Session Transcript
Chair: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am Valerie Monchi, a member of the Jewish Book Council, and I will be chairing this session.
It is a pleasure to welcome our two distinguished speakers, Steven Pinker and Jonathan Sacks.
Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. A native of Montreal, he received his BA from McGill University and his PhD in psychology from Harvard. His research on language and cognition has won him numerous academic awards, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His fame and worldwide recognition have come not only from his well-known rock-star looks but from the many popular science books of which he is the author, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and, more recently, The Blank Slate.
Jonathan Sacks became Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth in 1991. He was educated at Cambridge where he studied philosophy and is currently Visiting Professor of Theology at Kings College, London. As well as holding numerous honorary doctorates, he has been the recipient of the prestigious Jerusalem Prize for his contribution to Diaspora Jewish life. A distinguished scholar and spiritual leader, he is a frequent contributor to radio, television and the national press. He is the author of 13 books, including The Politics of Hope, Morals and Markets and, more recently, The Dignity of Difference.
If you are wondering what brings our two speakers together tonight, let me start with this modest proposition. Both of them are known as gifted communicators with the ability to pack lecture halls in their respective fields: cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology on the one hand, religion and faith on the other. But can these two great communicators make evolution and religion connect?
So, first let me start with you, Steven. Tell us, briefly, what is this new science of the mind? Until recently, it was left to Freudian behaviourists to explain the mind and we now have this new science. Can you explain to us what it does and what its claims are?
Steven Pinker: I can try to explain the way I have tried to synthesise ideas from the new sciences of mind. In a book with the title How the Mind Works I proposed that there were three key ideas that can organise our understanding of the mind.
The first is neural computation; the idea, first of all, that the mind is what the brain does. Not everything the brain does, because the brain metabolises fats and gives off heat and so on, but in particular the information processing activity of the brain. The mind is a kind of software on a neural computer. It doesn’t work in the same way that your Mac or PC does but, nonetheless, it engages in information processing and accomplishes intelligence for that reason.
The second idea is evolution; that the mind was not assembled in a factory or designed to process words or do spreadsheets, but rather is a product of the process of natural selection and therefore is organised around the goals of enhancing survival and reproduction in the kind of environment in which our species spends most of its evolutionary history. That is the foraging or pre-state or hunter-gatherer lifestyle that characterised our species until only about 10,000 years ago.
The third idea is specialisation; that I don’t think there is going to be a theory of everything as far as the mind is concerned. I don’t think there is going to be one equation that will solve all the problems that the mind solves; or that the brain is made out of some wonder tissue that can magically allow us to see and feel and move and reason. The mind, like the body, is divided into systems that are specialised for accomplishing different things: a set of emotions; a set of ways of conceptualising different aspects of reality, like physical objects, other minds, living things, numbers and so on, a set of social emotions and a number of means of communication -language being the one that I am most interested in.
So the three ideas would be: computation, evolution, specialisation.
Chair: Let me try now to immediately get us into one of the difficult subjects that are bringing us together tonight. The idea that what we call the soul or the mind can be reduced to the activity of the brain. As you say in The Blank Slate, ‘Science is reducing us to the physiological processes of a not very attractive 3lb organ.’
I think that that is what you need to defend and I think that is where Rabbi Sacks can come in to say where that fits in within Judaism.
Pinker: By ‘reducing’, I don’t mean that it can actually be explained at that level because there is no way they were going to explain love and patriotism and the number sense in terms of neurons directly. So I think that mental processes have to be described at a higher level of abstraction. But ultimately they don’t consist in anything other than physiological activity of brain tissue. It means that there is no separate substance, no ghostly, immaterial entity separate from activity of the brain that can part company with the brain or that gets injected into it at a certain point in foetal development. So that would certainly be a difference from many religious traditions. Whether it is a difference from the Jewish religious tradition is not as clear.
Chair: Would you like to reply?
Jonathan Sacks: I’ll have a go but, being a rav, allow me just to begin with a vote of thanks.
Friends, I couldn’t come here without paying tribute to the person who has made Jewish Book Week such a spectacular success. I want to pay tribute to everyone who has been involved on a stunningly good and wonderful occasion. So can we express our thanks to Anne Webber.
I also want to say what a privilege it is to share this conversation with Steven Pinker. Steven, we have never met before but reading your books, as with everyone here, made Elaine and myself aware that you have a most remarkable mind. How your mind works I have no idea! But I agreed to this conversation because it seemed the best way to guarantee that I got a seat!
Two thousand years ago our sages coined a blessing on seeing a scholar renowned for secular wisdom. Steven, I would like to make it now:
‘Baruch shenatan mechochmato lebasar vadam.’
‘Blessed are you, God, who has given of your wisdom to humankind.’
Friends, that’s a tough one. I love Woody Allen’s remark, ‘They threw me out for cheating in my metaphysics exam. They caught me looking into someone else’s soul.’
But in fact a Jewish view of the soul is difficult because here we come to one of the real differences between ancient Israel and the culture that has so largely shaped the West or Western science, which is that of Ancient Greece.
Ancient Israel thought in very concrete terms. Ancient Greece had a predilection for abstract thought and abstract nouns. If you actually look at the Hebrew words we associate with spirit or soul, nefesh, ruach, neshomo, they are all actually very physical. They all have to do with breathing. Ruach is a wind or a breath. Nefesh, ‘God rested on the seventh day’, Vayinafash, ‘and he took a deep breath’. Neshomo, linshom, means ‘to inhale’, and so on.
In fact there is a fascinating word in Hebrew which is always mistranslated in English, a key word of the Book of Ecclesiastes [Kohelet], the word hevel. We all know haveil havalim, hacol havel. This is normally translated as ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Or ‘meaningless’, ‘everything is meaningless.’
