Fiddling, or Being Willing to Advocate for Unpopular Positions:

a look at a key root of the fact — alternative fact phenomenon.

by Doug Matheson

In February of 2020 I happened to stop by a SmashfestUK science expo in London, and talked with two young staffers. The theme for their expo that year was imagined strategies and techniques to combat a ‘Space Plague’ epidemic which supposedly started right there. After complementing them on this ingenious way of engaging youngsters in science, I commented that the virus which we really need to figure out how to fight is not a virus affecting cells, but a social virus controlling and misdirecting how we think, how we figure things out. The timing of this science expo was an interesting coincidence, as the planning and preparation for engaging students in strategies and techniques to stop this Space Plague had been done before COVID-19 was known. COVID was new… anti-fact, anti-science, anti-expertise, and anti-openness-to-change were not new, but were growing significantly in their impact.

How have we gotten to where we are? Informed and concerned citizens ask this question about our polarized politics, and academics in various disciplines ask this about us in the broad context of civilization, and about us as a species. Fields from paleontology to genetics, from history to psychology, from neurophysiology to archaeology, from the study of religions to the dynamics of social power structures, from linguistics to evolutionary biology, and many more, each explore this question, sometimes in direct ways, and sometimes in very indirect ways.

Many today are justifiably concerned with the direction of civilization. I submit that an informed and responsible approach to problem-solving and priority-setting in terms of where we’re going from here, require an accurate knowledge of how we have gotten to where we are. Fairly late in life, with first hand exposure to horrific and deadly civilizational hiccups in Lebanon and Rwanda, with up-close exposure to widely varied religions, and a career in science education, I was drawn to anthropology because I saw it as a potentially insight-yielding intersection of the broad fields of science, psychology/the study of religion/sociology, and history/political science/economics, where a rich cross-disciplinary process of distillation and synthesis could best take place. This could draw on maximizing the accuracy of understanding how we’ve gotten to where we are in order to better help us chart a course towards responsible societal choices, the end-goal being to increase the odds of us creating a decent, stable, and enjoyable social and physical environment for our descendants.

Thus I found myself in London, a grad student again, already in my 60s, in a new discipline. It was at first a surprise, and then a puzzle, to find in my studies that what I thought would be recognized as two of the giants on whose shoulders social anthropologists stand — specifically physical anthropology and archaeology — seem most often completely ignored. My thought-context came from many years of teaching high school biology, and recognizing that all organisms have deep evolutionary roots and corresponding stories behind them. After all, we largely got to who we are as a species, with natural selection acting to favor or eliminate mutations among our ancestral early cavemen, before we developed complex civilization around us. I didn’t yet know that the ethnographic aspects of anthropology had well-preceded the development of physical anthropology. I soon noted that this ignoring of physical anthropology seems particularly acute in much ethnographic material when it centrally addresses or even touches on religious aspects of society/culture. Now, a full century after the early stages of the discipline of physical anthropology, of studying our development as a species, it seemed to me that the anchor of honesty when it comes to addressing the basic evidence for and reality of evolution, specifically human evolution, and therefore for the origins of religion writ large, is simply completely skipped by too many, not even being given mention in a postscript in social/ethnographic anthropology writing.

Later in this essay I will argue for greater communication between a concerned public which includes millions who seek to be broadly and reasonably deeply and accurately informed, and academic anthropologists. In that vein, attempting to constructively walk my talk, herein I will be addressing my thoughts sometimes to one of these groups, sometimes to the other, and most often to both. I assume here a broad audience of concerned citizens who seek to be broadly informed, and hope that among them will be scattered academic anthropologists, who might then bring this to the attention of others.

Having now completed my studies merely to the MA level, I now know that what was a surprise to me, is old news to anthropologists with deeper roots than mine; the heart of what I share here is why this lack of honesty and openness about human evolution and the origins of religion matters, and matters to civilization in practical ways beyond the discipline of anthropology. (I plan to express my concerns without bogging down the general reader with unending citations. Anthropologists reading here can certainly quickly list well-known ethnographies significantly focused on religion which illustrate the absence of even mentioning human evolution, established by physical anthropology, and the origins of religion. Any follow-up discussion can arise where it will, and be as citation-rich as warranted. While in parentheses, a personal disclosure: I was raised a missionary kid, educated in private Christian schools until my first masters nearly 40 years ago. I had to find my own way to seeing beyond my indoctrination. I then spent most of my career teaching biology and chemistry, later switching to history.)

