Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Religion, mockery, and violence -- ? explained by sociobiologists ?

Eric Roston, editor and science writer for Bloomberg Business Week, has summarized some important social science research that sheds light on the recent retaliatory attacks in Paris for satire felt to be insulting to Islam and the Prophet.  Quoting from Roston's article:

"Many thousands of generations ago, the alpha male in a roaming band of pre-humans felt threatened by a beta male. He picked up a heavy stone to warn the beta away from his fresh kill. Then he turned his back to feast on the carcass.

"The beta mocked the warning gesture to his companions, earning laughs, and then a fatal stone to [his] skull. In that moment, we became people. 

"The coldblooded slaughter at the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris this week—now compounded by slain hostages and reports of more hostage-taking—wasn’t as surprising as it was repulsive. We’ve seen such responses to satire before, and we know the fascist impulse to murder free thought when we see it.

"It wasn’t surprising, but of course it should be. And as these attacks increase, they raise a basic but compelling question:

"Why would anybody actually kill anybody over mockery?

"The easy answer is that the killer is violent, self-aggrandizing, depraved. All true, but it skirts the question. The reality goes much deeper.

"There are three basic traits involved here, which transcend nationality and ideology and touch the very core of who we all are: violence, religion, and satire.

"Violence was baked in at the beginning. Similar murderous impulses in humans and chimpanzees suggest that exterminating other bands to protect territory or food supply is an old instinct common to both. . . .

"As for religion, the sociobiologists make a compelling case that faith has been central to human survival. Not because one or another faith holds the secrets to the universe, but because religion bound individuals together into tribes and communities against external threats, raising everybody’s chance of survival to child-rearing age. . . . 

"If reverence is essential to our evolution, how did irreverence come to play such a powerful role in the way we relate to one another?

"We’re told we respond to threats in one of two ways: fight or flight. There is a third response: the laughter reflex. That’s our way of standing down without running away, or of standing up without really fighting. Greece had Aristophanes. Kings had their fools. France has Charlie Hebdo

"Charlie Hebdo does satire, and satire is weaponized humor. It’s an evolutionary tool that people who are neither in power nor armed can use to reduce the stature of the mighty—or, like radical Islam, the grandiose. It identifies something undignified, corrupt, or otherwise low-status about the powerful or sacred, says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of several popular science books. 

"As soon as that happens, laughter automatically ripples through those in the crowd who agree. Simply by hearing and reflexively understanding the joke, a listener acknowledges that the satirist’s target is asking for it.

"And that laughter doesn’t mean just that the listeners understand the satire, Pinker says. It means they understand that everyone else understands it.

"So it’s an epiphany, instantly transforming the common knowledge that holds communities together, the foundation of social order. In a blink, the emperor has no clothes. . . ."

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There's a lot more, and I agree with much of it.   What the writer does not cover, however, is the effect on the object of the satire, the butt of the joke.    Not only do all the listeners understand the joke, so do the objects of the joke.    They get it and they are insulted and, often, humiliatedSo a response is demanded.    The butts of jokes usually do not answer in kind with another joke but, more likely, with true violence.   And often great violence.    Unless it involves a powerful person or group who can respond immediately with great destruction, the response will often be delayed and well planned for surprise.    This is just the situation they are dealing with now in Paris, as we did in New York on 9/11.

Rather than cartoons humiliating their Prophet, our life style offends their ideology.   That does not excuse them, nor blame us.   But it might help us to understand their motives.

Ralph

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