You may have detected from time to time that there seems to be a fair amount of titillation in our media. Cheesecake and beef cake are pretty routine. Modesty does not seem to be that common. And, of course, the media’s ability to convincingly portray violence has become phenomenally sophisticated. Computer graphics and special effects modeling create very realistic scenes of death and destructive mayhem.

Several times over the past few years Becky and I found ourselves eating supper while one of the CSI shows played on the television. Yes, my pretties, we sometimes do watch television. And on more than one occasion an actor portraying a pathologist has performed what appears to be a very realistic looking autopsy while we were putting a fork to the pasta on the plate. It’s a little disconcerting—but not that much. Thankfully we were not eating while a real autopsy was being conducted in our kitchen. I have been present at a real autopsy which, in contrast to the virtual variety, was very unsettling. Dining on that occasion was certainly the very last thing that was on my mind. Think—shock and nausea.

Television manages to systematically mingle sex and violence in most of its dramatic fare. Cop shows, medical shows, and reality shows all bring daily doses of tingling excitement and gasps of horror. Yet we don’t really experience the same depth of feeling for the portrayal that we do for the actual thing. The fact that the shows are contained in a box in one’s living room puts us all in the position of being a voyeur at some safe remove from the action. The smart part of our brain knows that “it is only a television show.” But there are other parts of our brain which are not quite that smart. It is those other parts of our brain to which the creators of this media make systematic appeal. And they are somewhat successful.

I say “somewhat” because the sense of fascination or attraction can just as easily be a distraction. Researchers at the University of Iowa made an interesting discovery in a study conducted to measure the effects of viewing televised sex and violence. It was discovered that images of violence and sex significantly impaired memory. The research reinforced a theory called “cognitive neo-association” which theory asserts that scenes of sex and violence prime related memories about sex and violence to the exclusion of forming new memories. Dr. Brad Bushman stated, “Violence and sex impaired memory for males and females of all ages, and for people who liked and did not like to watch televised violence and sex....What we are finding is that when people watch a program with violence or sex, they think about violence and sex, The sex and violence registers much more strongly than messages that advertisers are hoping to deliver.”

This study suggests that maybe sex and violence doesn’t sell, unless perhaps you’re selling sex and violence. Perhaps if you really want people to remember your product you should annoy them. “Head On! Apply to the forehead!” The fact that Dr. Bushman’s study was completed in 2001 explains why we have seen since that time such a sharp reduction in the use of sex and violence to attract people’s attention. Of course, that one study was not sufficient to stem what is a very ancient tide. Advertising, it should be noted, is older than humanity itself. And advertising has almost always been about sex and violence.

Take your average male cardinal, and I don’t mean the Catholic Church variety cardinal. But as an aside, congratulations to Daniel DiNardo the new Cardinal for Texas. He is truly a mensch, a very decent man with an easy smile and a generous heart. But back to the other sort of cardinal. What’s up with that bird? You know a bird’s life is not an easy one, particularly if you are a small perching bird like a cardinal. Most birds are very nervous. And they have good reason to be so. They are small, the hazards they encounter are numerous. So for the vast majority of birds their ability to blend in with their surroundings is a very important survival strategy. Most birds are referred to by bird watchers as “LBJ’s,” or “little brown jobs.” They are naturally camouflaged in browns and grays so that if they feel unusually threatened they can dart off into the underbrush or the dense grass and reeds and disappear. But then there is the male cardinal, easily detected against almost any background because of his brilliant red color. But if camouflage is such an important survival strategy—why the brilliant coloration?

Many male perching birds have similar bright coloration when compared to their very drab female counterparts. Goldfinches provide an instructive comparison. Both male and female goldfinches are drab olive yellow for most of the year. But when springtime rolls around and it is mating season, the male sheds the drab olive and sprouts a blazing unmistakable and impossible to hide yellow. We could call it the Marvin Gaye effect, “Let’s get it on.” This bright plumage is advertising with a very clear message, “It’s time to make more goldfinches!” But the part you might not have known is that the advertising is also about violence.

Biologists refer to the phenomenon of distinctive bright sexual marking as “lekking.” Lekking is a surprising phenomenon. According to the theory, it is not really the case that the bright colors make the males easier to find nor that females find the bright colors pretty. Instead, lekking is a biological calculation made by females about a male’s ability to survive increased danger. A bird that has foregone the ability to hide because of camouflage must be stronger and tougher, able to survive the inevitable violence of the natural world. The primitive bird brain has been adapted to “know” that ability to survive increased danger means that bird is a stronger specimen and therefore will more likely produce stronger baby birds.

