The Science of Discworld II

to you, and keep proving it every day that we live, that I am committed at that level.’ Overcommitment beats the bean-counters hands down. While they’re trying to compare 142 beans with 143, overcommitment has wiped the floor with them.
    Nesse suggests that such strategies have had a decisive effect in shaping our extelligence (though he doesn’t use that word):
    Commitment strategies give rise to complexities that may be a selective force that has shaped human intelligence. This is why human psychology and relationships are so hard to fathom. Perhaps a better understanding of the deep roots of commitment will illuminate the relationships between reason and emotion, and biology and belief.
    Or, to put it another way: perhaps that’s what gave us an edge over the Neanderthals. Though it would be difficult to find a scientific test for such a suggestion.
    When humans overcommit in this manner, we call it ‘love’. Thereis far more to love than the simple scenario just outlined, of course, but one feature is common to both: love counts not the cost. It doesn’t care about who gets the most beans. 3 And by refusing to play the bean-counters’ game, it wins outright. Which is a very religious, spiritual and uplifting message. And sound evolutionary sense. What more could we ask?
    Quite a bit, actually, because now it all starts to get nasty. The reasons, however, are admirable. Every culture needs its own Make-a-Human kit, to build into the next generation the kind of mind that will keep the culture going – and, recursively, ensure that the next generation does the same for the one that comes after that. Rituals fit very readily into such a kit, because it is easy to distinguish Us from Them by the rituals that We follow but They don’t. 4 It is also an excellent test of a child’s willingness to obey cultural norms by insisting that they carry out some perfectly ordinary task in an unnecessarily prescribed and elaborate manner.
    Now, however, the priesthood has got its ideological toe in the cultural doorway. Rituals need someone to organise them, and to elaborate them. Every bureaucracy builds itself an empire by creating unnecessary tasks and then finding people to carry them out. Acrucial task here is to ensure that members of the tribe or village or nation really do obey the norms and carry out the rituals. There has to be some sanction to make sure that they do, even if they’re free-thinking types who’d rather not. Because everything is founded on an ontically dumped concept, reference to reality has to be replaced by belief. The less testable a human belief is, the more strongly we tend to hold on to it. Deep down we recognise that although not being testable means that disbelievers can’t prove we’re wrong, it also means that we can’t prove we’re right. Since we know that we are, that sets up a tremendous tension.
    Now the atrocities begin. Religion slides over the edge of sanity, and the result is horrors like the Spanish Inquisition. Think about it for a moment. The priesthood of a religion whose central tenet was universal love and brotherhood systematically inflicted appalling tortures, sick and disgusting things, on innocent people who merely happened to disagree about minor items of belief. This is a massive contradiction and it demands explanation. Were the Inquisitors evil people who knowingly did evil things?
    Small Gods , one of the most profound and philosophical of the Discworld novels, examines the role of belief in religions, and Discworld undergoes its own version of the Spanish Inquisition. One twist is that on Discworld, there is no lack of gods; however, few of them have any great significance:
    There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshipped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don’t demand much in the way of miracles.
    They are the small gods, the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.
    Because what they lack is belief .
    Small Gods is the story of one rather larger god, the Great God Om, who manifests himself to a novice monk called Brutha, in the Citadel at the heart of the city of Kom in the lands between the deserts ofKlatch and the jungles of Howondaland.
    Brutha’s attitude to religion