Hevel actually means ‘a mere breath’. Kohelet is talking about the fragility of life, very much like King Lear’s speech at the end of the play, as he is holding the body of Cordelia, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/ And thou no breath at all?’
So Judaism is not committed to any particular theory of the soul as an immaterial substance or a Cartesian ghost in the machine, although that fact did raise controversies in the Middle Ages. Let me simply say this, even if the soul were co-extensive with the brain, it cannot be reduced to a physical substance or a neurological process any more than (to take a simple example) you could reduce, let’s say, Rembrandt’s Night Watch to a configuration of pigments on canvas. Of course it is a configuration of pigments on canvas, but it is also a work of art. If a work of art is a physical thing, it is not just a physical thing. And if somebody couldn’t see that, then you would have to call them, as it were, tone deaf to art.
The soul is the name we give to a series of phenomena; consciousness, thought, reflexivity, intentionality, our capacity to imagine a world not present to the senses, and especially empathy, the ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. Judaism is fascinated by those processes, which is why I find your work so fascinating. But in Judaism we are, I think, fairly agnostic…[in our] ontology, [on] what kind of entity the soul actually is.
Pinker: I certainly agree that no-one is going to get insight about the psychological processes that interest us the most from looking at neuro-physiological activity directly. It is just too molecular a level, and the analogy with a painting is an apt one. I personally, in my own research, and in my teaching, argue that information processing or computation is the level at which we can get insight well above the level of ions flowing through channels or neurotransmitters seeping across synaptic junctions and that the psychology will make contact with the level of information processing which in a separate step will make our contact with the neurophysiology.
But, nonetheless, and I know that this is not as radical a position in Judaism as it is in some denominations of Christianity but it still denies that there is a substance dualism. That is, a second kind of stuff that has to be injected into the brain to give it its powers of reasoning and consciousness.
Chair: Let me move from the soul to evolution, in a way. In The Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Sacks, you say that science can tell us what and how but not why. In a way, evolutionary psychology is attempting to answer that question, the question of why we are here, or what is the meaning of our being here. Who would like to take that first?
Pinker: There are a lot of different ‘why’ questions. There is a certain kind of ‘why’ question that explains something in terms of its function: Why do we have a liver? To detoxify poisons. Why we do have a heart? To help the blood circulate. There are ‘why’ questions of that sort that I think evolution can answer.
When it comes to human thought and emotion: Why do we have romantic love? Why do we have sexual desire? Why is there sibling rivalry? Why do we fear snakes and heights?
There is another kind of ‘why’ question in terms of the purpose that we can justify morally. What is the goal of each individual? There, evolutionary psychology by itself cannot provide answers and there may be still other ‘why’ questions that might involve some mixture.
Sacks: Yes. Evolutionary psychology can tell us how we got here. It can’t tell us where we should be seeking to go. I have this wonderful thing in my car. It is called a satellite navigation system. It is absolutely wonderful! You key in the destination and it tells you the route. Obviously whoever designed this thing never met a Jew because you key in your destination and it says, for example, ‘Go 300 yards along the street and then turn left’. Of course when this happens to a Jewish driver, the immediate response is, ‘What does a machine know? I’ve been living here 45 years. I know a better route! You should go right …!’ And it is absolutely wonderful to see what this machine does. It doesn’t say, ‘Oi, you’re just like your mother!’ It is a wonderfully polite machine. It stays very quiet, very calm and then sends up a little note saying, ‘Recalculating the route,’ and it gives you a new set of directions.
Now from this wonderful machine I learned two things. One, I learned the principle of hope, that however many wrong turnings you take, so long as you know your destination there is a route from here to there. Secondly I learned the difference between evolutionary psychology and religion because this satellite navigation system does not tell you where you came from: it tells you how to get where you want to be.
I think science can tell us how we got here but it cannot in principle, because of the ‘Humean gap’ between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between description and prescription, it cannot tell us where we ought to go. Religion exists because we are forward-looking, meaning-seeking animals who want to make sense of our lives in terms of purposes, not in terms of chains of causation. That is where religion complements evolutionary psychology and I am sure that evolutionary psychology has a lot to teach religion as well.
Pinker: I certainly believe in the ‘Humean gap’ between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ and I would agree that neuro-science, evolutionary psychology, genetics and so on cannot answer questions about ‘ought’. I guess the question is whether religion would be the source of the knowledge of where we want to go, as opposed to secular moral reasoning. That is, religion has a component of moral philosophy but then it also has a cosmology. It also has an ontology, a metaphysics. To what extent does religion provide the answer to the question of what ought we to do, as opposed to the kind of reasoning that non-religious people engage in when they try to hash out what is defensible on moral grounds?
Sacks: There was a great political theorist called Friedrich Hayek. Hayek’s last book, a very interesting book, was called The Fatal Conceit. There is a strong kinship between that book and your book The Blank Slate. It was a critique of social engineering and what the fatal conceit was for Hayek was the belief that we can reason alone our way through to desired and desirable social outcomes. That was fairly systematically disastrous because of the law of unintended consequences. You develop a programme to help the poor and you find that it generates more poverty not less. That kind of thing.
His view, therefore, was that in order to survive humanity needed certain things that had been proved to work over the course of time but which operated at a much deeper level than conscious thought. Obviously what you are telling us from evolutionary psychology is that we have a lot of inherited encoded instincts which were once functional and are now very dysfunctional. Hayek said that that is what religion does: it delivers a series, let’s say, of ‘thou shalt not’ which don’t make sense at a conscious level but which do speak to some of the dysfunctional instincts that we have brought with us from, let’s say, the hunter-gatherer stage of human evolution.
