Preface: Ghosts, Post-truth Despair and Brandolini's Law
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
Francisco Goya
This volume is based on a paradox.
How come that, despite centuries of scientific research, the main academic discipline dedicated to the historical study of religion has been - and still is - so blindly devoted to an apologetic study of its research subject?
The paradox lies in the fact that nature, in the guise of deep-historical, impersonal, aimless and meaningless evolutionary dynamics, has provided us, Homo sapiens, with a software that, for the mere purpose of its hardware self-maintenance, survival and replication, is inclined to produce immediate, personal, intentional and purposeful answers which are intuitively at odds with evolutionary and scientific thinking (e.g.
Evans 2000; Kelemen 2012; for nonhuman animals and their cognitive abilities, see de Waal 2013 and de Waal 2016).1 When confronted with science and evolution, just as the famous episode of the TV animated sitcom Family Guy where Carl Sagan's Cosmos had been overdubbed to be broadcast in the US Bible Belt, believers, religionists and theologians are likely to answer ‘God'.2And yet, no goddess, god, spirit, ghost or superhuman being has ever walked among us mere mortals (however, Carl Sagan did). No divine intervention of some sort has ever interrupted our daily existence. No miracle has ever been ascertained beyond reasonable doubt. Apparently, the era of miracles is closed, and rivers of theological ink have been shed to justify this absence. Today, miracles are within the domain of science. The very perception, diffusion and reception of miracles have been demystified by neurosciences and cognitive science. Today, science is so close to magic that the two are almost indistinguishable. Immunotherapy and CRISPR/Cas genome editing techniques promise to offer a solution for devastating conditions, new fossils are continually improving our understanding of the 4.5 billion years of life evolution on this pale blue dot we call home, and Mars Exploration Rovers on a planet 220 million kilometres away from Earth (on average) are gathering and sending us data almost on a daily basis.
And yet, what might appear as the unquestionable triumph of rational approaches to understand life, the cosmos and everything in between, crumbles down before ‘alternative facts' and fake news. By sheer volume of shared online data, this will be probably remembered as the era of digital manipulation (‘have you seen that shadow of an alien on the latest NASA pics?'), of imaginary conspiracies (‘it's a cover up!'), of extinct animal sightings (wouldn't it be great to observe a living thylacine, by the way?), of Moon-landing hoaxes, of chemtrail and anti-vax movements. This is the era in which the blood liquefaction miracle of St Januarius coexists with de-extinction research aimed at bringing back the charismatic Pleistocene and Holocene megafaunae (are we going to see a living thylacine, after all?), the era in which millions of smartphones and tablets all over the globe have failed to record a single, incontrovertible instance of a divine or miraculous sign, and yet we are constantly flooded by tearful stories of miracles of every sort on our social media networks (and kittens playing the piano too, of course). This is the era of post-truth. Move away, ‘Spooky’ Mulder. We all want to believe.Spoiler alert: there might be no happy ending to this story. This is rather unsurprising. For most of our history, the vast majority of human beings have been almost naturally insensitive to critical thinking and scientific research, and even more prone to confuse technology with magic, which is just one step away from being miraculous. Once upon a time, writing technology was reputed a sacred device to practise magic, fix the words of the gods, or cast magical spells to bind or summon demons. Today, tap on the screen of your smartphone and, magically, you can almost telepathically communicate from Reykjavik to Canberra, scroll the sacred texts of all the major religious traditions past and present, and still bind and summon virtual demons in an online MMORPG. Electric grids, communication satellites, repeaters, digital signals, are all obliterated, nay, happily ignored, and the triumph of applied scientific technology - the result of centuries of interconnected research - turns into a nightmarish maelstrom of magic 2.0, where videos and pictures of weeping statues of Madonnas, thirsty simulacra of Ganesha, and Abrahamic angels of all kinds are shared millions of times (cf.
