Rod Hetzel wrote:
> I'm all for discussing the psychology of religion on this listserve, but
> right now our conversation doesn't seem to be going in that direction.
> People are giving examples of supposedly "empirical" evidence that
> supports their position and proves the other side wrong.
I'm with Rod on this. Our past experience with these discussions here
hasn't been very good, and this current discussion shows all the sure signs
of being a discussion based on the wrong question. As behavioral scientists,
I assume that we're all aware that all behaviors have multiple causes within
an individual and across individuals. In focusing on establishing a single
cause, this discussion seems to ignore that. Of course I don't think that
anyone is arguing that religion is the only cause of violence, but even in
arguing that it is the foremost cause in recent times, we seem to drift away
from a more appropriate focus on the violence itself. At the same time, I
think that the focus on religion as the cause "enables" the counterargument
that one's right to free practice of religion entitles one to commit acts of
that sort (acts that in fact one has no right to commit - obviously I'm
thinking of Hill and Moore here).
A proposal for better questions - how does religious belief serve to
justify bad behavior? Do other kinds of beliefs work in the same way? Here
I'm thinking about what it is that Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, the
Crusades, Naziism, and the Khymer Rouge have in common, and how those
motivations and justifications might play out in somewhat less dramatic ways
in the behaviors of people like Hill and Moore and McVeigh and Kaczynski
(sp?) and McCarthy and even perhaps PETA members and people who vandalize
SUVs. I certainly think it's a little silly to look at Stalin and Hitler and
the Crusade instigators as though their differences wrt religious faith mean
that their actual motivations were opposites. If anything, those "-isms"
illustrate the need to look beyond religious belief or nonbelief in
explanations of these kinds of movements and behaviors. Counting and
weighing examples of "religious" and "other" seems like an exercise in
distraction from the real problem.
Personally, if I had to put my money on a contender for main cause of
violence in history, I'd say something having to do with our natural
responses to limited resources, including competition, and the need to form
in-groups and out-groups so that we don't have to compete as individuals and
so that we can improve the chances that our offspring will be successful,
and then in turn the need to demonize the out-groups.
Here's a completely unrelated question I was wondering about this
morning. It seems to me that the advent of war films has produced something
that didn't really exist a hundred years ago: a popular image of "soldier"
("sailor", "airman", etc.) based largely on fictional ideals (pretty uniform
depictions, if you'll pardon the pun) rather than on our interactions with
the real thing (surely far more varied). I wonder what effect, if any, this
has had on the actual behavior and attitudes of those entering the military.
I imagine that people come to the military with certain fiction-based ideas
about the role they're going to take on. But I could be completely wrong -
perhaps the contact with reality overwhelms the fictional ideals
immediately, or perhaps people who actually enter the military these days
have enough contact with real military before entering that the fictional
role is already replaced by a more realistic one.
Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
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