Pinker: I am certainly impressed by Hayek’s argument for a kind of intelligence that is distributed amongst a large number of agents exchanging information, as opposed to being deduced from the top down, from a few sets of axioms and logical rules. I guess the question is: When does the sheer accumulated convention, which Hayek pointed to, be[come] justifiable on moral grounds, that we can often use to cut through convention in a clean stroke. The example being slavery, which of course was part of the conventional understanding, the accumulated norms and values of many cultures. More recently; the oppression of women, discrimination against gay people, all of which, from a pure Hayekian point of view, would have to have some merit simply because they allowed a society to progress up to that point, but with principles of equality, of interchangeability of perspectives, of the fact that you can’t justify keeping a slave if he wouldn’t be happy being a slave. You can throw centuries of accumulated custom out of the window and, in those cases, one doesn’t really want to satisfy oneself with the accumulated traditions and unspoken social mores.
So this is not to deny that in many cases a kind of evolved sense of decency in conventions by which people treat each other without necessarily being able to articulate them does have some moral status. But, on the other hand, that can be taken too far and there are other cases where rigorous reasoning has to be used to overthrow mere tradition.
Chair: Let me interrupt here. We are already talking about these moral dilemmas, but what is your answer, from an evolutionary perspective? Because you faced that problem as well. You say that morality is derived from our universal capacity for empathy. That empathy applies to the family, the tribe. How do you go beyond that if you don’t use religion? This is where religion can come in and provide a foundation or a basis for that morality. How do you get to that moral sense which expands beyond a small circle within your framework?
Pinker: I assume you are alluding to Peter Singer’s idea of the ‘expanding circle’?
Chair: Yes.
Pinker: Over the course of history one can see a sense of sympathy or empathy, which formerly was restricted to one’s own clan, being expanded to larger and larger groups, most recently all of humanity. In Singer’s own formulation it ought to be extended to all sentient animals. So how can that happen? I am not sure that one can point to religion as the force that propels the circle outward. There is a certain inherent, inexorable logic to the expanding circle. Namely, that as soon as you begin to do moral reasoning at all, as soon as you have to persuade other people that there are certain ways they ought to behave, you can’t not treat them as equivalent in interest to yourself.
If I say, ‘I hereby defend the social system in which I get rights but you don’t. I am free from imprisonment, torture and so on but you aren’t,’ the question is, why should anyone listen to me? Why is my perspective privileged over those that I hope to address?
Since there is no logical defence of egoism once you are engaged with other people at all, it becomes impossible to maintain that blacks ought to be slaves but whites shouldn’t, that women should be disenfranchised but men shouldn’t, and so on. So part of is just the inherent nature of the idea of morality as some kind of rising from your own parochial perspective and taking the universalist position. Once you start that, it inexorably expands outward.
There may also historically be technological and historical circumstances that make this more likely. Robert Wright has argued that the expansion of networks of trade just as a practical historical cause has led people to expand their moral circle outward. As more and more of humanity becomes more valuable to you alive than dead, your morality will tend to follow your networks of trade and you will take a more universalist perspective. The crude way that he puts it is,
“Among the many reasons that I think we shouldn’t bomb the Japanese is that they made my minivan.”
Also, it is possible that many people believe that what you can call ‘technologies of empathy’ have had something to do with the expansion of the moral circle over the centuries. Journalism, history, realistic fiction; mechanisms that encourage people to put themselves in the shoes of others and to imagine themselves in other circumstances, make empathy more natural and make it more difficult at an emotional level to treat people as not having interests and rights.
So it seems to me that these three things, trade, technologies of empathy and the sheer logic of the interchangeability of perspectives are what propel the circle of empathy out beyond what evolution may have prepared us for. Regarding religion: first of all, any doctrine that appeals to faith, given that unlike interchangeability of perspectives which is a kind of intellectual endpoint that reason itself forces you toward, faith by definition would be the belief in something for which you had no reason to believe it. That is inherently non-universalist because there is no compelling reason for people born in different times and places to arrive at the same faith. The faith that you acquire from your peers, from your elders is naturally going to be different from the faith that someone else acquires from their accumulated community traditions. So, unlike reason itself, it could be a divisive force. And, of course, historically we do not need to be reminded of the ubiquity of sectarian religious strife.
Chair: Is that satisfactory as an answer? Because, in The Dignity of Difference, you point out the limits of markets, of that kind of perspective.
Sacks: I don’t share Singer’s view which is a basically Whiggish view that we are getting better and better all the time. I actually believe that life is a journey full of wrong turnings, blind alleys, regressions. In many senses, in many parts of the world, we are in a regressive state right now: suicide bombing, terror. I would much rather think about a journey. The walk across the wilderness that should have taken ten days and instead took forty years because Moshe Rabbenu didn’t have a satellite navigation system!
I prefer to see it slightly differently. I don’t know if this analogy will make sense to you. In the long, last movement of Beethoven’s Quartet in B-flat Major Opus 130, the Grosse Fuge begins by sort of setting out the themes and then proceeds to the development. The Bible is written like the Grosse Fuge. You have certain ideals stated very upfront, very early on. One: the dignity of every human being in the image of God, and so on and so forth. Take, for instance, Genesis II. Genesis II, Adam and Eve, Garden of Eden: it is stated that monogamy is the ideal biblical form. Now Judaism did not impose monogamy until Rabbenu Gershon in the 10th century. That’s a long time.
Exodus is the ultimate refutation or rejection of slavery. But neither England nor America abolished slavery until the 19th century and in America not without a civil war. Both sides, Abraham Lincoln of course as well as his opponents, quoted bible in defence of their cause.
