In the world of plants and animals, it often happens that some external force intervenes, altering the balance of a particular ecosystem to favor or harm species. A flood or drought can suddenly alter an ecosystem to favor one species over another. An ice age can lower the ocean's level, creating land bridges that suddenly (on the geological time scale) allow new species to invade a formerly isolated island, or even a whole continent. An asteroid can wipe out a large fraction of the large animals on Earth.
This book is primarily about memes and evolution, and how religion came into existence and evolved via the forces of natural selection. But cultural evolution doesn't happen in isolation. In this chapter, we're going to take a slight detour from our main topic, and examine some of the other forces that have influenced the development of the Religion Virus.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke
Imagine you are a forty-year-old South Pacific Islander, and the year is 1944. You are an expert fisherman, you know the ways of the sea, and you can navigate your proa (outrigger sailing canoe) across 500 miles of open ocean with nothing more than the wind, stars, birds and waves for navigation, just to visit your friends on the next island. You have children and grandchildren, and as an elder in your village, and a fine fisherman, you are enjoying the respect of the entire island. You are a well educated, skilled and experienced man, one who has accomplished everything a man could hope for.
One day a strange proa, bigger than yours and with no sail at all, comes to your island. Out of it come a half-dozen men, all dressed in strange clothing, and carrying many strange and wonderful objects. You've seen white men before, and heard stories from your neighboring islands, but never before have they come in such numbers, and stayed so long.
One of them speaks a few words of your language, enough that you can learn a bit of what they're doing. It seems they are in a war with some other tribe, one that lives far away. Although these men are strange, you understand warfare. These men tell you they're setting up a "radio", and explains that the tall tower, with long thin ropes that he calls "wires", will call down goods from the sky. You and your friends all find this very amusing, and wonder how these strange, crazy men are going to survive when they don't even know how to fish, and have no women with them.
But then, it happens! Strange, noisy machines fly overhead, like great birds, and the when these strange men speak their unknown language into their radio, these flying machines drop Cargo onto your island. And what Cargo! Food, blankets, guns, tents, and more machines! These men are rich beyond comprehension. Knives, axes and saws made of steel, sharper than anything you've dreamed of. Food that comes from cans and boxes, and these strange men never go fishing or climb the trees for coconuts or fruit. Machines that roll around your island at high speed with nobody pushing.
And then, one of your grandchildren, your favorite little granddaughter, gets sick, very sick, and you remember all of the other children who died before they could grow up, and you are very sad, because your granddaughter may be next. But the strange men send their "doctor", who gives your beautiful granddaughter some medicine, and in a few days she is up and running around with the other children.
After a year, the strange men tell you that they have defeated their enemy, and they begin to pack up their cargo, and some of them leave. But a new man arrives. This man is dressed differently, and he is not a warrior, but calls himself a "minister." He speaks your language well, which surprises everyone. And he begins to tell you about a new god, a god called Jesus, who came to Earth to save everyone from a terrible death. This minister tells you about heaven and hell, and it is very frightening.
Not only does the minister say that Jesus is God, but he also says that the other gods, the ones you and your ancestors have always worshipped, are false gods, that you must not worship your old gods any more, that you will surely go to hell if you don't accept this new Jesus god.
Many in the village do not believe the new minister. They have never heard of this Jesus before. But, it is very hard to understand – if your old gods were so powerful, why do these strange men, and their minister, have so much cargo, and such good medicine? Why was their doctor able to save your granddaughter? Maybe you should listen to this minister, and start praying to this Jesus god, for he must be a very powerful god indeed to have given such great riches, technology and medicine to these strange men.
The story related above is fictional, but it could be real – many such events actually happened. The "cargo cults" went much further than the tale above; there are documented cases where the natives tried to emulate western technology by building "radio towers" of bamboo, and clearing strips in the forest for the airplanes to land, in the hope of calling down more cargo from the sky.
The point we are interested in is not the cargo cult itself, but rather the legitimacy that western technology lends to the Religion Virus. The technological advances that took place between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century were a towering achievement of the collective minds of the human race. By the time of the colonial era, European technology, agriculture, and medicine were more advanced than every culture they encountered. Native people couldn't help but be impressed by huge ships, guns, steel knives, written language, woven clothes, glass, flint-and-steel fire starters, and hundreds of other cultural and technological wonders. Combine this with the idea, shared by almost all religions, that good things are granted to us by our gods, and you get a wide-open door for the introduction of Christianity.