Eco 2008: 102-1). Online, traditional, visceral, committed, non-negotiable beliefs translate into strong emotions which, in turn, filter out, or distort, everything that does not conform to someone’s assumptions, and the result is that you see what you want to see. If critical thinking is applied at all, it is usually hijacked by biases and marred by fallacies. Specialists and scholars are themselves derided as slaves of the system. ‘There must be a governmental conspiracy on 9/11, here are the clues!’ (9/11 might be easily substituted with the death of Elvis, Paul McCartney’s doppelganger, alien visitors from outer space, reptilians, you name it.) Once those committed beliefs set in, and a support network is created, a rational change of heart is difficult, if it is possible at all (Prothero 2013; D’Ancona 2017).All of this is post-truth. Despite the superficial differences, the overarching trait d’union is the perception of ‘truthiness’, that is, the appeal to one’s own emotions just because it feels right to believe in that particular something. Therefore, preference is accorded to the likeliness of something held to be ‘true’ over factual, objective truth. There is a clear echo of the most extreme forms of postmodernism in this definition. However, if post-truth refers to ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal beliefs’, then this phenomenon is not just something old, but also recurrent (Oxford Dictionaries 2016a). Already in 1647, Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracian y Morales (1601-1658) alerted his readers to
take care when gathering information. We live mainly on information. We see very little for ourselves and live on others' testimony. Hearing is truth's last point, and a lie's first. Truth is normally seen and rarely heard. It rarely reaches us unadulterated, especially when it comes from far off. It is always tinged with the emotions through which it has passed. Passion tints everything it touches, making it odious or pleasing.
Gracian 2015:14; original emphasis
Three centuries later, during the apogee of Interwar totalitarianism, George Orwell rightly identified the modern origins of truth manipulation in the combination of emotional attachment and reactionary ideologies (D'Ancona 2017: 4-5). When ideologies, prejudices, and intuitive beliefs take over institutional and collective knowledge, truth itself is always the first victim. But if that is the case, then it is quite easy to recognize that post-truth has always gone hand in hand with politics, academic research - and religion. The digital era of social media and shared online content is only acting as a real-time quantitative amplifier and accelerator, the likes of which, to be sure, have never been witnessed. It is difficult to stay critically focused when bombarded by more information than one can handle in one's entire lifetime - all of it just one click away. The usual and most comfortable defence against challenging ideas and cognitive overload is to cling onto one's own cherished point of view. Although apparently paradoxical, this is understandable (the devil you know is better than the devil you don't, anyway), and this is why science is so difficult. When push comes to shove, curious and intelligent people find curious and intelligent ways to dodge criticism and justify their theses - or beliefs. Which is a great way to advance knowledge, if you stick to the rules of critical thinking; if not, that is the perfect recipe for a post-truth disaster (Chatfield 2018). The Humanities and the social sciences have been a hotbed for the intelligent defence of belief systems and, among their ranks, historians of religions have been the unquestionable masters of post-truth.
Magic powers, paranormal events, anti- democratic advocacy, theological intrusions, ethnocentric chauvinism, anti-scientific stances, creationist support, all abound in the writings of some of the most renowned historians of religions of the past. Why is that? The usual defence, whether interested or just lazy, is that everyone during their age, whether recent or remote, thought like that.
This excuse, however, is based on the ‘everyone does it' fallacy (Warburton 2007: 64) and, as such, has no bearing on the point raised above. At most, it can be objected that everyone did or thought so within the environment of that discipline, which begs the question of why such an environment had been colonized by such scholars or, alternatively, why this academic space has been capable of exerting such cultural pressures on its denizens. Which are exactly the kinds of question that I try to tackle in this book, and their relevance is self-evident to the archaeology of the post-truth era.Looking back in time, institutional religion has always been the main actor in the arena where science and pseudoscience have been long since duelling. Since Darwin published his groundbreaking work on the Origin of Species in 1859, the evolutionary debunking of the argument from design in a world deprived of any theodicy has risen to symbolize the godless, and religiously dangerous, scientific research. Admittedly, various accommodationist stances have tried, and are still trying, to assuage this conflict, albeit to no epistemological avail. Already a century before Darwin, in the continuing and obvious absence of any miracle or superhuman sign, David Hume advocated a Natural History of Religion (1757) which, in a sardonically dissimulated style, accounted for the natural causes behind complex sets of beliefs and behaviours (such as cognitive anthropomorphism, terror management and wishful selfpreservation), while acknowledging the futility of religion for morality and its penchant for bringing out and justifying the worst violent behaviours (topics also tackled in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1779; Hume 2008a). But long before that, more than 2,000 years earlier, Greek philosopher Xenophanes led a ‘full frontal attack' against traditional theology, by famously stating not just that every human culture has imagined its gods with characteristics which typically followed that of the people in question (thus undermining any universalizing claim), but even that ‘if cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-like gods, cows cow-like gods, and each species would have made the gods' bodies just like their own' (Waterfield 2009: 22, 27; cited fragment DK21B15, KRS 169).