So I see moral progress in terms of a constant tension between internal ideals and their realisation in time. There is no doubt whatsoever that Peter Singer is taking us back to a much earlier kinship with animals which you see in the Bible very early on. The Patriarchs were all shepherds. Human beings in Genesis I are commanded to be vegetarians, they are not to kill animals. Peter Singer himself was amazed when he was researching in the British Library to discover that a Jewish guy called Lewis Gompertz had stated his arguments 150 years earlier in a book with which he founded what today is the RSPCA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. So I think we are going back to a more pastoral sense of inter-connectedness.
There is no natural progress in morality. There is a constant struggle in every generation to realise timeless ideals.
Pinker: It seems to me that at least in the West, in the industrialised West, I would be prepared to say that one could document some degree of moral progress. Although not, again, without zigzags. But if one were to try to quantify things like even the rate of homicide, the best statistics that I have seen show that the rate of homicide in the last 800 years has plummeted. Wherever there are English towns that have kept statistics, you were actually much less safe in 1300 or 1500 than you are now. In terms of frequency of war, especially in the West, there has been a steep decline since the Second World War. In terms of cruel punishment, the fact that in the entire West most attention has been directed at capital punishment in the United States where a minority of states execute a minority of murderers. Granted there is still room for improvement in the United States but the fact that we have come to that as opposed to the situation a few hundred years ago when there was an enormous list of capital crimes and when the form of execution was often gruesome public torture, and there were cruel forms of entertainment, including torturing animals in public. These have declined, as also have corporal punishment for children, political assassinations, street riots, and pogroms.
By all these measures, there has been a decline. It is an interesting problem in science and history to find what is responsible for this. Failing to recognise this, and it is easy to miss given how horrific the 20th century was, nonetheless it is a real phenomenon which, if we could bottle it, concentrate it and export it then there would be some hope of improving our lot.
Sacks: I really agree and I think we do get closer each century to our destination. That is our journey towards the Messianic age. But there are some very dangerous pitfalls on the way. We can’t fail to be mindful of the fact that the very country that was one of the leaders of enlightenment and liberalism, the country of Goethe and Kant and Bach and Beethoven produced the Holocaust, the Final Solution. More than 50 per cent of the participants in the Wannsee Conference that decided on the Endlösung had doctorates.
Therefore, it seems to me, and I am not talking here about religion in general, I am talking very specifically about something unusual about Judaism…[that] we must keep with us all the time. What is it? The fact that the Bible, the Mosaic books, in one place say ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, but in 36 places say, ‘Love the stranger’. The biggest form of evil is to fail to see from your victim’s point of view. ‘You shall not oppress the stranger because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.’
This is fundamental. The fact that on Pesach, during the Seder service, we will spill drops of wine to remember the suffering of the Egyptians. The fact that on Rosh Hashanah when we blow the Shofar (and that is called teruah), the rabbis searching for a definition of what this thing is took the text from Sisera’s mother. Sisera was the captain of the Canaanite army. When we utter our cries through the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah, we are remembering the mother of our enemy’s chief of staff who cried when her son died in victory.
To be able to see somebody else’s point of view, that capacity for empathy, is difficult and sometimes civilisations under stress lose it. When that happens, terrible crimes happen.
Chair: The next question is to you, Steven. How do you explain the tenacity of faith from an evolutionary perspective and not just faith but perhaps monotheism?
Pinker: I don’t know if one would want to try to explain monotheism from an evolutionary perspective because I don’t think it is typical of our species and evolutionary explanations are only even warranted when there is something that one could plausibly argue is part of our nature, which I think monotheism is not. Certainly the monotheistic religions have been very successful in how far they have spread. But if one were to do an ethnographic survey of what are the most popular religious beliefs across cultures, then there would probably be a handful of monotheistic ones and many that are not. We are apt to believe in souls and spirits and deities at the drop of a hat.
It is an interesting question as to why the kinds of belief that we call religion are so widespread and there are a number of very interesting recent books on that topic: In Gods We Trust by Scott Atran and a book with a title as audacious as my own, Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer.
I tend to doubt that we have a specific evolutionary adaptation for religious belief, a religion module or a ‘God module’, as it has sometimes been called. With Atran and Boyer, there are reasons to think that religious beliefs are a by-product of other modes of thinking. Foremost among them is what psychologists call a theory of mind, or intuitive psychology. That is the tendency that we have to attribute minds to other people, even though we cannot witness them directly. That is, in interacting with someone else I don’t treat them as a wind-up doll, or a robot, or a stimulus-response machine, but I assume that they have a mental life like mine (beliefs and desires) even though I can’t witness them directly.
From the idea that other people have minds that you can’t see, it is a short step to start to think about minds that exist separately from bodies and indeed some kind of belief -dualistic belief, is common in cultures all over the world. It emerges early in development and it is even reinforced by certain experiences like dreams where, when you are asleep and in a dream, you know that your body has been in bed the whole time but apparently some other part of you is up and about roaming the world. Or, in death, where often there is no visible physical change in the body but seemingly some animating force that was with it just a few hours ago appears to have departed.
So the tendency to posit other minds, which is indispensable to social life, combined with certain experiences of having a human body, naturally lead to the conclusion that there are minds that can exist separately from bodies. So that would be one ingredient.
Another one would be division of labour, of expertise, which again is universal across societies. Here there is a temptation among shamans and priests and witch-doctors to appeal to a world of wonders beyond the comprehension of the flock, the rest of the tribe, in order to cultivate certain arcane expertise so as to enhance their own status within the tribe or the group.
A third ingredient is our own sense of teleology, of design: that it is natural when we look at a human artefact, a watch in the standard example, to assume that there has to have been a designer. The parts could not have fallen together by sheer chance. When that habit of mine is extended to the natural world, to plants and animals and the eco-system, one is apt to ask the same question, namely: Who or what designed plants, animals, the world? It is then a short step to posit some cosmic engineer analogous to whatever human engineer fashioned human artefacts.
