Book Review: The Wealth Paradox by Frank Mols and Jolanda Jetten

The Wealth Paradox: Economic Prosperity and the Hardening of Attitudes [Goodreads] is the right book at the right time. Short, succinct, and with hard data to prove their central thesis, The Wealth Paradox is worthy of a thoughtful read by policy makers, political operatives, academics, and in these troubled times, the general public.

The last few years have seen what Mols and Jetten declare in their preface to be a "perfect storm" in both Western liberal democracies and other countries that pretend to the democratic mantel. A combination of deep economic recessions and global crises have seen 21 million people earn the legal title of refugee and an estimated 65 million people forcibly displaced from their homes. A bit of political turmoil was bound to occur.

Readers might immediately think of Donald Trump's populist rise in the United States in the frantic few months following the British choice to Brexit. Mols was one of very few political scientists to foresee the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. His rationale forms the central thesis of The Wealth Paradox: The rise of far-right parties and political movements are not simply attributable to the poor and dispossessed but also to middle class voters with some modest degree of wealth to protect.

There are others. News watchers could not have missed the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's grab for dictatorial powers after transitioning from prime minister to president of that country. In the Philippines, strongman Rodrigo Duterte grabbed the presidency with his promises to murder drug dealers, street children, and, purely as a form of collateral damage, political opponents. Russia's Vladimir Putin, like Erdoğan a former prime minister of his country and now president, went several times better by being prime minister, then president, then prime minister, and now president again. One must give him points for consistency.

All of these leaders were democratically elected. Something to notice is how close these decisions have been. Trump became the second Republican president in a row to lose the popular vote on his way to the White House. Putin won his first presidential bid in 2000 with 53% of the vote. Erdoğan won his presidential bid with in 2014 with 51.79%. Duterte won with a minority 39.1%. The referendum deciding that Britain should leave the European Union was passed with 51.89% voting to leave. In all of these cases and many more, a populist platform was adopted with nearly half of the electorates voting for the opposite.

Invoking [Godwin's Law], it seems an excellent time to recall that at the time Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, he was head of a political party that had garnered a third of the seats in the German parliament by democratic means.

Why should people elect leaders who so often pursue unarguably unpopular policies, or who hold unpopular ideas? Mols and Jetten argue that enough middle class voters, those with above average incomes, do so in order to protect their own narrow interests. It is this point, and the data behind it, that makes The Wealth Paradox worth reading.

Recent votes in the Netherlands and France rejecting populist parties have left little time to celebrate. The combination of Byzantine political systems and continued strong showings by populist parties clearly show that history is not over. We may yet see a spread of their simplistic mixture of xenophobia and protectionism.

The authors of The Wealth Paradox are not, of course, the first scholars to note the connection between the middle class and populism, nor the odd (to the settled mind) desire to rip and replace an imperfect system with a new one.

The British historian George Dangerfield, writing in the 1930s about the pre-World War I actions of the Tory party then in opposition, made Mols' and Jetten's case for them. Dangerfield's crisis resulted in the partition of Ireland and the mutiny of a portion of the British Army:

The Tory Rebellion was not merely a brutal attack upon an enfeebled opponent - that is to say, political; it was not merely the impassioned defence of impossible privileges - that is to say, economic; it was also, and more profoundly, the unconscious rejection of an established security. For nearly a century men had discovered in the cautious phrase, in the respectable gesture, in the considered display of reasonable emotions, a haven against those irrational storms which threatened to sweep through them, And gradually the haven lost its charms; worst still, it lost it peace. Its waters, no longer unruffled by the wind, ceased to reflect, with complacent ease, the settled skies, the untangled stars of accepted behaviour and sensible conviction; and men, with a defiance they not hope to understand, began to put forth upon little excursions into the vast, the dark, the driven seas beyond.
(George Dangerfield. The Strange Death of Liberal England. Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 122-3.)

Dangerfield could have been writing about today's political challenges. We find ourselves coming off of an unprecedented post-war period of established security that, when buffeted by the "perfect storm", resulted in rejection. It is little wonder that his book became the archetypal modern history.

Worrying, too, is the lesson learned by unrepentant socialist Christopher Hitchens. Visiting his literary superhero Jorge Luis Borges in his unhappy home in Buenos Aires, Hitchens read at Borges' request Rudyard Kipling's "Harp Song of the Dane Women" whose opening verse:

What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker?

so beautifully gets to the beating heart of the human male's yearning for adventure, and the the acceptance of the accompanying risk. Hitchens was dismayed that his idol "heartily preferred" the "gentlemen" of the brutal and populist regime of Juan Perón who abused both his family and himself. Borges, for all his stunning illumination of human foibles, himself fell in his old age into a sort of populist Stockholm Syndrome.

Herodotus noted millennia ago how to react to those protective of their wealth. "Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in prosperity to the end... Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word 'happy' in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky." Those voting for populist leaders should carefully note the warning. Pursuit of short term interests must be carefully weighed with longer term consequences.

No, the The Wealth Paradox is not entirely new. It is up to date, well researched, and particularly timely.

