Il fanatismo altruista

Il fanatismo altruista

The Gods of Cooperation and Competition – Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict BY Ara Norenzayan

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Argomenti: religione, morale, coesione sociale, competizione tra gruppi, conflitti.

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For all its virtues in binding strangers together, religious cooperation is born out of competition and conflict between groups. It is therefore expected that religious cooperation in turn fuels the very conflicts, real or imagined, that are perceived to threaten it. (This is the topic of the next chapter.) This dynamic helps us understand and resolve the seeming paradox that it is the handmaiden both of cooperation within the group and of conflict between groups.

Note:CIÒ CHE CI FA COMPETERE E CI FA CONFLIGGERE

groups that happen to have members who acquire traits favoring self-sacrifice and subordinate self-interest for group interests—that is, groups with stronger social solidarity—will tend to win out.

Note:SACRIFICIO DI SÈ

Religion returns to center stage, not as a theological explanation of purpose or order, but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units—at least to a degree.

Note:SLOAN WILSON

In an ambitious cross-cultural investigation spanning 33 nation-states, Michele Gelfand and her colleagues measured something related to social solidarity. They looked at the degree to which nations are “tight”—that is, do they have strict social norms that apply to many situations? How important is conformity to these norms? How much deviation from norms is tolerated and do people get punished for violating these norms?

Note:GELFAND: ALTRUISMO E GUERRA

they found that, all else being equal, conflict a hundred years ago increased the odds of strict norm-enforcement today. Tighter nations were also more religious—and that makes sense too if world religions are a group-mobilizing force.

Note:IL NUMERO DI GUERRE PREGRESSE PREVEDE LA RELIGIOSITÀ

as any observer of team sports fans can see, the “cooperate to compete” instinct is particularly strong among that segment of the population that likes war: young men.

Note:FANATICI E ALTRUISTI

Richard Sosis and his colleagues looked at this issue from a different angle..,. they found that the greater the participation in warfare, the more likely there are costly rites for males…. Sosis sees these painful rites as costly behaviors that signal group commitment. He points out that ritual scarification and violence create male solidarity, which keeps freeriding during warfare under control….

Note:SOSIS

Atran explains, seemingly irrational tendencies make for stronger groups that can outdo their more rational, self-interested rivals:

Note:RITI IRRAZIONALI

Seen in this light, it is not surprising that prosocial religions have been a major force shaping human history. When intergroup rivalries are strong, prosocial religious groups, with their Big Gods and loyalty practices that promote social solidarity, could have a competitive edge over rival groups.

Note:MONOTEISMO E STORIA

Building Moral Communities of Strangers

As Jonathan Haidt shows, much of morality is rooted in social intuitions in the service of gluing individuals together to form “sacred” communities.

Note:MORALITÀ E COESIONE

As Haidt recognizes, not all moral systems are religious, and not all religions are moral systems, but some religious systems—those that have prosocial consequences—have been moral systems throughout time.

Note:RELIGIONE E MORALE

They found that the stronger an individual expressed religious belief and reported high levels of religious participation, the more likely he or she condemned moral transgressions.

Note:QUENTIN ATKINSON

These findings complement results by Shariff and Rhemtulla discussed earlier, who found, all else being equal, lower crime rates in nations with stronger belief in hell than heaven.

Note:CRIMINE E RELIGIOSITÀ

Morality without God

This does not mean, of course, that religion is necessary for morality. No doubt core human moral instincts evolved long before religions spread in human groups.

Note:MORALITÁ E RELIGIONE

Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom have found that moral-like judgments can be found even in preverbal babies: by six months of age, they show a preference for an individual who helps and an aversion to an individual who obstructs someone else’s goal.

Note:BAMBINI

Even our primate cousins have vestiges of moral instincts. A long line of research by primatologist Frans de Waal and his colleagues shows capacities for emotional contagion, consolation, and grief in chimpanzees.

Note:MORALITÀ E SCIMMIE

We do not need religion to be moral beings. But moral communities of strangers may not have evolved as readily without religions with Big Gods.

Note:IL PROBLEMA DELLO STRANIERO

Intergroup Competition and Warfare

There is no shortage of evidence in the historical and ethnographic record showing that violent and nonviolent conflict has been endemic to human existence.18 In fact, one driver of large group size in cultural evolution is the intensity of between-group competition for resources and habitats. For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods.

Note:CON COSA SI CORRELA LA VIOLENZA UMANA

one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war.

