(NB: As a part of this post, you must also read the comments by Hennie below. )

In a conversation a couple of weeks ago with someone that has spent some time living in Indonesia, I learned that Bali has a much lower crime rate than the rest of Indonesia. The explanation* she offered for this was that Bali was predominately Hindu, and Hinduism includes a belief in karma. The rest of Indonesia is largely Islamic.

What is karma? I would suggest reading the Wikipedia page on karma for a primer. Or if that is too long, you could read just the three paragraphs extracted by Lisa (of South African adventure racing fame). For now, I’m going to be a bit ugly, and use a reductionistic/modernistic sound-byte definition:

The Law of Karma: Basically, what one does in the past affects one’s future: performing good deeds will result in good effects and performing bad deeds will result in bad effects.

Regular readers of this blog should hopefully immediately recognise this as an incarnation of “conventional wisdom”.

Is it a superstition?

If I wore my scientific reductionist hat, the same hat that encourages horrid sound-byte definitions of such concepts, I might argue there is no enforcer for karmic balance, no balancing force. The belief in karma, the belief that if I do terrible things something terrible will happen to me, is but humans assigning meaning to events and performing observational selection to the extent that it can help them believe there is some form of justice in life. It certainly sounds like superstition.

But I don’t like that hat. It is an ugly hat. I like my “memetic engineering” hat much more. I like working with an awareness of the meaning and the feeling, and the purpose of a meme, of an idea. Let karma be something less harshly defined, approach it with a mindset more aware of pre-modern culture, let the definition be a little more mystical. Distilling an idea like that into a reductionistic definition is already doing it an injustice.

Unreductionism

(Yea, I’m coining new words. So sue me.)

What does the idea of karma capture, in essence? Do good, then good will happen to you. It encourages the same actions that a rationality-based ethics built on the Golden Rule encourages. Both result in the same practices, even if they’re not build on the exact same beliefs.

The reductionistic approach takes the belief to a logical and harsh definition, to be empirically tested and scrutinised. The result is then typically “this cannot be tested” (if karma balance is believed to be achieved in another life, perhaps), or “there is no evidence to suggest this is true”. To get to that kind of conclusion, you’re embracing individualism. Look at the bigger picture…

Much of religious tradition is about enabling cooperation between individuals for the benefit of the collective, providing a survival benefit to the tribe. (Including superstition: some anthropological theories on the origins of certain superstitions suggest they are a solution to the trust problem: when humans developed language, for the first time in their history they had the ability to lie, an ability that could be used for personal gain. What ideas might have to develop in order to foster cooperation?) The greater truth, for the collective as a whole, is that karma most certainly does work. It just doesn’t necessarily come back to you, the individual — it’s positive benefits are for the community. And a well-functioning community should then have knock-on benefits for you, the individual.

Traditions that recognise karma balance isn’t necessarily found in this life, and solve the problem by postulating reincarnation, finding balance in “another life perhaps”, are much more correct than you might imagine. Doing a good deed can have a good benefit for those around you: those around you are the people living those “other lives”. The reincarnation belief is an instantiation of empathy: the other might as well be you, so treat them well! Consider us all connected, then a good deed certainly benefits us, connected. Besides that, people also do reciprocate, so there is sufficient “selfish” reasons enabling individualists to recognise the benefit.

Karma is then a tool enabling each individual to evaluate a “best” course of action for themselves, without needing to wonder about the other‘s choices and actions (much like free-market capitalism might dream of successfully reducing decisions with complex society-wide implications to an individual’s personal economic concerns). Karma could thus be considered a factorisation of collective best-behaviour.

There is another aspect to karma, and that’s the positive use of confirmation bias: do well, then expect to reap rewards, and you might be prone to recognise and emphasize all the good things that happen to you rather than the bad. (And if bad things happen, you might go dig through your past, looking for bad actions, and blame those for your current predicament. Thus, self-reinforcing good behaviour.)

I have no trouble appreciating the correlation between a belief in karma, and a low crime rate…

When it doesn’t work…

And I could have just ended the post. But you know me. I need to take this further, I need to think too much. Let’s revisit the suggestion that belief in karma explains why Bali has a lower crime rate than the rest of Indonesia:

If we wanted to find some degree of certainty about this particular explanation, we would have to consider alternative hypotheses and find a way to test which is more likely. Ideally, we would want many examples of this kind of correlation, to see if this holds for other groups and in other contexts as well. Already pretty much impossible to find enough data, but suppose we had many examples. That could establish whether a low crime rate and Hinduism can be associated. That does not guarantee causality though — it does not guarantee that it is Hinduism that causes the low crime rate. It might even be the other way round: a society with a low crime rate might provide an environment suitable to support beliefs in Hindu memes — i.e. the low crime rate might cause (or at least support) the beliefs.

In particular: in a well functioning society without a problem with crime, the traditional wisdom that is encapsulated in the concept of karma seems valid, whereas having a “Job experience”, where everything goes wrong despite impeccable behaviour serves as a dramatic counter-example to undermine such a belief. Translating the story of Job into a Hindu context (for now: minus belief reincarnation to redress imbalance in “this life”): Job’s friends could arguably be more prone to karma-belief, whereas Job discovered that it just doesn’t work that way. Might a tribe in the middle-east endure many more hardships, despite doing everything “right”, and therefore find it much harder to believe in a concept such as karma?

What about the “conventional wisdom” found in the prosperity gospel then?

Prosperity theology is the teaching that an authentic religious belief and behaviour in a person will result in their material prosperity.

It is in many ways similar to the conventional wisdom expressed by the karma idea, but “authentic religious belief and behaviour” can be much more demanding and all-encompassing than the general “good behaviour” required by karma. This ensures that prosperity gospel ideas can survive hardships better than the karma idea, as hardships that cannot be blamed on insufficient good deeds and attitude can still be blamed on insufficient religiosity by simply extending and exaggerating the religion’s demands. (For example, as explanation for why they were stuck under Roman oppression, ruled by the empire, the Pharisees suggested it was because of insufficient purity. If we could all live to the highest standards of purity… God will free us from Roman rule, his kingdom will come. And Jesus didn’t agree with the Pharisees, God’s kingdom is already at hand! But I digress. As always.)

This is pure speculation though. Combined with a belief in reincarnation and “wrongs committed in my previous life might explain suffering in my current one”, the whole meme complex can become much more tenacious and pernicious. For that reason, I really shouldn’t speculate as to whether the South African economic context has any effect on how sustainable belief in karma might be. So… the little table below is in a separate section that really has nothing to do with this post.

Rough economic comparison between Indonesia and South Africa

(If you’re a South African:) Did this post make you wonder about how the economic situation of Indonesia compares with our own? I did, so I took a look at the CIA World Factbook. South Africa seems much, much worse:

(NB warnings such as: “The quality of surveys is improving with time, yet caution is still necessary in making inter-country comparisons.”)

While I can think of two different ways to interpret that last statistic, I think it means the top 10% of our population gets 44.7% of the country’s income, and the bottom 10% of our population gets only 1.4%: we have a much bigger gap between rich and poor.

Um, anyway, enough randomness. I hope some of this was interesting or thought provoking to you. Oh, and do point out any errors, I’m not giving this post a final proofread.