Hi, I'm Paul Verschoor, and together with my colleague Julia Lupp,
we're speaking with Ed Slingerland about the role that ritual and alcohol have
played in generating collaboration throughout history.
A professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia,
Ed's research encompasses Chinese thought, comparative religion,
cognitive science, and the relationship between the natural sciences and humanity.
Edvard Slingerland, welcome, Edvard. Thanks for having me. Great.
So, Edward, to start our conversation, maybe you can give us a little bit of
a sketch of the trajectory, your professional trajectory, that brought you to
the point where you are today and hopefully tomorrow.
Yeah, to the point where I'm writing about alcohol, which is puzzling to my colleague.
Exactly. This is the million-dollar question. How did I get here?
It actually is not as strange as it seems. So, you know, my specialty is early
Chinese philosophy and also comparative religions, my PhDs in religious studies.
And I've done a lot of work, as
Julia knows, on the cognitive science of religion, evolution of religion.
So, I'm interested in a couple questions. One, just at a very broad level.
I'm interested in mysteries hiding in plain sight.
So, when it comes to the evolution of religion, as a scholar of religious studies,
we study religious diversity, we study how people differ across the world in
their religious beliefs and practices, so history of religion.
We very rarely stop and look at religion and go, why do people do that?
And when you do that, It's a puzzle because religion is really costly.
It's costly at the individual level, observing taboos, going to church,
scarifying yourself, cutting off the foreskin of your penis.
It's very costly for groups, cultural groups.
So these large scale societies that build massive pyramids that have no practical function.
And ancient China, a significant portion of the GDP just went into the ground
into these massive tombs where they put a good 20% of GDP,
just they buried it and made it unusable by living human beings.
You would think that individuals and cultures that didn't go in for this kind
of waste, especially on such a large scale, would do better than groups that do it.
So, a group that instead of building a massive tomb to the first emperor of
Qin and building a terracotta army that they then buried in the ground,
if another group did the same thing, but actually armed a real army,
you'd think that they would defeat the group that made the fake army and buried it.
But they don't. All large-scale societies we know of go in for religious waste,
if you want to think of it this way, on a large scale.
And so, this is where we got interested in, well, there's got to be functions,
positive functions that religion is doing for groups and for individuals that pay for the cost.
And that's where our big project on the evolution, cultural evolution of religion got started. Okay.
I started to think about alcohol in the same way, chemical intoxicants in general,
but particularly alcohol.
It's incredibly costly. It's physiologically costly for individuals.
It causes liver damage, raises cancer risk.
We think probably a good 15% of the human population is prone to alcoholism,
so they're unable to use alcohol in a safe way.
It causes lots of group problems, social chaos, alcoholism causes lots of societal problems.
It sucks up a huge amount of resources.
So, in ancient Sumer, the estimate is half of their grain production went into making beer.
So, they're taking nutritious, healthy grain and turning it into a low-dose
neurotoxin. And that's kind of puzzling.
The other puzzling thing is we've been doing it for a
really long time so unlike so the standard story about
alcohol is that it's an evolutionary mistake it's just
alcohol is just hijacking reward circuits in our brain that evolve for other
reasons um the problem and there are certainly evolutionary mistakes so um our
taste for junk food is a good example um so that's a classic mismatch mistake
where it was once adaptive to like fat sugar but But now in some parts of the world,
in very recent times, it's become a problem.
Another evolutionary mistake I talk about as a type of hijack is masturbation,
or just non-reproductive sex.
So, you know, we get this great reward from evolution for reproducing,
but we figured out a way to game the system and we get away with it.
But, you know, in these cases with the junk food example, it's a very recent
problem and still geographically constrained.
There's still lots of places in the world where getting enough fat and sugar is a problem.
For people. And with the masturbation example, it's not very costly.
And it doesn't, contrary to what people may have been taught as children, make you go blind.
So, it doesn't, not physiologically costly, not costly to society, unlike alcohol.
So, you know, alcohol does make you go blind if you drink enough of it.
So, and we've been doing, we've been producing alcohol for as long as we've
been doing anything in an organized fashion as a species.
So, I explore in my recent book, Drunk, this beer before bread hypothesis that
argues that humans were gathering and making beer,
and having these big religious rituals that we don't know much about the content
of them, but some sort of religious rituals thousands of years before we had agriculture.
And that, But in fact, it was the desire to make more and better beer and wine
that caused people to start settling down and cultivating crops.
So in this regard, the desire to get intoxicated actually very directly gave rise to human cultures.
So it's not, it actually kind of follows naturally from work I've done before,
both trying to explain a puzzle, something that should be puzzling that doesn't puzzle us enough.
Um and then trying to look for what the functional role might be and i think
i assume one of the reasons you've had me is because the functional roles revolve
a lot of them revolve around.
I'm not hearing your audio now. Sorry, that's me. I just pushed a button.
But what I want to know first is really your personal trajectory,
because you say you have a background in Chinese philosophy.
There is also into the cognitive science of religion.
So it also means what are the intellectual tools you bring to bear on this challenge, right?
That's why I always like to understand that trajectory. So would that really
be, let's say, Chinese philosophy, cognitive science? Would you really see that
as the perspectives that you take here, or are there other elements that we should consider?
Well, I'm trained as a humanities scholar, so I'm originally trained as a historian
and a linguist, as a sinologist.
So I'm bringing those tools to bear, so the tools of a historian, tools of a linguist.
But then after graduate school, I found myself getting drawn by the cognitive
sciences. So, cognitive linguistics at first, how metaphors work in the mind.
And then that got me interested in how metaphors work and so behavioral neuroscience.
And then that got me interested in why the brain is structured the way it is.
So, that got me into evolutionary theory.
And so, my toolkit now is very much gene culture co-evolutionary theory.
I'm using the tools of a historian and cross-cultural historical surveys,
but then analyzing what I'm seeing using the tool, using the theoretical framework
of gene culture co-evolution.
Right. Great. But in our case, the question is around collaboration,
and you earlier also mentioned cooperation.
