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Uncertainty, Religion, and Law | | | Extreme uncertainty creates intolerable anxiety, and human society has developed ways to cope with the inherent uncertainty of living on the brink of an uncertain future. These ways belong to the domains of technology, law, and religion. I use these terms in their broad senses: Technology includes all human artifacts; law, all formal and informal rules that guide social behavior; religion, all revealed knowledge of the unknown. Technology has helped us to defend ourselves against the uncertainties caused by nature; law, to defend against uncertainties in the behavior of others; religion, to accept the uncertainties we cannot defend against (pg. 146).
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< | The role of religion and law in managing uncertainty is the topic of this essay. I examine the proposition that religion and law serve as uncertainty-management mechanisms. The relationship between law, religion, and uncertainty is evident in many avenues, but perhaps the central mechanism entails the establishment of a logical narrative of which we have absolute knowledge. We might analogize to the standards for a good plot in soap operas and other narratives: “Loose ends” are seen as great weaknesses in drama, but in real life they are rampant. These aesthetic attitudes can also be explained by a desire for absolute knowledge of a social system. | >
> | These definitions are admittedly vague, but they point toward the topic of this essay: the role of religion and law in managing uncertainty. Specifically, I examine the proposition that religion and law serve as uncertainty-management mechanisms. The relationship between law, religion, and uncertainty is evident in many avenues, but perhaps the central mechanism entails the establishment of a logical narrative of which we have absolute knowledge. We might analogize to the standards for a good plot in soap operas and other narratives: “Loose ends” are seen as great weaknesses in drama, but in real life they are rampant. These aesthetic attitudes can also be explained by a desire for absolute knowledge of a social system. | | | Religion and law often serve as rationalizations for decisions, actions, or events that are of other origin. The causes of these decisions and events are not self-evident, sometimes mysterious, and other times corrupt or hypocritical. Law and religion not only legitimize such decisions, but also integrate them into a coherent cognitive framework. Telling ourselves that our life decisions result from religious epiphanies—just as telling ourselves our legal conclusions result from constitutional principles—gives us certitude in the rightness of our decisions. In these cases, religion and law serve to pacify intolerable emotions associated with uncertainty. For example, when the Supreme Court decided to give abortion constitutional protection, it was seen as a difficult and uncertain act; but once the opinion was written, it could be cited as law, given full respect as a declaration of our normative fiber. Similarly, an expectant mother’s decision whether to have an abortion is extraordinarily difficult and uncertain; but once the decision is made to keep the baby, the raw religious power of faith provides firm basis to defend that decision. | | | The hard logic of their creed required the Puritans always to doubt the evidence of their own senses but never to doubt the fundamental precepts of their religion. . . . If a persuasive argument should jar a Puritan's certitude or a clever line of reasoning confuse him, he had every right to suspect that some devilish mischief was afoot (pp. 51-52).
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< | The most infamous historical example of the Puritans’ certitude was the Salem witch trials. These trials, overseen by the devoutly Puritan judge Lord Hale, exemplify the nexus of religion, law, and certitude. | >
> | The Salem witch trials, especially, were a destructive example of uncertainty management. | | | | |
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< | Another example is the view that religion among blacks in the slave era was an uncertainty-averse coping strategy. Jacobson et al. (1990), observing the stronger emotionality and communality of black church services, conjecture that this tradition arose out of the legacy of slavery. On this view, worship services strengthened community bonds and provided emotional support for enduring the hardships and uncertainties of slave life. A contemporaneous discourse among theologians, centered at Princeton, was aimed at theological justification of slavery, using legalistic analysis of biblical texts to allay moral uncertainties about slave ownership. The propriety of slavery was a foundational pillar of the Protestant worldview, and theological arguments were wielded in its defense. Slaves were taught this same system-justifying doctrine—that it was God’s will that they be enslaved—and thereby the moral uncertainties of both master and slave were alleviated. | >
> | Another possible example is the uncertainty-reducing role of religion among blacks in the slave era. Presumably, worship services strengthened community bonds and provided emotional support for enduring the hardships and uncertainties of slave life. A contemporaneous discourse among theologians, centered at Princeton, was aimed at theological justification of slavery, using legalistic analysis of biblical texts to allay moral uncertainties about slave ownership. The propriety of slavery was a foundational pillar of the Protestant worldview, and theological arguments were wielded in its defense. Slaves were taught this same system-justifying doctrine—that it was God’s will that they be enslaved—and thereby the moral uncertainties of both master and slave were alleviated. | | | Empirical evidence from the behavioral sciences is also consistent with the view that religion provides an outlet for avoidance of uncertainty. Willer (2009) ran an experiment in which he asked test subjects to write short essays, half writing about watching television and the other half writing about death. After the essay, subjects