And these are just a few notable examples. As anyone sufficiently acquainted with ancient historiography should know, critical thinking, atheism and agnosticism, in many different forms, have always coexisted and wrestled with religious institutions and dogmas (Minois 1998).3 But if before 1859 tension between science and pseudoscience existed in the form of a zero-sum guerrilla war punctuated by the occasional outburst of religious intolerance, the three-fold combination of the slow scientific accumulation of knowledge after the Scientific Revolution, the European Enlightenment, and Darwin's works, resulted in the veritable outbreak of a world war. One of the main battlefields of such conflict in the academy has been the history of religion(s) (HoR, henceforth).HoR is a very complicated academic discipline, in that, mirabile dictu, it has no established agreed-upon charter. From a historiographical point of view, the discipline shifts back and forth from the universal (i.e. a single, innate religion) to the particular (i.e. the many historical religions) while trying to understand or justify their relationship on ontological, metaphysical, cultural and historical levels (Smith 2004: 184-6).4 What can be safely stated is that the HoR is based on comparison writ large. But, as remarked earlier, the very basic cognitive mechanisms and biases that intuitively allow for the comparative endeavour (such as essentialism and teleological thinking, which we will tackle later on) are an obstacle for a correct, historical understanding of the impact of evolutionary processes on culture and religion. As it appears, ordinary human cognitive construals that provide the scaffolding for intuitive explanations find the very logic of evolution counterintuitively baffling (Blancke and de Smedt 2013; Girotto, Pievani and Vallortigara 2014; Coley and Tanner 2015). 'I Therefore, and unsurprisingly, the most appealing and successful study of religion(s) is that which has answered positively to, and piggybacked on, these immediate, agentive, essential and teleological non- evolutionary and virtually anti-scientific tenets. Institutions have exploited this penchant, and most scholars in the field, eager to manipulate socio-cultural evolutionism, have provided supportive ethnocentric, theological and/or racial interpretations to the HoR as a whole. However, there is epistemological justice after all. Daniel Lord Smail has written that ‘natural history, obviously, does not require an awareness of history on the part of the subjects' (Smail 2008: 70). Historians of religions may have thought that their ideas about how to conceptualize the HoR were right, but most of the times, as the cases analysed in the book will show, they were not. Sometimes they rejected natural history as meaningful for their studies (and some do so even today). And yet, given that those historians of religions were, until proven otherwise, mammals with an evolved brain and evolved cognitive biases, natural history explains both their ideological inclinations and their disciplinary leanings.
However, readers might opine that, if those intuitive biases are natural, and religion is fundamentally a product of those cognitive biases, religious stances might be natural, right and naturally good. Unfortunately for those who entertain such beliefs, there is a catch. Religious sets of beliefs and behaviours may be cognitively natural, i.e. the natural products of evolutionary pressures (McCauley 2011), but this does not mean that they are inherently good or reliable. Let us indulge in a slight variation on the Humean is- ought problem. Heart attacks and strokes due to smoking, obesity and poor dietary habits are the natural outcome of an ultimate evolutionary cause (i.e. addictive behaviour and human propensity to eat high-caloric food, a valuable - if occasional - source of energy in nature) and a proximate historical cause (that is, market economy and psychotropic consumerism), but this does not automatically make heart attacks or strokes n aturally good (cf. Smail 2008; Diamond 2012; Diamond 2015). An unnatural history of religions such as the one conducted within the HoR, for want of a better parallel, would be like having cardiac surgeons, maybe even affected by heart attacks and strokes because of such causes, actively downplaying, minimizing or misinterpreting the impact of the ultimate and proximate causes behind cardiovascular issues, encouraging the usual bad habits which lead to such health problems as though nothing has happened, and judging the very causes of such tragic outcomes as naturally non-problematic or unavoidable. This is the core of what I have dubbed herein as the academic history of an intrinsically anti-Humean unnatural religion as the one pursued within the HoR.