Thoughtful citizens, not limited to university settings, fairly often focus on evaluating and responding to ideas. Among them — Are there more constructive, and more destructive, ways to live… with a central focus on how we live collectively, with a particular eye to how large groups can impact the whole of civilization? Drawing from history, psychology, science, and the discipline of anthropology, these citizens can thoughtfully participate in this evaluative and responsive process. As pointed out, Anthropology is well positioned to help broad society better understand how we’ve gotten to where we are, as a species and as civilization, and through that learning, improve our decision-making moving forward. Keeping in mind the adage that “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should,” I wish to specify here that Anthropologists not only can engage in this process, but that we also should do so in ways which might maximally impact our collective societal thinking, choices, and therefore actions, even if some of these ways of engaging might be uncomfortably honest ones, and therefore unwelcome in some quarters.

So, allow me to suggest just two reasons why this lack of honesty and openness about humanity’s deep roots as a species matters. First, despite seeded doubts and drummed up controversy, there is a clear preponderance of evidence, and hard-earned consensus, that climate change is real, very significantly anthropogenic, and urgent. (If you aren’t yet persuaded of that, a whole separate paper is needed here.) We need not be concerned that life on earth won’t survive; it will. It is the civilizational chaos that rapidly shifting conditions on a densely populated and resource-limited earth will cause, that should concern us.

I should explain in slightly more detail that part of what spurs me on is that I was working in Rwanda when the genocide hit. I have indelible memories of the sights and sounds and smells of rampant death amidst that chaos. Western readers tended to hear only about this being an ethnic conflict, the Hutu vs. the Tutsi. What few outsiders could understand, because it wasn’t often explained, was that Rwanda was the most densely populated country in Africa, and that whereas in 1940 the average family had about 12.8 hectares to live off (more than they could hand-cultivate), by 1990, that was down to 2.7 hectares. (* Explanation of calculation in end-note.) When power-mongering and manipulative people broadcast on local radio waves that “It is either kill these cockroaches (term used for Tutsis) now, or they will kill you later,” what, a generation before, would likely have been dismissed as nonsense, was now received as believable. Corner human beings in what they perceive as a fight for a basic survival resource, in that case enough land to feed your family, and most will behave like a cornered and dangerous animal. I do want to ultimately focus on solutions, not fears, but for now permit me to point out that global-scale civilizational chaos could create a death spiral, leaving the proportionately few survivors, as some have predicted, living as scattered hunter-gatherers.

The second specific reason for this mattering is that we live in a time when fact vs. alternative ‘fact’, evidence-based consensus vs. sincerely held belief, the importance of real expertise vs. the power of various forms of modern ‘tribal’ authority, real problem-solving vs. problem denial or deferral, and the open-minded willingness to learn, to update, vs. the tendency to double-down, to stick with ‘our’ tradition, are muddled and confused at best, then ignored, or reversed in valuation at worst.

Shift gears slightly with me for a moment please.

In a list of my self-evident truths, I included: “That we owe a decent, stable, and (hopefully) enjoyable planet to future generations.” To be up to this challenge, we’ve got to be at our best as problem-solvers. That requires being honest with evidence, and not simply selecting evidence we like, dismissing what we don’t like. To cultivate a tendency in that direction, we also need to be honest about things that get in the way of that. We must recognize that: it’s human nature to habituate to believing what we want to believe, and to expecting that your beliefs should be ‘respected’, which we interpret as going unchallenged; and that we must learn to question things. We must then ask: Where in human experience do we get the most practice at, the most reinforcement and refinement of, habituation to believing what we want, and expecting that to be respected, to go unchallenged?

I have now spent the last two decades searching, and a recent year studying anthropology, to find the best answer that I can to this question. I have yet to find a better-supported answer than: a typical training within a community of those with sincerely held religious beliefs. From childhood we learn that we don’t directly and openly challenge others’ beliefs — even if we do try to share our ‘better’ beliefs, and within our communities we might call their beliefs nutty or dangerous — in exchange for the same absence of open challenge directed at us.