answered a series of survey questions about their religious beliefs. Subjects in the death treatment reported significantly higher belief in the afterlife and significantly higher belief in God. Willer interprets this as evidence of motivated reasoning in religiosity, and specifically motivation by fear of death. We might also interpret the result as evidence of emotional uncertainty associated with death, however. Supporting this latter interpretation is the study reported in vas den Bos et al. (2006), which found that low tolerance for uncertainty was associated with angrier responses to antireligious arguments by religious test subjects. Being primed for uncertainty and being more religious were associated with more intensely emotional responses. | | | Posner (2003) proposes that Protestantism’s “encouraging people to think for themselves may well have promoted economic progress at the same time that resources were being shifted from the religious to the commercial sector” (pg. 173). This comment is an allusion to Weber's classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930). Weber’s argument had many working parts, but what is important for the present essay is whether certain forms of religious belief—like colonial Protestantism—spurred economic growth by alleviating uncertainty aversion. As mentioned above, low uncertainty-aversion is the defining quality of the entrepreneur (Licht, 2007). Huang’s (2008) aforementioned study, which related low uncertainty aversion with success in innovative industries, also found that the country’s dominant religion (Protestant or Catholic) explained a significant chunk of the variance in economic productivity. This evidence suggests that, apart from alleviating feelings of emotional uncertainty, religious beliefs might actually be able to mitigate aversion to uncertainty. | |
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> | But using the Calvinists as an example of this process requires oversimplification of historical events. Calvinists had a peculiar stance toward uncertainty and uncertainty management. The doctrine of predestination was adamant: One's good works in life had no bearing on one's salvation. Unlike most other religions, Calvinism explicitly precluded its adherents from reducing uncertainty about the afterlife by engaging in a quid pro quo with God. So notwithstanding the points noted in the previous paragraph, it is nonetheless true that belief in Calvinism was defined by uncertainty. The Protestant ethic might have some relationship to success in markets, but the role of uncertainty aversion in that process is not understood. | | | 4. Law
A topic that has received much theoretical investigation but less empirical investigation is the relationship of law to uncertainty management. This section surveys some of the existing literature on that relationship, which analyzes three important ways that law relates to uncertainty. First, as indicated by Hofstede (2001), law serves to reduce uncertainty in social environments by constraining the behavior of other agents. Second, the effectiveness of law in constraining behavior can be undermined by widespread uncertainty in its legitimacy. This legitimacy rests, in part, on the ability of courts to appear impartial. But judges themselves, as emphasized by Posner (2008), face “radical uncertainty” when making decisions, both in terms of cognitive uncertainty about factual evidence and emotional uncertainty about the prudence of their substantive judgments. The efforts by judges and other legal actors to manage these uncertainties explains much of the otherwise puzzling qualities of the modern legal system. | | | 5. Conclusion | |
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< | The many connections between uncertainty, religion, and law described in the previous sections justify further empirical investigation of the subject. In this section, I propose a relatively simple economics experiment that takes a small step toward reducing the scientific uncertainty in this subject area. The experiment is founded in the observation that the existing empirical work on uncertainty and uncertainty management tests the effects of priming emotional uncertainty on subjects who perform a task and then fill out a questionnaire (e.g., van den Bos, 2009). The experimental data consist of the answers to the questionnaires. What hasn’t been done—and which moves us into the area of experimental economics—is to test the effects of salient social priming on uncertainty aversion, as measured in an Ellsberg task (Ellsberg, 1961). My two- fold hypothesis, motivated by the arguments made in the previous sections, is that religious and legalist priming can reduce observed uncertainty aversion in the task. | >
> | The cursory inquiry undertaken in the previous sections suffices to show an important psychological and social relation between uncertainty, religion, and law. Granted, it is premature to attempt a broader theoretical subsumption of these ostensibly disparate ideas, but I believe that the present discussion has suggested future directions. Further inquiry might be guided by the perspective that religion and law are not independent social forces, but rather subsets of a broader range of human activities. All human activities, including religion and law, are characterized to various degrees by uncertainty management. On this view, we cannot dichotomize human works into those that manage uncertainty and those that do not; rather, we can view all modes of understanding the world, and all human rhetorical devices, as means to reduce uncertainty in some way. It is no surprise, then, that religion and law involve uncertainty management, as all human works involve uncertainty management. Hofstede's (2001) observation that technology is used to reduce uncertainty accords with this perspective. What has been shown by the present essay's focus is that religion and law are especially powerful institutions in human society, and therefore the uncertainty-management strategies associated with religion and law are also some of the most important. Correspondingly, many of our metaphors for managing uncertainty are drawn from those domains.
