Emotions and Relationships

When Homans first read the Stark-Bainbridge theory, he reminded me of the famous statement by the first-century satirical writer, Petronius: "Fear first brought gods into the world." William James (1902:89) contended: "The ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the gladness of deliverance from the fear." Either way, religion seems rooted in emotion, and the primary dimension is our feeling about costs and rewards.

Sacred discourse frequently concerns feelings, from guilt to bliss, terror to awe, and longing to ecstasy. The Bible is eloquent in its depiction of human emotion, across the entire spectrum: Job 4:14: "Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." Job 38:7: "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." John 16:21: "A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." 2 Corinthians 4:8: "We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair." Luke 13:28: "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out." And who could forget the comforting words of John 3:16, which testify that even the Lord has emotions: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

If religion elicits and shapes the meaning of emotions, surely the fundamental human feelings are shared by the higher animals, who are apparently incapable of religion. A purring cat must be experiencing bliss, and it can inspire fear in pigeons and mice. The tender care lavished upon their babies by birds and mammals is behaviorally indistinguishable from human love. Thus, emotion is deeply rooted in our animal biology, even if our recently-evolved cognitive abilities are required for religious belief. In addition, as Homans said, "...the laws of human learning have themselves evolved and maintained themselves genetically as one mechanism for helping humans to survive in their environment" (Homans, 1987:139-141; cf. Wilson, 1975:551).

Robert H. Frank (1988) has alerted rational choice researchers to the idea that emotions, whether in humans or higher animals, may partly have evolved to signal intentions to other individuals, and to force them to behave in desired ways. Thus with the human capacity for role playing, emotional expressions become moves in a game. This insight is as old as history, and Porter Abbott has analyzed the strategic use of emotion in The Portuguese Letters, a work of fiction published in 1669. From her bare room in a convent, a nun writes five letters to her former lover. Abbott (1984:74) argues that she expresses her feelings in accordance with a syllogism that she thinks will logically force him to love her again: "(1) All great love is greatly to be loved, (2) I love greatly, (3) therefore I am greatly to be loved." Jay Haley (1963, 1969) analyzed psychotherapy as a strategic interaction in which the therapist maneuvers the patient to take his or her emotional assumptions to their illogical extreme, and he said the crucifixion was the masterful sacrifice move made by Jesus Christ in a game where the human soul was the prize.

The strategic use of emotion featured in my own analysis of how Scientologists appear to believe they can attain a higher state of being called clear, and I have briefly considered the comparable states of sanctification in the Holiness tradition and satori in Zen Buddhism (Bainbridge and Stark, 1980; Bainbridge 1997). Like many birds and mammals, humans cry for parental attention, shriek in fear, and shout for help. Clearly, communication intended to cause another person to help us is deeply rooted in our biological inheritance, as well as in the psychology of childhood.

Humans sometimes become trapped in a pattern of emotionally intense help-seeking behavior when no help is in fact available, and this condition may be called neurosis, dependency, or depression. Perhaps this is most common for people with insoluble practical problems of ill health, poverty, lovelessness, or powerlessness. But the human capacity to imagine a better life, and the social demands that so often inspire shame and guilt, could force anyone into this vicious circle. The person invests so much energy in self-defeating obsessions to get help, that his or her life becomes significantly worse than it would otherwise be, and sometimes the person is even prevented from finding a real solution to the problems. Clear, sanctification, and satori are spiritualized conceptions of the psychological state of being free of such help-demanding and self-blaming obsessions.

Homans's classic, The Human Group, makes much of sentiment, a term that was meant to cover such murky concepts as: "sentiments of affection, affective content of sympathy and indulgence, intimate sympathy, respect, pride, antagonism, affective history, scorn, sentimental nostalgia" (Homans, 1950:37). Homans restricted sentiments to the feelings of one human being toward another. Much later work by Homans and others in his tradition conceptualizes social relationships as concrete bonds that are studied as structural elements in networks, or as stable patterns of interaction that readily can be observed. Yet we should recognize that social relationships are fundamentally based in emotions and images that exist only within human minds. Thus, many of the same challenges and opportunities associated with the sociology of emotions apply also to research on social relationships.

In this essay, emboldened by the essays Homans (e.g. 1981) published about his ancestors, I shall use data on my own ancestral family to develop a model of how religious emotions are embedded in social exchange. Fundamentally, reciprocity is the principle of obligation that links members of a family into an enduring relationship. Rooted in biological bonds, reciprocity at times resembles exchange, and of course nothing prevents members of a family from also being exchange partners. Alternatively, one could say that market exchange is merely a highly rationalized form of reciprocity that has outgrown the boundaries of the biological family.

Homans wrote about the exchange between two abstract individuals, Person and Other. Let us give them more human names, Lucy and George. Whether from biology, habits acquired in family-based reciprocity, or a history of mutually profitable exchanges, let us say that Lucy has developed a powerful relationship with George. Then she realizes that he is dying.