It is a very short step then, in our brains, to expecting non-religious beliefs to also be respected, to go unchallenged. Interestingly, this seems to be increasing in very recent years. Flat-earthers now hold conventions, but don’t like real challenge. Some deny plate tectonics; some of the same people promote a very young earth, and don’t like being challenged. Racists have re-emerged, and while they seem very willing to engage in a physical fight, they don’t like a deep and evidence-based intellectual challenge. Some say vaccines are dangerous conspiracies, and feel attacked if challenged. And — elephant in the room — many dismiss climate change, and don’t want a discussion of serious physics, or broad evidence, won’t read deep and detailed reports and analyses if they can superficially tell that it doesn’t agree with their opinion, and feel that their opinion is of equal weight to the evidence, reasons, and concerns explained by experts. Habituation does, habits do, matter.

I realize that some readers might already be balking at the idea that strong religious communities contribute to believers expecting that whatever “our” beliefs are should not be challenged, so brace yourself, I’m taking this a step further.

Members of the many varied religious communities scattered around our globe have often never heard an evidence-based explanation of religion’s origins and history. There are many anthropologists who have contributed to our understanding of this, but for brevity here, I draw significantly from Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained (and would also suggest reading Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: the Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life).

As noted, we’ve figured out this story through the closely related fields (the shoulders/foundation we now build on) of physical anthropology combined with archaeology (with more recent refinements from fields including cognitive psychology). The details they’ve painstakingly worked out tell the story, supported further back by basic paleontology, of human evolution. I don’t pretend to ‘inform’ anthropologists reading here of this story, but to provide a reminder and a simplification (I know that’s risky in itself), and thereby an illustration of a form of the story that could be refined without overwhelming lengthening.

We can see the earlier brain-case volume increase, and then, between 100,000 and 50,000 years BP, a relatively sudden change and increase in our tool technology and symbol use, and ceremonial burial. Even more so than our stepped-up variations of tools, our increasingly complex use of symbols is a strong indicator of growth in breadth and depth of our very mental capacities, among them: agency detection — real and imagined, deepening self-awareness, theory of mind (TOM; awareness of or imagining what some ‘other’ might be thinking) and increasingly complex social interaction, and everything that goes with increased intelligence and communication ability, including simply pondering things. Noting the word mental capacities, not capacity, is important. The interplay between different inference systems is vital to beginning to adequately understand our development.

Our early ancestors developed agency-detection naturally because it was selected for. (Better a false positive that the rustling in the grass might be caused by a predator, than a false negative, that it was ‘nothing’.) Piggy-backed on simple agency/cause, was intentionality — that cause was at times thoughtfully deliberate, intentional. They also had a seemingly endless set of puzzlers which they could not understand, and which seemed to call for agency. What makes the river rise seasonally when it hasn’t rained in months on our horizons? What occasionally makes the moon go blood-colored and then quickly come back to normal? What is that very rare strange fuzzy light with the long tail in the night sky that even the stories of our ancestors never mention? What makes the very regular tides of the ocean? What causes different sicknesses? What is the sun? What causes thunder, and what causes lightning, and even wind? What are these images I see in my eyes sometimes when I sleep? And what do they mean? By far the most likely agency which people in those primitive circumstances could, and probably did, come up with were spirit-world explanations, which of course were soon ascribed names, and general intentions. Naturally, these would have been passed down in stories, becoming oral histories, and their collection of spirits became part of their clan’s identity… probably contributing a unifying, and sense-of-belonging-creating, adaptive feature, with no obvious maladaptive costs in that context.

In addition to this mental capacity for detecting real agency and imagining others, we then include TOM and possible motives/intentions in other real people and various potential agents, and that our early ancestors also developed greater levels of self-awareness. When a caveman saw his brother’s eyes fade to the blank stare of death after being gored on a hunt, and saw the same thing happen in his toddling daughter’s eyes from just a couple days of watery crapping — he probably came not only to wonder about and possibly fear death in a sense beyond an animal’s struggle to not drown or be eaten, but he and his clan would likely have created stories of what might be possible, what might happen, after death… stories which could reduce fear and add hope, thus being a possible helpful and adaptive mechanism for dealing with their very hazard-filled life.