Do you differentiate between the two, or do you see this as sort of different
words, same phenomenon?
They overlap quite a bit um collaboration are you hearing that i heard something
yeah there's some kind of crazy that's a ghost in your bookshelf.
I live down in downtown vancouver and i think this is road work that's just
started hopefully it's short-lived i assume we can edit this sure no problem
we could edit this out we We can add more noise.
You won't hear it. We can add more noise later.
Yeah. I have no control over what happened down here. So, um,
yeah, I think it stopped. Um,
So, I'm arguing in the book that, let's take alcohol as an example,
but religion has some similar effects.
It does two important functional things.
It enhances creativity, so individual creativity, but also group creativity.
And that may be kind of more in the collaboration bucket.
So it's alcohol, one of the functions of alcohol is to down regulate to turn
down a few notches or prefrontal cortex, right?
So PFC is really important for pursuing rational self interests for controlling
emotions for staying focused on task, it's super important part of the brain.
But there's pretty good evidence that it interferes with creativity,
it interferes with lateral thinking, which is why kids, for instance,
are much more creative than adults because their PFCs are not very developed.
One of the things alcohol does is essentially return us temporarily to being like a kid.
It turns down our PFC a few notches so we can regain some of that cognitive
flexibility we had as children.
But then what it's also doing is disinhibiting us, So, we're less inhibited.
It's also pumping up feel-good hormones.
So, we're serotonin, endorphins, we're getting boosted.
And so, we're feeling both better about ourself and better about other people.
We're feeling more likable and we're also liking other people more.
And I think that combination is really crucial for collaboration.
So, one of the things I argue you is that there's a really good reason that
successful organizations are,
use alcohol in professional context when
you're getting groups of individuals together who maybe have different
types of training um they may not know
one another but you want them to uh you
know spitball things to come up with new ideas i mean the anstroman forum does
this right we go we work all day but then we go out and drink right um it's
a it's a crucial tool i actually argued uh when we got this big partnership
grant from the canadian government uh they shirk our federal funding organization
will not pay for alcohol.
And I actually went separately to my dean and said, I cannot run a huge international
collaboration without alcohol.
I need to be able to get people, sit them down, downregulate the preferential
courtesies, get them to trust each other and talk more.
And so I actually got a kind of separate slush fund from my dean that I could use to pay for wine.
And it was crucial. I mean, in fact, that grant
itself came out of a collaboration that started because we
finally got a pub on campus at ubc we
didn't have a place for grown-ups to drink there was a
grad student pub um and then i
think 2010 ish this pub opened up right near the bus loop and so it was very
easy to stop there on your way home from work and um joe henrik and ara noren
zion and i and some other steve heiner started meeting after work and chatting about,
oh, I'm interested in religion too, and I have this type of expertise.
And I really don't think that the collaboration would have gotten off the ground
without that kind of just the 0.08 BAC seems to be the sweet spot, like a B or two N.
But now, Edward, so you're saying, okay, alcohol, this sort of slight suppression
of prefrontal cortex can facilitate collaboration.
But then what is collaboration? How would you define it and what is it good for?
Collaboration is, I think, pursuing some sort of dimly envisioned goal in a
cooperative manner where different individuals are bringing different strengths to the table.
So, I see collaboration. So, you know, in our grant, I was a historian.
I was a religious studies scholar. I had knowledge of the content of religions
historically and across the world that, say, Joe or Ara didn't have.
Joe had gene culture, co-evolutionary theoretical framework that he was bringing to the table.
Ara had expertise in psychology of religion, experimental evidence about religion.
And then we had a kind of vague sense of, hey, we want to do a big project.
And here's a couple questions that we
think are cool like why do people build big monuments why do people um sacrifice
to invisible beings and we we just started talking um and we we tried to figure
out um and so i think that it's a dimly perceived goal because the goal i think
in good collaborations,
the goal is not set in stone and usually changes a bit in the course of the conversation.
But yeah, I think, I mean, at least in an academic context, collaboration is
about some shared question.
You have some shared questions that interest you all, but you have different
tools that you're bringing to the table.
And if we now go back to your earlier example on religion, and you were also
describing that as entailing massive collaboration to for instance build monuments to your gods.
Sure. So how do you see then this relationship between religion and collaboration?
Is collaboration a necessary feature to build your religion?
Is your religion a necessary feature to scale your collaboration?
Yeah, I haven't thought that carefully about this distinction between those
two things, but I would see, so if you want to talk about Gobekli Tepe,
this is a site in present-day Turkey where hunter-gatherers,
again, long before agriculture,
were coming from all over, they were converging on this site.
And they were, I would call that then cooperating. They
were cooperating to build this massive ritual
site with these huge stone stelae that
they would cut out of the rock and drag long distances and
erect and carve um they would
capture a game and they would have large feasts
and and they were also almost certainly making huge quantities
of beer there were these huge bats that were used to
to contain some liquid and we know people were making beer in
this part of the world at this point but this is before the neolithic
this is still before this is uh yeah
neolithic um so this is the site the dates are
a little bit disputed but somewhere between 10 12
000 years ago okay so uh so yeah before yeah
right right at this shift um so i'd
call that cooperation in the sense that you'd have
to presume there's some group who's in charge and they know that they want to
build this site for whatever religious reasons they have and then they're having
to get the cooperation of the workers to do it to all these people to work together
and do it um and clearly you know one One of the ways they did this was by providing
gear and providing feasts.
And this is something we see in traditional societies around the world,
that if you have a large scale public project that needs to get done.
Uh in the era before you had
unionized workers and you know wage labor uh
you do it uh either by enslaving people or by
enticing them with with feasts with alcohol and
food um and so there you
have people cooperating so maybe i'd call it less
collaboration because it's not clear that the people building the
site had a lot of input into the design or what
it was going to be used for um but people
need to learn to cooperate on large scales and so
the second um i talked a little bit about this creativity function
another function of alcohol is to help us i
call it a kind of cognitive disarming um so humans in cooperation situations
often face cooperation dilemmas where you know prisoners dilemma type situations
um you're going to get the best payoff if you trust the other person,
but you don't have usually a way to ensure that they're trustworthy,
that they're actually going to cooperate.
