Religion in Human Evolution

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

The great Robert Bellah just passed away. I recently finished his shatteringly brilliant last work, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, and immediately regretted allowing it sit on my shelf as long as it did. In his honor, I thought I would start a thread about the phenomenon of religion in human evolution.

I will start with Bellah's perspective, and maybe we can go from there.

The first thing to understand about Bellah is that he was a social scientist whose intellectual forebear was Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, an early-20th century sociologist and atheist, is basically one of the fathers of group selection theory, and of the social theory of religious phenomenon. He was puzzled by the apparent ubiquity of religion, as well as its tendency to stick around in the face of contrary facts and events. He reasoned that if religion was simply a costly maladaptation, like many hyper-rationalsts then and now insist, why wouldn't such a process have been bred out of us by now? What good could it be doing individuals to believe things that aren't true, even being driven to sacrifice oneself or healthy members of a society, or to cause harm to oneself? Durkheim was more thoughtful than today's pop New Atheist jokers who think they're being original when they talk about faces in the clouds, hyper agency detection, etc and say that religion is simply a vestigial characteristic that has become maladaptive in today's world. Durkheim thought of all that, and went beyond it.

Durkheim decided that the problem was in the question: it wasn't about what religion was doing for the indvidual, but what it was doing for the social group. He settled on the group as the basic operative unit in natural selection, and focused on religion phenomena from that perspective. He theorized that, at least in social creatures or, as some call humans and some other species, ultrasocial creatures the group was the primary unit of evolutionary interest, but it competed with a centrifugal force of individual self-interest that always threatened to pull a society a part. Therefore, Durkheim said, the group developed behaviors - rituals, systems of belief as identifying markers, etc - to bind the group together (in much the same way that a crowd is drawn together to feel a sense of unity at a concert or something). Sociologists following him would extend this theory to insist that the religions of different groups, along with their other cultural traits, were then subject to the process of natural selection, whereby those groups with the belief and ritual structures that most effectively bound them together for directed action eventually outlived those with weaker systems. (This part has run into a lot of opposition today, because it dares to say that modern successful religions, like Christianity and Islam, are higher on some kind of scale than aboriginal systems... and saying that anything is better than anything else is a great taboo in the humanities.)

Bellah was with Durkheim on almost all of this, except for one thing... he was a Christian.

But anyway, Bellah largely dismissed the scholars who focused on what religion did for the individual... he saw that largely as a side-effect of religion that could be either helpful or harmful depending on the circumstances in an individual's life and the particulars of his ritual and belief structure. However, he also believed that the mental structures that led to the ubiquity of religion did not disappear when people stopped believing in gods, and he was one of the great explicators of the truth that people are nearly always religious, though the symbol system they use to fill the necessary holes can be swapped out. His great piece from the 1960s on the American civil religion and its structure is seminal in this regard (http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).

If he conceived of ritual as a social bonding technology, he considered myth to be something like a mnemonic technology used by pre-literate people to store multiple layers of information and meaning and transmit it through generations. There is surely something to this, in my opinion.

[Nonc Hilaire]

This does sound like a sensible approach. The three major religious life transitions - birth, pair bonding and death - are always marked in ritual by both religious and non-religious people.

The subject is broad and I haven't read the book, but those three transitions might be a way to structure a discussion.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

That's sort of the path taken by many of the synthesists who got their start in the first half of the 20th century. They are out of fashion these days, but I still tend to enjoy their approach more than most of the provincial academics these days. The post-modern approach was to atomize everything down to such a level that any attempt to compare at all was sneered at. For example, if anyone attempted to talk about "hunter-gatherer religion", he would be met with a chorus of boos proclaiming that you couldn't possibly generalize and that there were so many different types of hunter-gatherer religion that the term was basically meaningless. Which, despite the fact that it is actually a useful classification and there are certain shared characteristics, is a reasonable enough claim. But then they took it to another level. Someone who did his thesis on a particular Australian aboriginal group would insist that his group was so different from all the others that you couldn't possibly talk about "Australian aboriginal religion" and the term was meaningless. This went on for awhile, with anthropologists, historians, scholars of religion, etc all agreeing to stay out of one another's specialized territory, until it got to a point that the general consensus was that you couldn't really say anything about anything... ever.

There was a double motivation. The first was territory. All the humanities scholars benefited by having everyone else agree that that the intricacies of such and such a subject were so specific and particular that no one except one with a Ph.D. in that specific area was qualified to speak on it. If anyone from outside the field wandered in, they could be laughed out of the room as a dabbler. The second motivation was political/moral. In the post-modern movement, it became anathema to make any kind of generalized claim about anything, especially people and cultures... that was the kind of thinking that led to thinking of people in terms of groups, and down that road is racism, nationalism, chauvanism of all kinds.

