[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Tara Maya]

2011/12/13 John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com>
It has been a place of great intellectual creativity, yes...  But I have always thought of Italy as being a people with a love/hate relationship with their Church.  And so Italians are not necessarily the most truly observant of Catholics.

I've been working on a research paper about the sociobiological impact of  celibacy, actually. There are several rival explanations:

1. The number of actual celibates was so small as to have no real impact. (To my surprise, when I brought the topic up with David Buss at a conference, this was his stance.)

2. Celibacy could represent the triumphal parasitism of a meme (religion) which succeeded in co-opting the most intelligent members of a community to the biological detriment of the community but to the benefit of the religion, which therefore continued to spread.

3. Celibacy was actually biologically beneficial at a certain point in time, and then became less so (at which point, it also became less common).

I believe either (2) or (3) is probably correct. The list has already discussed the evidence for (2) [including comparison with rabbis in geographically close community], so I'll share the evidence for (3).

During a certain period of human history, celibacy became very popular, apparently independently in several very different civilizations. Before the Catholics, there were other groups that had monks, and there were also Buddhist monks, Jain monks, and other kinds of less structured celibate and hermit traditions around the world. There are certain things these monk/hermit traditions had in common, but I'll focus on the Catholic monks during the Dark Ages, since I've done more research on them. 

Their ranks were usually made up of younger sons of the nobility or very smart sons from the middle or even lower classes. In a period when class divisions were very strong, there were basically only two kinds of class mobility: the military or the church. The path of warlord during the dark ages no doubt fostered a certain kind of cunning, but not literacy or numeracy or the use of cutlery. It basically favored brawn over brain. There is no question that warlords fathered lots of kids, and so did the landholders who inherited titles and wealth, even if they weren't as strong or cunning. Those two groups of guys did well.

Now imagine some scrawny, yet brainy peasant who is smart enough to read, but not brawny enough to bash heads. So he won't be able to rise above his station through war. And you have another kid, perhaps not scrawny, but the third or forth born son of nobility, who is therefore not likely to inherit any land or gold. What these two boys have in common is that neither was likely to get married. Possibly not even laid. They really had nothing to lose, evolutionarily speaking, by joining together as celibate monks and investing a lot of time in learning to read and write and giving sermons to the warlords and nobles about what bastards they were, and the best way to get in good with God would be to give us, er, I mean the church, some of that gold you plundered.

The church was extremely rich and powerful in the dark ages, before merchants or even princes could really compete with them. What is interesting is that if you study the families of famous clergy, especially the higher up, is that you realize whole families became very, very rich by having successive generations of second or third sons rise to power in the Church hierarchy. New noble families rose up based on the power base created by clergymen. 

The clergy may have used their wealth and power to be hypocrites and foster illegitimate children. That definitely happened, and even Popes had offspring. But possibly even without that, it might have made evolutionary sense for families to invest younger sons in the Church because of kin selection (also known as nepotism). It your success means that you have more surviving nephews, nieces and cousins, it might be worth it to have no children.

Now, what I suspect is that between the High Middle Ages and the Reformation, this path no longer paid off as well, and that's why smart younger sons began to go into trade rather than take vows, and why hypocritical behavior may have increased even in those who were forced into the clergy. Growing dissastisfaction with a situation which was no longer a net gain to families may have contributed to the Reformation. 


Tara Maya
The Unfinished Song: Initiate 
The Unfinished Song: Taboo
The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice 


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