Indeed, one could argue that until the several discoveries of 19th century science (Darwin and the case of complexity of life and its origin; the neuroscience revolution in terms of the origin of thoughts and feelings in material processes) it would be rational to believe in a cosmic designer and in a soul. There is no way that simply looking at a brain cut out of a skull one could imagine that it would have the microscopic complexity necessary to support thoughts and feelings. That was a late discovery of science. Similarly until Darwin came along. It was almost unimaginable that the complexity in the natural world could have arisen through sheer physical processes until Darwin gave a non-teleological explanation as to how the illusion or appearance of teleology could come about.
So indeed it was rational to have these beliefs until modern science provided alternative explanations.
Chair: In a way, I’m almost disappointed. I was kind of hoping that a ‘religious gene’ would explain how people who are educated similarly religiously turn out to be different. If there was such a thing as a religious gene, then that would explain that. But, unfortunately, you are not advocating that?!
Pinker: Well, there is something to that in that the explanation I gave was not at a level of what makes individuals differ from one another, but rather patterns that one sees re-occurring in culture after culture and that might reflect some universal property of how human minds work. In terms of why, say, two siblings raised in the same family with the same religious upbringing might differ in their degree of commitment to religion, we know that there is almost certainly not one religion gene but that the full complement of 25,000 genes has something to do with it because religiosity is substantially heritable. Identical twins separated at birth, brought up in different continents, even in different religions, will tend to be similar in their degree of religious commitment even though the content of their religious beliefs, of course, will differ.
This is not a hundred per cent correlation by any means, but indeed as far as behavioural traits go, a degree of religious belief has a pretty high degree of heritability.
Chair: If that is the case, does it make sense to try to teach people to be religious if there is an innate ability for religiosity?
Sacks: Well I’d quite enjoy doing a bit of genetic engineering to get everyone to come to shul! But I really don’t think that it is that simple. It would be extremely surprising if we found a direct genetic correlation with the ‘god gene’, as it were with religion. It seems to me that religion is universal because we are the only life form so far known in the universe capable of asking the question, ‘Why?’ That is how religion emerges. Why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? And so on.
That seems to me to be universal. I’ve always loved that story Isaiah Berlin told about the taxi driver who said to him, ‘You’re Isaiah Berlin, you’re a philosopher, philosophers are useless! I had that Bertrand Russell in the back of my cab one day and I said to him, “Russell, you’re a philosopher: what’s it all about then, guv?” And, do you know, he couldn’t tell me!’
Well I think there is a ‘What’s it all about then, guv?’ in all of this which searches and which yields religion. Now religion is more or less a human universal but there is nothing whatsoever universal about religions in the plural. I am talking about not just wildly different religions like Judaism, Hinduism and Confucianism, but even quite close cousins like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They have different beliefs, they generate different cultures; they produce different character types and configurations of virtue.
To take an obvious example: every major Jewish text is what I call an anthology of argument. Abraham, Moses, Job, Jeremiah argue with God. Now that is something that would be almost heretical in any other faith. I remember the wonderful BBC series about the world religions 20 or 30 years ago. The host of the programme was clearly shell-shocked when he encountered Judaism. I remember the conversation he had with Elie Wiesel. He said, ‘Professor Wiesel, Judaism is a very noisy religion, isn’t it? Do you have such a thing as silence in Judaism?’ Elie Wiesel looked at him and said, ‘Judaism is full of silences. But we don’t talk about them.’
So it seems to me that there is a clear coming together here of genetic disposition on the one hand and cultural difference, mediated by education, on the other. Steven has so eloquently written about the universal human language instinct which is universal across cultures. But at the same time there are 6,000 different languages and education is essential, or at least conversation in early childhood, otherwise you will not acquire a language.
I remember that once somebody said about a member of the London Beth Din many generations ago that he spoke ten languages, all of them Yiddish! But the language we speak is a matter of culture and education. The fact that we speak at all, that is genetic and universal.
Pinker: Indeed, there are certain universal, or near universal, characteristics of religion, among them: a belief in immaterial souls and spirits, appealing to them in order to seek fortune or alleviate misfortune. My favourite definition of prayer comes from Ambrose Bierce who said that,” to pray is to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy”.
Sacks: You know what? Sometimes it works!
Pinker: Another widespread quality is the attempt to predict and alter the future by examination or manipulation of physical signs that are causally disconnected from the actual event. Also, even though to some extent the division between religion and other spheres of life is an artefact of our secular age where these things were much more blurred together in past centuries where art and science and history and so on could not be demarcated as to where one ended and religion began.
But I think it is very common (I don’t want to say universal) that peoples themselves recognise some distinction between the everyday and the sacred. When they appeal to ghosts and spirits, when they try to divine the future, it is surrounded by ceremony, by ritual, by some demarcation from prosaic cause and effect, which also they have to be keenly aware of in order to survive in this universe. It is often in desperate circumstances, in the case of preparation for a battle, or recovery of a child from illness, that they start to appeal to a separate world of wonders whose difference from the everyday is recognised even from within these traditions.
Chair: Let me move from religion and morality to the idea of an innate human nature and, in particular, its implication for gender issues. We are all aware of the reactions to Harvard President Larry Summers and his suggestion that the reason why there may be fewer women in mathematics and science may be due to innate sex differences. You support Summers in his view. Would you like to elaborate on that?
Pinker: Summers actually alluded to three possible differences of the gender gap in particular in science: one of them being discrimination and other barriers and forms of bias; a second being the incompatibility of draconian work schedules of 80-hour weeks with child rearing which at least now and for the foreseeable future is going to be more associated with women than men!; and the third being small differences in mean, that is average, in abilities like spatial cognition and mathematical reasoning but, more important, differences in variability. In many traits, in many organisms for that matter, whatever you plot you get more males at the high end and more males at the low end, whereas females tend to be somewhat more clustered around the average. He said that if you look at a high cut-off for something like being a professor of physics, you are not going to expect a fifty-fifty ratio although you are not going to expect it to be exclusively male either.
