God™: an ageing product outperforms expectations

From The Economist

God gets mixed reviews on Amazon. This is perhaps surprising. His marketing campaign (now in its third millennium) has been strong. His slogans (“God is Great!”) are positive. And indeed many shoppers effuse. “Wonderful!” reads one five-star review beneath His best-known work, the Bible. “Beautiful,” says another. “Amen,” adds another satisfied customer.

Other reviewers are critical. One, after giving the Bible just a single star, observes bluntly, if rather blasphemously, that it is a “boring read”. Another review complains: “The plot is not cohesive.” A third disgruntled reader argues that there are “too many characters” and that the main protagonist is a bit full of himself.

If it feels surprising that God is reviewed on Amazon, it should not. He may have made heaven and earth, but He also makes an awful lot of money, as Paul Seabright, a British economist and professor at the University of Toulouse in France, points out in a new book.

Hard facts on the economics of the Almighty are hard to come by. But the Mormon church is reportedly one of the largest private landowners in America. One study found that in 2016 American faith-based organisations (non-profits with a religious bent) had revenues of $378bn. This was more than the revenues of Apple and Microsoft combined. Better yet, churches usually pay no tax. God may be great; His full-year results are greater.

Secularists may smirk at religion as silly, but it deserves proper analysis. “The Divine Economy” looks at how religions attract followers, money and power and argues that they are businesses—and should be analysed as such.

Professor Seabright calls religions “platforms”, businesses that “facilitate relationships”. (Other economists refer to religions as “clubs” or “glue”.) He then takes a quick canter through the history, sociology and economics of religions to illustrate this. The best parts of this book deal with economics, which the general reader will find enlightening.

Economists were slow to study religion. Some 250 years ago Adam Smith observed in “The Wealth of Nations” that the wealth of churches was considerable. He used secular language to describe how such wealth arose, observing that churches’ “revenue” (donations) flowed in and benefited priests, who he argued were sometimes animated less by love of God than by “the powerful motive of self-interest”. He also argued that if there were a better functioning market in religious providers, this would lead to increased religious harmony. According to Laurence Iannaccone, a professor of economics at Chapman University in California, Smith’s analysis was “brilliant”—and for a long time largely ignored.

Divinity departments are staffed by theologians rather than economists; the idea of mixing the dismal science with the divine strikes many people at the very least “as odd and at worst strikes them as blasphemous”, says Mr Iannaccone. People associate God with angels, not with Excel.

Yet religions lend themselves to economic analysis nicely. They offer a product (such as salvation), have networks of providers (priests, imams and so on) and benefit from good distribution networks. It is not just trade that travels on trade routes: ideas, diseases and religions do, too. Roman roads allowed the plague of Justinian to spread across Europe with a rapidity never seen before. They allowed Christianity to do so as well.

Starting in the 1970s, some economists have been approaching religion with more academic devotion, analysing, for example, the economics of extremism and obtaining a place in the afterlife. This mode of thinking can help clarify complicated religious history. When historians talk about the Reformation they tend to do so using thorny theological terms such as “transubstantiation”. Economists would describe it more simply as the moment when a monopoly provider (the Catholic church) was broken up, leading to an increase in consumer choice (Protestantism) and the price of services declining (indulgences were out).

A greater variety of suppliers started to offer road-maps to heaven. Henry VIII swapped his old service provider, Catholicism, for the new one—which was not only cheaper, but also allowed him to divorce a troublesome wife. There were, admittedly, some bumps: the pope was not pleased, and the habit of burning picky customers at the stake dented consumer confidence. But overall, the Reformation enabled people and their rulers to “get a better bargain”, says Davide Cantoni, a professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Ask a believer why they believe in their particular deity, and they will tend to talk of religious truth. Professor Seabright offers another explanation. The two most popular religious “brands” (Christianity and Islam) have, he writes, replaced smaller local religions in much the same way that Walmart, Lidl and Tesco have replaced smaller local shops.