Let me elaborate on this for a moment. Science and religion are similar and, at the same time, profoundly different. Theological knowledge can be as much elaborated and hard to grasp as cutting-edge science itself. Compare for instance the discovery of a subset of homeobox genes that guide the sequential development of physiological structures, and whose activation and functioning are the same across the animal kingdom, with the Christian Holy Trinity, which fuses three distinct religious agents, or hypostases (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit), in a single nature, at once consubstantial, co-eternal and equal. However, while cutting-edge science is based on the grasping of more basic but still counterintuitive processes which are not arrived at via merely intuition but through critical thinking and the accumulation of epistemically warranted knowledge, theology builds on and depends upon immediate, widespread and highly intuitive ideas which may arise independently in each cultural setting. This set of cognitively uniform core beliefs and templates has been called ‘popular (or folk) religion', which explain the almost panhuman cultural presence, formation and diffusion of anthropomorphic agents constrained by human-like features such as ghosts, dead ancestors living in the otherworld, talking animals as messengers and more. Taken together, and notwithstanding innumerable proj ects of accommo dationism and harmonization, theology and popular religion remain at odds with the tenets of scientific critical thinking and evolution (Coyne 2015). The immediate appeal of intuitions which feed into religious beliefs can be shrugged off only with constant, onerous, effortful, institutionally supported education, which makes science inherently fragile (cf. Ambasciano 2017a).
There is also a willingness to believe, an emotional attachment, an affective investment to believe in beliefs themselves, an addiction that might feed into our intuitions, in a self-reinforcing loop. As philosopher Stephen Law has recently summarized, our cognitive machinery is vulnerable to successful cyberattacks by beliefs involving counterintuitive, divine hidden agents, special places, charismatic objects and miraculous or paranormal actions - which Law has collectively labelled as ‘X-claims’ - when subjective experiences and testimony are added to the mix (Law 2018). Religions and pseudoscience literally thrive on X-claims. Just think about this for a second: our computational brainpower is limited. We can always be deceived. Cognitive predispositions once useful to strengthen group solidarity and individual reliability can be easily hijacked. Not to mention that ‘our computational devices are only just good-enough, and they make us prone to false positives in the detection of meaningful patterns, from anthropomorphism to pareidolia, from distorted national myths to imaginary conspiracies. Our neural networks devoted to gathering and processing data into meaningful patterns (no matter how authentic) are unrelentingly at work’ (Ambasciano 2015b: 242-3; cf. Gottschall 2012: 96). Do not get me wrong: emotions and cognition are interconnected, and the myth of a perfectly rational, emotionless Vulcan mind is, indeed, a sci-fi caricature. No emotions, no rationality (Galef 2011; Galef 2016). However, emotions do get in the way of effective decisionmaking if no sufficient rational literacy has been provided. It takes brains, a lot of guts, a bit of luck and decades of education and literacy to counter the effects of our potentially fallacious intuitions. And even this might not be enough. We are social animals, and we depend on others to survive. Academic research would be unthinkable without institutional resources, tools, support and funds. And here is the crucial point: it just takes some very simple tweaks in the institutional hierarchy to control funds and scholarships so as to control subtly the academic study of religion(s). The educational costs of a scientifically disengaged HoR are far too high, for higher education shapes the cultural and mental environment of our fellow citizens of tomorrow, those who will vote and be voted for, those who will propose, implement or support policies that will affect us all. In the light of this, what are the long-t erm, collective, socio-political damages by governmental legislation aimed at endorsing the teaching of the supernatural, of creationism, of theological dogmas, as positive, institutionally endorsed facts? And just like the aforementioned example, who watches the watchmen when the supervisors themselves are prone to be institutionally controlled, cognitively biased, ideologically compromised, and prejudicially manipulated?
As psychologist James Leuba rightly foresaw more than a century ago, ‘the advent of psychological analysis and explanation should bring about a crisis more painful, because more profound, than the one due to the less recent appearance of the comparative history of religions and the literary criticism of sacred writings’ (Leuba 1912: ix-x). Indeed, both the evolutionary and cognitive revolutions have brought about a ‘crisis more powerful’ than anything else in the HoR. The explanatory power born of those revolutions has proved to be immense. For the first time ever, scientific tools and critical thinking can support evidence-based, scientifically sound research to produce solid and epistemically warranted knowledge. However, as we will see, even these tools and frameworks can be easily rejected or manipulated to justify apologetic or accommodationist ends. Indeed, most historians of religions, immunized from external or internal criticism within their safe echo chamber, are successfully resisting - and counterattacking. Science, it should be recalled, can be easily lost. The resistance, the disdain and the contempt against science and evolution are quite diffused within the Humanities, especially since the spread of postmodernism, but within the history of the HoR they reach unimaginable levels. Institutions are not helping. As I am writing these lines, the Republican US administration, led by post-truth champion Donald Trump, has reportedly advised the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) against the use of a list of words or syntagmas from their budget documents, among which, quite expectedly, there are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘science-based’. There is a war, indeed, and it is raging on (Helmore 2017).
