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Humans often make their greatest exertions and sacrifices, including killing or dying for ill or good, not just to preserve their own lives or kin and kith but for an idea—the abstract conception they form of themselves, of “who I am” and “who we are.” This is the “the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only” of which Hobbes wrote in Leviathan. At least since the rise of chiefdoms and state-level societies, religion has been the locus of this privilege and power of absurdity. For Hobbes, as for countless other religious and nonreligious thinkers, from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Galileo to A. J. Ayer, the “incomprehensible” nature of core religious beliefs, such as a sentient but bodiless deity, renders them immune to empirical or logical verification or falsification. Religious consensus over values does not primarily involve fact checking or reasoned argument but ensues from ritual communion and emotional bonding whose symbolic signposts channel and coordinate cognitions and emotions toward preparedness for action. Costly commitment to idiosyncratic and apparently absurd beliefs and associated values, cued by sartorial and corporeal markers (e.g., veils, beards, and especially more indelible marks, such as the zabiba on the forehead of pious Muslims generated by repeated friction with the prayer mat), can deepen trust by identifying cooperators while galvanizing group solidarity for common defense. Thus, while the term “sacred values” intuitively denotes religious belief, in what follows, sacred values refer to any preferences regarding objects, beliefs, or practices that people treat as both incompatible or nonfungible with profane issues or economic goods, as when land or law becomes holy or hallowed and as inseparable from people’s conception of “self” and of “who we are.” This includes the “secularized sacred,” as, for example, in political notions of “human rights” or in the transcendent ideological “-isms” that have dominated political life ever since the Enlightenment’s secularization of the universal religious mission to redeem and save “humanity” through political revolution (liberalism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, etc.; Gray. Our previous research indicates that when people act in defense of sacred values, they act in ways that cannot be reliably predicted by assessing material risks and rewards. Our empirical studies in multiple cultures and distressed zones across the world indicate that sincere attachment to sacred values entails: |