The 191 pages of main matter make The Wealth Paradox a respectable size for an audience uncomfortable with lengthy prose. Forget War and Peace: One sometimes wonders how many years will pass before the last undergraduate slogs to the end of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis at 55 pages, or the 64 pages of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. No time have we in these days of Internet-connected pocket supercomputers for the massive 4,736 pages of Winston Churchill's The Second World War. Even our academics must adjust to doling out words short enough to absorb during a commute or a visit to the toilet. But perhaps I simply suffer from last century's skills. As Kurt Vonnegut so ironically juxtaposed his writing with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in his geriatric romp A Man Without a Country, "I am windy".

The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

The Testament of Gideon Mack [Amazon, Goodreads] by James Robertson has a single unambiguous theme: doubt. That is the only unambiguous feature of the book. Robertson manages masterfully to question every aspect of his own story until one is forced to question nearly everything. Upon finishing the book, I was almost certain that I had, in fact, read it.

The book's notional plot describes the fantastic story of the eponymous Gideon Mack, a Presbyterian minister in a small Scottish seaside village, and his encounter with the Devil. At least, it might have been the Devil. Mack thought so. Sometimes. He might have just been insane. Many of the signs were there, from the fantasies of his loveless childhood to his literal howling at the base of a standing stone that might, or might not, have been imagined. Mack wrote his testament and it supposedly made its way to a publisher who doubted whether he should publish it. The publisher's notes frame Mack's version and supply both context and, following Mack's death, a conclusion of a sort. In a nice twist in the endnotes, the supposed publisher assures us that each sale of The Testament of Gideon Mack will benefit an aged care home in the fictional town described in the story. Robertson leaves us little choice but to doubt his word from beginning to end. This is fiction that will demand that you think.

Mack himself is a classic anti-hero, a characterization that Robertson uses in a footnote to describe another author's character. Robertson draws on many literary references. His characters read, and are influenced by, novels and histories both real and fictional. The author himself holds a Ph.D. in history from Edinburgh University; His dissertation on the works of Sir Walter Scott, a fellow Scotsman and author of such famous early nineteenth century works as Ivanhoe , echoes in The Testament. The women in Mack's life, Jenny the unloved and now deceased wife, Elsie the lover, and diseased Catherine the disputant, find their archetypes in nineteenth century English and French literature such as Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Lord Byron's Don Juan .

The real publisher, Hamish Hamilton in Scotland, part of Penguin Books, assures us in a standard disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." I would personally be saddened to think that our playful Dr. Robertson did not sneak in an intentional resemblance to a living person or two, just to carry his device to its logical conclusion.

Robertson authored two novels prior to The Testament and has authored two since. Hamish Hamilton is publishing a new short story by Robertson every day of 2014, each one 365 words long. None of the dozen or so I read included Robertson's broad Scottish vernacular. The Testament relies upon it. Having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy is critical for American readers and others who are unfamiliar with the meanings of hunkers, boaks, or a smirr of rain. He is forced to explain commonly used words such as kirk (church) and manse (minister's house). Where the Scots Gaelic becomes too thick, Robertson helpfully supplies footnotes from his fictional publisher. The scene feels Scottish, from the persistent rain and angry young men to the shale beaches and craggy topology. The result is a novel that is fresh and genuine in its love of setting.

Robertson is also a partner in the grant-funded Scots language children's publisher Itchy Coo. Itchy Coo's Web site proudly offers a Hame page and an Aboot Us description. A character in The Testament amusingly pokes fun at authors who try to set Scots down in print. In fact, The Testament fairly brims with jibes at authors. One character is a perennially unpublished novelist. Another complains that "everybody thinks they have a novel in them" before declaring that writing is "a refuge from confusion". The process of writing does facilitate a certain clarity of thought, in my experience, if only because one must decide what to say.

Robertson holds out much hope for the written word, as if warding off a merely spoken evil. Mack laments the premature telling of his story by saying, "if people could have read this full and honest account rather than heard me announce it amid the din and confusion of that day, then perhaps they might have reacted with more open minds." At least three of his characters are writers.

The core of the book, though, is our relationship to truth. What is it? Can we know it? Would we understand it if it were presented to us? Why do people believe as they do? What are the costs of their beliefs? The Testament asks the big questions, explores them from many angles, and leaves you to answer them as you see fit. Robertson explores truth from many angles, including the ability to trust "facts" as they are presented, asks what we can truly perceive, informs on the limitations of human thought, wonders about the wisdom of teaching fairy stories to children, and worries about passions left uncontrolled.

Mack's justification for writing his testament is repeatedly referred to as a drive toward truth. But the absolute truth can be amazingly harmful to a community, as Robertson explores. Mack is shunned by everyone by the end of his truncated life for his effort. Robertson's story does not lend credence to Sam Harris' more recent thesis that we should all just tell the unabashed truth at all times (in Lying [Amazon, Goodreads]).

Naturally enough for a book set in Scotland, the central pole around which the book swings in its discussion of truth is religion, and its antipode, doubt of religion. "What is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?" Robertson asks.