And so, the rational strategy is to defect.
So, rational agents will defect, but they'll get a suboptimal outcome.
And real human beings solve prisoner's dilemmas all the time.
We cooperate, we don't stitch on each other.
We help each other move couches and do all these things where we don't have
any guarantee of a payback.
Um one of the ways you get people past
prisoners dilemma situations is religion you
get them to trust each other because hey we all believe in the same god and
how do you know i believe in that god because would i tattoo my face if i didn't
you know would i cut off the foreskin of my penis if i didn't believe in this
god so we do costly signaling in the context of religion to create trust,
to create in-groups that can cooperate
the way that blood relatives can cooperate. That's one way to do it.
Another way to do it is alcohol. And they're often used together.
They're synergistic in this respect.
So alcohol is by suppressing your similar set of functions for a different goal.
By slightly suppressing the PFC, it's making it harder for you to lie or to cheat.
So, lying is cognitively a very difficult task.
You have to keep in mind both what reality is and what you said reality was.
You have to be able to suppress leakage, facial expression, emotional leakage
that would be counter to what you're claiming reality is.
It's really difficult. Lying is very difficult. And it's totally PFC driven.
If your PFC is impaired, it's harder for you to lie.
What, that's kind of intuitive. What's a little less intuitive is people are
better lie detectors when their PFCs are turned down a few notches.
And that seems to be because we think we know how to detect lies,
but we don't. And so if we're using our PFC, we're like relying on something
we saw in a Sherlock Holmes show, you know, where, oh, look to see if he looks left when he talks.
And that's not really what you need to look at. You need to look at a bunch,
a big bandwidth of data, facial expressions, tone of voice.
And you're better at doing that when you're a little relaxed and you're not
consciously trying to do it.
Right. So, I argue that you have a bunch of hostile, potentially hostile people,
for instance, and you need to sit them down and get them to agree on something.
What's the one thing all cultures across the world do first?
They get them drunk. Or they use kava or some other intoxicant that has very similar properties.
But you mentioned a number of things now that we should maybe try to elaborate.
So, on the one hand, it's this linkage between religion and collaboration,
and in some sense, you interpreted that in terms of sharing a common value in some sense.
We have a similarity which is expressed in our religious commitment,
and I'm showing you my religious commitment because, like you,
I have my face tattooed with something or other, right?
Or you compare genitals and you show what has been done to them.
But now, is that really enough?
Because if you analyze religion, you might also see incentive structures that
would, in some sense, coerce people into collaborating.
Because if you don't help the other, you would act against the fundamental laws
of your religion if that other is a member of your religious group.
So there's a bit of this issue now, is it common identification with some upper
and uber being, or is it also the adoption of a much more complex,
if you want, cognitive structure of rules of conduct?
Yeah, it's probably both, and they're probably kicking in. They're probably both contributing.
So the way I'd rephrase that is you can imagine one force is a bonding-created trust.
So I feel connected to you. you, I'm internally motivated to cooperate with
you because I come to see you as a brother, as a brother in our religion in some way.
So that's internally motivated. You can also imagine,
and this is one of the things ours, Neuron Zion, has done a lot of work on,
that if I believe that if I don't cooperate,
I'm going to be punished in the afterworld or i believe
that god can look into me and see if i'm
lying or not um that's an external sanction
based essentially what you're doing there is um
you're removing you're removing the prisoner's dilemma problem because i can't
prisoners dilemma i don't know if you're going to cooperate or not but if god
knows and god's going to take care of whacking you if you don't cooperate then
it's not a dilemma anymore so yeah so both could be working so with that That
raises an interesting question, right?
So on the two interrelated questions, on the one hand, what are then the intrinsic
drives for collaboration that are genetically predefined and picked up during evolution?
And how has human culture then elaborated on that to scale it,
right? So how do you see that linkage between intrinsic drives for collaboration
and then their further expansion for scalability?
Yeah, so we intrinsically are motivated to cooperate with kin,
and then less so with unrelated people we know and have reciprocal relationships with.
So, you know, kin selection and reciprocal altruism drive a lot of behavior
across the animal world.
And that's one of the things humans just get for free.
So, in terms of scaling, one of the things religion is doing is exploiting that
psychology but expanding, for instance, the scope of kin.
So, it's one of the reasons that religions tend to use kin-based language to
talk about co-religionists who call each other brothers and sisters.
You talk about God as your father or mother.
So, you're tapping into something that
you get for free just for being a human um for being
any type of animal that reproduces um but
expanding the scope of it so that's that's one very easy way
to do it but also you're creating you know when you go through also when you
go through a lot of religions have kind of painful initiation rituals and going
through a painful experience with another person also creates bonds that is
probably tapping into some basic built-in stuff,
but cultures have figured out how to get it ramped up so that you can have that
feeling of brotherhood or being bonded with a much larger group than you would
typically get in a small-scale society.
Preston Pyshke So, would you be able to, also given the work you've done,
do you see then common features across the main religions of the world in build a ladder?
Yeah absolutely um um and
especially in what we call pro-social religions so the
what you get for free out of human cognition when it comes to religious cognition
is supernatural beings so humans seem just um prone to over projecting agency
onto the world so um you know the storm storm comes and destroys our fishing vessels,
we don't think, oh, random cause and effect, you know, mechanistic world,
we want an intentional story about it.
So, the sea god is angry at us, we didn't do something.
So, projecting intentionality onto the world seems to be something we do naturally.
But what this gets you is not what pro-social religions look like.
Like what it tends to get you is what most small scale society religions look
like. So you've got a bunch of God's,
They typically have different areas they're in charge of, the sea, the sun.
You've got ancestor, often ancestor spirits you need to placate.
But it tends to be, they're not typically moral. So, in most small-scale societies,
the gods don't really care about human collaboration, if you want to think of
it that way. The gods just want their stuff.
You know, the ancestors want to be fed, the gods want to be reverenced.
