friendly information and ideas.Read more at location 590
contrary to those who see global conflicts along long-standing “fault lines” and a “clash of civilizations,”19 these conflicts represent a crisis, even collapse, of traditional territorial cultures, not their resurgence.Read more at location 593
Many made giddy by globalization—the ever faster and deeper integration of individuals, corporations, markets, nations, technologies, and knowledge—believe that a connected world inexorably shrinks differences and divisions, making everyone safer and more secure in one great big happy family.Read more at location 595
But my field experience and experiments in a variety of cultural settings lead me to believe that an awful lot of people on this planet respond to global connectivity very differently than does the power elite.Read more at location 601
For there is, together with a flat and fluid world, a more tribal, fragmented, and divisive world, as people unmoored from millennial traditions and cultures flail about in search of a social identity that is at once individual and intimate but with a greater sense of purpose and possibility of survival than the sorrow of here today, gone tomorrow.Read more at location 605
Many, especially the young, are increasingly independent yet interactive, in the search for respect and meaning in life, in their visions of economic advancement and environmental awareness. These youth form their identities in terms of global political cultures through exposure to the media.Read more at location 608
The decidedly nonsecular jihad is another political culture in this massive, media-driven transnational awakening: thoroughly modern and innovative despite its atavistic roots in the harsh purity of the Prophet’s original community in the Arabian Desert.Read more at location 615
Politicians and pundits assure us that jihadism is nihilistic and immoral, with no real program or humanity. Yet charges of nihilism against an adversary usually reflect willful ignorance regarding the adversary’s moral framework.Read more at location 628