We are told, "Human beings are at one and the same time utterly splendid and utterly insignificant." Could there be a more succinct description of the confusion of our times? Our Western civilization has advanced from an ego-centrism under the sky of the only world to one in which we are simultaneously the only intelligent life form we know and yet a mere speck in the vastness of an impossibly large universe. Robertson plays on our confusion from all angles. He gives us the character of Peter Macmurray, elder of the church and Mack's institutional nemesis, who represents the authority of religious institutions, and the character of Lorna Sprott, a fellow minister who is both a true believer and a sad alcoholic crushed under the authority to which she has submitted herself.

Robertson's tight writing shines in his description of Macmurray: "By day he is an accountant and by night, as Jenny used to say, he adds the saved and subtracts the damned, and always comes out with a minus figure."

Robertson deeply questions the role of the Church of Scotland and its relationship with Scottish culture. The nasty element of control in Western religions does not escape Robertson's notice. He has Mack speak of "the overwhelming weight that bears down on most people who enter a church - the weight of years of learning not to disrupt, not to object, not to speak out against authority." At one point he declares that, "The great age of religion had passed", only to suggest that the Kirk could still have a role in society. It is this Gaelic sensitivity to culture and identity that makes The Testament a wonderfully human book. Robertson recognizes and acknowledges non-traditional roles for traditional institutions but can only hope that they will come to see the world in the doubting way that he does. To not is tantamount to denying our recently-won knowledge and risks living with a permanently entrenched cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance is clearly evident in America's science-denying evangelicalism. Robertson informs us that the same stresses exist within other societies.

Lest one consider Robertson's religious beliefs clearly defined, he dithers. His characters are true believers, agnostics, fakers, atheists, vacillators. Elsie's husband John exclaims, "There are no answers, don't you see?", but John is a troubled and desperately unhappy man. He has not replaced religion with a working philosophy that might, as Aristotle suggested, provide him a replacement comfort. Robertson subtly pokes at the religious who express belief in the Devil while steadfastly finding Mack's claims to have met him utterly ridiculous. "The whole religion thing - not being able to reject it and not being able to embrace it", as Elsie says, seems to come closest to his position.

"The present", Robertson says, "was a mere waiting room for the future." That lovely observation is the exact opposite of the mindfulness of the present encouraged by Buddhism. It is also perhaps an unintended or unwanted consequence of our society's current affair with invention and discovery. The scientist or the engineer works toward a future in which theEureka moment will happen. The teenager waits for the new model mobile phone. The salaryman waits for retirement. We are a society of delayed gratification. Those who defer gratification until after death are religion's real losers.

There are many minor recurring themes in The Testament. Perhaps the most central to the book's exploration of truth is the tendency of people to see intelligent action where it is not. This is known to psychologists as hyperactive agency detection. If I suppose a tiger is responsible for the rustling of leaves I just heard and I am right, I might save my life by running away. If I am wrong, little harm is done. This instinctive survival trait causes no end of confusion for the modern person, living as we do with the distinct absence of tigers.

Gideon Mack's life is dominated by hyperactive agency detection. Upon seeing a bee fly out of a drawer, Mack "wondered if there was a message in it; any kind of meaning at all." When confronted with the appearance of the standing stone, he noted:

• "It seemed to me that the Stone had provoked this crisis, had engineered it in some way."
• "Because the Stone prevented it."
• "Perhaps the Stone was wielding some strange power over events and had brought her to my door at this moment."
• "The Stone did not want to be photographed. I no longer wished to share the Stone with anybody."

The last, of course, makes one immediately think of J.R.R. Tolkien's characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and the One Ring.

Later, in a museum exhibition, "I got up on the wooden step, and this seemed to trigger the tape." Mack jumps to unfounded conclusions quickly, seemingly just to avoid missing one. Robertson, whether consciously or not is impossible for me to say, seems to warn against such actions.

Failures of imagination, and another attendant willingness to jump to conclusions, similarly haunt Robertson's characters. Chance appearances of plot devices seem "incredible" to them. When faced with an experience that he cannot readily explain, Mack races to cognitive closure. He seems unwilling or incapable of keeping an open mind until additional facts are acquired. The unnamed being that he (possibly) encounters must be the Christian Devil. God must exist if the Devil does. All of this is wrapped in layers of tortured logic by means of justification. When Mack feels that he could not have reasonably survived his near death experience, he proclaims, "I was of the opinion, therefore, that I must be dead."

Robertson's characters are not an unrealistic stretch from everyday human experience. We have all met the gullible, but Robertson's exploration goes deeper than pedestrian gullibly. He probes the limits of humankind to judge likelihood. It is something that we do poorly.

Radiolab, a weekly radio show syndicated across the United States by National Public Radio, recently illustrated our intuitive problem with comprehending statistics in an episode called Stochasticity. Stochasticity is a florid academic word for randomness. The study of stochasticity provides techniques to understand events whose results can only be measured statistically. We cannot know whether a particular coin toss will result in a "heads" or a "tails", but we can know that, given a high number of tosses, the results should be about half of each.

