Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

556 J HOW THE MIND WORKSLet's focus on the truly distinctive part of the psychology of religion.The anthropologist Ruth Benedict first pointed out the common threadof religious practice in all cultures: religion is a technique for success.Ambrose Bierce defined to pray as "to ask that the laws of the universe beannulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." Peopleeverywhere beseech gods and spirits for recovery from illness, for successin love or on the battlefield, and for good weather. Religion is a desperatemeasure that people resort to when the stakes are high and theyhave exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success—medicines,strategies, courtship, and, in the case of the weather, nothing.What kind of mind would do something as useless as inventing ghostsand bribing them for good weather? How does that fit into the idea thatreasoning comes from a system of modules designed to figure out howthe world works? The anthropologists Pascal Boyer and Dan Sperberhave shown that it fits rather well. First, nonliterate peoples are not psychotichallucinators who are unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.They know there is a humdrum world of people and objects driven by theusual laws, and find the ghosts and spirits of their belief system to be terrifyingand fascinating precisely because they violate their own ordinaryintuitions about the world.Second, the spirits, talismans, seers, and other sacred entities arenever invented out of whole cloth. People take a construct from one ofthe cognitive modules of Chapter 5—an object, person, animal, naturalsubstance, or artifact—and cross out a property or write in a new one,letting the construct keep the rest of its standard-issue traits. A tool orweapon or substance will be granted some extra causal power but otherwiseis expected to behave as it did before. It lives at one place at onetime, is unable to pass through solid objects, and so on. A spirit is stipulatedto be exempt from one or more of the laws of biology (growing,aging, dying), physics (solidity, visibility, causation by contact), or psychology(thoughts and desires are known only through behavior). Butotherwise the spirit is recognizable as a kind of person or animal. Spiritssee and hear, have a memory, have beliefs and desires, act on conditionsthat they believe will bring about a desired effect, make decisions, andissue threats and bargains. When the elders spread religious beliefs, theynever bother to spell out these defaults. No one ever says, "If the spiritspromise us good weather in exchange for a sacrifice, and they kn6w wewant good weather, they predict that we will make the sacrifice." Theydon't have to, because they know that the minds of the pupils will auto-