These brands have honed the international distribution of their product: the Catholic church, like McDonald’s, offers a striking uniformity of service, whether you are in the Vatican or Venezuela. They have the resources to compete for customers in ways that smaller, less well-financed, local gods cannot. Baal, it seems, died out not because—as the Bible has it—he was a false god but because his franchise failed.

Popular works have tackled the idea of religions as businesses before. In the 1960s Tom Lehrer, an American satirist, observed that if Catholics “really want to sell the product” they should improve their music: his solution was “The Vatican Rag”, which contained such lines as “Two-four-six-eight / time to transubstantiate”. Incensed Catholics declared it blasphemous.

“The Divine Economy” is more tactful than Mr Lehrer—though not quite as much fun. The book’s scope is big. So too, alas, are many of the words. Sentences such as “Probabilistic models of cognition assume that human cognition can be explained in terms of a rational Bayesian framework” leave the reader wishing for lines that are, like those in “The Vatican Rag”, a little snappier, and his idea that religions are “platforms” is at times more confusing than clarifying.

An obvious riposte to all this religious analysis is: who cares? It is 2024, not 1524. God, as Friedrich Nietzsche stated, is dead. But such a sweeping judgment is misplaced and wrong. The West may be less Christian—but the rest of the world is not. Between 1900 and 2020, the proportion of Africans who are Christian rose from under 9% to almost half; the proportion who are Muslim rose from around a third to over 40%.

Even in secular countries, faith remains powerful. In America in 2022, Roe v Wade was overturned due, in part, to decades of campaigning by evangelicals and Catholics. Non-believers dabble too. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian author, performs to stadiums with a talk titled “We Who Wrestle With God” and garnishes his books with statements such as “Our consciousness participates in the speaking forth of Being.” God might wish He were dead when He hears such things. He is not.

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A Religious Market Theory Explained

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

In 1987, the American sociologists Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge formulated a ‘Religious Market Theory.’ The theory is a critique of the ‘Secularisation Thesis.’ The secularisation thesis was initially developed by the German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. In the next five decades, it was further evolved by numerous scholars.

To Weber, due to modernisation, especially from the late 18th century onwards, societies entered a process of ‘spiritual disenchantment.’ Space for ‘pre-modern’ beliefs in magic, faith and superstition shrank and people began to adopt more rational modes of thinking.

Even non-Western societies started to adopt models of modernisation and, indeed, here as well, the traditional variants of religion began to decline. They were replaced by secularised formations of traditional faiths, framed and monopolised by the state.

But the secularisation thesis came into question when, from the mid-1970s onwards, the exhibition of religiosity, especially in modernised Muslim-majority nation-states, began to grow.

In the 1980s, when religiosity saw an increase in the US as well, Stark and Bainbridge formulated their religious market theory, challenging the secularisation thesis. The religious market theory suggests that when religiosity declines, it eventually revives itself, because the decline opens up spaces for new faiths and modified versions of the old faiths to emerge.

Stark and Bainbridge saw the rise and decline of religiosity as a cycle, which moves like markets do in capitalist settings. Religions which fail to adjust to the needs of changing conditions, fall by the wayside and lose followers. Readjusted religions and new faiths begin to emerge in a scenario where religiosity seems to be receding.

Gradually, though, new and readjusted variants are able to revive interest in faith, by providing services and products that are better suited to meet the needs of changing conditions.

According to Stark and Bainbridge, this cycle produces a diverse collection of faiths, cults, sects and subsects, which compete against each other in the ‘marketplace of faiths’ and improve to attract followers. The religious market theory posits that this renews an interest in faith and religiosity.

In 19th century India, during the complete fall of the Mughal Empire and the mushrooming of British colonialism, the established variants of Islam began to struggle to keep pace with the changing conditions. It seemed that the modernity introduced by the British was rapidly secularising the polity. But as the old religious ethos dwindled, new variants emerged to address the changing needs of India’s Muslims.

On the one hand, new Sunni sects such as Deobandi, Barelvi and Ahl-i-Hadith sprang up and, on the other, the Ahmadiyya, the Ahl-i-Quran and Muslim Modernism emerged. They competed against each other, promising the most suitable narratives to India’s ‘depressed’ Muslims and, in the process, gathering followers — more importantly, followers who had political and economic clout.