You might wonder, how does the bird “know” this? Well, it obviously doesn’t make a rational calculation about strength. But the little tiny bird brain “knows” the calculation in the deeper recesses of its DNA. Many generations of goldfinches have been selected by the evolutionary process of sexual selection to always prefer the stronger mate. That is, those female goldfinches that did not exhibit a preference for the obviously stronger mate would not create as many robust baby goldfinches. Over the long stretches of evolutionary time those who did not prefer the bright yellow males would disappear from the gene pool leaving only those whose DNA was selected to always prefer bright yellow goldfinch males.

Probably the most difficult thing for people to grasp when it comes to evolution is this business of how creatures come to “know” facts that are important to their survival. While most creatures possess some skills at knowing things in the way that we ordinarily think of knowledge, the vast amount of things that all creatures know are silently encoded in their DNA. DNA could be thought of as a massive instruction manual not unlike you get when you buy anything which must be assembled. It contains massive amounts of data. Just think how much information it would take to create just one single human organ such as a liver. Imagine if you picked up a disassembled liver at IKEA. How large would the accompanying instruction manual be? (“You don’t have to be rich, just smart!” Really, really smart.) Then think about all of our body parts together and add the matter of synchronizing all the decisions about what kinds of cells should be created and in what order they must be created. It is amazing that the creation of something as complicated as a human body happens at all.

The idea of DNA shaped by evolutionary forces as an instruction manual is not normally disquieting. If anything, the biology seems rather elegant as long as we are thinking only of the creation of physical bodies. Where things get a trifle more interesting, however, is in the matter of the behavior of some of those organs also being shaped by evolutionary forces. And biologists have determined that our evolutionary heritage is profoundly influential when it comes to certain forms of behavior. These underlying DNA encoded instructions are very evident, as you may have guessed by now, in human behaviors involving sex and violence. Most pointedly, the brain’s DNA does things with us without our permission.

On a certain level, this insight is simply just very interesting. It explains why young human males, for instance, are prone to indulge in dangerous behaviors. We commonly think of their appetite for danger as simple ignorance about their own mortality. What is really going on, however, is that they are being driven, just like male cardinals, by their DNA to prove that their ability to survive danger indicates just what excellently studly genes they possess. Young men do not know they are being driven to act this way by their DNA because the DNA doesn’t communicate with rational consciousness. But the DNA information still drives the behavior. And this is but one small example among many of what turns out to be the genetic background for a great deal of behavior. The scope of the genetic role in behavior is actually a little un-nerving. (And although I don’t have the time here to adequately describe all of the features of the genetic background of much of our behavior, I should note that this genetic research is not an argument for determinism. If you could think of behavior as a kind of “language,” the genetic information does not provide the “words’ so much as a “grammar” by which the “words” can be assembled to form meaningful sentences.) When it comes to the matter of sexual selection our brains are very interested, for example, in body symmetry and aromas which we cannot even detect. Our notions of physical beauty are not solely the creations of Madison Avenue ad executives but of our brains’ “ad executives.”

Of course, sexual selection is not the only evolutionary force which has had a tremendous impact on our behavior. Natural selection is just as potent a force in shaping how we live and react to the environment in which we find ourselves. And one of the most important components of that environment in which we are driven to survive is the presence of other human beings. It turns out that massive amounts of our brain is dedicated to the task of figuring out what other human beings might mean to us in terms of our survival. In the largest sense much of what our brain wants to know is quite simple; which of three categories will anyone I meet be put into: friend; foe; or irrelevant? And again, the vast amount of what goes into making these calculations occurs beneath our consciousness. Our brain does most of the work for us.

It might surprise you to know, for instance, that of the three categories, friend, foe, or irrelevant, our brain prefers “irrelevant.” It prefers “irrelevant” because once it has made that calculation it can cease putting out the enormous neurological effort which is involved in determining friend or foe. The brain, as you know, is a very busy place and must be by necessity a very careful steward of its resources. So the brain has a very strong “end program” function which allows it to stop performing calculations when it believes it is safe to do so. If it could not stop calculations it would become deeply fried. You notice the “end program” only by accident. If you are walking along a path and see a curved stick up ahead your brain goes into high alert mode because it thinks it could be a snake. You may be conscious of the fact that it could be a snake. But did you also instruct yourself to be anxious or to tense your muscles? And as soon as the brain determines it is not a snake, it stops the “worry about danger” program. Your muscles relax and your anxiety recedes—all without you consciously instructing, “muscles relax, anxiety recede.”