The Stark-Bainbridge theory immediately suggests that Lucy will be open to supernaturally-based compensators to comfort her in her loss. But what does it say about her obligations to George? What does she have to offer him in his greatest time of need? In fact, Lucy was George's sister, and he lay dying slowly and painfully of typhoid fever in the early 1860s, when medicine had not yet discovered a cure. There is considerable doubt how much religion can really compensate an individual for his or her own most severe losses. Because Lucy and George shared the same religious assumptions, however, she could feel that the prayers she gave him really did fulfill some of her obligation to help him.

At a first approximation, we can distinguish two kinds of religious compensation, primary and secondary.

* Primary compensation substitutes a compensator for a reward that people desire for themselves.
*

Secondary compensation substitutes a compensator for a reward that a person is obligated to provide to another person.

Secondary compensation may be a major factor in the creation and maintenance of religious organizations, even though the literature on the subject has concentrated on primary compensation. If religious compensators actually do not satisfy sufferers' needs very well, they might still satisfy their exchange partners' obligations to provide assistance. I am not here asserting that religious primary compensation is ineffective, merely raising the theoretical point that it might be and suggesting we should examine scientifically how much of the success of religious organizations is due to secondary compensation.

If religious compensators can satisfy existing obligations, they may also make a person attractive as a prospective exchange partner. In other words, secondary compensation is an issue prior to the formation of exchange relationships, as well as afterward. Two of the propositions in the Stark-Bainbridge theory are relevant here: "Religious specialists promulgate norms, said to come from the gods, that increase the rewards flowing to the religious specialists" (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987:99). "Religious specialists share in the psychic rewards offered to the gods, for example: deference, honor, and adoration" (Stark and Bainbridge, 1987:101).

To appear to be a valuable exchange partner is beneficial to any individual. A person is attractive to the extent that other people will give rewards to that person without requiring the person immediately to reciprocate by giving them a reward of equal or greater value. People invest in someone they find attractive, in hopes that they will receive great rewards in the future, perhaps in the distant future or in some undefined context. Another way of look at this is to say that an attractive person receives rewards from others but can satisfy them in the immediate exchanges by providing compensators. Thus, a religious specialist may invest in activities to increase the apparent value of the compensators he or she has to offer.

In some societies, the individual may undergo costly spiritual ordeals, perhaps to forge a publicly acknowledged exchange relationship with a supernatural being. In a society with a highly professionalized clergy, the individual may invest in extensive formal training and attempt to create masterworks of the spirit (such as ritual performances, religious art, or sacred scholarship) that demonstrate that he or she has the requisite spiritual skill, sacred knowledge, or divine talent.

There are many different strategies for becoming an attractive exchange partner, and no cosmopolitan culture restricts itself to just one or two, even in the limited realm of religion. However, strategies are simply general explanations about how to attain certain goals, so they tend to be learned from other people as are most other valuable algorithms. Members of a family or other intimate social group will tend to share a particular strategy. To the extent that being a religious specialist is an inherited profession, therefore, supernatural strategies will tend to run in families. Members of such families who enter professions that are functionally similar to the clergy, will tend to carry over the family's religious strategy, with only such modifications as are required to make the strategy appear to fit the secular occupation.

General explanations about how to obtain highly desired rewards are difficult to evaluate. In a competitive cultural specialty, individuals and groups will often become committed to the wrong strategy, or at least to one that is suboptimal and can be defeated by other, more effective strategies. If an individual has invested heavily in one strategy, he is unlikely to be able to switch to a different one quickly and easily. Therefore, a person who has wholeheartedly adopted one particular strategy for becoming an attractive exchange partner will be relatively committed to it. Especially if the strategy is supernatural (which means that explanations are especially difficult to evaluate), he or she may respond to failure by exerting even more effort, rather than by backtracking and looking for a different strategy. Sometimes this can lead to success, if the person can innovate in strategy-specific ways that are attractive to other people, and if the person's amplified emotions are of a kind to arouse positive feelings in others. Arguably, this is the source of much religious charisma. In many cases, however, exaggeration of a poor strategy will lead to catastrophic failure, and what the individual considers to be religious inspiration will appear to other people as madness.

Becoming an attractive exchange partner through increasing the potency of the compensators one offers is a strategy that aggressively employs secondary compensation. If other people accept the compensators, it can be successful. But if other people ignore or reject the compensators, the individual may become trapped in isolated primary compensation. The dreams that one wished to sell to others may become a costly liability that prevent the individual from investing elsewhere, until the person's social capital has been exhausted. The cases described below illustrate how primary and secondary compensation may lead to extremely successful or unsuccessful social outcomes.

Edited by Nicky Bita
Student at Daystar University
Fourth year Community Development