And so the old cross-discipline synthesists fell out of fashion. People like Eliade, Campbell, Jung, etc. who talked about religion from a comparative standpoint were, to be sure, criticized by specialists in their own day, but it wasn't until 1970s that the post-moderns fully banished them from serious academic discussion. Many of them drew on depth psychology, which was also no longer in fashion, but they came at it a little differently.

Eliade

Though he wrote many books, there are only a few you need to read to understand Mircea Eliade. Start with The Sacred and the Profane, and the Myth of the Eternal Return. Both short works that can be gotten through in an afternoon. Then, it's good to keep his History of Religious Ideas set around as reference. Also, his Shamanism is a necessary reference for that topic as well. But only The Sacred and the Profane and the Myth of the Eternal Return are really needed to get an idea of what he's about.

Eliade drew very heavily on William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience and, especially, Rudolf Otto and his work The Idea of the Holy. If you are at all familiar with those works, then you know that Eliade's focus was on the ecstatic experience, Freud's 'oceanic' feeling, the mystical experience of awe in the face of sacred power known to the yogi or the saint. And indeed, Eliade was a lifelong practitioner of yoga whose primary interest was in the ecstatic travel of the shaman.

In the Sacred and the Profane, a lovely little book, he suggests that man, being self-conscious and existing in time, faced a difficult environmental problem unique among all creatures. Other animals, living solely in the present are always only concerned with here/now. Although a place, such as a nest or a water hole, might be remembered for its past tendency to provide safety or refreshment, these places are not "significant" to an animal, because an animal can only ever be concerned about its immediate impulses. Anything an animal is doing has an immediate goal. Man, however, having woken up and found himself, as an individual, persisting from day to day, had a need, arising immediately from the simple fact that he was self-aware, to orient himself in both space and time. That is, imagine space as an open plane, a grid, with no place distinguishable from any other place. With no point of reference, you cannot say that you are "here", for there is just homogenous space stretching in all directions. You need a second point from which to work. Eliade suggests that this need was fulfilled when a particular object or piece of space revealed itself to man as being particularly meaningful, powerful, etc. Often it would be a sacred stone, or a tree, or a mountain. This irruption of the sacred into our realm served as the "founding of a world", for indeed there was no world before it was discovered, only homogenous space. Once the sacred mountain, for example, had been identified, one could now decide on a place to build one's dwelling, for example, and you would know "where" it was because of its position vis a vis the world mountain.

He also developed the idea of sacred time. He suggested that the liturgical calendars of cultures all over the world are based on the idea that the founding events of the world order took place in a "previous age", almost always a mythological age. In this sacred past, everything important had happened. For many primitive cultures, the very models for their daily behaviors were laid down; you see in many ancient myths explanations of why our people make the spears this particular way, why we prepare food in that particular way, etc. Even when this is not the case, such as in Christianity, it can still be said that everything "important" happened during the events described in the Bible, while the daily grind we go through is merely the mundane, profane time that we go through in between rituals and festivals (the Protestants turned this around by eventually getting rid of the mass altogether and turning the tasks of daily life into their religious observance.) When a group was enacting a ritual during a festival season, they were not simply honoring the past, but bringing it forward into the present. As the wine and wafer are transmuted into the actual blood and body of Christ, that sacred time is made present during the festival. He believed this had a much more direct effect on people not dominated by western rationalist thought structures and our linear conception of time.

Campbell

For Campbell, who drew heavily on Jung, and also on German philosophy (he studied German, spent important days in his youth there, and was very influenced by German thinkers, especially Schopenhauer, Nietszche, and Spengler - the Decline of the West was his favorite book), he brought depth psychology to the study of comparative mythology, taking Jung's approach (though breaking with him significantly on many issues) and applying it to a much broader and more detailed understanding of the topic of mythology.

He suggested the approach that Nonc Hilaire mentioned, that man, having awoken, found himself in a unique circumstance among all animals. Man is a creature that, owing to his large head and the restrictions of female hip width, is born too early, and left in a state of total dependency for a very long time. What would take place within the womb for most animals, or in a pouch for marsupials, for man takes place after birth. So when he is born, and for some time after, he is essentially still a fetus. A child therefore, must progress through stages of life that other animals don't. He goes through some 10-12 years of almost total dependency on the parents. After this extended childhood, in which the built-in constellation of references is the mother and the self-interested demands of his growing body, he must be transformed into responsible member of his social group, so that his growing strength and energy can be turned to the purposes of his society. Not long after he reaches the height of his powers, he begins to decline, and is faced, especially in later ages with a very extended decrepitude and knowledge of his approaching death. Campbell believed that one of the primary purposes of mythology was to usher a person through these stations in life, and the commonality of these stations (along with the birth trauma) and the pressures and terrors they bring with them, was a big part of the reason for the similar structures of mythological systems all over the world. However, it should be noted that Campbell was not a proponent of parallel development, but of cultural diffusion.

