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

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/12/15 Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com>:
>
> 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:

Super good luck for me this!

> 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.)

I don't think the mathematics would support this stance. Before
accepting this point of view, I would do the math VERY carefully,
double checking everything. This thread gives a great start on how to
proceed.

> 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.

So in this sense, Catholicism is (in biological terms) a parasite
feeding on the intelligence of the population. While not killing the
host (or decreasing the intelligence to the point of causing major
damage) it does suck some life force from it.

> 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).

That's an interesting point, but I'd like to hear more. Ah, I see
you've done that below... thanks!

> 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.

Fascinating! Really.

> 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.

But is there historical evidence that this is the kind of person that
joined the priesthood? It's a nice hypothesis, but seems like it would
need some statistical historian to ferret out the truth of the matter.
Smart kids that would not reproduce anyway join the priesthood, that's
not a bad headline, but there would have to be a lot of research
behind it because big claims require big evidence, and all that.

> 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.

Ok, so they helped their families after becoming clergy, this helped
their genes in a method similar to drone bees or ants helping their
families/genes as described in Dawkin's Selfish Gene book... Again,
this is a very nice hypothesis, is there any real data to back it up?

> 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.

Yes, very interesting.

> 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.

Do you have the numbers to back up the idea that the percentage of
eligible intellectuals going into the priesthood decreased. Also, I
wonder about the impacts of the church's propaganda machinery for
recruiting priests... if there were any such machinery (I'm assuming
there MUST have been, from basic principles) and did it apply to monks
as well as priests and/or nuns.

This is really some first rate thinking Tara! I am very happy to have
read and responded to this post! You are a very smart person with
dedication to have dug this all up. I do hope you are able to pursue
this line of reasoning to the point of supporting it with good
evidence. It would make a great Masters Thesis...

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