My caveats (a high number, about half) are important and point to our difficulties in understanding the random world. Radiolab interviewed Deborah Nolan, a professor of statistics atUC Berkeley, who demonstrated how poor we are at understanding random acts. She asked a group of students to make up a list of 100 coin tosses. Simultaneously, the Radiolab hosts were asked to toss a real coin 100 times and record the results. Nolan immediately spotted which list constituted the real coin tosses. How? By choosing the list that contained a run of seven "tails" in a row. The students felt that such a run would not appear to be random, but real random sequences include such apparent patterns quite often. Our misunderstanding of randomness stems from the simple fact that the human cortex is a very effective pattern recognition engine. We seek patterns for our own survival. They guide our actions. Lack of patterns, randomness, confuses us. We seek, and often find, patterns that do not exist.

The phenomenon of seeing patterns that aren't there is common enough that there is a word for it: apophenia. Psychologists associate the onset of such persistent delusional thinking with schizophrenia - unless it is associated with an established religion.

Pascal's Wager appears and reappears throughout The Testament. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal famously argued that everyone should believe in God because "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it postulates a lack of cost to belief in a god. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Pascal did not acknowledge that belief requires a separation from reality, and that bad things happen to the human brain when it is forced to close cognitive dissonance based on too few facts. Wild leaps of the imagination or other mental gymnastics are required to make sense of nonsense. Robertson compares authorial leaps of imagination, which are the very basis of creativity, to leaps of faith. But in admittedly extreme cases, leaps of faith may also lead to anything from standing on a street corner with a sign reading, "The End is Nigh" to suicide bombing to the Toronto family that left a corpse in their house for six months expecting resurrection. We do ourselves no favors by encouraging delusion.

Or do we? We often think of evolution as a search algorithm that fits an animal to its environment. People have been around long enough to evolve to fit people-dominated environments. We have evolved to cooperate with other people. Sometimes, really quite often in fact, that means that we need to compromise our understanding of the world in order to get along with others. Robertson explores the prices of compromise and failures to compromise by presenting us with characters who span the gamut. 

Both real and fictional Presbyterian ministers make their appearance in The Testament. Their interests, with the single exception of the true believer Lorna, transcend those of traditional Christianity. Robertson neatly brings in the nineteenth century minister Robert Kirk and his book of folk tales, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies[Amazon, Goodreads] to make this point. The book makes a variety of appearances across the generations. Robertson intertwines folk myths, mainstream religion, doubt, love, lust, friendships, vanity, and self-obsession into a tapestry that approaches the complexity of real-life thought.

It is almost not worth bothering to mention the fatherhood obsession shared by Gideon and, more subtly, his father James. It is too obvious. However, this does lead to some brilliant foreshadowing with Elsie's daughter Katie and her imaginary friend. The friend seems to be Mack's Devil, lending yet another bit of support for the reality of an illusion that one had just decided was an illusion. Similarly, Elsie's eleventh-hour admission of the length of her affair with Mack, and the depth of it, questions Mack's veracity just after others had established it. Robertson's misdirection took some careful construction.

Robertson, while pillorying religious belief, does not spare non-religious thought. The atheists in The Testament are generally unhappy, and the one professed agnostic is depicted as physically crippled and verbally vitriolic. Robertson asks, but does not answer, what makes one happy to live one's life. Perhaps, being Scottish, he has no idea. More likely he simply was not aware of modern scholarship which has started to unravel this conundrum, such as this study of coping strategies of the irreligious.

Robertson employs some beautiful metaphors throughout The Testament. My personal favorite is this:

"Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Everything is familiar, and everything strange. It’s as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal."

Walking past the sleeping multitudes is a wonderful depiction of the atheist experience. One often feels the weight of the mass delusion that grips our world. Naturally, and very Robertson, true believers must feel the same way. One is left to make of it what one will.

My one substantial criticism stems from an experience that Robertson could presumably not personally explore. Mack's character undergoes a near death experience, but Robertson, it seems, could not pull from observation to make his description plausible. My own near drowning left me uncomfortable with Robertson's portrayal. Although I recognized Mack's reported lack of panic, I experienced no flashing of my life before me, nor a feeling that I had left too much unresolved. The immediacy of the situation dominated my mind, even as I began to think that perhaps I should try breathing water after all. Those who told me I could not could have been mistaken. I do not fault Robertson overly much for his reliance on clichés for this part of his story. I am glad for him that he has not gained the insight.

The Testament of Gideon Mack should not have been long-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. It should have won it. Perhaps it didn't because some members of the review committee were themselves religious. The book is designed in a certain sense to offend. It would not offend a doubter, but it threatens the homey comfort of the believer. "How can it be blasphemous? It’s the truth. There isn’t a word of a lie in what you’ve heard." Gideon Mack tells his friend and fellow minister Lorna. She replies,  "Of course it’s blasphemous. It goes against everything we stand for. You simply mustn’t repeat it." I urge you to ignore her advice.