And um you want to think about the greek
greek pantheons a bit like this right the greek gods
are just messing with people they get if they don't get reverence they they
get angry um they don't they're certainly not moral um so we think that a a
new development is when you get this idea that the gods actually care about
us collaborating essentially they care about pro-social norms
they don't just want stuff they don't
just want their sacrificial goods they want
us to be good to one another they want us to be generous they want
us to not lie they want us not to not violate social norms that's an innovation
another innovation is the ability is an expansion of surveillance so often small-scale
society gods don't know what's happening outside the village for instance,
where they don't know what's happening in the dark.
So, if you get the idea that God knows everything, anywhere in the world,
past and future, God can also look inside and not only see your behavior,
but see your motivations, that's a very powerful idea.
If you have the idea that God can watch you everywhere you go,
it's a very powerful idea.
If you get these kind of costly rituals where people are both,
they're doing things in synchrony.
And they're typically consuming chemical intoxicants at the same time.
They're creating bonds with one another.
They're making, but they're also signaling. They're making costly signals to
one another that make everyone feel like, oh, I can trust that he's really part
of our group. These are all cultural innovations.
And so, our argument is that the forces of cultural evolution,
in the same way you get with genetic evolution, you get convergent evolution, right?
So dolphins and sharks look similar, even though they're very different genetic histories.
Around the world, when you get large-scale societies, you get common features in religions.
And this is the result of convergent evolution in a cultural sense.
So, earlier you also indicated this sort of at the edge of the Neolithic,
you started to hunter-gatherers, just sort of started to have more collaborative
processes or collaborative cooperative processes.
And you could argue that this could be handled with standard hierarchical power relationships.
So, within that context, what problem is religion then solving, right?
So, how would that boost that process? So what's a unique feature that religion adds to this?
Is it that it also gives you sort of an ontological frame to look at the unknown
that go beyond the standard human power relations?
Or what's that added feature? Yeah.
Yeah. So the people who are building these sites, places like Gobekli Tepe,
are cooperating on a much larger scale than is typical for hunter-gatherers.
So this is not small-scale societies anymore.
They're actually cooperating to build the beginnings of what creates agriculture
in large numbers. What are the numbers?
What kind of numbers are we looking at then? Yeah, that's a good question.
Probably at least you needed probably about 500 people at a time to be moving
the stones and erecting them.
So, much larger scale cooperation than you'd get in typical hunter-gatherer bands.
Ants um the they're coming together they probably don't know each other well
so they're coming from different regions and so what what you're getting so
for instance at gobekli tepe um,
there are different parts of the ritual site and that have different animals
that are featured so whatever one one area may have crocodiles predominating
another one um one of the theories is that what this is, is kind of totem animals.
So, you're giving people a new fictional identity that's linked,
you know, as you say, to some kind of ontological claim about the world.
So, you have this idea that there's a crocodile God, and the crocodile God wants X, Y, and Z.
And we who all tattoo ourselves with the mark of the crocodile and worship the
crocodile God are brothers in a significant way.
We can trust one another. We know we can meet someone one far away from the
ritual site, but greet them in a way that shows that we are worshippers of the
crocodile God, and then therefore we know we can cooperate right away.
Religion's giving you this tool that allows you to scale up cooperation on a
level that you just can't, we think you can't get without it.
Okay. Julia, you want to go? Okay.
You're muted. You're muted. You're still muted.
You're still muted. There we go. I want to go back to the, you've raised the
issue of trust several times, and perhaps Gobekli Tepe is a good point to discuss this.
Because we're going to be looking at what makes collaboration succeed and what makes it fail.
And so if we were to imagine a hunter-gatherer, a large hunter-gatherer group,
do you see this religious institution as providing sort of a sense of trust
that the individuals in the group will trust to do a collaborative project without
questioning the leaders who are in charge?
And this concept of the supernatural, whether you're going to add punitive measures
or not, notwithstanding, does it give a structure to the collaborative effort
or the cooperative effort?
It gives a shared narrative, typically, about why you're doing what you're doing.
So everyone's on the same page in terms of what the goals are and why.
Um and it gives you this trust that people are internally motivated to cooperate and not,
relying on sanctions um so the
reason we can solve a cooperation dilemma is that we run into where um i know
that i'm pulling on my end of the rope i can't see my buddy who's on the other
side but i assume he's pulling too and not just sitting down you know resting
or having a snack um how do
i know that because i know that he is possessed
by the same love and reverence for
the crocodile god that i possess um so
it it gives you some assurance that the the other members of your group are
internally motivated to collaborate and to cooperate in a way that's not relying
on sanctions so it provides social cohesion yeah yeah and it's you know there
are other ways you can get it.
So one of the things that Ara has argued is once you get into modern industrial societies.
It's possible that rule of law could take over some of the functions that religion used to do,
and maybe nationalistic values can give you the same kind of sense of shared
goals and shared identity,
and maybe that's when you're going to see organized religions start to wither
away because the functions are taken over by their structures.
But around the world, the way we see it happening first tends
to be with religious police and i think it's because
it's a it's very effective way to tap into some basic
cognitive tendencies we already have but push
them in a certain direction then in that case we we could look at at um at least
let's say three stages of the scaling of human collaboration right because first
we hunt the gatherer then we we We add a religious layer to find scaling,
and then possibly the nation-state might become the next step in that scaling.
But that raises the first question, are we aware of any sort of massive religion
that actually failed? Yes.
Religions that fail i don't think
so because we just don't know we don't know about them
because they're gone um so but this is interesting right because it's not that
the written written record is is that short right yeah yeah one of the things
we um so we're built we have this project big project that i'm running now it's
called the database of religious history history.
And one of the goals of the database, we don't have enough data to do this yet,
is to try to answer that question by looking at periods of history when you do get...
We have enough data that we know about the groups that failed.
Typically, we don't. But we have period like, if you want to think about 19th
century America, you have a lot of these new religious movements that arise,
you have all these utopian communities that arise, and a lot of them fail.
But then some of them do, you know, Mormonism, for instance,
Church Latter-day Saints does really well.