Campbell's best essay was one called The Symbol Without Meaning, in which he took issue with Jung's suggestion that the mandala was a universal human symbol. He delivered the paper at the Eranos conference in Switzerland, which was dedicated to Jung, as his first ever lecture on such a stage. It was received with some surprise, but he makes his case so well that it had to be accepted: the mandala was a symbol that was adopted at a specific period in human history, namely after the agricultural revolution when society began to stratify into four basic castes: priest, politician/warrior, merchant/householder, worker/slave.

But for Campbell, there is really nothing better than his four-part Masks of God series, which consists of Primitive Mythology, Oriental Mythology, Occidental Mythology, and Creative Mythology. You don't really need to read Hero With a Thousand Faces unless you are an aspiring screenwriter (and even then the ideas have been so worked into popular culture that reading it would be redundant), and the PBS series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, recorded when Campbell was in his 80s, a few years before his death, doesn't give an idea of the scope of the man's thought.

For guys like Eliade, Campbell, etc.. you have to take the good with the bad. There is no doubt that they overgeneralized. No doubt that they seize on details that seem to support a favored case that, on further review, probably weren't as strong as they thought. No doubt that they tended to make connections that were flimsy at best... leading Eliade to suggest that all religious behavior can be explained by a few of his theories, and Campbell to suggest that all religions everywhere, at bottom, lead to the unitive mystical experience described by Sufis, yogis, Christian mystics, etc. They often get accused of superficial reading of their material, but I don't think that's right. It's true that later specialists took issue with a lot of the stuff they used as evidence, but you can't read their work and say that their knowledge was superficial, only that when you are excited about a particular thesis, and not intellectually careful enough, you run the risk seeing what you want to see occasionally.

Nevertheless, anyone who is remotely interested in religion or mythology ought to read all four of the Masks of God series, which are brilliant, as well as Eliade's Sacred and Profane and Myth of the Eternal Return.

[Enki]

That's sort of the path taken by many of the synthesists who got their start in the first half of the 20th century. They are out of fashion these days, but I still tend to enjoy their approach more than most of the provincial academics these days. The post-modern approach was to atomize everything down to such a level that any attempt to compare at all was sneered at. For example, if anyone attempted to talk about "hunter-gatherer religion", he would be met with a chorus of boos proclaiming that you couldn't possibly generalize and that there were so many different types of hunter-gatherer religion that the term was basically meaningless. Which, despite the fact that it is actually a useful classification and there are certain shared characteristics, is a reasonable enough claim. But then they took it to another level. Someone who did his thesis on a particular Australian aboriginal group would insist that his group was so different from all the others that you couldn't possibly talk about "Australian aboriginal religion" and the term was meaningless. This went on for awhile, with anthropologists, historians, scholars of religion, etc all agreeing to stay out of one another's specialized territory, until it got to a point that the general consensus was that you couldn't really say anything about anything... ever.

There is no such thing as 'Hunter Gatherer Religion'. Saying there is, is kind of an Orientalizing idea. When people try to compare religious beliefs of that nature they completely deny the idea that it is possible that certain people's in ancient antiquity thought in a way that is completely and totally alien to us.

Like I cannot imagine what it was like in Carthage for the noble class who were willing to sacrifice their first born in order to ensure that Carthage remained victorious and prosperous. Nor can I imagine how that compared to Rome where the entire empire was built on the backs of captive chattel slaves won in battle by Roman Legions. You can compare Athens and Sparta all you like, but their cultures could not have been more different. They were more different at their apex than New York and Shanghai are today.

There was a double motivation. The first was territory. All the humanities scholars benefited by having everyone else agree that that the intricacies of such and such a subject were so specific and particular that no one except one with a Ph.D. in that specific area was qualified to speak on it. If anyone from outside the field wandered in, they could be laughed out of the room as a dabbler. The second motivation was political/moral. In the post-modern movement, it became anathema to make any kind of generalized claim about anything, especially people and cultures... that was the kind of thinking that led to thinking of people in terms of groups, and down that road is racism, nationalism, chauvanism of all kinds.

Analyses of trade and property are really interesting. The notion of filial ownership over progeny is probably the one common root of all belief systems. How they traded those resources was different depending on which tribe. Matriarchal societies run by a council of women that distribute resources are very different from patriarchal societies where and old man warrior priest determines the distribution of resources, including the women.

And so the old cross-discipline synthesists fell out of fashion. People like Eliade, Campbell, Jung, etc. who talked about religion from a comparative standpoint were, to be sure, criticized by specialists in their own day, but it wasn't until 1970s that the post-moderns fully banished them from serious academic discussion. Many of them drew on depth psychology, which was also no longer in fashion, but they came at it a little differently.

