Religious Virulence
Someone with virulent guests. Photo (cc) Assbach
My opinions on how religion works in society vary. If there is one constant it’s that they’re invariably too simplistic. Recently I’ve listened to an read a few things that are changing my opinion again. The two I’ll bring up today are a follow-up to Is Religion a Virus? from early last year.
Briefly, I was persuaded by an idea put forward by Ben Cullen in Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion, that vertically transmitted infections tend towards less virulence because their own survival is bound to the success of their host. If you accept the virus model of religion (and I’m not sure I do), then this makes sense. No one is inherently religious, so it would pay for the religion to enable survival long enough to pass along the virus and better still to boost fertility.
Or so I thought. Last week’s episode of MicrobiologyBytes has shown up my thinking as a bit weak with an episode Do viruses evolve to protect their hosts? It seems that recent research shows that virulence and fitness are not necessarily related. I’ll need to read round, because I still suspect that vertical transmission requires lower virulence, but I haven’t really been thinking of what it means to be fit.
From another direction Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology has brought up another interesting paper in his post You Can’t Grok Its Multiplicity. He refers to a paper (visit his site for details) which tackles Norse religion. The key quote here is:
The concept of an Old Norse religion (as it has been used by e.g. Karl Hauck and Lotte Hedeager) is useless. Such a non-codified, orally performed and transmitted body of mythology and liturgy cannot be coherent across time nor space. So all statements about Old Norse religion must be qualified with two questions: Where? When? And when things don’t add up, this is only to be expected.
This is a very important point because, even if religion is vertically transmitted, mutations occur. No-one can sensibly argue any modern variant of Christianity is the same as the Christianity of the people who lived in the 1st Century Roman Empire. There was no Bible, no codification and most importantly no tradition.
This lack of tradition meant that Christianity spread horizontally like a lot of other Oriental cults of the time. It has changed its method of transmission, but never entirely. The process of evangelising is horizontal transmission and the idea doesn’t have to be beneficial, just capable of infecting new hosts. This can be applied to most religions. There are exceptions like Druze and the Yazidi, but most religions have an equivalent evangelism which seeks fresh converts.
In this light there’s no reason to expect religions to be inherently benign. Even benign religions could be sources for virulent mutations. It’s hard to think of a vicious Jain, but perhaps we’re just waiting for the first one do take an accountant’s approach to cruelty and decided a harrassment of a non-believer here is justified by the lack of killings over there. It would also indicate that there’s no selective pressure for sects that prioritise conversion to become less virulent.
I’m not sure yet if this has a serious implication for ancient religion. It might. I don’t think the principle of religious conversion was a major factor in the ancient world. Religion was a civic practice so the gods you sacrificed to openly acknowleged to be dependent on where you were. In ancient Greece if you were a foreigner in a city you explicitly were not allow to sacrifice to the local gods, because that would be making a political statement that you belonged there. Panhellenic sanctuaries were the exception rather than the rule. Even somewhere like Delphi you would employ a local as a proxenos to make the sacrifice for you.
At the same time there are records of threats perceived by cults. The rituals of one of the more interesting ones was recorded by Livy.
At first these were divulged to only a few; then they began to spread amongst both men and women, and the attractions of wine and feasting increased the number of his followers. When they were heated with wine and the nightly commingling of men and women, those of tender age with their seniors, had extinguished all sense of modesty, debaucheries of every kind commenced; each had pleasures at hand to satisfy the lust he was most prone to.
A History of Rome 39.8
So I may be wrong about that too and perhaps should be thinking about how religions were policed.
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