In spite of all the outrage that this provoked, there are a lot of data to support it. In large-scale surveys of cognitive aptitudes one finds that men and women are equal in overall intelligence, that there are certain sub-types of intelligence that on average women are better at than men such as remembering locations, verbal fluency, mathematical calculation. There are other sub-specialties which, again on average (there are always overlapping distributions), men are better at: mental rotation of three-dimensional objects, solving mathematical word problems. Given this different set of profiles in both average and in variance, it would be very unlikely that in any particular pursuit you would get an exact fifty-fifty distribution of men and women, even if discrimination were eliminated, which is quite reasonable.
I come from a field in which the sex ratio is reversed. I study language development in children and the majority of the practitioners in that field are women, and it is certainly not because men are discriminated against.
Now the important thing to realise is that much of the uproar that these comments inspired came from the fear that this would return us to the days in which women were systematically and overtly discriminated against in the sciences and many other fields. It is very important to realise that the issue of whether men and women should be treated fairly is different from the issue of whether men and women are statistically indistinguishable. Even if there do turn out to be differences, which there may be, both fairness and the empirical fact that all differences are differences in statistical distribution with lots of overlap mean that we ought to treat people as individuals and that discrimination is both self-defeating and morally indefensible.
If one remembers that that is what our commitment to equality means, then the data can come out however they come out and they won’t force us to return to the days in which women were systematically kept out of professions, something that would now be unthinkable in any case. And there is no sane advocate of turning the clock back to the 1960s and before.
Chair: The question from the religious point of view is whether, in saying that, Steven Pinker is providing water to the mill when it comes to defending different roles for men and women within religion which applies to monotheistic religions?
Sacks: Look, one of the interesting things about Judaism is that we believe the God of revelation is also the God of creation. In other words, Judaism goes with the grain to some degree of the created world and we try and sanctify the grain of particular biologies, not just the male/female distinction but the fact that in kashrut we sanctify the act of eating; in taharat hamishpacha and mikvah we sanctify the act of sex. Biology is something that we are part of and we try and sanctify it in appropriate ways.
At the same time, obviously there was a lot of controversy about Larry Summers speaking about women making less-good scientists. As far as I can see, in Britain certainly girls are doing much better than boys in exams. In both Britain and in the United States they form a majority of university students. And we have travelled a long way in quite a short time.
Would you believe this? When I went up to Cambridge in 1966, no girl was allowed to be a member of the Cambridge Union Debating Society. And can you believe the first motion that they debated? There are two women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham. The motion was: ‘This House prefers Girton to Newnham because it is further away’. That was male chauvinism in Cambridge in 1966. Thanks goodness that has gone.
There was no parallel outcry to the Cambridge psychology Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (otherwise famous for being the brother of Ali G)…
Pinker: …Cousin
Sacks: Oh, sorry! Slightly less genetic link there, but in Judaism there is genetic determinism for the whole mishpocho -we all share the genes! But Simon Baron-Cohen argued as you know that autism is a quintessentially male illness and that it is, in fact, an extreme form of another difference between men and women, namely that women are much better at relationships than men are. We are back here to the left/right hemispheres of the brain. We are back to ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’. The really, really important thing is that despite these genetic and biological differences, we try as far as we can to create a society in which men and women have equal dignity as both representing the image of God.
Now we have come a fair way in Judaism in my lifetime. Many would say we have gone too far. Many would say that we have not gone far enough. But the timeless ideal is the equal dignity of men and women regardless of their biological differences.
Pinker: I am actually relieved to be on stage with someone who might have a bigger gender problem than I do! I want to pursue this.
Certainly the moral principle was well articulated by Gloria Steinem when she said that there are very few jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina and all the other jobs should be open to both sexes. I would actually like to pose a question to Rabbi Sacks. Granted that Judaism grants equal dignity to men and women, but it certainly doesn’t subscribe to Gloria Steinem’s principle and to the principle of treatment of people as individuals regardless of their gender, which I would argue on moral grounds, is certainly what universities and in fact all realms of life ought to subscribe to. So, within the Jewish tradition where (other than in the Reform Movement) there are still differences in what men and women are permitted to do, is there some way that that can continue to be justified from within Jewish moral reasoning or otherwise?
Sacks: It is a most wonderful thing to be able to say that the Almighty wrote the Bible, I didn’t. Mind you, He wrote a best-seller, Steven. You and I should eat our hearts out. I only hope He gets the royalties!
It is very interesting. If you go right back to biblical Judaism, you see two models of the religious life: two voices in Judaism which are intertwined in quite complex harmonies. Those are the world of the priest and the world of the prophet. Now the priesthood was an essentially male preserve. Only sons of Aaron were priests, not daughters. The prophet, however, was a charismatic individual and a woman could be a prophet no less than a man and so we have Miriam, Hannah, Deborah, these great women who were prophets and leaders of Israel.
It is very interesting, for instance, that one of the great Jewish prophets, Isaiah, actually speaks several times about God as a mother, not just as a father. There is the famous line we say when comforting the bereaved: Ke’ish asher imo tenachamenu… God says; ‘Like someone whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you.’
So you have that voice: the very egalitarian voice of prophecy; the quite hierarchical voice of priesthood. And they are both voices within Judaism. That’s a tension where we try and do as much as we can but rabbis are not legislators, we are interpreters and there are limits on what we can do.
Pinker: Your disclaimer about who wrote the Bible reminds me of a story that scientists often tell about why God was turned down for a research grant by BiMRC. It is because: He publishes in books instead of referee journals; the work has never been replicated; His old work was good but what has He done lately?
