Guest post: A human instinct to bargain
Originally a comment by Alan Peakall on Vice n virtue.
Certainty of paternity may be the ultimate material basis of the imperative for sexual control, but it does not account for religious taboos on non-procreative sexual acts. Possibly they are Gouldian spandrels emerging from cross firing of the supposed exchange instinct asserted to be disclosed by evolutionary psychologists’ study of Wason test experiments. Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction, non-reproductive sex becomes a potential trgger for guilt/shame at cheating nature or Nature personified as a god. Religion as an institution then seizes on that guilt as a means of social control and incorporates it into a meme matrix. This appears still more plausible if you recall the prevalence of the cliched campaign trail barb “If he cheats on his wife, he’ll cheat on the country”.
IIRC it was Stephen Budiansky who attributed many religious impulses to a human instinct to bargain even if there is no counterparty with whom to strike a deal (fasting, human sacrifice, …) just as a beaver will attempt to build a dam in response to the mere sound of running water.
Nah, that’s too complicated an explanation. It’s simpler to say that religions are inherently imperialistic. The religious prohibitions against non-procreative sex come from the religion’s mandate to increase its domination of the world, one person at a time.
I recognise that a more complicated explanation carries an obligation to pay for its complexity through greater explanatory power, but I think the sort of hypothesis outlined above satisfies that requirement by presenting a materially grounded explanation for the origin of particular memes which are subject to the mimetic drive attributable to organized religion’s “mandate to increase its domination of the world”.
The parallel is with the way in which Darwinian sexual selection can, though positive feedback of sex-limited genes, distort animal bodies and mating preferences in ways which are ultimately sub-optimal for individual survival even though the corresponding small initial preference may have been straightforwardly and intuitively adaptive.
Sometimes a phenomenon may superficially appear irrational and circular but closer examination will yield an explanation at a lower hierarchical level that supplements rather than falsifies the original perception: chickens really do both lay eggs and hatch from them, and they are descended from a lineage of ancestors going back to the dawn of sex.
I think there’s a lot of words there doing not much work.
“Once humans have acquired the intellectual sophistication to recognise sexual pleasure as an inducement to reproduction…” they have over-intellectualized their existence to the degree that they’re probably not having kids anyway. Very few people have ever, or will ever, interpret sexual pleasure in such a disembodied fashion. Rolling that intellectualization into dogma is the work of the priestly caste, which in many societies doesn’t reproduce. The great majority of people have sex just because it feels good, don’t get all intellectual about it, and are happy to avoid reproduction with no more guilt than such a priestly caste may succeed at instilling in them.
A religious insistence that sex is intended for reproduction, and that members of the religion ought to be fruitful and multiply leads directly to more members of that religion. It happened in the past, and it’s happening now, as some religious groups out-reproduce others. They have adaptive beliefs, whereas other religious groups have maladaptive beliefs – such as that people shouldn’t have sex at all – resulting in the reduction of that group in the future. That’s bad for the religious group, and bad for the priestly caste that lives off their surplus.
We’re running out of Shakers, and the explanation is simple.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/05/magazine/shakers-utopia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JU4.-foF.Mtg49LL3P7uw&smid=url-share