Note:STATO E GUERRA

Peter Turchin, who has pioneered the scientific study of historical dynamics, emphasizes that the scaling up of social groups happened predominantly in frontiers of states and empires. He calculated that over 90 percent of preindustrial age mega-empires—defined as unified states covering greater than 1 million square kilometers (or 386,100 square miles)—arose in frontier regions, such as the Eurasian steppes.

Note:TURCHIN E LE FRONTIERE

this is the old adage that the best way to compete with rivals is to cooperate with allies. Medieval Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldûn, who was a keen observer of the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties in fourteenth-century North Africa, saw social solidarity, which he called asabiya,

Note:VECCHI ADAGI CONFERMATI

How Prosocial Religions Won in the Game of Intergroup Cultural Competition

This observation brings us to the idea that prosocial religions, with their group-beneficial norms that suppress selfishness and increase social cohesion, outcompeted their rivals. There are good reasons to think that this process has been driven by cultural—rather than genetic—evolution.

Note:LA VITTORIA CULTURALE DELLE RELIGIONI

Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich summarize the idea this way: Religious beliefs and practices, like group beneficial norms, can spread by competition among social groups in several ways, including warfare, economic production, and demographic expansion. Such cultural representations can also spread through more benign interactions, as when members of one group preferentially acquire behaviors, beliefs, and values from more successful groups. Over historical time, demographic and cultural patterns have favored prosocial religious groups.

Note:SELEZIONE CULTURALE

Cultural Group Stability

when all is said and done, what matters, in cultural terms, is how well a group weathers storms that might lead to its collapse. World history is littered with the corpses of vast, but short-lived, empires, such as the Assyrian and Mongol conquests that unified large parts of the Middle East and Eurasia, respectively.

Note:RELIGIONE => MAGGIORE STABILITÀ

Returning to this study of the group longevity of religious and secular communes in nineteenth-century America, Richard Sosis looked at an ideal case study because these communes operated under difficult conditions, facing various internal and external threats to group stability. Communes that were unable to solve “collective action problems”—overcoming internal disputes, preventing members from defecting to rival groups, surviving droughts, and so on, could not prosper. Indeed, some communes were dissolved soon after they were founded, whereas others flourished. For every year considered in a 110-year span, religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average factor of four.

Note:LA RELIGIONE RENDE PIÙ STABILI

The evidence just discussed leads to two key conclusions: (1) differential rates of group survival favor prosocial religious groups; and (2) the combination of belief in supernatural watchers, extravagant displays, and other commitment devices explains the cultural survival advantage of these groups—precisely what would be expected if prosocial religions were “packaged” by cultural evolutionary processes.

Note:CONCLUSIONI

Neither could genetic group selection easily explain these effects, given the very short time frames (just over a 110 year span) and the fact that variation in nineteenth-century American commune membership is unlikely to be of genetic origin.

Note:CULTURA E GENETICA

Attracting Religious Converts

In her study of the spread of Islam into Africa, Ensminger argues that Islamic beliefs, supported by powerful displays of faith such as abstaining from alcohol, avoiding pre- and extramarital sex, not consuming pork, and ritual fasting—permitted greater trust, shared rules of exchange, and the use of credit institutions among converted Muslims.26 The spread of Islam in turn facilitated more trade and greater economic success.

Note:ISLAM: FORZA E COMPETIZIONE

This might come as a surprise to many, but Americans have not been as religious as they are today. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark emphasize the role of religious competition in the dramatic expansion of religiosity in America since 1776.27 Those familiar with American religious movements today know that competition among religious institutions for membership has been a long-time feature of American life.

Note:AMERICA LA COMPETIZIONE RELIGIOSA RAFFORZA LA RELIGIOSITA’. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ PERFORMANTI NELLA COMPETIZIONE TRA GRUPPI

Religious Fertility

To survive and prosper, religious groups attract followers, induce adherents to reproduce at rates greater than replacement levels, or, as the demographic expansion of the Mormon Church shows, ideally, do both.

Note:LA PROSPERITÀ DI UNA RELIGIONE. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ FERTILI

The Mormon Church grew, in a time span of just 170 years, from a small group of a few hundred to 15 million followers worldwide. Likewise, Christianity itself grew by leaps and bounds in the Roman Empire, and a once obscure offshoot of Judaism became the state religion of the empire in less than 300 years.

Note:MORMONI ED EBREI

The cultural success of prosocial religious groups is therefore aided in no small part by their reproductive success,

Note:FERTILITÀ

Sociologist Eric Kauffman remarks with irony that, in the culture wars between the religious and secular, arguments fly back and forth, yet neither side seems to have noticed the most important trend that may really settle the dispute. He notes: Religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world through demography. We have embarked on a particular phase of history in which the frailty of secular liberalism will become even more apparent. In contrast to the situation today, the upsurge of fundamentalism will be felt more keenly in the secular West than in developing regions. This is because we are witnessing the historic conjunction of religious fundamentalism and demographic revolution.