Sacks: Which reminds me of that wonderful Yiddish saying. The guy has ordered a suit from the tailor and he comes back. He’s been waiting three months for the suit and the tailor says he should come back the next week. The guy says, ‘It only took the Almighty six days to create the world!’ And the tailor says, ‘So? Look at the world. Do you want a suit like that?’
Chair: Well, one quote in How the Mind Works is puzzling to many readers. This is Steven Pinker saying:
“Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of queer nation. But I am happy to be that way and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.”
Now, for someone who believes in some form of genetic determinism, that seems to be an incredible admission of free will?
Pinker: In that statement I had two targets. One of them was a common misunderstanding of the application of evolution to psychology and behaviour which is the idea, which is really a misunderstanding, that if you apply evolution to human behaviour it means that you always act in service of replicating your genes. It is as if the genes directly pull the muscles and do whatever it takes to inject more copies of them into the next generation. That isn’t the way genes work. It’s not the way evolution works. What the genes do, metaphorically, is that they build a brain which has certain ways of feeling and reasoning and certain goals which, on average, would have led to the genes being replicated in the kind of environment in which we evolved.
So first of all the action of the genes is many steps removed from behaviour. Genes, buried in the nuclei of cells, can’t control behaviour. They help organise the brain during development and then they pretty much have to stay out of the way. It’s the way the brain functions that determines how we behave. Moreover, since genes not only can’t pull muscles but they don’t have eyes and ears, they don’t know what is going to lead to replication in the current environment. All they can do is embody the statistics of past environments and give rise to patterns of thought and feeling that would have led to replication.
It is plausible to say that the genes equipped us with sexual desire and with a desire to love and cherish children that we have reason to believe are our own. Left to their own devices, that will result as a by-product in gene replication. But there isn’t any imperative to reproduce directly. So if you have an environment in which there is contraception, in which there are competing demands on a person’s attention, the brain as a whole is not compelled to simply pump out as many babies as possible.
I also meant …[to] target those American moralists (a very strange mixture of evolutionary biology and moralisation) who try to stigmatise homosexuality by saying that it is a biological mistake hence a moral mistake and that therefore it ought to be stamped out and that gay people ought to be stigmatised or converted to heterosexuality. I argue that this is a mistake on many levels, one of them being that if one’s morality hinged on that which led to the greatest number of children, then anyone who voluntarily had fewer than the maximum number of children that he or she could have would be as immoral or as biologically defective as a gay person.
That is: if you could afford to have fourteen children and you have only three, you are telling your genes to go jump in the lake as much as someone who could have three children and chooses to have zero.
Sacks: I’m tempted to do the Jewish mother bit here, but I’ll … Oh my goodness! Free will. I think Isaac Bashevis Singer can not be improved on, right?: ‘We must believe in free will. We have no choice!’
Steven has very elegantly refuted some of the more absurd forms of genetic determinism. But they themselves are only the latest in many determinisms. The Greeks had theirs. Three of the great determinists were Jews, of course. I always say that if you are short of apikorsim, we do them as well: Spinoza, Marx and Freud. Those are three of the top four, I believe. Why Darwin wasn’t Jewish, I really don’t know! That was an oversight. All the qualifications: long beard, total apikores. He should have been Jewish but it was a genetic accident.
I once actually teasingly said that God’s first words to Abraham were directed against determinism. Lech lecha: Leave your land, your birthplace, your father’s house. Marx held that human history is determined by class, namely the ownership of land. Therefore God said to Abraham, “Leave your land”. Spinoza said that human behaviour is determined by instincts which we receive at birth. Therefore God said, “Leave the place of your birth”. Freud said that human behaviour is determined by our early relationship with our father. Therefore God said to Abraham, “Leave your father’s house”.
One way and another Judaism is a rejection on principle of determinism of any form. There is a serious point here. In my next book I have a chapter called ‘The Monotheistic Personality’. It seems to me that polytheism or myth sees conflict in terms of external forces. There are gods of the wind, the rain, the sun, the storm and so on. Now monotheism internalises all those conflicts into the mind of God. That generates a human counterpart, the monotheistic personality which internalises rather than externalises conflicts and, therefore, has the freedom to resolve them.
That is, according to Jack Miles (a very fine Jesuit writer) the difference between Oedipus and Hamlet, and in between Sophocles and Shakespeare. The problems that Oedipus has are out there. The problems that Hamlet has are all in here [pointing to his head]. Therefore, whereas myth produces fate, monotheism produces free will. Whereas myth produces tragedy, monotheism produces hope.
So, therefore, free will is not simply a scientific, genetic, empirical fact. To some extent it is a cultural artefact. In order to be free, we have to believe we are free. That is one of Judaism’s great contributions because in the religions of the world it is a, even the, religion of freedom.
Chair: Before we open the session to questions, on a more personal note what I would like to do is to ask both of you what motivated you to come here tonight and to debate with one another?
Pinker: Well, my own personal upbringing was very much tied to Judaism. I went to Reform Temple. I taught Sunday school in the Reform Temple. I went to Hebrew camp for a number of summers. I went to Israel when I was 18 years old. So that is certainly part of my own narrative of what led me to where I am. The questions that I eventually became engaged in, in my professional work, such as: What is human nature and how might we understand it? How do we make sense of morality, free will, responsibility, consciousness? [These] are questions that have traditionally been part of the subject matter of religion and that are now being answered in possibly complementary, but possibly alternative ways by sciences. Also because one of the things that I value most in the Jewish tradition and in the academic tradition is engaging in respectful disagreement and exploration of common ground from different viewpoints, in exploring the implications of ideas in greater depths than one could by oneself. That is one of the strands of the Jewish tradition that we all agree is most worth preserving and which led me to want to engage in the dialogue with Rabbi Sacks tonight.
