THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

Dick Pountain/20 October 2005/10:56/Idealog 135

In the IT industry we often speak of clashes between competing technologies as 'religious wars', notable examples of such unbridgeable schisms being that between Linux and Windows users; between PC and Macintosh users; between Palm and Pocket PC users; or between any pair of programming languages you care to name. Is this use of the word 'religious' merely a superficial metaphor, or is there a grain of truth in it? The implication of the term is that there's some irrational element in people's adherence to one or the other of these products, over and above any rational comparison of their respective physical specifications, and I think that is almost certainly true in most cases. People who love the Macintosh, for instance, think of themselves as being slightly different sorts of people from those who use PCs - their Mac usage  becomes a small part of what defines them as people. (Marketing folk have of course for years understood this aspect of brand loyalty and play it for all it's worth, which is a lot).

In a recent book the magnificently-moustachioed Robert Winston suggests that there might be a genetic predisposition in human beings to take a religious view of the world, connected to the D4 dopamine receptor gene that controls our feelings of well-being. The postulate is that - unlike birds or fishes whose flocking behaviour is hard-wired - we create group cohesion and cooperation through the feeling of satisfaction that can be aroused by following a shared code of conduct. This sort of argument is open to the objection (a la Dawkins) that once elements like shared codes of conduct get involved, you've left the realm of natural selection of genes and entered the realm of cultural selection of memes.  

A real religion fulfills several other roles apart from binding people together into communities of interest. It offers them an explanation for why things happen, one that's easier to live with than accepting that the universe is essential random and indifferent to our fate (even if that happens to be true). An equivalent for this role too exists in the computer world, among those folk who study fractals, Turing Machines, cellular automata and self-organising systems as ways of explaining how the world is structured. Such explanations are more scientific and closer to reality than religious explanations, but they're still only metaphors for the unimaginable ocean of boiling quarks (another metaphor, inevitably) which is all there 'really' is. And of course they can always be confuted by saying that God made them too, the way the Intelligent Design people do.   

However the most important role of a religion is as an institution for imposing a morality - that is, a code for distinguishing what's good from what's bad - and that it does this by disguising the truth is tolerable to many people if it makes them behave well toward one another. Many of the problems we currently face in the world - from Islamic Terror to Tony's bane, the Yob Culture - stem from the fact that secularism still hasn't produced a fully coherent morality, nor an equally effective way of imposing one. I'm sorry if the notion that 'moralities' exist in the plural, and that they can be constructed, offends religious readers. Religion achieves its powerful effect by claiming that there's only one true morality, and that comes from God - a clever and effective ploy for disguising the fact that every living creature has its own different and incompatible morality built into its very organism.

Seeking food, sex, and warmth, fleeing cold and danger lies at the root of every morality, every creature pursues its own version of the Good. Water drowns us but supports fish, vice versa with air. Evolution has so engraved such realities into the fundamental structure of our brains that we can't help but attach value to everything we encounter, and scientific reason is our partially successful, if impressive, attempt to filter out such value judgements. What's more, every creature's Good must necessarily be some other creature's Evil (yes, even vegetarians). It can only succeed by disrupting some other lifeform. Even plants fight for the same bit of soil and steal each others sunlight. A working religion, by inventing the fiction of God and a single unifying morality, makes people capable of sacrificing their own good from time to time in the interests of all, and it was that alone that enabled us to become civilised. And now that many of us have, like Dorothy, looked behind the curtain, we're struggling to keep the process from going into reverse.

Here too there are parallels in the world of IT. The Internet has evolved into a slimy ecosystem where the spammer's good is your and my evil (I'm presuming that my readers are all too classy to actually *be* spammers). The virus writer would appear to be that rarest of creatures, one that pursues evil for its own sake (very few animals do that as it makes little sense energetically), but I suspect that even they possess some notion of a 'good', expressed in terms like sticking it to the establishment or simply demonstrating their own cleverness to themselves and their peers. And of course we've developed a distinctive morality to help fend off such villains - applying your updates, patches and service packs, er, religiously, is the very definition of a good Net citizen.