Even though these "primitive" people weren't as technically advanced, they weren't stupid. They immediately recognized the value of Western technology, and were very impressed with the Europeans. Cargo cults are an of an extreme example, one in which a highly advanced technological culture suddenly "dumps" itself and all of its wonders into the midst of a technologically primitive society. But even in less extreme cases, relatively simple technology, such as glass beads, knives and axes, hand-held telescopes, and even sugar, had the power to impress less-advanced people. Missionaries were happy to "piggyback" on technology, gaining stature and legitimacy by their close association with the technology. It is best expressed as, "Your god is very good to you, he must be stronger than our old gods, so we'll listen to what you are teaching."
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
– Desmond Tutu
Cargo cults illustrate that technology lent credibility to Western religions, Christianity in particular. The darker side of technology's role in the spread of Christianity is the advantage it gave in warfare.
One of the darkest days in the history of Western imperialism was November 16, 1532, when the Spanish explorer Pizarro, and a small force of just 168 soldiers, captured the Inca monarch Atahuallpa through dishonesty and guile, and then massacred over 7,000 Inca warriors, without a single Spanish death. The slaughter that day was stunning – each Spanish soldier must have hacked something like fifty Inca warriors to death with his sword. And 7,000 dead Incas doesn't tell the full story, because Atahualpa's army, which eventually fled in panic and disarray, was estimated at 80,000 Inca warriors.
Although guns played a role in the battle, the guns of that time were awkward and hard to reload, and Pizarro only had a dozen of them. Most of the military advantage was due to the Spaniards' steel swords, chain mail, and horses. An armored Spaniard on a horse with a sharp sword and steel lance was a pure killing machine, virtually invulnerable against the Incas' blunt clubs.
Pizarro's overwhelming victory is sometimes attributed to the fear and confusion that guns, horses, and a couple of horns blasting, caused among the Incas, and their surprise and fear at encountering them for the first time. But later battles with the Incas, and similar victories by Cortez against the Aztec warriors, proved that European technology, not the elements of surprise and fear, were responsible for the Spaniards' victories. Again and again, the Spaniards were victorious in massively lopsided battles. Small bands of a few dozen or a few hundred Spanish soldiers were consistently victorious against massively larger Inca and Aztec armies, even when these armies were well acquainted with the Spaniards' horses and guns.
Infectious diseases introduced [into America] with Europeans ... spread from one Indian tribe to another, far in advance of Europeans themselves, and killed an estimated 95% of the New World's Indian population.
– Jared Diamond
Cargo Cults demonstrate how technology can lend credibility to religion, and Pizarro's defeat of Atahuallpa illustrates how religion was aided by technology's contribution to military conquest. This leads us directly to the question: Why was Western technology so much superior to the rest of the world? Why did Western civilization and culture invade and dominate the rest of the world? Is there something about Western Europeans that made them superior to other races? Were they smarter, or harder working, or physically superior? Did they just get lucky? Or (some might ask) is there really a God who favored the Christians over all others? Why did the Westerners end up ahead of everyone else, and why did they end up colonizing a huge part of the world, spreading their culture, language, and religion at the expense of so many other cultures that were wiped out or severely diluted?
The title of this section, and the topics in it, are borrowed from and a tribute to Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond's book answers these questions convincingly. If you had to boil down Diamonds entire book to a simple explanation, it would be this:
Westerners got lucky!
In other words, there was nothing magical about the rise and dominance of Western culture and its spread; rather, it was nothing more than good luck with the geography, climate, biodiversity, weather, livestock and diseases, that made Western culture advance faster and farther than other cultures.
I will make an attempt, in a few pages, to summarize and explain some of the insights that Diamond lays out. This is by no means a comprehensive summary of Diamond's insights, and any mistakes in this section are my own.
Below is a summary of the main factors in Western society's good luck.
Domestic Animals. Or more accurately, domesticatable animals. We're accustomed to horses, cows, pigs, and sheep, dogs and cats, and most of us never wonder where they came from. Why didn't the Australians or Native Americans have their own domestic animals? It was just bad luck. Diamond identifies six traits that an a domestic animal cannot have; any one of these traits makes the animal unsuitable for farming.
Nasty temper. No matter how much contact it has with humans, an American buffalo will try to kill you if it can. An African zebra will do the same. A full-grown male ostrich can and will kill you with a single kick if you're not careful. No amount of breeding has helped, and these animals remain mostly non-domestic.
Panics easily. Open-plains herbivores tend to be the dinner of lions and hyenas. To survive, they've evolved a hair-trigger panic reaction, and they can run fast. How do you domesticate a gazelle that is terrified if you so much as sneeze, and then easily jumps a twenty-foot fence?
