Pascal Boyer (2001) Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books 3 THE KIND OF MIND IT TAKES About halfway through Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the heroine Elizabeth and her relatives are given a tour of the house and grounds at Pemberley, the vast estate of her proud acquaintance and spurned suitor Mr. Darcy. The place is grand (“The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of their proprietor”) and promises pleasures thus far unfamiliar to Elizabeth (“To be mistress of Pemberley might be something!”). Being no social historian, Elizabeth is more interested in the many delights of owning these commodious apartments and lush gardens than in the hard work involved in maintaining this kind of household. She lives Upstairs and does not talk much about (or even consider) what happens Downstairs. But a lot happened downstairs. The efficient running of large households like Pemberley, with stables and fields, gardens and kitchens, guest rooms and dependents’ quarters, required the execution of precisely defined tasks distributed among dozens of specialists—house steward, housekeeper, groom of the chambers, butler, valet, lady’s maid, chef, footman, underbufler, young ladies’ maid, housemaid, stillroom maid, scullery maid, kitchen maid, laundry maid, dairymaid, coachman, groom, postilion, candleman, oddman, steward’s room man and servants’ hail boy, to name but a few. These specialists all had a precisely defined position in a hierarchy (there were several castes of servants, such as the Upper Ten or the Lower Five, which dined separately) and specific duties. The chef cooked but had no control over wine. The butler decanted wine but the stiilroom maid handled the china. With this complex division of labor came a complex chain of command. The housekeeper hired and directed all the female servants but not the lady’s maids and nurses; the steward, not the butler, could give orders to the chef; the chef controlled the preparation of food but not its serving, which was the butler’s domain.’ What is truly impressive about this system is how invisible it remained to the denizens of upstairs rooms, especially to house guests. Food and drink would appear magically at the appointed time, freshly shined boots would be brought to bedrooms in the morning. Even the owners of such places had but a vague notion of the complicated hierarchy and distribution of tasks, which was the steward’s full-time occupation. As a guest, you would not even perceive any of this but only marvel at how efficiently it all seemed to work. However, another feeling (commonly evinced by visitors to such places) was that getting everything you could possibly need is not quite the same as getting what you want. For the complex hierarchy came with a certain measure of independence and rigidity. Footmen were not supposed to do a valet’s work and vice versa. Kitchen maids who cleaned floors would not make breakfast for you. Your boots would be shined, but only in the morning—the relevant people were busy at other times. So master and guest could certainly nudge this organizational juggernaut in certain directions but they could neither really direct it nor in fact clearly understand how it worked. THE GUEST’S VIEW OF THE MIND It is unfortunate, and almost inevitable, that when we talk about religion we quite literally do not know what we are talking about. We may think we know our own thoughts (“I know what I believe; I believe that ghosts can walk through walls”), but a good part of religious concepts is hidden from conscious inspection: for instance the expectation that ghosts see what is in front of them, that they remember what happened after it happened, that they believe what they remember and remember what they perceived (not the other way around) and so on. This is so 2 Boyer (2001) Religion Explained because a good part of what makes all concepts remains beyond conscious access. Another misconception is that we can explain people’s having particular thoughts if we can understand their reasons for holding them. (“They believe in ghosts because they cannot bear the grief of losing people”; “they believe in God because otherwise human existence does not make sense,” etc.) But the mind is a complex set of biological machines that produce all sorts of thoughts. For many thoughts there is no reasonable reason, as it were, except that they are the inevitable result of the way the machines work. Do we have a good reason for having a precise memory of people’s faces and forgetting their names? No, but that is the way human memory works. The same applies to religious concepts, whose persistence and effects are explained by the way various mental systems work. Now having a complex brain is like being a guest at Pemberley. We enjoy the many advantages of that efficient organization, but we have no real knowledge of what happens downstairs, of how many different systems are involved in making mental life possible. The organization of mental systems is in fact far more complex than anything you would find in the most extravagant household. At Pemberley, different servants poured wine and tea; in a more modest household, the same person would have carried out both tasks. Because our mental basement usually works very well, we tend to think that it must be simple in organization. We often have a suburban view of the mind, assuming that a few servants may be enough; but that is only an illusion, and the brain is much more like a grand estate. What makes the system work smoothly is the exquisite coordination of many specialized systems, each of which handles only a fragment of the information with which we are constantly bombarded. TO CATCH A THIEF (USING INFERENCE SYSTEMS) Systems in the mind are complicated and complicatedly connected. Some of this complexity is crucial in understanding why people have religious concepts. Fortunately, we are already familiar with the most important aspect of mind-organization that is relevant here. In the previous chapter I mentioned that all the objects we encounter are mentally sorted in different ontological categories with associated expectations. Having ontological categories is not just a matter of classifying stuff out there in large classes (e.g., most roundish, furry or feathery things “animals”; flat surfaces and sharp angles “machines”). What makes ontological categories useful is that once something looks or feels like an animal or a person or an artifact, you produce specific inferences about that thing. You pick up different cues and process information differently, depending on whether the object is an animal or a person or an artifact or a natural object like a rock. If a branch moves, it is probably because something or someone pushed it. If the leg of an animal moves, it may well be because the animal is pursuing a particular goal. This description may give the impression that sorting objects along ontological distinctions and producing category-specific inferences is a matter of explicit, deliberate thinking. Far from it. The distinctions are constantly produced by the mind. We do not have to think about them. To get a sense of how smoothly inference systems work, imagine the following scene: In a quiet and prosperous suburb, a dapper old gentleman with a hat comes out the back door of a house and walks across the lawn. He is carrying a big screwdriver and a crowbar, which he puts in his trousers’ side-pockets. He looks around a few times and then proceeds along the pavement. Not far from there, a child is playing with a huge Labrador on a leash. All of a sudden, the dog starts at the sight of a cat in the next garden and gives a sudden pull that makes the leash snap out of the child’s hand. The dog dashes after its prey, charges across the pavement Chapter Three: The Kind of Mind it Takes 3 and knocks over the old man, who trips and falls flat on his face, his hat rolling in the gutter. The man yells in pain as the screwdriver has sprung out of his pocket and badly cut his arm. The man picks himself up and limps away, massaging his bloodied hand, leaving his hat in the gutter. You were not the only witness of all this; a police officer was patrolling the neighborhood. She picks up the hat, runs after the gentleman, puts her hand on his shoulder and says “Hey, wait!” As the man turns he recoils in visible shock at the sight of the police officer, looks around as if trying to find an escape route and finally says: “All right, all right. It’s a fair cop.” From his pockets he extracts a handful of rings and necklaces and hands them over to the bemused police officer. Although perhaps not altogether riveting (we are far from Jane Austen), the scene illustrates how multiple inference systems are involved in the perception of apparently simple events. Were you a witness to all this you might be surprised by some events but you would understand all of them. This is not because there is some center in the brain that is busy understanding “what is happening to the man, the little girl, the dog and the police officer.” It is because a whole confed- eracy of different systems are involved in handling particular aspects of the scene. Consider these: • Understanding the physics of solid objects: The dog yanked the leash out of the child’s hand and knocked over a passerby.