Sacks: Well obviously, Valerie, I wanted to get my copy of The Language Instinct signed! The serious reason was stated by the 19th century scholar and mystic Rav Tzaddok Hacohen of Lublin who said, ‘In the beginning, God wrote a book and called it The Universe. Then He wrote a commentary to the book and called it Torah.’
I believe that you can’t, therefore, understand Torah, understand Judaism, without understanding the universe to which it is a commentary. You cannot change the world until you understand the world. You cannot fight dysfunctional instincts until you understand the nature of instinct. You cannot educate or even change minds until you understand the human mind. That is why I find the evolutionary psychology findings, and especially the work of Steven, both fascinating and fundamental. I believe there must be a constant open-ended dialogue between religion and science and I hope tonight has shown how civil, how entertaining and how enthralling that dialogue can be. Thank you.
Chair: We haven’t much time for many questions but we will take just a few.
Questioner 1: I would like you both to comment on Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the origins of monotheism. He pointed out that it is a projection of a father figure and I think that although Steven Pinker sort of rather dismisses the idea of monotheism, the three main monotheistic religions have been very, very influential. But to me, I think it is very persuasive, the idea of a projective father figure in the sky and I’d like you to comment, please.
Chair: We’ll take a few questions together and then allow people to answer.
Questioner 2: I was impressed how polite Steve was towards religion, so I’ll try to remedy matters by being a little more blunt about what I think is the issue at hand. We all agreed that there is a distinction between ‘is’ statements and ‘ought’ statements and science is not going to give us answers to ‘ought’ statements.
Religion pretends to give answers to ‘ought’ statements. The question is whether its pretence is justified. As Steve said, religion has two aspects. It has an ethical aspect and it has a cosmological aspect making purportedly factual statements about purportedly factual matters. The heart of the matter is whether those allegedly factual statements are true. If they are, then the religious person has some authority to speak about ethical matters. If the ‘factual’ statements are false, then the religious person has no more or less authority to speak about ethical matters than any other secular ethical philosopher.
Chair: Shall we try to address these two questions?
Pinker: I can start with the question on Freud’s theory of the origin of monotheism. Certainly the metaphor of the father is essential to the conception of God in monotheistic religions. In Christianity you have got the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We have avinu malkeinu, our Father, our King which, by the way, suggests that it isn’t just the metaphor of the father but some notion of authority, rank, dominance. Indeed, all kinds of metaphors associated with authority and dominance can be found in monotheistic prayers and poems and religious imagery.
Indeed one of the anthropologists who study cross-cultural patterns in religion and morality notes that there is a widespread tendency for the mind to conflate dominance hierarchies with moral hierarchies and that we see this in language like the two meanings of the word ‘noble’, for example. Or the fact that many terms that we use for impoverishment we also use for moral turpitude, like ‘shabby’, ‘shoddy’, ‘low-rent’, and so on. So there is something cognitively natural about equating fathers, kings, generals and so on with supreme deities and Freud’s insight might be a version of that greater generalisation about our cognitive tendencies.
As for the second question, I’ll leave that to Rabbi Sacks!
Sacks: The issue of Sigmund Freud is seriously a long one and I have a chapter on it in my next book but one. I don’t want to evade the issue. Freud was right in one respect and wrong, or partially wrong, in a second. It was absolutely right to find family relations, and in particular father/son relationships, as the kind of DNA of a particular culture. Authoritarian families are found in authoritarian societies, etc. etc. That work has been done by the French anthropologist Emanuel Todd. It is therefore no accident that the book of Genesis is very much about families, about sibling rivalries and about father/son relationships.
In that sense Freud is pointing towards a very, very important feature of religion as a whole. Freud made a mistake in choosing a Greek rather than a Jewish model: choosing Oedipus instead of the Binding of Isaac. The Binding of Isaac ends with both father and son still alive. Oedipus is about attempted infanticide on the part of Laius and actual parricide on the part of Oedipus. Therefore, Freud gave psychology a tragic dimension which is very Greek, it is not very Jewish. Therefore, the Binding of Isaac, which in itself is not at all a self-evident narrative: it is one of the most opaque narratives of all and needs very careful decoding. But I agree that the father/son relationship is …key here…[and] I do think that Freud chose the wrong model.
Secondly, in terms of religions having to establish their case by the canons of reason, what the late John Rawls called ‘public reason’, I agree absolutely. I don’t think that religion should claim any authority other than that which it acquires by what it does, the impact it makes on human beings. Religion has had profoundly benign effects and, in some cases, profoundly evil effects.
The benign effects: the monotheisms were the first systems of thought to lift human horizons beyond the tribe or the city state or the empire to humanity as a whole. The Hebrew Bible is one of the great texts of freedom, of human dignity, of attempting to create a society without poverty and so on. But religion has been guilty of many evils: intolerance, contempt for those who are different, the outsider, the one not like us, the anti-Christ, the infidel, the unredeemed. Those are terrible evils and I do not ask anyone to buy religion whole. We have to live by the ethically uplifting elements of religion but I believe that all of us have to fight the negatives within religion for the sake of God.
However, religion is not philosophy, please understand that. Philosophy constructs, ethics is a set of principles. Judaism constructs ethics as a set of acts and rituals and stories and prayers. It builds families and communities around those principles. It is living philosophy: philosophy as it is realised in systems of thought, habits of the heart, in trying to inculcate emotional intelligence and moral maturity. So in that sense I have an enormous respect for philosophical ethics. I studied it. I teach it. I regard people like Alistair MacIntyre as my heroes: David Hume, Aristotle, etc. etc. So did Maimonides, incidentally, who thought Aristotle was really one of the great human beings who ever lived. But, in the end, religion translates ethics into life in a way that no philosophical system does.
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