Note:KAUFFMAN: L’ARGOMENTO RELIGIOSO

A study comparing the fertility rates of European Jews found that the atheists had the lowest birthrate, averaging around 1.5 children per woman (again, below replacement), whereas the religious Jews averaged nearly three, with the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel averaging six to eight children per woman.

Note:EBREI

Michael Blume explains: Although we looked hard at all available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.

Note:ATEI SENZA FIGLI DA SEMPRE

It is no accident that religious conservative attitudes on women’s rights, contraception, abortion, and sexual orientation are conducive to maintaining high fertility levels.

Note:RELIGIONE E DIRITTI DELLA DONNA

it is possible that religious fertility is shaped by a process called gene-culture coevolution.35 Just as the lactose-tolerance allele spread in less than 10,000 years in groups that adopted milk-producing cows, goats, and camels, it is conceivable that prosocial religious beliefs and practices adopted by some groups but not others might have exerted selection pressures on the human gene pool of these groups. This provocative idea is just starting to receive attention.

PERCHE’ PIU’ RELIGIOSI=>PIU’ FERTTYILI? BOH. L’IPOTESI DELLA COEVOLUZIONE

CHAPTER 2 TO BE HUMAN: WHAT IS IT?

CHAPTER 2 TO BE HUMAN: WHAT IS IT?Read more at location 345

Note: 2@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

“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

Note: CAUSA E FRATELLANZA Edit

BALTIMORE, OCTOBER 1962-NOVEMBER 1963Read more at location 395

Note: T Edit

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

Note: FEDE NELLA SCIENZA Edit

Neither do I think scientists are particularly well suited to provide moral guidance to society.Read more at location 460

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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

Note: FALLIMENTO DELLA SCIENZA COME MORALE §§§§§ Edit

“Is it not that God and society are one and the same?” French sociologist Émile Durkheim famously conjectured.Read more at location 468

Note: SOCIETÀ E RELIGIONE Edit

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

Note: GENOCIDIO E UMANITÀ Edit

THE CAUSERead more at location 473

Note: T Edit

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

Note: SOCIALIZZARE Edit

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

Note: SENSO Edit

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

Note: CIVILTÀ Edit

It’s about attempting to demystify terrorism, lessen our fears, and reduce the dangers of violent overreactionRead more at location 479

Note: LO SCOPO DEL LIBRO Edit

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

Note: MORIRE X LA CCAUSAS Edit

A SOCIAL CREATURE, EVEN “I”Read more at location 484

Note: T Edit

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

Note: FARE GRUPPO Edit

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

Note: GRUPPO E SOPRAVVIVENZA Edit

A person alone can analyze history but can’t make it without others.Read more at location 505

Note: SOLI Edit

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

Note: JIHADISTI E UMANITARI Edit

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

Note: TERRORISTACUN TIPO NORMALE Edit

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

Note: PROFILO Edit

THE DIVINE ANIMALRead more at location 535

Note: T Edit

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

Note: EVOLUZIONISMO. LA CHIAVE DEL NS SUCCESSO Edit

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

Note: LA RELIGIONE COME MOTORE Edit

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

Note: RELIGIONE E AMPI GRUPPI Edit

Note: IL SACRO COORDINA Edit

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

Note: IL GRANDE DIO Edit

A reason for these divine beings: to make large-scale cooperation possible between anonymous strangers.Read more at location 557

Note: LO STRANIERO Edit

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

Note: EGO E MORALE Edit

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

Note: RELIGIONE: NEMICO E SPERANZA. EMERSIONE DALL INNATO Edit

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

Note: LACGRANDE FAMIGLIA Edit

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

Note: PORNOGRAFIA E TRIBALISMO Edit

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

Note: ANDERSON Edit

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

Note: RELIGIONI SECOLARIZZATE Edit

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

Note: DIRITTI UMANI Edit

THE CRASH OF CULTURESRead more at location 588

Note: T Edit

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

Note: DISTACVCVO DAL TERRITORIO Edit

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

Note: CONTRO LA CLASH OF CIVILIZATION Edit

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

Note: GLOBALIZZAZIONE Edit

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

Add a note

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

Note: FRAMMENTAZIONE Edit

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

Note: IN CERCA DI SENSO Edit

Note: MEDIA Edit

Human rights constitute one global political culture,Read more at location 613

Add a note

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

Note: DIRITTU UMANI EVJIHSD Edit

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

Note: GLI ERRORI Edit