This is not a neutral academic volume. This is a book with an agenda, and a strong one. Apparently paradoxical, the sense will become clear only by reading the volume and following its argumentations until the very last sentence. For those who cannot wait, here is the ‘too long; didn’t read’ version: for the sake of the survival of the social- scientific study of the history of religions, the discipline called HoR must go (cf. Lincoln 2012: 135). To resolve the apparent paradox stated at the very beginning of this introduction, we need to think out of the box, and we need a serious discussion. Something new, something different, in the wake of the evolutionary and ‘cognitionbased social-scientific model [of] historical research’ (L. H. Martin 2014: 273) already prefigured thanks to the work of a small and brave scholarly community of forerunners, should take its place. Unfortunately, the current resurgence of pseudoscience, misinformation, deception and inaccurate analyses has infected the field of the HoR to such a degree that no therapy is available to cure it. Brandolini’s Law states that ‘the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it’ (Williamson 2016), and the current HoR is replete with bullshit, i.e. the disregard for truth and the willingness to engage in fakery and postmodern ‘instant revisionism’ for the sake of it - and for prestige and fame as well (Latour 2004: 228; see Frankfurt 2005, and Pigliucci and Boudry 2013). When this combines with genuine, but equally fallacious, fideism, the result is explosive (Ambasciano 2015a; Ambasciano 2016a; Ambasciano 2016b).5
To borrow a much-heard slogan from the 2008 global financial crisis, the HoR is apparently ‘too big to fail’. The sheer magnitude of such disciplinary bullshit shields it from disconfirmation. Deconstructing and dismantling the discipline to rebuild it on firmer grounds, while rescuing everything that could be scientifically updated, might seem the most viable option here, but I am quite sure that such a project will never be accepted nor be entirely successful - and not just because of the Herculean penance involved. Because of the very existence of those evolved cognitive biases, obscurantist resistance will a lways win. Cutting-e dge, counterintuitive science will always be misunderstood by laypeople when popularized for instant fruition or translated into easy terms (cf. Asprem 2016). Intuitive logical fallacies will always trump effortful evidence-based research in the field. Miraculous fake news, quackery, fideistic distortions will always claim their share. Para-institutional money from religious organizations will always exert some sort of bottleneck selection with regard to the research they want to fund (cf. Martin and Wiebe 2016: 221-30).
However, this does not mean that we cannot build a new edifice. For all my existentialist dread and utter pessimism, hope is unquenchable. Modern democracy might have seemed an archived social experiment under the post-Napoleonic Restoration. The extension of civil rights might have appeared like a mirage under the Confederate States of America. The establishment of universal suffrage before the breakthrough of the Suffragettes might have sounded like a hopeless goal. The victory of the Axis powers might have seemed inevitable before Churchill’s speech or Roosevelt’s intervention. Reaching the Moon or Mars might have looked like the fancy stuff of Jules Verne’s novels. Real-time, worldwide, relatively cheap audio-video communication, MRI scans, genetic screening, vaccines, virtually infinite archives of literary and scientific data, were once the subjects of sci-fi adventures or Borgesian novels. In a virtuous loop, technological breakthroughs allow for previously unthinkable answers, which in turn lead to new questions in academic research - and so on. Thanks to one of such serendipitous interactions between contemporary cognitive sciences, philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, Big and Deep historiographical research, and other cross-disciplinary contributions the demystified, and demystifying, study of religions, all religions, could at last be resolved within a Humean, natural and historical science (cf. Bulbulia and Slingerland 2012). Sometimes, real change does really happen. Moral progress and the advancement of science go hand in hand, because, in both cases, whenever institutional space and support for epistemically warranted criticism and refutation is provided, experimentation and logical thinking flourish to the benefit of all (bar the bullshitters, of course). Prove my pessimism wrong. If you want something to believe in, please believe in scientific hope for improvement and learn from past errors, engage the discipline critically, ‘bring the sword of criticism to [postmodern] criticism itself’ (Latour 2004: 227), and fight back post-truth with the arms of critical thinking. As you will discover by reading this book, you are not alone.