It is no surprise that as hunter-gathering ways gave way to the green revolution and to living in communities, that as labor specialized and society stratified, these spirit-world intentional agents and realms solidified into increasingly formalized religions. Complex sets of symbols, and rituals, and varied means of appealing for intervention to the prime agents/spirits, developed with these religions… as did a priest class to rule this domain. Through this came the great variety of gods, and faiths, and texts, varying with location and time.

A few quick side notes: Because some might already be thinking of theistic evolution, and this god perhaps later breathing a soul into man, as a still-religious explanation of the evidence, I will here simply remind us of Occam’s razor. To go further with just one example which we’ve heard in various forms, it is possible that I am nothing but a worm off in space with a vivid imagination. I’ve imagined my life, in all its details, including this ‘conversation’. It’s also possible that you are the worm off in space with the vivid imagination, and you’re imagining your life, including this conversation. I submit that we’re much better off when we spend our time dealing with high probabilities rather than mere possibilities. I am aware that this understanding of the origins of religion, particularly during anthropology’s postmodern emphasis on uncertainty, fell out of fashion shall we say. More on a few issues with this story as we go.

In addition to this seldom-avoided first risk that religion is accompanied by habituation to expecting one’s beliefs to be respected, to go unchallenged, and of that spreading in our thought processes, rendering us immune to evidence and facts which we don’t like, affecting practical and non-religious fields like climate change, there are three other risks which have tended to go with strong religious belief which I feel compelled to briefly share for your consideration.

Second: Those with strong faith tend to be quick to jump on the bandwagon of war in the name of their ‘right’ god, book, and people. “For God and country” is a recruiting tool which both history and our modern world demonstrate. Many in the west will think first of this implicating terrorists, pointing our fingers outward. This does indeed apply there, but to reduce the shallow temptation of stopping there, I offer the verifiable fact that when President George W. Bush was rallying the American public to invade Iraq and take down Saddam Hussein, it was the American Christian right which instantly rallied in support, and the secular left which attempted to have us pump the brakes, double-checking our assumptions and the evidence. As an attentive citizen, I observed this in real time. But readers can and should be skeptical, and so I provide this well-researched article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4153098?refreqid=excelsior%3Ae61d1c01129a299a2a80509259805cb3 ; Religion and American Attitudes toward an Invasion of Iraq; Sociology of Religion, Vol. 66, №3 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 243–261; Oxford University Press. … A hundred million modern Americans — this is not just a tiny network of radicals/terrorists.

Third: Those with strong faith tend to presume that everything is in their God’s hands, believe that they are too small to make a difference when it comes to earthly problems or challenges, and that there’s a supernatural solution in the end. Attempting to take our challenges seriously much less urgently then seems a waste of effort, and unnecessary in any case.

And fourth: That the most disenfranchised groups (the poor, less educated, minorities, and too often particularly the women among them) have for millennia been persuaded to put all their eggs in the basket of hope for a future better life, whether in some heaven or in an upgrade in their next life. They then are nearly infinitely patient and long-suffering in putting up with abuse, unfairness, and subtle (and direct) discrimination. All this while they could and should be organizing and finding ways to significantly improve their own lives here and now, and perhaps more importantly, greatly improving the chances that their descendants will have a realistic shot at equality of opportunity, and a decent, stable, and sustainable ecological and social environment. (Sadly, the most affected people are exceedingly unlikely to be reading here. It is the responsibility of those of us privileged to have the time and focus, to bring this to their attention, and help them reduce their patience for abuse in the here and now, and to find, impatiently find, just and effective ways to create change through the tools and ideals of democracy.)

To be clear, I do not go about advocating that every person should become an atheist, and am certainly not asking social anthropology as a discipline to do that. On a practical level, that’s not going to happen, and further, such a direct effort would cause deeply rooted resistance. Rather, I simply beg of believers to become aware of these four risks, and to self-monitor so as to avoid making the risks become realities. Today, on a crowded and resource-limited planet, these risks mean religion carries much more impactful negatives than it did in the days of cavemen or early civilization. The trouble with this set of negatives is that they’re not the type that will exert their influence slowly through natural selection; they’re much more likely to take things out with a figurative bang. If believers today put sincere effort into self-monitoring against those risks, sticking with a religion that adds something to their life no longer carries baggage harmful to the rest of humanity.