You could look at, you know, the period when Christianity arose.
So, you have a lot of these, you know, prophets arising, they're preaching different things.
Most of them fail and don't take off, but one of them ends up doing really well.
So, So what we want to do is
try to gather as much data as we can about the beliefs and practices of these
different groups and see if we can find some common features to the ones that
do take off and become successful and whether there are common features to the
ones that we don't know about today,
except through historians who study these obscure archives, we know about them.
But you could say that the Judean Christian religions sort of.
Conquered the world that was then dominated by the Roman religion or Greek religion, right? Right.
Yeah. So, you also want to look at how certain religions supplant others.
And so, we want to be able to trace, for instance, the movement of Buddhism.
So, Buddhism is another of these world religions that arises from time and place.
Out-competes some religions around it,
and then gets spread moves to china um and
and then and we're particularly interested in what features so we know a lot
we actually china is a good example because we know a lot about what's happening
in china before buddhism comes we know a lot about buddhism in india um then
we're going to be able to to basically see what happens when buddhism comes
to china how does buddhism change.
But also how does it change indigenous chinese religions
um and there's going to be a two-way street there um
and it'll be interesting to see if there's a common trend to
the way that world religions tend to shape cultures in
which they're they're transplanted so but
in the context of our discussion of today you
could also argue that okay if religion emerged to
scale collaboration is it then so
that the judeo-christian values were
more effective in scaling collaboration elaboration than the
roman copy of greek religion you could
argue that um but you know you'd want to see i'd
be interested in what the features were that were new i mean are some of them
are i think kind of obvious you've got a high god the guy cares about morality
um uh you have other very successful religions you know buddhism and islam have
also been been quite successful in terms of
becoming world religions that spread to new regions.
And so you want to be able to... But why I'm asking about it is I was hoping
that you could articulate then what these distinguishing features could be.
Yeah. So, a moralistic god. So, the Greek gods and Roman gods tended to be amoral, right?
They wanted, not entirely, they cared about certain things like honoring contracts.
They certainly cared about you honoring the civic structure and the rulers,
but they tended to be generally amoral.
They wanted their, like small-scale society gods, they just wanted their sacrifice,
and they got angry with you if you didn't do it.
You have this new god who actually cares about whether or not you lie and steal
and gives you some commandments and,
you know, is preaching the idea of brotherly love and treat strangers as brothers.
This is arguably more effective at tying people together.
Um the idea of supernatural punishment
seems pretty powerful uh so the idea
that there's a heaven and hell and you're going to have certain consequences or
in the buddhist context that there's a law of karma that's going to affect your
rebirth um so so there's a collection we have a piece in behavioral and brain
sciences from 2016 i think that r is the lead author on called The Evolution
of Pro-Social Religions.
And we pick out a series of these features.
Pro-social, moralistic gods, supernatural monitoring, costly displays.
There's about five or six key features that we lay out that we think the various
successful religions around the world seem to converge on.
You're muted. it are these features also of immediate relevance in boosting collaboration.
Yeah well i mean you can see if we actually i'm told that god cares about whether
or not i collaborate well and sincerely
with another person that's gonna immediately ramp up collaboration,
monitoring costs of real humans are
gonna go down i'm gonna be less i'm gonna be
spending less of my time monitoring your behavior if
i'm confident that god is monitoring your behavior and that you believe that
god is monitoring your behavior so it it's going to free up a lot of energy
for collaborating and cooperating rather than um monitoring uh and sanctioning people.
But now I could also turn it around and say, look,
this notion of explaining the intentions in the universe or the projected intentions
in the universe through religion might also be a great tool by a vicious genius
to control large groups of people.
So that in some sense would mean you build pyramids as a necessary step in building
a coercive society, and you build in these rituals, and you make people believe certain things.
So then the religion is not the driver of the collaboration,
but it's a tool that is used to coerce collectives to engage with or to serve in the goals of others.
So so would you
would you accept that that this sort of dual the dual
use of religion absolutely okay yeah
hierarchical the move from hunter-gatherer life to
living in large-scale societies sucked for
most people your quality of life went way down right
um so hunter-gatherer at least in the the levant in the golden triangle um you
know we're pretty egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle was probably a lot more
pleasant than early agricultural life. You had a much more varied diet.
You had much more interesting tasks to do.
Hunting and gathering is more interesting than building a pyramid or tending to grain.
So, the move from small-scale societies to large scale societies was probably
a happiness and quality of life loss for most individuals.
It was a big gain for the few at the top. And it's interesting because I think
if you look at the kind of arc of this development,
on the other hand, creating those stratified societies is what gave us agriculture
and then technology and literacy.
These are the things that allowed us to eventually invent technologies that
raise the standard of living of everybody and create modern science.
And, you know, the average person today lives much, whoever was in charge of
Gobekli Tepe at the pinnacle of that society would love to live like the average resident of Germany.
So, it has improved, you know, it eventually improved everyone's lives,
but we had to go through this period where things were bad for most people most of the time.
So, yeah, so large-scale cooperation
involves people subverting their own interest to the group interest.
Right. And that's often bad for a lot of individuals.
But the irony is that these achievements that you were talking about,
and you forgot to mention Facebook and TikTok, are actually occurring at a time
where societies become, again, more secular. Right.
So, in this whole point, the whole period that was dominated by religion,
that was the time that life sucked for most people.
Yeah. I mean, things start to get better and the Renaissance quality of life.
I mean, the Romans did, you know, what have the Romans done for us?
Aqueducts, you know, the famous Monty Python bit about that.
You know, the Romans did a lot of great things. They built roads.
They improved sanitation.
They brought water. So, there were improvements gradual,
but you're right that what really seemed to accelerate this was the creation
of the scientific worldview,
which required suppressing or at least bracketing religious beliefs or putting
them to the side when thinking about the world.
So, there is something ironic there that you get these religion help large-scale
societies get off the ground,
but then they seem to be the most successful when they can figure out a way
to then build institutions that take over a lot of the work that religion used
to do and bracket most religious beliefs.