From the mid-19th century till the 1920s, the marketplace of faiths in South Asia flourished with new variations of Islam and Hinduism. The variants were products/brands, and their followers were consumers. This indeed witnessed a renewed interest in religion and religiosity.

However, from the late 1940s, when India split into two nation-states, Bharat and Pakistan, the state in both countries decided to monopolise the marketplace of faiths, through an overarching meta-narrative.

India formulated a nationalist secularism that sought to build a socialist democracy. It was to provide economic services that religious organisations had been offering to attract followers. The state in Pakistan began to shape a nationalist-modernist variant of Islam and it regulated the marketplace of faiths by bringing its shops and products under the state’s control.

According to some contemporary proponents of the religious market theory, the presence of a centralised and ‘official’ faith eschews religious diversity. It nationalises the marketplace of faiths. This causes a decline in religiosity, as has been the case in various Scandinavian countries and in Britain.

The state in India (through nationalist-secularism) and Pakistan (through modernist-nationalist Islam) attempted to do this. Religion did not decline as such, but religiosity did.

In the 1970s, new economic and political challenges emerged in Pakistan and India. These also challenged the nationalisation of the marketplace of faiths. In Pakistan, political elites tried to absorb the alternatives offered by Sunni and Shia sects and subsects. They privatised the marketplace and began to gather fresh followers, who could not find remedies anymore in the centralised state-approved variant.

By the 1980s, the marketplace of faiths was once again booming. In Pakistan, the state continued to try absorbing the new variants by discarding the old modernist variant. But, as the middle class and the lower-middle class segments expanded, they became the most active consumers of new variants, thereby re-energising the marketplace of faiths.

These variants ranged from renewed and modified versions of evangelical Islam, to the more radical versions of Sunni and Shia sects and subsects. Religiosity revived itself.

In India, economic liberalisation weakened the monopoly of the nationalist-secular narrative in the marketplace of faiths. The Indian historian Meera Nanda, in her book The God Market, has closely tracked the trajectory of the expanding elite and middle-income groups in India, from being consumers of the nationalist-secular narrative, to becoming the most prominent consumers of Hindu nationalism — especially after benefitting from the post-1980s ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies.

According to Nanda, these segments, who now exercise increasing economic influence, “re-ritualised and re-enchanted Hinduism.” They now view Hinduism as being inherently compatible with modern economic ideas that guarantee profitability and prosperity. This, too, is how the renewed evangelical variants of Islam peddled their narrative to the elite and middle-income groups in Pakistan.

Consequently, exhibitions of religiosity have witnessed a manifold increase in both the countries. However, within the marketplace of faiths are also variants that are problematic. These include the more reactionary manifestations of faiths. For example, those looking to undermine Muslims in India in a violent manner will shop for variants that aid the consumer to theologically justify acts of violence.

This is also true in Pakistan. There are sectarian and sub-sectarian variants in the marketplace of faiths, which ‘theologically’ validate actions of those who want to use or instigate violence against an opponent in the name of faith.

More worrying is the fact that many urban, ‘educated’ folk, too, buy these variants, especially products (in the shape of narratives) that justify or instigate violence. These are often used to demonise perceived enemies as ‘Ahmadiyya sympathisers,’ or ‘anti-Islam’.

The marketplace of faiths is now almost entirely unregulated. And the state and governments whose job it was to regulate it, too, have become consumers in the marketplace of faiths to justify their own existence.

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AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Hariri in The Economist

Fears of artificial intelligence (ai) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new ai tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures.

Money, too, is a cultural artefact. Banknotes are just colourful pieces of paper, and at present more than 90% of money is not even banknotes—it is just digital information in computers. What gives money value is the stories that bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about it. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff were not particularly good at creating real value, but they were all extremely capable storytellers.

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually ai. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot, while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that ai has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the ai can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the ai chatbot Lamda, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most efficient weapon, and ai has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the past decade social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. With the new generation of ai, the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as ai fights ai in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to convince us to vote for particular politicians or buy particular products?

