Religion, Groupism, and Violence...

...or why Chimpanzees need religion.

Protestants and Catholics, Muslims and Jews, Muslims and Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, Serbs and Croats, what do these groups have in common? They are all religiously identified groups that have been involved in recent violent conflict and if I include all of history the list would fill volumes. So what’s to blame for all this conflict? These days the popular answer to this question in the West is “Religion” – I hear it all the time in the media and from friends. Do away with religion and you do away with much of the world’s violence. I think these people are wrong, and that the idea that religion is the cause of most conflict is a common misconception. Let me make the case.

Clearly religion is an aspect of many conflicts and religious differences are often stated as a motivation by the participants. So where’s the misconception. I believe that there’s a cause underlying the religious aspects of these conflicts and that if religion were removed from the equation we'd still have a history full of violent conflict. Consider the Hutu versus Tutsi, Basque versus Spanish, football firms (gangs that support soccer teams) versus each other, Hatfields versus McCoys and the Crips versus the Bloods – violent group conflicts that do not have a significant religious component.

I believe this underlying cause to be an instinctual predisposition for humans to be groupist, and hostile towards outsiders – particularly with males. I believe this predisposition to be built into our genetic code: a built-in behavior much as the desire to chase sticks is built into the genetic code of retrievers. If this is true then religion is just one of the more common ways people have of defining the boundaries of their group, any other difference between people can be used instead. Geographic location, family association, language, physical attribute, political creed, and moral system have all taken their turn as the main difference between two groups in conflict. It would explain why we have religious conflict even though most religions teach some form of tolerance, even Islam and especially Christianity: Christianity specifically instructs followers not to engage in violent conflict. And how is one to account for the various periods of strife involving Buddhists cultures, the most pacifistic religious philosophy on the planet? Blaming religion for world conflict is like blaming chocolate cake for obesity, the underlying drive is to eat and cake is just one motivation.

This genetic predisposition theory has been around for a while, I first read about it in the book “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” by Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, and it’s been around since the days of Darwin. Some of the most recent and compelling evidence comes from the study of chimpanzees -- our closest genetic relatives. In the book “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence”, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson report on many documented instances of inter-group killings amongst chimpanzees and at least two instances where one group of chimpanzees completely decimates a neighboring group. These observations take place in widely separated locations and seem to be a uniform characteristic of the species. This means that our closest cousins in the wild, without the influence of civilization that make humans hard to study, have a pattern of inter-group violence that is very similar to our own. At the very least it’s reasonable to speculate that humans and chimpanzees and our common ancestor all share a common instinctual antipathy towards those in other groups.

So once again considering religion, not only do I think we should let religion off the hook but I think a pretty good case could be made that, on balance, religion has been a moderating factor when it comes to group conflict. I believe that, with a few exceptions, religions have had a key role in the development and propagation of civilization and that it’s civilization that makes it possible for us to tolerate each other despite our genetic predispositions. Would feral humans, without the prohibition of civilization, be able to live together within cities of a million people without constant inter-groups violence? I expect what you'd get is gang warfare on a mass scale, at least until they reinvented civilization. Religion isn't the only civilizing influence but it is an important one and I believe there is good reason for us in the West to reconsider our current disdain for its role in the world. And I say this as a dedicated agnostic.