Book Review: Why We Believe in God(s) by J. Anderson Thomson

We lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with our arms around each other. We swayed back and forth as we sang. The little old lady to my left was frail and I was acutely conscious not to knock her off balance, nor to bruise her. The song, of course, was Amazing Grace. It is a beautiful and powerful song, perhaps one of the best spirituals ever written. We lifted our voices and sang. We swayed together, left and right.

Slides walked us through the lyrics, projected on a large screen at the front of the room. It seems that everyone knew the first verse, but not the others. "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved," we sang, struggling to hit the high notes, "How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed!"

Not one of us believed a word. This was, after all, a meeting of the Fredericksburg Secular Humanists. We all sat down as J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, author of Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith [Amazon, Goodreads], asked us for a show of hands. Andy is a practicing psychiatrist located near the University of Virginia and a faculty member there.

"How many of you feel more positive than you did before singing?", asked Andy. Almost every hand went up. He had us test our pain threshold by pinching the sensitive fleshy area on the back of our hands, between thumb and forefinger. It just didn't hurt as much as it did before we had sang. We had just proven by experiment his contention that ritual group behavior, what Andy calls "song, dance and trance", has a measurable positive effect on the mood and emotions of human beings.

You can do a small scale version of this experiment on yourself. Thomson tells you how on pages 99-100.

The vast majority of people believe in some form of god or another form of supernatural agency such as ghosts, a guiding hand, a purpose of some form. Many believe in reincarnation, bodily or not, and an immortal soul. Why should this be? Clearly it is not because we all, from primitive people to airplane-riding denizens of skyscrapers have the same perception of the same god. As Sir James George Frazer and Joseph Campbell showed, religions differ predictably in their fundamentals as the geography of their adherents change.

Frazer's epic study of comparative religion in the 1890's, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion [Amazon, Goodreads] was followed by Campbell's equally epic follow on two generations later with his Masks of God series: Primitive Mythology [Amazon, Goodreads], Oriental Mythology [Amazon, Goodreads], Occidental Mythology [Amazon,Goodreads] and Creative Mythology [Amazon, Goodreads]. Thomson does not seem to be familiar with either of these studies. Of course, comparing religions was not his goal. Instead, he informs the reader that his studies were informed by the potent combination of his training as a clinical psychiatrist, including Sigmund Freud's The Future of an Illusion [Amazon, Goodreads], his own personal atheism and the near-death experience of his son Mathew during the horror of the 9/11 attack on New York. He is interested in what is capable of turning a person from a religious believer into a suicide bomber.

Distribution of dominant world religions (Click image to expand)

No, Thomson did not set out to compare religions. He set out to determine why we believe. That is a tall order and one with a storied history. Heavy thinkers for more than the last two millennia focused on explaining why we should believe instead of why we do. Aristotle, noting that all activities have cause, postulated a prime mover (or unmoved mover) that began all events. St. Thomas Aquinas summarized five reasons (the quinque viae) to believe in the Christian god in his book Summa Theologica [Amazon, Goodreads] in the thirteenth century. There have been so many others, from the ontological argument of René Descartes to Pascal's Wager. All of them, shows Thomson, have missed the point entirely.

I had already read Why We Believe in God(s) when I had the opportunity to hear Andy speak at a lecture in October 2014. He is personally engaging, passionate about his topic and very obviously experienced as a lecturer.

The book is wonderfully concise and has playful, almost humorous, aspects to it. Each chapter is cleverly titled using either a Biblical quotation or one from Christian culture. In spite if its brevity, it has the potential to start a long overdue, critical conversation about religious thought. Why do we believe in gods? Because, as Andy put it in his Fredericksburg lecture, "We are all trapped in a Stone Age brain."

The book is a product of Pitchstone Publishing, a pocket publisher of the "new atheist" genre located in Thomson's home town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Their Web site lists only a meager seventeen print titles. I have heard of at least one of them, A Manual For Creating Atheists by philosopher Peter Boghossian [Amazon, Goodreads]. It is on my reading list. Some of the other authors are psychiatrists like Thomson. The book was co-authored by Clare Aukofer, a medical writer and frequent collaborator of Thomson's.

There have been other attempts to explain why religious thought is so prevalent. Bertrand Russell's 1927 essay  Why I Am Not A Christian brilliantly and insightfully went to the heart of the matter: Addressing why arguments for the existence of god and the usefulness of the church, Russell systematically dismantled rational reasons to believe. His arguments against the design of nature were powerfully supported by Darwin's theory and pointed out that, with evidence to show that we have adapted to our environment, it was no longer sensible to argue that the environment was designed for us. Today's generation of both theists and atheists would benefit from dusting off Russell's essay.

More recently, in 2003, Christopher Hitchens took a stand against any form of revealed religion. Hitchens' Razor states, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence". Hitchens followed astrophysicist Carl Sagan in his "baloney detection kit", introduced in his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World [Amazon, Goodreads]. Their arguments echo other rational thinkers like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. So-called "new atheists" such as Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennett and their predecessors like Sagan have argued from the standpoint of logic. This is rational because science has uncovered two critical facts:

1. The mechanisms of the world can be understood and explained through the scientific method, logic and mathematics.
2. Humans do not think logically very often or for very long.