Accordingly, I believe that the mode of inquiry taken in this essay could be fruitfully applied to other social domains. The physician-patient relationship, for example, has a significant uncertainty-managing component. Diagnosis of an ailment, for example, serves to reduce uncertainty in both doctor and patient about that ailment. In cases of uncertain etiology, that reduction involves a feeling of control over the ailment. In other cases, it allays feelings of guilt, as when an ADHD diagnosis relieves parents of responsibility for their child's misbehavior.
More generally, the previous sections illustrate the methodological rift between science and history. History's role is contingency; science's role is consistency. Scientists seek ever to simplify through reductionism; historians doggedly refuse to reduce complexity. An example of this is the social-scientific concept of ritual used earlier, which is not only underspecified but also oversimplified. These simplified models are useful, and they can be reliable. But we lose much of the character of ritual when we treat it as a mutually exclusive property, with some human activities being ritual and all others being not-ritual. Rituality has multiple describable components that deserve scrutiny in all of their complexity; this is the kind of inquiry that scientists reject but historians embrace. Whereas the scientist must begin with simple building blocks far removed from the complexity of human experience, historians take what is known about the past and what is known about the science of causality to construct a plausible narrative of historical events. Notwithstanding their different philosophies and methods, both science and history are themselves methods of uncertainty management. They both seek to give plausible explanations of a fundamentally uncertain world. Ritual, for example, is poorly understood, and actually rather mysterious. What is ritual? What does ritual do? Those questions might reveal important truths about human communication, and they can be productively investigated by both scientists and historians.
Field study will be an important component of both scientific and historical research projects into religion and law. We can say with confidence that uncertainty management is lurking in the churches and the courts, but casual theorizing based on current historical and scientific knowledge will only take us so far. We must go into the churches, go into the courts, observe the priests and judges, speak with the adherents and clients. The present essay might be seen as a call for an anthropology of uncertainty management. The churches and the courts will be prominent objects of this research enterprise.
More modestly, we can begin empirical investigation through laboratory experimentation with human subjects. In the subsequent paragraphs, I describe a simple economics experiment that takes a small step toward reducing the scientific uncertainty in this subject area. The experiment is founded in the observation that the existing empirical work on uncertainty and uncertainty management tests the effects of priming emotional uncertainty on subjects who perform a task and then fill out a questionnaire (e.g., van den Bos, 2009). The experimental data consist of the answers to the questionnaires. What hasn’t been done—and which moves us into the area of experimental economics—is to test the effects of salient social priming on uncertainty aversion, as measured in an Ellsberg task (Ellsberg, 1961). My two- fold hypothesis, motivated by the arguments made in the previous sections, is that religious and legalist priming can reduce observed uncertainty aversion in the task. | | | The Ellsberg task presents the test subject with two jars full of blue and green marbles. One jar, clearly labeled, has five blue marbles and five green marbles. The other jar also has ten marbles in it, but the proportion of blue and green marbles is unknown to the subject. The subject chooses a jar and picks out one marble. If blue, he wins $10; if green, $0. Under standard decision theory, the two jars have the same expected value and the test subject should be indifferent between them. Many experiments have shown, however, that subjects choose the jar with known color proportions about 75 percent of the time. |
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