Authors: Unknown
Most
religions evolve. Whatever theory of religious evolution we adopt, it
has to be capable of explaining the astonishing speed with which the
process of religious evolution, given the right conditions, can take
off. A case study follows.
In
The
Life of Brian,
one of the many things the Monty Python team
got right was the extreme rapidity with which a new religious cult can
get started. It can spring up almost overnight and then become
incorporated into a culture, where it plays a disquietingly dominant
role. The 'cargo cults' of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea provide the
most famous real life example. The entire history of some of these
cults, from initiation to expiry, is wrapped up within living memory.
Unlike the cult of Jesus, the origins of which are not reliably
attested, we can see the whole course of events laid out before our
eyes (and even here, as we shall see, some details are now lost). It is
fascinating to guess that the cult of Christianity almost certainly
began in very much the same way, and spread initially at the same high
speed.
My
main authority for the cargo cults is David Attenborough's
Quest
in Paradise,
which he very kindly presented to me. The
pattern is the same for all of them, from the earliest cults in the
nineteenth century to the more famous ones that grew up in the
aftermath of the Second World War. It seems that in every case the
islanders were bowled over by the wondrous possessions of the white
immigrants to their islands, including administrators, soldiers and
missionaries. They were perhaps the victims of (Arthur C.) Clarke's
Third Law, which I quoted in Chapter 2: 'Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic'
The
islanders noticed that the white people who enjoyed these wonders never
made them themselves. When articles needed repairing they were sent
away, and new ones kept arriving as 'cargo' in ships or, later, planes.
No white man was ever seen to make or repair anything, nor indeed did
they do anything that could be recognized as useful work of any kind
(sitting behind a desk shuffling papers was obviously some kind of
religious devotion). Evidently, then, the 'cargo' must be of
supernatural origin. As if in corroboration of this, the white men did
do certain things that could only have been ritual ceremonies:
They
build tall masts with wires attached to them; they sit listening to
small boxes that glow with light and emit curious noises and strangled
voices; they persuade the local people to dress up in identical
clothes, and march them up and down - and it would hardly be possible
to devise a more useless occupation than that. And then the native
realizes that he has stumbled on the answer to the mystery. It is these
incomprehensible actions that are the rituals employed by the white man
to persuade the gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo,
then he too must do these things.
It
is striking that similar cargo cults sprang up independently on islands
that were widely separated both geographically and culturally. David
Attenborough tells us that
Anthropologists
have noted two separate outbreaks in New Caledonia, four in the
Solomons, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in
New Guinea, most of them being quite independent and unconnected with
one another. The majority of these religions claim that one particular
messiah will bring the cargo when the day of the apocalypse arrives.
The
independent flowering of so many independent but similar cults suggests
some unifying features of human psychology in general.
One
famous cult on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides (known as
Vanuatu since 1980) is still extant. It is centred on a messianic
figure called John Frum. References to John Frum in official government
records go back only as far as 1940 but, even for so recent a myth, it
is not known for certain whether he ever existed as a real man. One
legend described him as a little man with a high-pitched voice and
bleached hair, wearing a coat with shining buttons. He made strange
prophecies, and he went out of his way to turn the people against the
missionaries. Eventually he returned to the ancestors, after promising
a triumphal second coming, bearing bountiful cargo. His apocalyptic
vision included a 'great cataclysm;
the mountains would fall flat and the valleys would be filled;* old
people would regain their youth and sickness would vanish; the white
people would be expelled from the island never to return; and cargo
would arrive in great quantity so that everybody would have as much as
he wanted'.
*
Compare Isaiah 40: 4: 'Every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low.' This similarity doesn't
necessarily indicate any fundamental feature of the human psyche, or
Jungian 'collective unconscious'. These islands had long been infested
with missionaries.
Most
worryingly for the government, John Frum also prophesied that, on his
second coming, he would bring a new coinage, stamped with the image of
a coconut. The people must therefore get rid of all their money of the
white man's currency. In 1941 this led to a wild spending spree; the
people stopped working and the island's economy was seriously damaged.
The colonial administrators arrested the ringleaders but nothing that
they could do would kill the cult, and the mission churches and schools
became deserted.
A
little later, a new doctrine grew up that John Frum was King of
America. Providentially, American troops arrived in the New Hebrides
around this time and, wonder of wonders, they included black men who
were not poor like the islanders but
as
richly endowed with cargo as the white soldiers. Wild excitement
overwhelmed Tanna. The day of the apocalypse was imminent. It seemed
that everyone was preparing for the arrival of John Frum. One of the
leaders said that John Frum would be coming from America by aeroplane
and hundreds of men began to clear the bush in the centre of the island
so that the plane might have an airstrip on which to land.
The
airstrip had a bamboo control tower with 'air traffic controllers'
wearing dummy headphones made of wood. There were dummy planes on the
'runway' to act as decoys, designed to lure down John Frum's plane.
In
the 1950s, the young David Attenborough sailed to Tanna with a
cameraman, Geoffrey Mulligan, to investigate the cult of John Frum.
They found plenty of evidence of the religion and were eventually
introduced to its high priest, a man called Nambas. Nambas referred to
his messiah familiarly as John, and claimed to speak regularly to him,
by 'radio'. This ('radio belong John') consisted of an old woman with
an electric wire around her waist who would fall into a trance and talk
gibberish, which Nambas interpreted as the words of John Frum. Nambas
claimed to have known in advance that Attenborough was coming to see
him, because John Frum had told him on the 'radio'. Attenborough asked
to see the 'radio' but was (understandably) refused. He changed the
subject and asked whether Nambas had seen John Frum:
Nambas
nodded vigorously. 'Me see him plenty time.'