Even without creating “fake intimacy”, the new ai tools would have an immense influence on our opinions and worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the oracle? The news and advertising industries should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what’s the purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?

And even these scenarios don’t really capture the big picture. What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when ai takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. ai is fundamentally different. ai can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, ai will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, ai culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Fear of ai has haunted humankind for only the past few decades. But for thousands of years humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate our minds and to create illusions. Consequently, since ancient times humans have feared being trapped in a world of illusions.

In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard. In ancient Greece Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen they see projected various shadows. The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.

Of course, the new power of ai could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop ai talk about it enough. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers. But certainly, ai can help us in countless ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to make sure the new ai tools are used for good rather than for ill. To do that, we first need to appreciate the true capabilities of these tools.

Since 1945 we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for the benefit of humans—but could also physically destroy human civilisation. We therefore reshaped the entire international order to protect humanity, and to make sure nuclear technology was used primarily for good. We now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world.

We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful ai tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release new drugs before testing both their short-term and long-term side-effects, so tech companies shouldn’t release new ai tools before they are made safe. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday.

Won’t slowing down public deployments of ai cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of ai tools in the public sphere, and regulate ai before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for ai to disclose that it is an ai. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an ai—that’s the end of democracy.

This text has been generated by a human.

Or has it?

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On Invoking Historical Parallels

Illustration by Abro

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn

Recently, Orya Maqbool Jan, the retired bureaucrat who now fancies himself as an ideologue and political commentator, warned that if the ‘establishment’ continues to support the current government, Pakistan will be rocked by a revolutionary uprising like the one that erupted in Iran in 1979.

Then there is the former prime minister Imran Khan who was ousted in April 2022 and is now claiming that, if he is arrested, people would pour out on the roads like thousands of Turks did during a failed coup attempt against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

Pakistani politicians and ideologues often refer to contemporary dramatic events elsewhere to conjure alarmist possibilities in their own country. Only rarely do they refer to past events that took place in Pakistan. At least not in this context.

For example, no one speaks of the violent 1983 movement against the dictator Ziaul Haq, which almost yanked Sindh away from the rest of the country. Or very few now speak of the mass uprising against the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1968.

Surely, our latest batch of sudden revolutionaries such as Jan and Khan could have given examples closer to home to forewarn the coming of an apocalypse in case things didn’t go the way they want them to.

Maybe they believe that examples like the 1968 and the 1983 movements, or even the 1977 uprising against the ZA Bhutto regime, or for that matter, the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement against the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship, were not dramatic enough? Perhaps. Indeed, images of public executions and firing squads and burning buildings from the Iranian Revolution, and visuals of people lying in front of tanks in Turkey, are certainly more exciting.

In 1969, when protests, mainly by leftist youth, had managed to force Ayub Khan to resign, the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi warned that the youth may face brutal retaliations from those who did not agree with their ideology. Maududi referenced the violence that Indonesian communists encountered in 1965-66.

In 1965, 500,000 to 1,000,000 communists and alleged communist sympathisers were massacred by the Indonesian armed forces and by right-wing Islamist groups when the military accused the largest communist party in Indonesia of murdering six military officers and attempting a coup.

But whereas Maududi, perturbed by the increasing leftist sentiments among Pakistan’s youth, warned about a retaliation against them in the mould of the 1965 Indonesian massacres, the retaliation did take place two years later — but 2,000 km away in the erstwhile East Pakistan.

What’s more, Maududi’s political party sent volunteers to facilitate Pakistan’s armed forces to eliminate Bengali nationalists.

This begs the question whether the alarmism that references dramatic upheavals elsewhere is actually wishful thinking on the part of those who use it to conjure what might happen in Pakistan? Their ‘warnings’ might actually be desires or even fantasies. After all, wouldn’t men such as Khan love seeing his supporters lying in front of tanks, or Jan relish the idea of an Iran-type revolution in Pakistan?

