Jul 23 2009
The Grooming of Gods
Envision a person praying complimentary words or singing praise to their god. “God, you are the greatest and I love you.” From a psychological perspective one might ask, What are they doing? Is there a naturalistic explanation for this type of behavior? What are the evolutionary roots, if any?
Some behaviors we are so accustomed to they seem “natural.” They need no explanation, they just are. Consider the human smile. A smile is just a smile, right? Yes and no. Yes, smiling is an integral part of human nature. But an evolutionary perspective will cause us to wonder from what more rudimentary form the behavior originated. In the case of a smile it is likely the mammalian fear grimace, which shows the teeth, served as the lump of clay from which the smile was shaped. Over generations a flash of the teeth came to signify a friendly acknowledgment. Interim stages may have communicated “I am slightly afraid of you, so don’t worry, I will not attack or attempt to dominate you.” Perhaps. We do see smiles and smile-like gestures in other species and the social situations they are used in. So speculations about the origin of the human smile are built upon something, rather than being simply assumed or accepted as immaculately human and beyond understanding.
As for friendly prayer and praise to a god, I have ideas where this type of behavior originated. These ideas are built upon an understanding of primate behavior. Before sharing more specific details, I offer this teaser: through prayer and praise human beings engage in a verbal grooming of their invisible alpha.
First, some groundwork. There is self-grooming, autogrooming, and there is the grooming of others, or social grooming. Primatologists refer to this as allogrooming or allopreening, depending on the species.(1) A great many primates and terrestrial mammals engage in this form of behavior.(2) From the house cat licking another cat’s head, to a rhesus monkey fingering through the shoulder fur of another monkey. Yet it isn’t all about cleanliness. Not nearly. In her book, The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes, Barbara King writes,
“The energy and persistence that underlie these various encounters attest to the fact that grooming is a way of creating, maintaining, and repairing social bonds among the African great apes.”(3) Grooming brings important social consequences.
Chimpanzees spend a lot of time grooming. A lot. In a sense, this activity doesn’t make sense. Wild chimps have no fleas. Grooming consists of picking off bits of skin, burrs, plant seeds, assorted detritus, as well as the occasional tick.(4) In purely physical terms this activity could be considered a colossal waste of time. So frequent and prolonged sessions of riffling through fur, so pathetically few bits of dirt and parasites removed. Why do it? In a large part: social benefits.
Touch. It is such a powerful sense and stimuli. Touch can be arousing and comforting. In psychology we often use the phrase “contact comfort.” When anxious or fearful, cling to mom. Or a mom surrogate. Jane Goodall noticed that even adult chimps are comforted by touch. In the wake of a chimp having been threatened by a dominant, it may “scream and make submissive gestures until the aggressor calms him with touch.”(5)
Have you ever witnessed an unfamiliar human child or even adult sobbing in distress? Did you experience the urge to comfort the person? We humans tend to reach out with kind words and perhaps a pat on the back, a squeeze of the shoulder. To strangers even! The impulse is that strong.
“But man’s tendency to stroke (as reassurance to pet animals, for example) or his propensity for enjoying skin massage may derive from his innate tendency to allogroom or to be allogroomed, as practiced far back in his evolutionary history.”(6)
Often, however, the reach extends in the other direction. Those frightened by one of their kind will seek reassurance for the source of their apprehension.
“A frightened subordinate may approach a superior after an agonistic incident, then reach out and groom him (or her). Often this is merely a few movements, a ‘token’ that has become incorporated into the repertoire of submissive gestures already described (and from which, most probably, some forms of reassurance touching have derived).”(7)
How far from the evolutionary tree have the archetypal Adam and Eve fallen? Not far. Yes, we are primates.
Touching brings good feelings to both the toucher and the touchee. Pets are popular in part because stroking them brings good feelings to the pet-owner. And the pets seem to like it, too.
Grooming clearly feels good to both the individual doing the grooming and the individual being groomed. This is true for chimpanzees.(8) And it is likely true for humans as well. But what does all of this have to do with religion, the Bible, and belief in gods?
Briefly and tangentially, you will find in the Bible tell-tale signs of our primate nature. These extend, in a somewhat masked form, even into the supposedly “spiritual” tales. Consider the role physical contact — touching — plays in these more mundane verses from Genesis:
As soon as Laban heard the news about Jacob, his sister’s son, he hurried to meet him. He embraced him and kissed him. (29:13)
When the time drew near for Israel to die, he called for his son Joseph and said to him, “If I have found favor in your eyes, put your hand under my thigh and promise that you will show me kindness and faithfulness. (47:29)
But you can’t touch a god. So how do humans bridge the gap to the supernatural? We are also a hyper-vocal species. And that is how we groom gods, the imagined, invisible alpha of our kind. With our voices. Stay tuned to read how physical grooming has transubstantiated over time into verbal grooming behaviors such as offering praise.
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(1) Sparks, J., “Allogrooming in Primates: a Review,” in Morris, D. (ed.) Primate Ethology, Aldine, Chicago, 1967, p. 148
(2) McCrew, W. C., The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 133
(3) King, Barbara, The Dynamic Dance: Nonvocal Communication in African Great Apes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, p.164
(4) Goodall, J., My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees, National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., 1967.
(5) Goodall, J., 1967, p.138.
(6) Sparks, J., 1967, p. 170
(7) Goodall, J. The Chimpanzees of the Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986, p. 400
(8) de Waal, F. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are, New York, Riverhead Books, 2005, p. 149