Unfortunately, point #2 ensures that most people will never be swayed by logical arguments such as Russell's.

The journalist, author and educator Michael Shermer touched on Thomson's core argument in his 1997 book Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time [Amazon, Goodreads]. Although Shermer is not a scientist and did not have the benefit of the last decade of neuroscience, he managed like Russell to close on the core problem:

In my opinion, most believers in miracles, monsters, and mysteries are not hoaxers, flimflam artists, or lunatics. Most are normal people whose normal thinking has gone wrong in some way.

Shermer proceeded to list a large number of logical fallacies where people's thinking goes wrong. He thus follows centuries of atheistic thinkers who can prove logically reasons for disbelief without being able to explain why people behave as they do. It is not uncommon for scientific explanations to proceed from facts, to knowledge, to theory, to more fully complete theory. Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, did not in fact explain the origin of species, only their differentiation. Others were required to do that following the explanation of genetic coding by Darwin's contemporary Gregor Mendel and the description of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick a century later.

By contrast with these earlier authors, Thomson has effectively related the mechanisms of evolutionary psychology to the actions evinced by religious thinkers. Where Shermer was only able to list, Thomson has been able to explain. Thomson systematically describes the reasons and benefits of each cognitive feature prevalent in religious thought so that we may see how and why it has been adopted for that purpose. Religion, it turns out, has empirically come to use each aspect of our brains that enable the religion itself to be considered compelling.  It is critically important for memes to be sticky; those that are attract adherents and thrive. Those that do not whither and die. A wonderful example is how the proselytizing religions such as mainstream Christianity grow while smaller factions that do not proselytize, and in fact erect a high barrier to entry such as the Shakers, have disappeared entirely or have fallen to just a few members.

Thomson challenges us to think about who we really are and how we really think. Not many will welcome such introspection. Reading Why We Believe in God(s), I am reminded of that other great modern insight, that the concept of self is also an illusion. In The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood [Amazon, Goodreads], we are asked to consider what that would mean:

One can imagine all sorts of scenarios in which brain structures are copied or replaced cell by cell until none of the original brain material is left and yet people maintain an intuition that the self somehow continues to exist independently of all these physical changes. If that were true, then one would have to accept a self that can exist independently of the brain. Most neuroscientists reject that idea. Rather, our brain creates the experience of our self as a model - a cohesive, integrated character - to make sense of the multitude of experiences that assault our senses throughout a lifetime and leave lasting impressions in our memory.

This exploration seems dangerous and perhaps it is. Challenging our most closely held beliefs about ourselves may be our final frontier - and maybe even a frontier where most of us dare not go.

In an attempt to summarize Thomson's long list of cognitive features that relate to religious behavior, I decided to group them by their evolutionary benefit. The first and longest list relate to group cohesiveness. Group cohesiveness is critically important to the survival of humans and our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. Interestingly, it seems that these features align with a category of behavior theorized by Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, especially Piaget's symbolic function substage that kicks in between two and four years of age and that is characterized by the beginning of social behavior.

Cognitive Features Driven By Group Cohesiveness

	Thomson's Definition	Notes
Decoupled Cognition	This allows us to conduct a complex social interaction in our mind with an unseen other.	Also related to mating behavior. We choose much of our behavior after playing out various scenarios in our heads to judge which would yield results closest to the ones we want.
Attachment	This most basic of human needs almost defines religion’s premise. Religion supplements or supplants family.	Also related to safety. We cling to family in times of hardship or crisis.
Intensionality	This allows us to speculate about others’ thoughts about our thoughts, desires, beliefs, and intentions.	Also related to mating behavior. We take actions based on what we think others are thinking.
Theory of Mind	This allows us to “read” others’ possible thoughts, desires, beliefs, and intentions.	Also related to mating behavior and closely with intensionality. Thomson: "A chimpanzee mother will never share her baby, but humans will because we can judge trust."
Mirror Neurons	We literally feel each other’s pain; this is inborn, not invented by religion. We are born caring about others.	Also related to safety. Mirror neurons are also implicated in spectator sports and probably systems that inspire via grandeur (e.g. Catholicism, British Empire).
Transference	We can accept religious figures as easily as we accepted the family figures we’ve known since birth. We transfer our familial thoughts to religious figures.	Who are our parental figures once our parents have died or are absent? Not everyone is comfortable becoming parents without a safety net.
Deference to Authority	We are all more deferential to authority figures than we can see or want to admit to ourselves.	See Stanley Milgram's experiments.
Kin Psychology	We are hardwired to prefer our kin over others.	This simple survival mechanism allows us to define an "in group", which has the natural result of simultaneously defining the opposite: the out group. Those not in the in group become The Other.
Reciprocal Altruism	You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.	Probably just a human iteration of social grooming in other animals.
Moral Feeling Systems	These generate moral decisions. They are instinctual and automatic. Because they operate largely outside of awareness, religions can claim ownership of them and insist that we are only moral with faith.	Experiments related to moral sense theory shows that moral feelings are innate and not a product of religion.
Ritual behavior - song, dance and trance	This enhances group cohesion and tests who is committed to the group. Song and dance harness our neurochemistry that reduces pain and fear and increases trust, love, self-esteem, and cooperation.	This was what Thomson was illustrating with the song and dance experiment discussed above.