The reason that these remain alarmist fantasies inspired by events outside Pakistan is because Pakistan’s diverse ethnic and sectarian demography and the strongly unified nature of its armed forces are not compatible with the aforementioned events in Iran and Turkey — two countries that enjoy more sectarian/religious and ethnic homogeneity.

Yet, the reference of the 1979 Iranian uprising was all the rage in Pakistan across the 1980s. Ironically, it was mostly referred to by those in power. For example, in 1980, a sitting minister in the Zia dictatorship explained Zia’s Hudood Ordinances as deterrents formulated “to avoid an Iran-like revolution in Pakistan.” The stringent ordinances were described as ‘Islamic’ by the dictatorship, but were largely seen as being draconian and even “barbaric” by Zia’s opponents.

The minister was thus warning that, without such ordinances, the “Islam-loving people of Pakistan” would rise up and demand Shariah rule and that Zia was fulfilling this demand in a more measured manner and therefore mitigating the kind of commotion seen in Iran in 1979.

Even till the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990-93), Sharif was warning that if he did not continue “Zia’s mission”, the country would face an Iran-like uprising. In this case, however, it wasn’t wishful thinking, really. It was a warning to those who were his opponents.

In a way, Nawaz was telling them (as had Zia) to better tolerate his strand of Islamism than the strands being demanded by militant clerics. But why refer to the 1979 Iranian revolution in this respect, when one could refer to the vicious 1953 and 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya movements? Of course, after 1974, these movements became constitutionally justified and couldn’t be used as warnings of any kind.

The devastating Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) was once another favourite alarmist example. In the late 1980s, when ethnic violence erupted in Karachi, the then chief of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), Altaf Hussain, often warned that Karachi would become like Beirut, the Lebanese city that was ravaged by the civil war. Images of that civil war were still fresh in people’s minds. So, instead of, say, referring to war-torn Dhaka of 1971 in former East Pakistan, Hussain chose to speak of Beirut.

The interesting bit is that, whether it was 1965’s Indonesia, 1980’s Beirut, 1979’s Iran or 2016’s Turkey, none of these references are very convincing in Pakistan’s context because the dynamics of Pakistan’s political and economic cleavages are nothing like those of Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon or Turkey.

And certainly not like those of 18th century France. Yes, Pakistani politicians are also very fond of warning about an uprising like the 18th century French Revolution. Why not refer to the 1857 uprising against the British in India instead, one wonders?

Most of these referential warnings look and sound like alarmist fantasies more than an outcome of any informed analysis. Pakistan’s 75 years are full of events that our alarmists can conjure. Yet, they continue to look elsewhere, blissfully ignorant of the fact that conditions elsewhere are quite different than what they are in Pakistan.

The reading of history by our alarmists is alarmingly sensationalist.

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Does religious faith lead to a happier, healthier life?

David Robson in The Guardian

In his Pensées, published posthumously in 1670, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal appeared to establish a foolproof argument for religious commitment, which he saw as a kind of bet. If the existence of God was even minutely possible, he claimed, then the potential gain was so huge – an “eternity of life and happiness” – that taking the leap of faith was the mathematically rational choice.

Pascal’s wager implicitly assumes that religion has no benefits in the real world, but some sacrifices. But what if there were evidence that faith could also contribute to better wellbeing? Scientific studies suggest this is the case. Joining a church, synagogue or temple even appears to extend your lifespan.

These findings might appear to be proof of divine intervention, but few of the scientists examining these effects are making claims for miracles. Instead, they are interested in understanding the ways that it improves people’s capacity to deal with life’s stresses. “Religious and spiritual traditions give you access to different methods of coping that have distinctive benefits,” says Doug Oman, a professor in public health at the University of California Berkeley. “From the psychological perspective, religions offer a package of different ingredients,” agrees Prof Patty Van Cappellen at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Studying the life-extending benefits of religious practice can therefore offer useful strategies for anyone – of any faith or none – to live a healthier and happier life. You may find yourself shaking your head in scepticism, but the evidence base linking faith to better health has been decades in the making and now encompasses thousands of studies. Much of this research took the form of longitudinal research, which involves tracking the health of a population over years and even decades. They each found that measures of someone’s religious commitment, such as how often they attended church, were consistently associated with a range of outcomes, including a lower risk of depression, anxiety and suicide and reduced cardiovascular disease and death from cancer.