I don't think I'm a person who believes there's kind of pseudo-religious beliefs
kicking around in all of us.
I mean, I'm an atheist, but I think that I'm committed to certain norms that
I don't really have empirical evidence for.
I just believe in them deeply, like human rights and human dignity.
But if it's a type of religion, it's really stripped down religion,
and that seems to have done really well.
But the transition you describe, that's also the transition from living in a
world filled with magic transiting in a world where there's no more magic.
Yeah. So, that seems to be one of the transitions that allowed science to happen
was suppressing a lot of intuitive things.
I mean, science is counterintuitive. So, what's intuitive is thinking that if
we want it to rain, we pray to the God of rain.
That is plugging into our basic social reasoning.
It makes complete sense to most people. It's what most people around the world
do when they need rain. They pray to a God to get rain.
Realizing that the world is not intentional and trying to figure out the principles,
the mechanical principles that are really driving it is counterintuitive.
And that was some kind of cognitive achievement that happened gradually
in Northern Europe at
a certain period of time right why that happened obviously is an
entire cottage industry but then
in some sense given your analysis you
would say well then this whole belief in a nation state with its roots in enlightenment
is still sharing certain aspects that we find in these religions because there's
also this ideal of this higher entity which is now your nation and your national
identity it's like praying to the crocodile God, right?
Because look, my passport, we are actually brothers.
So what kind of carryover do you see there to the belief in national identity,
and nationalism and the nation state?
A lot, obviously. So the nation state borrows stuff that works.
Synchronized rituals, right? We have big parades where we march.
We have symbols that we wave. We have pledges of allegiance that we make, perhaps.
But I don't think it's that neat a division because the modern nation states
that arose tended to see themselves in a religious worldview, right?
America was certainly based on the idea that God gave this land to us because
we're destined to be great.
And in America, it's still a very common view.
You um so they're not easily um
untangled and they use a lot of the
same tools um there's a very good reason why
um religion and politics tend to be mixed together in most places in the world
north europe and and canada are probably um real outliers in this regard this
the united The United States looks a lot more like the rest of the world.
How would alcohol improve that? How would alcohol improve that?
So, the basic argument in my book, Drunk, is that alcohol is serving a lot of
the same functions that religion is in terms of enhancing trust,
enhancing cooperation.
When you sit down with someone and drink a few beers, I argue it's similar to
when you sit down and shake hands.
You're showing you don't have a weapon when you shake hands.
When you drink a few beers, you're taking your prefrontal cortex out and putting
it on the table and saying, you know, I've given up cognitive control.
So, it's a tool for enhancing trust between individuals. That's very important.
It also helped the transition, you know, hunter-gatherers were probably motivated
to settle down by the appeal of intoxication.
So, you know, we have beer, come join our crocodile, uh, God group.
Um, once they made that transition and suddenly their quality of life plummeted,
alcohol probably helped them deal with that quality of life decline.
Um, it helps with stress. It helps with mood.
Um, there's a, um, you know, people laboring on the crocodile God temple all
day long, probably at the end of the day, went home and drank beer and made
them feel better the same way we have a drink at the end of the day.
Um so it helps with stress reduction um and
helps with mood it helps with creativity in
the ways we've laid out right people get together they drink a
little bit and they come up with better ideas uh they're
less self-conscious about sharing what
if they were sober they would think is a stupid idea they
may be willing to say something right because they're
disinhibited um so it has a lot
of it helps humans get along in
these weird large-scale societies that we've created so
it was in a way it's both the motivation the original motivation for
creating them but then once we get into them it's then a tool for helping us
both cope with the difficult it's difficult living in large-scale societies
um and also helps these societies to to function in better ways and that's That's
how alcohol is paying for itself, essentially.
It's paying for the cost in this regard.
So does it follow that a lack of alcohol will lead to a breakdown in societal
cooperation or collaboration?
That's what I would predict.
So, you know...
It's hard to do this on a large scale experimentally. What you can do is take
advantage of natural experiments.
So, in the book, I report this one study that I think is still unpublished by
an economist who looked at a natural experiment, which was the imposition of
prohibition in America.
And we tend to think of that as something that happened all at once at the federal
level, but that's not the case.
It actually was imposed over a very long period of time at the county level.
And so, he took advantage of that variation and looked at counties that were
previously wet where alcohol was legal and then had prohibition imposed.
And then as a proxy of collaboration, he used patent applications.
So, he had data, county-level data on patent applications made in a given year.
And what he found was when prohibition gets imposed, patent applications go
down 15% and take about three years to get back to previous levels.
And he argues what's happening there is, so, you know, prohibition didn't mean
people stopped drinking entirely, right?
They had homemade alcohol at home or bootleg liquor, but what it did is shut
down the saloons. And so, it stopped group drinking, it stopped social drinking from happening.
And he thinks that's what's going on. So you see this drop in innovation when
people can't gather in saloons and chat anymore.
And he thinks what's happening three years later is speakeasies are arising.
People are creating workarounds and coming up with new ways,
underground ways to socialize and drink.
So it's correlational, but it's kind of neat bit of correlational evidence.
Um, I would also predict, so I talked a little bit about in the book about COVID, um, um,
So, with people, you know, annual conferences getting canceled and what people
do at annual conferences, they go to talks, they give talks, but they drink.
The main motivation, right, is to go and see your friend, colleagues,
meet people you've heard of and want to talk to and you meet over drinks.
That didn't happen for a year and a half. It's still not happening very much.
I'd predict that we're going to see a drop in creativity and collaboration.
And you could pick a proxy to measure that.
There was one I did dig up. It's in a footnote because I stumbled on this study
late in the process of writing the book.
But again, a natural experiment that happened was a political science annual
conference got canceled because of a hurricane.
So, this one year, the annual conference didn't happen.
And these scholars found that in the wake, the one year after that canceled
annual conference, the percentage of papers that co-authored went down significantly.
So, you seem to have a fall in collaboration.
So, I'm going to predict that COVID has done a similar thing.
When we're not getting together in person and meeting over drinks anymore.