I am also convinced that more openly placing each religion in the context of the myriad others throughout history would be a helpful and honest step. With the acknowledged likelihood that, since they all tend to believe and claim that they are relatively (or absolutely) right and the others relatively wrong, while it is possible that one of them is in fact ‘right’, and all the others wrong, that the probability points decidedly against that. This reality could play a constructive role in cautioning against the risk of quickly jumping on the bandwagon of war in the name of their ‘right’ god. It might also be helpful in getting more people to understand and embrace the necessity of cooperation in facing and solving many global-scale challenges, and this is no trivial matter!

To step back, we need to more often be part of reminding each other to ask and attempt to answer some big questions that are important. Keeping in mind Kierkegaard’s quite condensed comment on truth, “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true,” we need to follow this simple fact with a vitally important question: What does history show has been humanity’s best, even if never perfect, tool for figuring out what is true?

While I have heard individuals from various modern claims-based traditions (religions) temporarily offer the answer that our best tool for figuring out what is true has been their book, some discussion usually finds them willing to reconsider. It is beyond simply arguable that it is: to take a science-like approach to things. We put our ideas, our temporary understandings, to the test in the most objective way(s) we can, and we verify the evidence, and then we change our minds, adjust our conclusions, when the evidence warrants it. This evidence-based approach is profoundly different than a claims-based approach, and it applies beyond the hard sciences, to the social sciences.

In the years that I have argued that while science is not perfect, that it is still what history has shown to be our best tool for figuring out, as best we can, what is true, I have summarized that the central realization of the Scientific Revolution was that it was not only Okay to question… everything, it was Good to question. (As opposed to accepting assertions from authority, be it Aristotle, the Church, or…) This Revolution then fleshed out details on what became the scientific method, but the broad important concept was that in questioning everything, we should question even our own beliefs/ understanding. These beliefs, in their tentative forms, we came to call hypotheses, but terminology isn’t nearly as important as the idea. Another important and broad feature is that we must verify and then respect evidence, whether we like it or not, and let consensus form around the best of it; this requires personal honesty, an openness to changing our minds, to admitting that a cherished previous idea turned out to be wrong. This willingness to change one’s mind in response to the best available evidence is not just the final step, it is in fact a pre-condition to the process. To carry this quickly and briefly forward, in essence The Enlightenment then took this “Okayness” of questioning and applied it in the social realm. Did Kings really have a Divine Right? Were women really 2nd-class citizens? Was slavery just fine? Were races fundamentally unequal in capacities, and therefore in rights?

Here’s what I personally hope for: I want to do all I can to help us avoid the worst of potential civilizational chaos; I don’t want to accept that I essentially fiddled while the kindling under Rome was ignited. And I’m inviting, yes challenging, the many of you everyday citizens with a commitment to being broadly informed and who actively support the idea of honesty with evidence in our collective problem-solving, and anthropologists with deeper roots and a much more developed knowledge base than mine within social anthropology, to consider the same hope. Yes, we know that a good number who are directly or indirectly involved with anthropology (Berliner, Boyer, Dennett, Laidlaw, Harari, and many more) directly and honestly address human evolution and the origins of religion, and that others (Ingold, Lindholm, Sidky, and many more) do openly advocate for applying the strengths of a science-like approach in social anthropology, in contrast to an ever-softening postmodern indefinite uncertainty which indirectly encourages all manner of ‘alternative fact’ in today’s society. But we also know, for example, that too many ethnographies on religious groups are so carefully written exploring and explaining, “through the eyes” of the subject group, that when the many members of said groups get the book and read about themselves, they never see their religion in the context of the myriad others past and present, and never hear human evolution and an academic, evidence-based, understanding of the origins of religion explained, and therefore only feel affirmed and all the more certain of being ‘right’. These group members, and some members of the broader public, may not yet (or ever) see these suggested at-least-postscript explanations as plausible, but we need introductions to and then reminders that what makes ideas more, or less, well-connected to realities is the verifiable evidence, not the intensity of conviction. We need reminders that in democracies — where voters hire the crews that run the ships of state, citizens having ‘mindsets’ that are not set on pre-formed claims-based beliefs, and are, rather, open to change, to verifiable evidence — this honesty about the need to overcome our tendencies to believe what we happen to like and dismiss the rest, is vital. (Two prime examples of beautifully written and empathetic ethnographies which miss the opportunity and responsibility of providing perhaps unwelcome but needed context of one religion among myriad others, and the development of humanity and of religion, are: Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back and Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety.)