People who pray tend to have a more positive outlook on life – and those who pray for the wellbeing of others tend to live longer. Photograph: Kumar Sriskandan/Alamy

Unlike some other areas of scientific research suffering from the infamous “replication crisis”, these studies have examined populations across the globe, with remarkably consistent results. And the effect sizes are large. Dr Laura Wallace at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, for instance, recently examined obituaries of more than 1,000 people across the US and looked at whether the article recorded the person’s religious affiliation – a sign that their faith had been a major element of their identity.

Publishing her results in 2018, she reported that those people marked out for their faith lived for 5.6 years more, on average, than those whose religion had not been recorded; in a second sample, looking specifically at a set of obituaries from Des Moines in Iowa, the difference was even greater – about 10 years in total. “It’s on par with the avoidance of major health risks – like smoking,” says Wallace. To give another comparison: reducing hypertension adds about five years to someone’s life expectancy.

Health effects of this size demand explanation and scientists such as Wallace have been on the case. One obvious explanation for these findings is that people of faith live cleaner lives than the non-religious: studies show that churchgoers are indeed less likely to smoke, drink, take drugs or practise unsafe sex than people who do not attend a service regularly (though there are, of course, notable exceptions).

This healthier living may be the result of the religious teaching itself, which tends to encourage the principles of moderation and abstinence. But it could also be the fact that religious congregations are a self-selecting group. If you have sufficient willpower to get out of bed on a Sunday morning, for example, you may also have enough self-control to resist life’s other temptations.

Importantly, however, the health benefits of religion remain even when the scientists have controlled for these differences in behaviour, meaning that other factors must also contribute. Social connection comes top of the list. Feelings of isolation and loneliness are a serious source of stress in themselves and exacerbate the other challenges we face in life. Even something as simple as getting to work becomes far more difficult if you cannot call on a friend to give you a lift when your car breaks down.

Chronic stress response can result in physiological changes such as heightened inflammation, which, over the years, can damage tissue and increase your risk of illness. As a result, the size of someone’s social network and their subjective sense of connection with others can both predict their health and longevity, with one influential study by Prof Julianna Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University suggesting that the influence of loneliness is comparable to that of obesity or low physical exercise.

 

The 17th-century mathematician Blaise Pascal, author of the Pensées – and the famous wager. Photograph: Alamy

Religions, of course, tend to be built around a community of like-minded worshippers who meet regularly and have a shared set of beliefs. And many of the specific rituals will also contribute to a sense of communion with others. Christians, for example, are encouraged to pray on behalf of other people and this seems to bring its own health benefits, according to a brand new study by Prof Gail Ironson at the University of Miami.

Ironson has spent decades studying the ways that people with HIV cope with their infection and the influences of these psychological factors on the outcomes of disease. Examining data covering 17 years of 102 HIV patients’ lives, she found that people who regularly prayed for others were twice as likely to survive to the end of the study, compared with those who more regularly prayed for themselves. Importantly, the link remained even after Ironson had accounted for factors such as adherence to medications or substance abuse or the patient’s initial viral load.

Besides encouraging social connection, religion can help people to cultivate positive emotions that are good for our mental and physical wellbeing, such as gratitude and awe. Various studies show that regularly counting your blessings can help you to shift your focus away from the problems you are facing, preventing you from descending into the negative spirals of thinking that amplify stress. In the Christian church, you may be encouraged to thank God in your prayers, which encourages the cultivation of this protective emotion. “It’s a form of cognitive reappraisal,” says Van Cappellen. “It’s helping you to re-evaluate your situation in a more positive light.”

Awe, meanwhile, is the wonder we feel when we contemplate something much bigger and more important than ourselves. This can help people to cut through self-critical, ruminative thinking and to look beyond their daily concerns, so that they no longer make such a dent on your wellbeing.