The following, plus the ones noted in the table above, all relate to safety:

Cognitive Features Related to Safety

	Thomson's Definition	Notes
Hyperactive agency detection (HADD)	This leads us to assume that unknown forces are human agents. It evolved to protect us. We mistake a shadow for a burglar and never mistake a burglar for a shadow. It encourages anthropomorphism.	Errors toward false positives, and a near-complete elimination of false negatives.
Promiscuous Teleology	This arises from our bias to understand the world as purpose driven.	Why? What benefit do we get from that? Perhaps we benefit from the presumption that the world is understandable even though nature can be capricious. All of science presumably arises from the bias to understand the world as being understandable.
Childhood Credulity	We all believe too readily, with too little evidence. Children are even more vulnerable, especially when taught by someone with a mantle of authority.	What happens during adolescence that reduces this?

Some of these features date to the far evolutionary past of our species, so far in fact that we could reasonably suppose that other animals share them.  Others seem to be related to "higher" thought. There is almost surely a continuum between humans and other animals in this regard. Darwin was the first to intuit (or at least to have the guts to express, however lately and reluctantly) that the theory of evolution applied to humans as well as any other animal. Thomson quotes Darwin at the beginning of his seventh chapter, "Such social qualities, the paramount importance of which to the lower animals is disputed by no one, were no doubt acquired by the progenitors of man in a similar manner, namely, through natural selection, aided by inherited habit."

As we approach a complete theory of how cognition operates, we must accept that Darwin was right. Many animals empirically show elements of familiar cognition, although certainly to a lessor degree. The primatology studies of Jane Goodall, which showed that chimps had individual personalities, and the ever-evolving recitation of tool usage by animals, have begun to break down the religiously circumscribed belief that humans are somehow separate from the rest of nature. Thomson was right to highlight what he called the "lovely phrase" of William Allman, "We are risen apes, not fallen angels." The quote is from Allman's book Stone Age Present: How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Life - From Sex, Violence and Language to Emotions, Morals and Communities [Amazon, Goodreads].

The many dog cognition studies referenced in The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think [Amazon, Goodreads] by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods seem to lead to conclusion that dogs do "think" using much of the same physical properties of brain that humans have. Hare and Woods illustrate the special relationship which dogs have with people, not just socially (or culturally) created, but as a product of a sort of evolutionary co-dependance. Similarly, studies of dolphin cognition show that they, too, are a species with strong social ties. We have no reason to believe that the underlying mechanisms are completely different. To make matters worse for those who would deny that evolved brains produce complex social behavior, the book Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence [Amazon, Goodreads] by James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould should give any reader pause.

So we are left with a question for Thomson's remaining cognitive features: Do dogs or dolphins also have these features, much less monkeys?

We might think that they do. Wolfgang Köhler's primatology studies from the 1970s reported the dancing of a group of chimpanzees around a central pole. This probably relates more to group dynamics than religion per se, but it provides an interesting continuity of behavior from our closest extant ancestors and the earliest human religions, regardless of the human justifications for the action. The observation is in Köhler's 1976 classic The Mentality of Apes [Amazon, Goodreads].

A useful discussion on the study and its wider context is to be found in the first volume of Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God series, Primitive Mythology [Amazon, Goodreads] (pp. 358-359): It seems to me extraordinary,” Köhler concludes, “that there should arise quite spontaneously, among chimpanzees, anything that so strongly suggests the dancing of some primitive tribes." and on the same page Campbell says:

We note, furthermore, the surprising detail of the central pole, which in the higher mythologies becomes interpreted as the world-uniting and supporting Cosmic Tree, World Mountain, axis mundi, or sacred sanctuary, to which both the social order and the meditations of the individual are to be directed. And finally, we have that wonderful sense of play, without which no mythological or ritual game of “make believe” whatsoever could ever have come into being.

Other Cognitive Features Implicated in Religious Expression

	Thomson's Definition	Evolutionary Benefit	Notes
Minimally Counterintuitive Worlds (MCIs)	This allows belief in the supernatural, as long as it’s not too “super” and does not violate too many basic tenets of humanness.	Possibly cognitive closure, which is presumed necessary for understanding the world.	Could this be related to intuitive reasoning in that one is perhaps a mechanism of cognitive closure and the other (MCI) a minimization of the effort involved?
Intuitive Reasoning	This helps us “fill in the blanks” of logic.	Possibly cognitive closure, which is presumed necessary for understanding the world.	Could this be a (the?) mechanism of cognitive closure? If we are presented with multiple disconnected facts and need to cognitively close the world, we must do it somehow.
Person Permanence	(Discussed in Thomson's slides, but not his book)	Object permanence is necessary for object tracking and recognition, especially in noisy environments. Person permanence probably builds on the same mechanisms.	Also called object-person permanence.