A couple final clarifications. This is not a call for atheism to be a litmus test in social anthropology. We all know that informative ethnographies have been written, useful theories advanced, aspects of power, injustice, politics, and economics revealed, and new perspectives on social stability, and change, relationships, and space shared, by believers (Evans-Pritchard, Douglas, the Turners, and more), but I would suggest that in our current world circumstances, greater honesty is called for in the writing, in the contextualizing and explaining of religious traditions. And I will add the caution that an anthropologist who is a believer today bears an extra obligation to publicly explain to their readers how they self-monitor so as to limit the risks that have gone with faith, which can cloud and limit urgently needed problem-solving, and confuse what could and should be sound public/collective policy decisions.

I hope we, especially social anthropologists, can appropriately handle the tempting sidetrack of disagreements on the particulars of any single example of telling the stories of the rise of humanity and then of religion. This sidetrack could cause us to forget that it is vital that we honestly recognize and face psychological factors which get in the way of us realistically addressing urgent issues like climate change, factors which also contribute to confusion when considering the profound difference between consensus on the most plausible explanation of evidence, as compared to collections of alternative facts, recent conspiracy theories, and sincerely held beliefs — Lindholm’s warned-of mingling of “fact and fantasy.” (Logical and Moral Dilemmas of Postmodernism; Charles Lindholm; The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 3, №4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 747–760.)

If you are persuaded that the social/civilizational risks and challenges associated with climate change are great and are urgent, and if you are persuaded that in order to collectively be good problem-solvers on a global scale, we need to reduce the level of habituation to believing what we want and expecting that to go unchallenged, thereby remaining of unchanged mind on multiple issues, then I hope you might also find yourself persuaded that we, as individual concerned citizens and/or as anthropologists, must engage in open discussion with our fellow-citizens, of the avoidable but serious risks that have tended to go with strong faith.

We are often enough reminded of the difficulties of speaking truth to power. I submit that we need to give more thought to the challenges of speaking truth to the masses. I’m not speaking here of those hanging on by their economic fingernails; they can be forgiven for their necessary preoccupation, and helped toward less precarity. I’m speaking of the many who are concerned but too often confused; who work at being informed, but are slowed and distracted by not having a fairly reliable way to evaluate information for accuracy; who intend to and often do vote; who sometimes do question things; who participate in types of public dialogue, whether simply with family and co-workers, reading (or writing) op-eds and blogs; and who participate in other social media where ideas, for better or for worse, can do their viral thing. In would-be democracies, this matters. Vital messages are not necessarily popular. To anthropologists: Please, more frequently take advantage of anthropology’s solid position for helping broad society better understand how we’ve gotten to where we are by writing with a public audience in mind, far beyond a collection of other ivory towers. This is not about ending ivory tower dialogue; it’s about helping some of the understandings developed there reach everyday concerned and involved citizens, and make a difference. I hope most reading here might find yourselves persuaded to openly and unapologetically advocate for our best tool for finding relative and probable truth — this science-like approach, and persuaded that a more honest and frequent (even if for some, unwelcome) reminding of the human story — including at least a postscript explanation of religion — is needed, and would be constructive.

*Calculated using land area minus National Parks & Forests, divided by # of families. Families derived from population divided 8 individuals/family; based on 1940 population of 1.5 million; family size of 8 from initial 10 because of fertility rate=8.2, and child mortality rate about 250/1000 births; 1990 population of 7.1 million; family size of 8 from initial 9 because of fertility rate=7.2, and child mortality rate of 150/1000 births.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=RW-ID

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT?locations=RW