Last, but not least, religious faiths can create a sense of purpose in someone’s life – the feeling that there is a reason and meaning to their existence. People with a sense of purpose tend to have better mental wellbeing, compared with those who feel that their lives lack direction, and – once again – this seems to have knock-on effects for physical health, including reduced mortality. “When people have a core set of values, it helps establish goals. And when those goals are established and pursued, that produces better psychological wellbeing,” says Prof Eric Kim at the University of British Columbia, who has researched the health benefits of purpose in life. Much like awe and gratitude, those positive feelings can then act as a buffer to stress.

Volunteers sort produce at a food bank warehouse in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, in February this year. People who spend time helping others seem to live longer. Photograph: Vickie Flores/EPA

These are average effects, which don’t always take into account that huge variety of people’s experiences. While some Christians might see God as a benevolent figure, others might have been taught that he is judgmental and punishing and those views can make a big difference in the effects on our health. In her studies of HIV patients, Ironson found that people who believed in a vengeful God showed a faster disease progression – as measured by their declining white blood cell count – compared with those who believed that he was a merciful figure.

Ultimately, most people’s faith will arise from real convictions; it seems unlikely that many people would adopt a particular religious view solely for the health benefits. But even if you are agnostic, like me, or atheist, this research might inform your lifestyle.

You can start by considering contemplative techniques, which come in many more forms than the mindful breathing and body-scan techniques that have proved so popular. Scientists have become increasingly interested in “loving-kindness meditation”, for example, in which you spend a few moments thinking warm thoughts about friends, strangers, even enemies. The practice was inspired by the Buddhist principle of mettā, but it also resembles the Christian practice of intercessory prayer. When practised regularly, this increases people’s feelings of social connection and empathy with the consequent benefits for their mental health. Importantly, it also changes people’s real-life actions towards others, for instance encouraging more pro-social behaviour.
The power of religion is that it gives you this package of ingredients that are pre-made and organised for youProf Patty Van Cappellen

To build more gratitude into your life, meanwhile, you might keep a diary listing the things that you have appreciated each day and you can make a deliberate habit of thanking the people who have helped you; both strategies have been shown to improve people’s stress responses and to improve overall wellbeing. And to cultivate awe, you might go on a regular nature walk, visit a magnificent building within your city or watch a film that fills you with wonder.

If you have time and resources for greater commitments, you could also take up a voluntary activity for a cause that means a lot to you, a task that may help to boost your sense of purpose and which could also enhance your social life. Dr Wallace’s work has shown that the sheer amount of volunteering someone performs could, independently, explain part of the longevity boost of religious people, but charitable actions do not need to be linked to a particular faith for you to gain those benefits. “If people are able to plug into causes that really light up their intrinsic values, and then find a community that helps them reach their goals, that’s another way in which the framework of religion can be taken into a non-religious context,” says Prof Kim.

The challenge is to ensure that you build all these behaviours into your routine, so that you perform them with the same regularity and devotion normally reserved for spiritual practices. “The power of religion is that it gives you this package of ingredients that are pre-made and organised for you,” says Van Cappellen. “And if you are not religious you have to create it on your own.” You don’t need to make a leap of faith to see those benefits.

Pakistan needs a "Deus Ex Machina"*

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi in The Dawn

WHAT is happening to Pakistan? Anyone interested in the question knows the answer. Who is to blame? Opinions differ.

However, there is broad agreement on the cast of culprits: political leaders; political parties; political institutions; non-political institutions; the security and intelligence establishment and its institutions; the civil services; comprehensive corruption; the dysfunctional state of the economy caught in a permanent debt trap and outrageous inequality; complete external dependency and a consequent lack of policy independence; a general lack of education and a scientific outlook; the media contributing to an uninformed, partially informed and misinformed public opinion; the deliberate misuse of religious fervour to obscure the true teachings of our faith; an obsolete social structure preserved by a voracious and unaccountable power structure; a judiciary that demands but does not command universal respect; uncontrollable population growth; irreversible climate change; a forever threat of nuclear annihilation, a security environment that challenges rational resource allocations; palliatives presented as solutions, etc.