We're having these weird Zoom meetings where we're not drinking together.
We have very reduced bandwidth in terms of facial expressions and tone of voice.
The timing's a little bit off and timing is crucial, right?
The social signals that we use to coordinate when it's time for me to stop talking
and when it's time for you to start talking are fractions of a second, and Zoom screws that up.
So we're lacking all the dynamics of in-person meeting.
I think we're going to see a really serious effect on innovation and collaboration.
But Edward, in some sense, there have been other proposals on,
let's say, how mushrooms and the consumption of mushrooms,
hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms also led to the creation of religion.
And there, it was sort of the hallucinogenic component that would contribute to that,
while in your case, you would say, well, it's more this sort of the suppression
of the cognitive control that leads to, if you want, more magical thinking and
the creation of religious considerations.
So, how do you see that link to other drugs, including, let's say,
mushrooms and these mushroom theories on the evolution of religion?
Yeah, well, I mean, hallucinations are the result of suppression of cognitive control.
So, what's happening in trips, mushroom trips, LSD trips, is the playground
monitor is gone now and different parts of the brain can talk to each other
that don't normally talk to one another.
And you get these weird kind of synesthesias where you're getting sensory modes
kind of overlapping in weird ways.
So, Michael Pollan's got a relatively recent book about this,
you know, How to Change Your Mind, and he's arguing that.
Um hallucinogens have played this important role so i look at
hallucinogens the book the book is about chemical intoxicants
in general so i look at uh right i look at
kava i don't look at uh caffeine or nicotine because those are not intoxicants
so caffeine and nicotine are friends of the prefrontal cortex they they enhance
your cognitive control and i'm not interested in them i'm interested in things
that mess with your pfc essentially essentially.
And hallucinogens do that. Cannabis does that.
My argument in the book, though, is that the reason that I focus primarily on
alcohol is because alcohol is the king of intoxicants.
It's by far the most commonly used chemical intoxicant.
And it's a better drug in certain ways.
It's not an accident that it's the king of intoxicants. I think if you gave
a group of cultural evolutionary engineers some design specs,
you said, we need something, We want a chemical substance that will suppress
PFC, but not for too long and not too much.
We want it to be short-acting because we want people to be able to do this for
a few hours, but then get back to everyday life again.
We want it to be easy to make. You should be able to make it anywhere.
You should be able to dose it well.
It would be something like alcohol. So cannabis, for instance,
is very difficult to dose, whether you're smoking or eating it.
And also cannabis has very variable effects across individuals.
It has very almost opposite effects in different individuals,
whereas alcohol's effects are pretty consistent across individuals. It's easy to dose.
Hallucinogens are just so powerfully disassociate you from reality that they're
not useful for most of the things we use alcohol for.
You're not going to sit down with business partners to negotiate a contract
and all drop acid together.
It's going to end up being a very interesting contract, right?
And they're too long acting. I mean, they take too long.
I am open to the fact that the idea that in the modern world,
we may be able to adapt some of these drugs to be more user-friendly.
So I talked a little bit about microdosing.
But now that we can synthesize the active component of, let's say,
psilocybin mushrooms, we may be able to take smaller doses that would give us
some of the alcohol-like benefits.
So we'd still be able to sit down and talk to colleagues. We'd still be able to go to work.
But we'd have some of these benefits without the cost because the problem with
alcohol is the two big strikes against it is it's really dangerous physiologically.
It's really damaging physiologically and it's
super addictive it's physiologically addictive um on the level of kind of cocaine
and heroin right it's um whereas cannabis and psychedelics are pretty harmless
physiologically and don't seem to create um physiological addiction,
Well, cannabis, chronic use can really lead to rather important shifts in how
the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex interact, right? Suppression of cortex.
But okay, it's not comparable. Compared to alcohol, it's a safer drug.
Right. And it does, and it can be on, you can be psychologically addicted to
cannabis, but it doesn't create physical addiction in the way alcohol does.
But what's interesting in terms of also this distinction between alcohol as
sort of the perfect drug in that sense versus hallucinogenics,
in the ritual sense, this was often also delegated to an elected few, right?
They would have the trip and then report back to the rest of the community what the gods told them.
Yeah, so that's interesting. Yeah, I talk about that. Typically,
because hallucinations are so powerful, cultures have two different strategies
for dealing with it. One is the one you said.
So, there's a class of people, shamans, right?
And their job is to trip a lot, but that's their full-time job.
They don't have to farm. They don't have to do anything else.
And then they come back and tell us what the gods said, which is basically their
parts of their brain that don't normally get to talk to the conscious part of
the brain suggesting solutions.
So, you know, why are the gods angry with us? We haven't been capturing game.
The shaman takes a bunch of mushrooms and goes up in the mountain and,
you know, has a trip and speaks to the gods and maybe comes up with.
So, Michael Pollan has a great analogy.
He argues that hallucinogens are
to cultural evolution what mutagens
are for genetic evolution so for
genetic evolution you need variation you need mutations uh
they're mostly really bad they mostly have negative consequences but every once
in a while one is good and that that's what that's the raw material for selection
to act on he thinks for cultural evolution you need variation you need kind of entropy,
you need the brain scrambled up a bit.
And most of what that's going to produce is nonsense. So most of what you come
out of with a trip is nonsense.
But maybe every once in a while, you come up with something that's really new,
because it never would have happened if these brain regions weren't talking
to one another. And it's useful.
And so the shamans provide that. Or the other strategy groups use is everyone
does hallucinogens, but we only do it once or twice a year. It's a very special ritual.
But it's never an everyday drug for everybody.
Right. Clear. So Edward, to get us to the finish line, two questions.
Do you believe humans will ever manage to establish a sustainable collaboration?
Like all of us on the planet together? Exactly.
No. I'm kind of pessimistic about that.
You know, I think… Let's be pragmatic about it, right? If we face these global
challenges now, we need a global response.
So, by consequence, we need global collaboration. How are we going to manage that?