As I said, the neurological wattage that is burned up determining friend or foe, on the other hand, is immense. There is probably no other distinction so important to our brains. And I cannot emphasize enough how much of this calculation occurs far beneath our ordinary consciousness. As with any evolutionary process, we have been selected so that people whose neurology was very interested in quickly detecting the difference between friend and foe would survive. Those who did not care to make the distinction have been weeded out of the gene pool a long time ago.

So our brain is constantly on the alert to determine who will help and who will hinder. The strong preference is always the identification of others who might share something in common with oneself. Any detectable difference on the other hand is a cause for neurological alarm which we usually experience as anxiety or anger. The most common source of neurological discomfort is skin color. I suppose there is no surprise there. Almost everyone feels at the very least, a little more self conscious when meeting someone with a different skin color. But there are other signs which the brain seeks. You would be surprised to know how much of the brain is dedicated to detecting differences in dialect. Same dialect—the brain relaxes. Different dialect, decisions have to be made. These two, skin color and dialect, are only a tiny fraction of a great many ways in which the human brain is working on the task of identifying who is “like minded,” a friend, or “unlike minded,” a foe.

It might have occurred to you to wonder why I have delved so deeply in a scientific subject which may seem at the surface to have little to do with what some normally might think of as religion. You can be quite certain I believe it has everything to do with religion, and certainly with Unitarian Universalism. I am not reporting this information to you because I think it is merely interesting. As a matter of fact, I think our future well being, both as a religious community, and by extension as a species, depend very much on our understanding this information.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when Unitarian Universalism understood itself as the bastion of free thought. It was commonly believed among us that the persistent application of reason to matters of faith and morals would in time create the kind of society in which human beings could flourish. We still await that outcome. I have spent a great deal of time trying to understand why this outcome remains so elusive. This search is extremely important because without an answer our faith becomes an extremely frustrating practice. Like in the myth of Sisyphus, we will always be grasping for some positive outcome which may eternally elude our grasp.

Ponder what this research might mean for us. Unitarian Universalism eschewed dogma because we believed that it blinded people from arriving at the best possible answers to persistent human problems. We have seen ignorance enforced most spectacularly in the routine clash between scientific findings and cherished religious opinions. But there was an unglimpsed side effect which occurred when we released our minds from their captivity to dogma. We have consciously given up on dogma, but our brain did not ever give up its insistence on associating with others it deems acceptable. The underlying neurobiological drive would thus create other forms of conformity which have plagued our practice as a community that had released its members from bondage to slavish opinions. There are reasons why Unitarian Universalism religious communities are primarily comprised of upper middle class highly educated Caucasian people. The one thing a dogma could achieve is some neurological ease by suggesting that people who shared the dogma were “friends.” So—lacking a dogma that would signal a well understand reason for forming bonds of trust, our brains have turned to other means of enforcing homogeneity.

It had always been a mystery to us why African Americans, for instance, have stayed away from our congregations. Well, it is a mystery no longer. Our conscious behaviors indicate that we are perfectly okay with black people but our brains are doing the exact opposite. You can arrive at the same equation when it comes to any of the central features of this religious community. We think we are okay with people who are from a working class background, but our brains undo our best intentions.

So does this research mean, then, that our best intention to forge a community that liberates people from their bondage to whatever enslaves their minds is a waste of time? Are we just kidding ourselves? The good news is—hardly. If anything, you can’t really treat a spiritual disease unless you understand the root cause. Lucky for us all, it turns out that the human brain is not inevitably trapped in performing these routines. It has just been doing what it’s always been doing for the past 60 to 100 thousand years. And our brains are if anything capable of a fair amount of flexibility. And, we can only make a difference once we know what it is up. But I should not underestimate the difficulty of addressing our behavior on a neurological level. Such a project will involve, first of all, that we get rid of our pervasive habit of only relishing people who are “like-minded.” We are going to have to develop a taste for embracing people who are “unlike-minded.” This will inevitably entail an experience of anxiety because that is the primary way our brains tells us to be wary of the stranger. But in this case anxiety is our friend because in very important ways, our brain is simply wrong in much of its subterranean calculations. And you yourself might hold fast to your own experiences of the times when you became wiser, more profound, learned something important from someone who was not “like-minded.”