We are taught that one should neither hate nor act in anger. This is true as far as persons are concerned. But actions that deliberately undermine the welfare of a whole people can and must be hated. When they threaten the survival of a nation and render its dreams and aspirations impossible they must be confronted by the elemental force of rejection.

If, instead, political observers and commentators couch their opinions in euphemistic and safely coded language they become complicit in the perpetration of a national crime. They convey a pathetic message of resignation, surrender and betrayal. There comes a time when Faiz Ahmad Faiz has to give way to Habib Jalib. Either Quaid-i-Azam was much mistaken or we are all complicit in insulting his memory and murdering his legacy. We prefer, however, to slander the father of our country instead of becoming the citizens it required.

We are today, accordingly, reduced to being spectators of a daily goon or puppet show in the guise of a morality play — without any wit, humour or goodwill. There are no good guys in the unfolding drama of our national tragedy.

The Baloch are killed. Their killers are martyred. When one political character attributes unspeakable and unforgiveable crimes and misdemeanors to his rival we know he speaks the truth. When his rival returns the charges redoubled we know he too speaks the truth. They are of course transparent partners in a single, massive and lethal crime against the people and the country.

So what else is new? What should be new is the realisation that we who are aware and do nothing are just as guilty. If one can live with this realisation so be it. If not, we need to do what we can and without delay. The chances are we won’t. The chances are we have already lost our country. Unless…

Another wasted year of political posturing by rupee multibillionaires representing their victims beckons. While the US contemplates a climate emergency, Pakistan is beset by an existential emergency that commands no contemplation. All the challenges confronting Pakistan will be ignored. Technocratic servants of the elite will continue to spin fairy tales about stabilisation and progress invisible to the eye of the uninitiated. They will be well compensated for dressing their employers in the finery of their analyses and assessments. Other servants or experts will do much the same in their own spheres. The people must learn to eliminate the word ‘sarkar’ from their political dictionary if they are to stand any chance against the forces arrayed against them.

When a country’s ‘leadership’ fails to address fundamental existential issues at home it can have no external policy to speak of. The rest of the world sees this and refuses to take its foreign policy seriously, however well articulated and reasoned it may be. Pakistan has itself become a major stumbling block to the success of its principal foreign policy issue: a principled, peaceful and lasting settlement of the Kashmir dispute with India that is primarily and ascertainably acceptable to the Kashmiri people.

The Kashmiri people cannot defeat India although they have so far heroically denied it the victory it strives for. Pakistan cannot defeat India although its nuclear deterrence capability limits India’s military options. A diplomatic stalemate maximises the suffering of the Kashmiri people. The world is aware of India’s perfidy in Kashmir but is simply not inclined to back a failed or failing Pakistan against the gigantic market and strategic value of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. China, for obvious reasons will continue to back Pakistan against India, while increasingly worried about Pakistan’s inability to learn anything from the amazing experience of its most reliable friend.

The US sees Pakistan as a resentful puppet ruled by dependent elites who will do its bidding even it undermines the confidence of China in Pakistan’s resilience and strategic value.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan backs the Taliban which backs the TTP which perpetrated the massacre of schoolchildren and teachers in the Army Public School on Dec 16, 2014. The army today engages with the TTP, which is essentially a Pakistani branch party of the Afghan Taliban, while refusing to engage with the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement of Manzoor Pashteen which is a Pakistani movement because of its protests against the bombing of Waziristan.

Pakistan has practically no support among the Afghan political intelligentsia, particularly the educated youth who are the future of the country. India has the field to itself.

These absurdities are the direct result of the state of the state in Pakistan. Unless this state of affairs is addressed, foreign policy, indeed all other aspects of national policy, will not be able to develop coherence and credibility. This is all too clear to political observers in Pakistan. But they are by and large easily resigned to the prospect that this state of affairs will not be addressed — and that they will themselves be complicit in this dereliction of duty, citizenship and patriotism. Unless we await a deus ex machina.

* Deus ex Machina - an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel.

Blasphemy Laws in India