Grows slowly. Galapagos tortoises wouldn't be a good farm animal, because it would take longer than your lifetime for them to reach the age where you could eat them!
Picky eater. Panda bears only eat bamboo. They can't be raised anywhere their bamboo doesn't grow.
Won't breed in captivity. Some animal's mating rituals involve scenery or activities that they just can't do in a barn. You can't breed American Bald Eagles in captivity because their mating involves elaborate aerial displays, swoops and cartwheels, and locking talons in a freefall "wrestle" that only ends when the pair are about to hit the ground. Without this pre-mating rituals, the birds just don't get "in the mood for love."
Can't be dominated by humans. Animals like dogs already have a strong social structure, and if raised with humans will naturally accept humans as the "big dog." The "loner" animals are hard to domesticate.
In addition, domestic animals have to be the right size for working or for eating. You might be able to farm mice, but it's a lot of work to get enough mouse-meat for a meal.
When you take all of this into account, it turns out that, just by luck, almost all of the domesticatable animals happened to be in Eurasia. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens and horses are among the world's best domestic animals, and they're all from Eurasia. Africa had a few such as cattle, Central America had the llama and alpaca. North America had nothing decent to domesticate, so Native Americans had to resort to hunting the wild buffalo and deer, and Australia had a similar situation. Diamond gives an excellent and comprehensive accounting of every possible domesticatable animal in the world, and shows that the Europeans got almost all the luck.
Geography. Europeans also benefitted enormously from geographical luck: The Eurasian continent stretches across 173 degrees of longitude, nearly half way around the Northern Hemisphere, measuring roughly 12,000 kilometers east-to-west. This means that climate zones – the region where animals and crops can thrive – are huge. A horse could wander from Portugal on the Atlantic coast, to China on the Pacific coast, and find suitable weather and food the whole way. This gave Europeans a much wider ecological area to draw from for their domestic animals and crops.
By contrast, the Americas span a similar distance, but in the north-south direction. The Americas span roughly 125 degrees of latitude, from the Arctic almost to the Antarctic, yet the climate zones rarely span more than a few thousand kilometers in the east/west direction, and more often are less than 1000 kilometers. These relatively small ecological zones naturally have fewer species than the huge zones that span Eurasia. More importantly, the east/west climate zones form barriers to the north-south migration of species. For example, the Sonoran desert that spans northern Mexico and the American Southwest completely stops tropical plants and animals from crossing from Central America to North America. Many plants and animals from South and Central America could thrive in North America, but they never crossed the Sonoran desert.
Diseases. We've all heard of bird flu and swine flu, and that AIDS probably came from primates in Africa. It turns out that most deadly human diseases, such as measles, smallpox, and influenza, originate in animals and "jump" from our domestic animals to humans through close contact and chance mutation. Once again, Europeans "had all the luck." The horses, sheep, cows, chicken and sheep that the Europeans domesticated gave the Europeans lots of diseases. Plenty of Europeans died from these diseases, but more importantly, they developed immunity or resistance to them. By contrast, on continents where there were few or no domestic animals, there were also far fewer communicable diseases, and no immunity. When the disease-infested Europeans came into contact with the native people of the Americas, the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand, disease transfer was almost exclusively one way: European diseases wiped out the native populations.
Nathaniel Philbrick's excellent history, Mayflower, chronicles the journey of America's first successful European settlers (the "Pilgrims") to America, and how they established their first town. Philbrick describes the typical outcome of contact between Europeans and natives:
The biggest advantage of the [Plymouth] area was that it had already been cleared by the Indians. And yet, nowhere could they find evidence of any recent Native settlements. The Pilgrims saw the eerie vacancy of this place as a miraculous gift from God... Just three years before... there had been between one thousand and two thousand people living along these shores ... the banks of the harbor had been dotted with wigwams, each with a curling plume of wood smoke... and with fields of corn, beans and squash growing nearby. Dugout canoes ... plied the waters. ... Then, from 1616 to 1619, disease brought this centuries-old community to an end. [By] the winter of 1620, gruesome evidence of the epidemic was scattered all around the area. "[T]heir skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground...," Bradford wrote, "a very sad spectacle to behold." It was here, on the bone-whitened hills of Plymouth, that the pilgrims hoped to begin a new life.
The Pilgrims' experience was the rule rather than the exception. Everywhere Europeans went, their diseases caused staggering death rates: fifty percent, eighty percent, even ninety-nine percent of indigenous people would die.