If you could make it… The problem
with the global challenges we face is they're not… they're
happening at a time scale and on a causal scale
that i don't think we're evolved to really get right so climate change is causality
so diffuse like the the link between me driving to work and the storm that happened
that wiped out louisiana is so diffuse it's just we're not good at thinking about that.
So, if we can figure out some way to make something like climate change feel
real to people in the same way, look, here's the invading army that is threatening us.
How do we know it's happening? Because look over the walls. There they are.
People are not rational, right? So, you got to get their guts on board.
So, I guess if we could figure out a way to make some of these existential global
threats cognitively graspable, emotionally graspable by people.
Maybe you'd be able to... You get collaboration and cooperation in the face of common enemies.
And obviously, climate change is a common enemy. We're all going to be affected by it.
But I just don't think we've been very successful in getting people to feel that.
Or think about COVID response and just the political divisions in the United
States, for instance, or even here in Canada on just no-brainer things like vaccines.
I mean, you could have reasonable disagreement on whether or not kids should
go to school or whether or not masks should be required in the classroom.
But vaccines are just, there's no rational answer.
Debate about that but there is there's well there's debate about it because it's been,
tribalized and i just you know the
the way getting people together in religious groups large-scale societies is
in a way fighting against our tribal nature is creating a super tribe or it's
suppressing tribal instincts but they're always there and i think what we've
seen is they They come back.
Right. But if I listen to your analysis, the consequence would be that we could
set up a new religion where we have to protect.
It's more like a Gaia-oriented religion that has to sort of protect Mother Earth.
And Mother Earth is our new god, and we have to venerate her by making sure
that she doesn't get further compromised.
Wouldn't that be a way through this? We start to mobilize again all these very
primitive responses of collaboration in order to actually achieve this goal
because the rational route is closed.
Yeah. How do you practically do that, though?
You need a Jesus, right? You need one or a series or a group of charismatic
leaders who can convince you of this. And a lot of beer.
And a lot of beer. beer organic beer
you know exactly sustainably um but yeah
so this something like that is in theory
great um it's just the practicalities of how you would get it off the ground
because people need to believe it right they need to they need to believe it
and that's the tricky thing well in that sense you could argue that that these
movements who try to sort of instill ecological psychological change,
right, have in some sense already these kinds of metaphysical considerations
in them. So you can build on that.
Yeah, that's where I hope the database of religious history is going to prove helpful.
Because if we can, once we get enough data, if we can see that there are these
common features of religions that are successful, you can imagine then kind
of basically consciously engineering a type of new that had some of these features.
You have 10 years, right? So we've got to hurry up.
The last question, Edward, my last question, if you could change one thing in humans, right?
So you're the Uber God and you can change one feature, one trait of humans,
what would it be so that they would collaborate more effectively? Oh, God.
As an Uber God, you cannot resort to that. So this is it. Yeah. Yeah.
It's tricky because you change, anything you change could have these knock-on
effects that you can't predict.
That's why. So yeah, I'd like to change, you know, let's change human selfishness,
you know, self-regarding, but if you change that or you get a screw with parenting,
would you screw with friendship?
I don't know. Right. You would also screw with agency.
Yeah, I can't answer that question. I'm not a Newbery god.
But yeah. No, look, I would have said that there's a self-limiting alcohol absorption
system that brings everybody to the sweet spot of, what was it,
0.8 or 0.08? 0.08, 0.08 it seems to be.
So 0.08 homeostat in the brain.
Yeah, being able to turn, if we had a way to turn that on really easily or,
you know, so one thing I'd change is not give us a tendency to be physiologically
addicted to alcohol and change what would be nice as a drug that does everything alcohol does,
but is not physiologically harmful or addictive.
Exactly. That would be nice. And maybe micro-dosed psilocybin is going to be
that, but it's early days. We only have about eight years of experience with that.
And we've got about 12,000 years of experience with alcohol.
So yeah. Great.
Edward Slingerland, thank you very much for this conversation.
Yeah. Thanks, Ted. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was great. So Edward, yeah,
I hope we're not derailing too much, of course, your analysis of religion and
also the role of alcohol in that.
That because i was really to really switch you
to the collaboration side no that's all
those are all relevant questions yeah yeah that was great
and i really would like to read your book so um
i have to find it somewhere okay it's
everywhere okay and i yeah i don't i'm not at airports anymore you know so i
don't see the book yeah right right right and um yeah i would be really happy
to to follow up because for in my case in my work on consciousness i also postulate
that there's an intentionality prior, right?
So you have the Kantian categories of space and time.
And I believe there's also an intentionality prior that's just implanted in
the brain from the beginning.
And from that unfolds all these complexifications that we now are trying to
deal with through religion, for instance.
Okay. So something like Dennett's intentional stance, you mean? No, no, no.
Because for Dennett, it's also more of a cognitive tool. Like it's easier to
look at the world. It's easier to, yeah.
But for me, it started in the Cambrian explosion.
As soon as you have predator-prey systems, you can only survive if you have intentionality prior.
Because as a prey, you just have to consider everything unknown and expect it
as a potential predator. So now you start to impose intentionality on the whole world by necessity.
So predator-prey systems for me are really the beginning of this intentionality prior.
Oh, that's interesting. And then, of course, in the case of humans,
when you add culture, symbol systems on top of that, okay, now we have the gods.
Right, right. But it's really the evolutionary trick. It's the only way to survive
in multi-agent systems.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, that's cool. I can send the paper to you. Yeah, I'd like to see it.
Is it wrong? I've got a – my last monograph was actually on mind-body concepts in early China.
Oh, cool. And arguing that they are there contrary to popular belief.
And they're there because they're built in. They're part of the cognitive architecture.
Oh, that's – but that's not an airport book, I think.
That's not. It's called Mind and Body in Early China. Okay.
Oh, that's great. Great. Okay. No, that sounds very relevant because it seems...
It might be relevant. Okay. That's great.
Well, Luke Edwards, thank you very much.
I hope we can bump into... Hi, you listened to one of our podcasts in the series
on collaboration produced by the Ernst Trommel Forum and the Convergent Science Network.
You can find more episodes on our website.