Anthropologist Lionel Tiger on how churches act as ‘serotonin factories’

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Wed Jun-16-10 09:57 AM
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Anthropologist Lionel Tiger on how churches act as ‘serotonin factories’

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger on faith and sexual behaviour, why religion comforts us, and how churches act as ‘serotonin factories’

Montreal-born anthropologist Lionel Tiger, 72, best known for coining the phrase “male bonding,” has long been interested in bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences. In his latest work, co-authored with psychiatrist Michael McGuire, Tiger enters into the new field known as the cognitive science of religion. In God’s Brain, Tiger and McGuire argue that religious practice “brainsoothes”—alleviates the sharp edges of the human experience—far more than any other human activity.

Q: The ubiquity of belief in all human societies, you argue, means religion is rooted in our brains. You see it originating about 150,000 years ago when we were coming out of Africa, and were smart enough to contemplate death?
A: Yes, we had developed enough cortical tissue to anticipate a whole series of things about the future. The utterly astonishing one, the defining feature of religions, is the notion of an afterlife. It’s really hard to deny that this is an act of marketing genius, if you were to look at this in a cynical sense. Nobody likes to die. The idea of an afterlife, for you and for loved ones, is very attractive. It seems to me wholly improbable—what’s the evidence?—and yet it works, it just works. If you’ve got a very bad idea in your head—death—which is causing stress, and you can put another idea which is a very good one in its place, then the level of serotonin—which fights depression and anxiety and makes people feel good about themselves and others—begins to build. And you begin an organization to sustain that. Since five billion humans seem to accept that there is a heaven or reincarnation or something after death, then I have to say this is something that comforts the species.

Q: The three ways you argue that religion soothes people—socialization, ritual and belief—how do they interact with each other?
A: You can’t have belief without some sort of ritual providing regularity and reinforcement. And if you think about rituals, again they’re utterly remarkable. People gather on a Sunday and they’re told that they’re really awful, they are virtually doomed to hell, they’re sinners. However, if they perform this ritual again next week and if they accept its importance in their lives they will be saved, as it were, until next week. The Catholics have done it in a brilliant manner with the confessional, and it’s dazzling how that works. But the point is that it’s a place to go for the individual and for the group, and it unites the individual to the group in an agreeable, warm-hearted way, unlike, say, paying taxes.

Q: From the outside, then, it’s not religion’s strangeness you see, but its naturalness?
A: I’ve been on panels a couple of times with Richard Dawkins and invariably we come to the point where Richard will go on about how terrible religion is, and I’ll say, “Richard, are you a naturalist?” And he says, “Well, of course I am.” And then I say, “Would you agree, as you’ve in fact argued in your books, that over 90 per cent of people have some religion?” and he finally says, “Yes.” “How can you be a naturalist and assume that the great majority of the species is not natural? That doesn’t make any sense.” As a social scientist I wanted a deeper explanation for this otherwise remarkable activity. When you think of the cost of religion—the buildings, the tax exemptions, the weekly offering—it’s not trivial, it’s simply not trivial. If only out of respect, one has to pay attention to this.

The whole interview is interesting, whether one is pro, anti or neutral about religion.