What Makes Religion a Force for Good or Evil?

By Terrence McNally and Robert Wright, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2009.

With a non-zero-sum game, however, there is some degree of correlation in your fortunes. Playing tennis doubles, you're in a completely non-zero-sum relationship with the person on your side of the net, because every point is either good for both of you or bad for both of you.

In the real world, you seldom find either extreme. You find a lot of positive correlations in fortune, though you rarely find a completely positive correlation. For example, the global economy went downhill, and people are suffering all over the world. Globalizing the economy puts people in a non-zero-sum situation, because to some extent their fortunes are correlated.

Economics per se tends to be non-zero-sum, because -- though they may turn out to be wrong, -- both people in an economic exchange are under the impression that they gain. Buying something in a store, you'd rather have the merchandise than the money you're handing over; the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise.

TM: But your negotiation can be zero-sum.

RW: Right. If you're at a car dealer, and you've decided any price under $20,000 works for you, while the car dealer knows he or she can make money at anything over $19,000, then the bargaining takes place between 19 and 20. That's a totally zero-sum game.

TM: So the purchase of the car is non-zero-sum, but the negotiation between buyer and seller is zero-sum.

RW: There's a zero-sum range of bargaining, but if the deal falls apart, you both lose. That's the interesting tension: You both act as if you're willing to bail, though neither of you wants it to fall apart.

Usually in life there's a combination of zero-sum and non-zero-sum dynamics. You're friends with others because you have some commonality of interests.

TM: And you've both decided that there's mutual gain.

RW: The emotions that undergird friendship evolved by natural selection because they were conducive to non-zero-sum interaction. If you're talking with someone you don't know very well, but you find you have a shared interest -- baseball, a political cause -- you'll warm up to them without necessarily calculating that collaboration will be in your interest.

This is what underlies the dynamic I'm talking about with religions. When you think people are not a threat, you tend to judge their religion more tolerantly. Hamas may say they'll never accept the existence of Israel. That may be their stated position, but human nature makes people's affiliations and relationships more malleable than that.

Ultimately, this is based on a somewhat cynical view of human nature: that people don't actually have very fixed principles. If it's in their interest to change their view on certain things, they tend to do it. So the key is to make it in the interests of people to live in peace. Sometimes the way to lead people to moral truth is to make it in their interest.

TM: Let's look at Hamas and Hezbollah. Hezbollah has been allowed to actually govern in Lebanon, and it has moderated their politics. When Hamas won the Palestinian election, I thought that if they had to fix potholes and meet budgets, they were more likely to moderate. But the U.S., Israel and others wouldn't allow them to govern. That's an opportunity lost, do you agree?

RW: To show you how naive I am, when Hamas won the election, I assumed surely we can't say we were just kidding, you don't get to govern. But that's exactly what we did.

TM: Engagement is a non-zero-sum game.

RW: Economic engagement is. That's why blockading Gaza until the religious extremists moderate their views puts the cart before the horse. You moderate people's views by getting them in a non-zero-sum relationship. So much was backwards during the Bush years.

During the recent war on Hamas in Gaza, people asked why Hezbollah wasn't jumping in. Well for one thing, they were legitimate political actors in Lebanon, and they had an interest in behaving in a more responsible fashion.

TM: So with religions over time, when they engage in non-zero-sum games, they're likely to move toward common interests.

RW: I argue that monotheism doesn't emerge in Israel until the Babylonian exile in the mid-first millennium BCE, later than a lot of believing Christians and Jews would have it.

And I think what drove Israel to monotheism was a very zero-sum view of the world. They were a small nation in a bad neighborhood, and they got pushed around a lot, especially by the great powers -- Egypt and Syria and so on.

Prophets who argued before the exile that Jews should only worship Yahweh were saying don't worship the gods of other nations. They were nationalists and had a very negative view of interacting with other nations. And there was some basis for their belief, because things hadn't worked out well for Israel.

See more stories tagged with: religion, christianity, evolution of god, robert wright

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org). Visit his Web site,A World That Just Might Work, for podcasts of all interviews, and more.

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