Thomson also lists "Hard to Fake, Costly Honest Signals of Commitment" as an important cognitive feature that is used by religious belief. An example of a costly signal is the giving of an expensive gift to a friend, a potential mate, or in the case of potlatch, to an entire community. Costly signals do not seem to fit with an evolutionary argument but with a cultural one. Thomson suggests that costly signals help a person to determine when someone is lying to them (pp. 80-81) and thus associates them with safety. Of course, we cannot perfectly detect lies. Just as shiny hair, full lips or clear skin are often taken as signals for robust health and hence indicate good mating potential, they can also be faked. Faking them is in fact big business. A 2012 study by Michelle Yeomans for Market Research Firm Lucintel, forecasted that the global beauty care products industry will grow to approximately $265 billion annually by 2017. (See Global beauty market to reach $265 billion in 2017 due to an increase in GDP ). Similarly, costly signals can lead us to believe the sincerity of someone like a religious leader even when the long term impact of that belief might not be good for us. Thomson naturally uses as examples the mass murder/suicide at Jonestown and Islamist suicide bombers. One is left to wonder just how detrimental mainstream religious belief might be to the interests of believers. There has been wide consensus among literati for millennia that religion helps keep the powerful powerful. "Religion is regarded by the common people as true," said Seneca the Younger in the first century CE, "by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." Readers of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers would recognize the truth of that statement in the character of Cardinal Richelieu. The relationship between the established religions and politics seem to be in the headlines of international newspapers on a daily basis.

One of the few criticisms I will make of Why We Believe in God(s) is that the book is in desperate need of an index. The publisher really should have seen to that. Thomson asks in his preface that we take four actions: "Finish the book. Refer to it often. Give it to a friend. Donate it to a library or school." It is in fact rather difficult to refer to specific sections of it quickly in the absence of an index. A good index provides a complement to a table of contents as the other side of the same coin. Readers might approach a table of contents as a map to give them an overview and an index as a key to specific content.

Andy has collected a very large (250MB) number of slides and has been incredibly generous in allowing their public distribution. I have placed his entire slide deck online for download here with Andy's permission. Please note that the collection has been modified for various talks over time and does contain some significant duplication. There are no speakers notes in the slides. However, the book's Web site contains an hour-long video of Dr. Thomson lecturing on the topic using the slides.

I highly recommend Why We Believe in God(s). Perhaps only by understanding why we believe can we begin to consciously decide what we should believe.

An Abbreviated Literature Survey

Andy recommends a number of studies during his lectures. Here is a short list of them for your further enjoyment with notes regarding their applicability:

• Asp E, Ramchandran K, Tranel D. Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Human Prefrontal Cortex, Neuropsychology. 2012 Jul;26(4):414-21. doi: 10.1037/a0028526. Epub 2012 May 21.
• Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs [Amazon, Goodreads]
• The first human religion:
  • Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures [Amazon, Goodreads]
• We attribute to the dead mental states that we cannot shut off, so we think of them still being somewhere. Those raised in religious schools or families lose this tendency later than those raised in secular schools or families:
  • Jesse Bering, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life [Amazon, Goodreads]
• Robert Karen, Becoming Attached, Atlantic Monthly, Feb 1990
• Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil [Amazon, Goodreads]
• Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect [Amazon, Goodreads]
• Morality is innate and not attributable to religion:
  • Steven Pinker, The Moral Instinct, The New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008
• Autistic people "simply cannot be religious", as in the case of Temple Grandin:
  • Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism [Amazon, Goodreads]
• Neuroimaging evidence that religious experience occurs in Theory of Mind networks:
  • Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Sua, Giovanna Zambonia, Frank Kruegera and Jordan Grafmana. Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief, PNAS, 106/12,  4876–4881, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0811717106
• Neuroimaging evidence that belief in self and god overlap; belief in others resides in a different part of the brain:
  • Nicholas Epleya,1, Benjamin A. Conversea, Alexa Delboscb, George A. Monteleonec and John T. Cacioppoc. Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs, 106/51,  21533–21538, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0908374106
• The origin of religion is based on kin group selection, as driven by oxytocin release:
  • Bernard Crespi and Kyle Summers. Inclusive fitness theory for the evolution of religion, Animal Behaviour, v92, June 2014, Pages 313–323, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.02.013
• Rowers moving in synchrony had higher pain thresholds than those rowing alone:
  • Emma E. A. Cohen, Robin Ejsmond-Frey, Nicola Knight and R. I. M. Dunbar. Rowers' high: behavioural synchrony is correlated with elevated pain thresholds, Biol. Lett. 23 February 2010 vol. 6 no. 1 106-108, doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0670
• Neuroimaging differences between believers' and nonbelievers' brains:
  • Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, Mark S. Cohen. The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, PLoS ONE, Oct 2009, vol 4, issue 10