R.K.: Why do we have religions? How do they function?
F.W.: Well, religions have a very important social function. They bring people together. We also know from research that people who are religious usually are healthier so it has beneficial health effects. It certainly has beneficial social effects.
And so first of all, it has a social function and probably also religions are important for human morality in the sense that they enforce it and stimulate it and provide narratives for it and guide it in certain directions. And so even though I don't believe that religions are the source of morality, I don't think they invented morality, they became an important sort of support system for human morality and that's the thing that intrigues me.
The few societies have kicked religion out, they have not been particularly moral societies. Remember the communists, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot? They kicked religion out aggressively and Stalin even executed more than thirty thousand priests and bishops at some point, and so they have not been the most shining examples of morality. And so I am not sure what society would look like without religion and would they be good societies, or bad societies? That's a question that I am struggling with: how important religion is for morality.
R.K.: So it makes me wonder when an individual, be it human, or primate, acts from tendencies that are genetically endowed, that's bottom-up and it's deep within the person. When a person embraces morals, that's external. It would seem to me that this bottom-up, internal upwelling way of behaving and seeing would be more powerful and more deeply rooted and I wonder if there's been any way of looking at that and to look at that. There is a lot written about how, as we move into this century, we're moving to a shallower, more distracted way of way being and there's a book called, The Shallows, and I wonder if this externalized, top-down way leads to a shallower level of function in terms of that.
F.W.: Well, you said morality is external, but you know I think human morality... yes, we do have a set of rules so to speak for society that you are supposed to follow and you could consider that external, but the reason we can follow these rules is partly because we are endowed with certain tendencies. So you can say for example, we want to have a society in which fairness operates, but the only reason you can say that is that people have already a sensitivity to fairness.
If you would go to a bunch of sharks, who have no concept of social relationships, or fairness, and you would explain that they need to be more fair in how to distribute the food for example, they would have no clue about what you are talking about because they have never had any reactions in that regard. So the reason we can talk about taking care of others and being empathic to others and following social rules and being sensitive to fairness and so on; the reason we can impose that there now are moral systems and talk about it is precisely because people have all these sensitivities already. They have already, when they were children, experienced lots of situations that they found to be unfair and to be fair and so on. So even if morality is looked at as a set of rules that comes from the outside, it is very much related to how we are as a species and how our psychology is constructed and those are biological facts basically.
R.K.: Are there different religions that reverberate more with the bottom-up aspects of morality than other religions?
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