I boken Darwin's Cathedral, där DS Wilson försöker förklara hur religion fungerar utifrån ett evolutionärt perspektiv, använder han detta begreppspar, men skriver först om Émile Durkheims begrepp "secular utility":
DS Wilson skrev:Since religious belief is such a poor representation of the natural world, its "secular utility" must reside elsewhere. Durkheim proposed that religion functions as an organizer of social life, both by defining groups and by prescribing the behaviors of its members. For Durkheim, the essence of religion was a distinction between the sacred and the profane: "A religion is unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unites into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them"
Alltså, eftersom religiösa verklighetsuppfattningar är dåliga faktiska verklighetsbeskrivningar så måste deras nytta (givet att de har en) ligga någon annanstans. Denna nytta menar Wilson ligger i dess förmåga att organisera folk och öka folks motivation att agera och förenkla beslutsfattandet. Notera att Wilson använder Durkheims definition av religion, som inte innehåller övernaturliga väsen (men inte exkluderar dem heller), utan snarare uppfattningar och praktiker kopplade till heliga saker. Det är gemenskapen runt det som ses som heligt och moraliskt som är kärnan.
Här är Wilsons skäl till att vad som är praktiskt med falska verklighetsbeskrivningar:
[3] Wilson vet att detta inte stämmer. Det är bara ett exempel.DS Wilson skrev:Ask a person to do something and the most likely response will be "Why?" An adaptive belief system cannot simply provide a list of behaviors but must also justify them. It might seem that the justification could be factual and straightforward: "Do this because it is good for you." However, this approach is unlikely to succeed by itself for a number of reasons. First, it works best when the consequences of the behavior are well known: "Eat your spinach because it is high in iron and will make you healty."[3] Often the consequences of behaviours are not well known, and the most obvious short-term consequences (the bitter taste of spinach) can lead to a different conclusion than the more subtle long-term consequences (the health effects). An adaptive belief system must cope with ignorance in its justification of behaviors.
Second, a belief system that is adaptive at the group level must cope with the problem of cheating, which benefits some individuals at the expense of others within the group. Cheating is genuinely beneficial for the cheater (when he or she gets away with it), and therefore cannot be argued against on the basis of personal benefit. The same point can be made in terms of the "veil of ignorance" that Rawls (1971) used to explain the concept of justice. Ask self-interested people to design a society, subject to the constraints that they will be placed at random within the society, and they will design a just society. However, once placed within the society, they are subject to a different set of constraints and may well want to destroy what they previously created. This problem, which lies at the heart of multilevel selection theory, makes it difficult to justify the behaviors that constitute an adaptive group in terms of personal benefit.
Third, an adaptive belief system must be economical. The beliefs that justify the behaviors must be easily learned and employed in the real world. A fictional belief system that is user-friendly and that motivates an adaptive suite of behaviors will surpass a realistic belief system that requires a Ph.D. to understand and that leads to a paralysis of indecision.
Fourth, a fictional belief system can be more motivating than a realistic belief system. Imagine two individuals competing for a common resource. Even though the facts of this situation are easy to comprehend, regarding one's enemy as inhuman can be more motivating than regarding one's enemy as just like oneself.
Fifth, a fictional belief system can perform the same functions as externally imposed rewards and punishments, often at a much lower cost. For example, the usual means of raising money to serve the common good is in the form of taxes. Unfortunately, individuals who avoid paying taxes without punishment are always better off in material terms than solid citizens within the same group. Cheating can be prevented by punishment, but implementing a system for detecting and punishing cheaters can itself be costly. Another solution is to manipulate the cost of cheating in the mind of the average citizen. Groups governed by belief systems that internalize social control can be much more successful than groups that must rely on external forms of social control.
For all of these (and probably other) reasons, we can expect many belief systems to be massively fictional in their portrayal of the world (Wilson 1990, 1995), As I discussed in chapter 1, their adaptedness must be judged by the behaviors they motivate, not by their factual correspondence to reality.
Det finns alltså adaptiva och nyttiga fördelar med falska verklighetsbeskrivningar. T.ex. är det lättare att hantera komplexitet i verkligheten genom att reducera den till två tydliga alternativ som ont och gott. Men det finns också nytta med sanna verklighetsbeskrivningar, som var maten finns. Det finns alltså en trade-off mellan dessa:
Om detta stämmer kan det förklara varför det är svårt att övertyga någon med falska men nyttiga verklighetsuppfattningar om hur det egentligen står till. Personen kommer förlora sin nytta och få en opraktisk och onyttig men sann verklighetsuppfattning. Lite som att jag skulle ta din mat som du just tänkt äta under tiden som jag berättar i detalj vad den består av, eller hur matsmältningen går till.DS Wilson skrev:It is true that many religious beliefs are false as literal descriptions of the real world, but this merely forces us to recognize two different forms of realism; a factual realism based on literal correspondance and a practical realism based on behavioral adaptedness.
[...]
If there is a trade-off between the two forms of realism, such that our beliefs can become more adaptive only by becoming factually less true, then factual realism will be the loser every time (Wilson 1990).
[...]
The study of evolution is largely the study of trade-offs. Becoming better in some respects requires becoming worse in others, which in part explains why life consists of a diversity of forms rather than one all-purpose species. The proper and intellectually respectful way to approach factual and practical realism is as a trade-off. Factual knowledge of one's physical and social environment is useful for many purposes. All people (including the most "primitive") have this kind of knowledge and can express it in at least some contexts [...] However, it appears that factual knowledge is not always sufficient by itself to motivate adaptive behavior. At times a symbolic belief system that departs from factual reality fares better. In addition, the effectiveness of some symbolic systems evidently requires believing that they are factually correct. Constructing a symbolic system designed to motivate action is a substantially different cognitive task than gaining accurate factual knowledge of one's physical and social environment. Somehow the human mind must do both, despite the fact that they partially interfere with each other.
I sin senaste bok Evolution for Everyone skriver Wilson mer om detta, och ironin i att på ett religiöst eller ideologiskt sätt skildra en värld utan trade-offs för att på så sätt förenkla beslutsfattandet:
DS Wilson skrev:The real world is full of complicated trade-offs, conflicts of interest, and win-lose situations. In principle, a belief system could score high on factual realism by representing all of these complexities and also score high on practical realism by showing how to deal with them. In practice, such a belief system would probably require too much time, energy, and mental resources for most people and societies to operate. Religious belief systems are more user-friendly. They reduce the complexity of the real world to motivate a suite of behaviors that are adaptive in the real world. Ironically, the reason that trade-offs are absent from religious belief systems is because of a trade-off between maximizing factual and practical realism at the same time.
Wilson ger många exempel på detta fenomen, bl.a. Chewongfolket på Malackahalvön som tror på en övernaturlig kraft som drabbar de som inte delar sin insamlade eller infångade mat med alla som är hungriga. När de som brutit mot regeln senare skadar sig sägs det vara en bestraffning för regelbrytandet via de övernaturliga krafterna. Den övernaturliga förklaringen är alltså ett sätt att påverka människors beteende genom en återkopplande bestraffning. Skulle man påpeka att krafterna inte finns så skulle man också (in)direkt riskera upplösa reglerna för matdelning som skulle ha stora konsekvenser för både gruppen som helhet och individerna.
Ett annat intressant exempel kommer senare i en annan tråd.