Farmable Crops. Again, just by luck, Eurasia had almost all of the farmable crops in the world, and had a climate suitable for developing agriculture. We all learned in grammar school about the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from Egypt, through Israel and Lebanon, on to parts of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and ends with south-western Iran. The Fertile Crescent was more than just conducive to farming, it also just happened to have a number of wild grains (such as wheat) that were suitable for domestication. By bad luck, no other continent had more than a few crops suitable for farming.
In America, only a very few plants such as corn, beans and squash could be farmed. The grains in America were uniformly unsuitable – the grain was too small, and a crop produced very little usable food. American agriculture was also hindered by geography: The Americas span a huge distance north-to-south, whereas Eurasia spans a huge distance east to west. Without no extensive long-range trading between the peoples of North and South America, a crop that might be farmable in South America had little chance of crossing the tropics, then crossing the Sonoran desert, to a farmer in North America. By contrast, a crop that grows well in China can find its way across the continent to Europe, since there is a climatic zone suitable for the crop that spans the whole continent.
Another barrier to domestication of crops is that a farming society needs more than one crop to sustain it. American Indians domesticated corn and squash, but they still had to hunt and fish, and a full farming economy never developed. Again, Eurasia had all the luck: The many domesticatable plants made a variety of crops possible, which was the foundation of a full farming economy.
We can hardly do justice to Professor Diamond's 480-page Pulitzer-Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel in just a few pages of this book, but I hope I have conveyed enough of his thesis to illustrate the main point: The rise of Western culture and technology were largely due to accidental circumstances. The Christians just happened to live on the right continent.
It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Governments to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.
– Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
The story of the Israelites' return to their "promised land" is one of the traditional high points in Jewish history. Yahweh, after letting the Israelites wander through the desert for generations, and suffer all sorts of indignities and defeats at the hands of their enemies, finally brought them "home" to the land of Canaan, and miraculously felled the walls of Jericho. This land, "overflowing with milk and honey," was given as Yahweh's reward to the Jews.
But this "milk and honey" didn't spring from the ground; the land Yahweh was turning over to the Israelites already belonged to someone else, the Canaanites, who had worked hard to make it a wonderful land. There is a saying, "history is written by the victors," so we don't have the Canaanite's side of this tale. But it's a good bet they would portray the Israelites as heartless murderers. The Israelites, with Yahweh's permission, "... devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys."
Most readers (Christians and Jews) of this story unconsciously identify with the victors; after all, who likes a loser? This leads to a conqueror mentality, a belief that God is on the side of the winner. And it wasn't just in war – In most European nations, aristocracy and royalty put forth the idea that their exalted positions were a sign of God's approval. On a national level, whole countries believed the same thing: European colonial nations were successful in their imperialist expansions because God approved, and was helping them take God's words to the non-Christian nations. They wore a "mantle of Jericho," justifying their conquests with the belief that it was their duty to dominate and enlighten the less advanced people they conquered. You can't just steal your neighbor's farm and cows without a good excuse, and you can't just invade a neighboring country (or one half way around the globe) without a reason. Jericho was that reason.
A new school of thought called "post-colonial theology" takes a more balanced view of the Bible, trying to see events such as the fall of Jericho from both sides. The falling walls of Jericho were the Israelites' miracle, and the Canaanites' catastrophe. Yahweh's gift of the Promised Land to the Israelites was simple thievery to the Canaanites. The Israelites' victory was the Canaanites' genocide. The prostitute Rahab, who hid Joshua's spies, was a hero to the Israelites, but a vile traitor to the Canaanites.
This same more enlightened attitude is being applied to all aspects of our history. Pizarro's massacre of the Incas is just one example where a post-colonial attitude helps us see the conquest from both points of view. Pizarro, in addition to being a Spanish hero, is also a vile liar, a dishonest man who lured an Inca monarch into a trap with dishonorable lies, and then massacred over 7,000 Incas (including hundreds of non-combatants) in a single day, stopping only when darkness brought a halt to his crimes.
When we add the insights of Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, the story is even more clear. Pizarro was simply wrong when he claimed God was on his side. It wasn't Yahweh that sided with Western imperialism to help spread Christianity. God didn't have anything to do with it. Geographical accidents helped Western culture develop faster. The Religion Virus partnered with technology and government and thereby vastly increased its hold on human society. Pizarro was nothing more than a thief and murderer, killing for profit.
Christianity spread through sheer good luck: It happened that Jesus was born on the right continent, nothing more.