'What
does he look like?'
Nambas
jabbed his finger at me. "E look like you. 'E got white face. 'E tall
man. 'E live 'long South America.'
This
detail contradicts the legend referred to above that John Frum was a
short man. Such is the way with evolving legends.
It
is believed that the day of John Frum's return will be 15 February, but
the year is unknown. Every year on 15 February his followers assemble
for a religious ceremony to welcome him. So far he has not returned,
but they are not downhearted. David Attenborough said to one cult
devotee, called Sam:
'But,
Sam, it is nineteen years since John say that the cargo will come. He
promise and he promise, but still the cargo does not come. Isn't
nineteen years a long time to wait?'
Sam lifted his eyes from the
ground and looked at me. 'If you can wait two thousand years for Jesus
Christ to come an' 'e no come, then I can wait more than nineteen years
for John.'
Robert
Buckman's book
Can We Be Good without God?
quotes
the same admirable retort by a John Frum disciple, this time to a
Canadian journalist some forty years after David Attenborough's
encounter.
The
Queen and Prince Philip visited the area in 1974, and the Prince
subsequently became deified in a rerun of a John-Frum-type cult
(once again, note how rapidly the details in religious evolution can
change). The Prince is a handsome man who would have cut an imposing
figure in his white naval uniform and plumed helmet, and it is perhaps
not surprising that he, rather than the Queen, was elevated in this
way, quite apart from the fact that the culture of the islanders made
it difficult for them to accept a female deity.
I
don't want to make too much of the cargo cults of the South Pacific.
But they do provide a fascinating contemporary model for the way
religions spring up from almost nothing. In particular, they suggest
four lessons about the origin of religions generally, and I'll set them
out briefly here. First is the amazing speed with which a cult can
spring up. Second is the speed with which the origination process
covers its tracks. John Frum, if he existed at all, did so within
living memory. Yet, even for so recent a possibility, it is not certain
whether he lived at all. The third lesson springs from the independent
emergence of similar cults on different islands. The systematic study
of these similarities can tell us something about human psychology and
its susceptibility to religion. Fourth, the cargo cults are similar,
not just to each other but to older religions. Christianity and other
ancient religions that have spread worldwide presumably began as local
cults like that of John Frum. Indeed, scholars such as Geza Vermes,
Professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford University, have suggested that
Jesus was one of many such charismatic figures who emerged in Palestine
around his time, surrounded by similar legends. Most of those cults
died away. The one that survived, on this view, is the one that we
encounter today. And, as the centuries go by, it has been honed by
further evolution (memetic selection, if you like that way of putting
it; not if you don't) into the sophisticated system - or rather
diverging sets of descendant systems - that dominate large parts of the
world today. The deaths of charismatic modern figures such as Haile
Selassie, Elvis Presley and Princess Diana offer other opportunities to
study the rapid rise of cults and their subsequent memetic evolution.
That
is all I want to say about the roots of religion itself, apart from a
brief reprise in Chapter 10 when I discuss the 'imaginary friend'
phenomenon of childhood under the heading of the psychological 'needs'
that religion fulfils.
Morality
is often thought to have its roots in religion, and in the next
chapter I want to question this view. I shall argue that the origin of
morality can itself be the subject of a Darwinian question. Just as we
asked: What is the Darwinian survival value of religion?, so we can ask
the same question of morality. Morality, indeed, probably predated
religion. Just as with religion we drew back from the question and
rephrased it, so with morality we shall find that it is best seen as a
by-product
of something else.
6
THE
ROOTS OF
MORALITY: WHY
ARE WE GOOD?
Strange
is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not
knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the
standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know; that
man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose
smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.
—
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Many
religious people find it hard to imagine how, without religion, one can
be good, or would even want to be good. I shall discuss such questions
in this chapter. But the doubts go further, and drive some religious
people to paroxysms of hatred against those who don't share their
faith. This is important, because moral considerations lie hidden
behind religious attitudes to other topics that have no real link with
morality. A great deal of the opposition to the teaching of evolution
has no connection with evolution itself, or with anything scientific,
but is spurred on by moral outrage. This ranges from the naive 'If you
teach children that they evolved from monkeys, then they will act like
monkeys' to the more sophisticated underlying motivation for the whole
'wedge' strategy of 'intelligent design', as it is mercilessly laid
bare by Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross in
Creationism's
Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design.
I
receive a large number of letters from readers of my books,* most of
them enthusiastically friendly, some of them helpfully critical, a few
nasty or even vicious. And the nastiest of all, I am sorry to report,
are almost invariably motivated by religion. Such unchristian abuse is
commonly experienced by those who are perceived as enemies of
Christianity. Here, for example is a letter, posted on the Internet and
addressed to Brian Flemming, author and director of
The God
Who Wasn't There,*
6
a sincere and
moving film advocating atheism. Titled 'Burn while we laugh' and dated
21 December 2005, the letter to Flemming reads as follows:
*
More than I can hope adequately to reply to, for which I apologize.
You've
definitely got some nerve. I'd love to take a knife, gut you fools, and
scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are
attempting to ignite a holy war in which some day I, and others like
me, may have the pleasure of taking action like the above mentioned.