Well Jung was a mystic not a scientist, so was Campbell really.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

You know how I roll on this stuff. Nobody in the humanities is a scientist. You really only have two types of people working in the humanities: people in the field collecting data, and storytellers. I'm not suggesting we take Jung, Campbell, Eliade, or anyone serious as scientists.

But the post-moderns who are so against comparison go way too far. You don't have to be able to put yourself in the mind of an ancient pharaoh to be able to look the historical phenomena side by side with one another from the outside. To deny the value of comparison in drawing out broad structures and themes that couldn't otherwise be detected is like saying that because none of the days last year had exactly the same weather as the corresponding day this year, we can't possibly presume to hold the two years up side by side and make any grand pronouncements of so-called "seasons". Or, to take an evolutionary version of the same idea that I picked up I can't remember where, you can look at the human hand, the bat's wing, and the porpoise's fin individually and learn some things about how they function in isolation, how they relate to the rest of the body, etc... but until you hold them up next to one another and see their similar structure, you cannot understand the related morphology of each one. A human hand is not a bat's wing is not a porpoise fin, but holding them up to the light to search for related morphological processes is a valuable exercise - although, again, it is highly out of fashion.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

JN,

Are you familiar with Rene Girard and his ilk?

[Enki]

You know how I roll on this stuff. Nobody in the humanities is a scientist. You really only have two types of people working in the humanities: people in the field collecting data, and storytellers. I'm not suggesting we take Jung, Campbell, Eliade, or anyone serious as scientists.

But the post-moderns who are so against comparison go way too far. You don't have to be able to put yourself in the mind of an ancient pharaoh to be able to look the historical phenomena side by side with one another from the outside. To deny the value of comparison in drawing out broad structures and themes that couldn't otherwise be detected is like saying that because none of the days last year had exactly the same weather as the corresponding day this year, we can't possibly presume to hold the two years up side by side and make any grand pronouncements of so-called "seasons". Or, to take an evolutionary version of the same idea that I picked up I can't remember where, you can look at the human hand, the bat's wing, and the porpoise's fin individually and learn some things about how they function in isolation, how they relate to the rest of the body, etc... but until you hold them up next to one another and see their similar structure, you cannot understand the related morphology of each one. A human hand is not a bat's wing is not a porpoise fin, but holding them up to the light to search for related morphological processes is a valuable exercise - although, again, it is highly out of fashion.

Well to me, the idea that people have COMPLETELY different mental operating systems is far more exciting than the idea that we can just categorize human behavior into these neat little datasets.

Society over the past several thousand years has grown to a lot of common ways of organizing people. The big megalithic bureaucracies that are nation-states are more similar than different.

This is one reason I liked the film Apocalypto, they showed just how different the people actually were. To the point that they were like aliens next to one another. Regardless of whatever historical merits it may have lacked...

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

JN,

Are you familiar with Rene Girard and his ilk?

Hi Nap. Yeah definitely. Bellah doesn't usually mention him specifically, but nonetheless draws on his ideas on mimesis. I enjoyed Violence and the Sacred, or whatever it was called, although I tend to disagree with most of its conclusions, ingenious though they were. I tend to think our need to oppress and destroy is less complicated, although I liked what he had to say about violence in group dynamics. I can't go along with his idea that the ritual sacrifice is the source of archaic religion, because the record seems to show that human sacrifice usually exists in a narrow range of early complex societies - those sandwiched between the small, kinship based tribal societies on the one hand, and the early civilizations on the other. Neither kinship based tribes nor full-flower civilizations tend to engage in much, if any, human sacrifice, with a few obvious exceptions (such as the Mesoamericans). Nonetheless the power of the myth itself as a world-founding event survived even where the practice did not.

One of the best books on that subject is by Eli Sagan, called At the Dawn of Tyranny. Great book, highly recommended.

*EDIT* Looking over Girard's bibliography and realizing he has a lot of stuff I haven't read. Heading to Amazon.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

You know how I roll on this stuff. Nobody in the humanities is a scientist. You really only have two types of people working in the humanities: people in the field collecting data, and storytellers. I'm not suggesting we take Jung, Campbell, Eliade, or anyone serious as scientists.

But the post-moderns who are so against comparison go way too far. You don't have to be able to put yourself in the mind of an ancient pharaoh to be able to look the historical phenomena side by side with one another from the outside. To deny the value of comparison in drawing out broad structures and themes that couldn't otherwise be detected is like saying that because none of the days last year had exactly the same weather as the corresponding day this year, we can't possibly presume to hold the two years up side by side and make any grand pronouncements of so-called "seasons". Or, to take an evolutionary version of the same idea that I picked up I can't remember where, you can look at the human hand, the bat's wing, and the porpoise's fin individually and learn some things about how they function in isolation, how they relate to the rest of the body, etc... but until you hold them up next to one another and see their similar structure, you cannot understand the related morphology of each one. A human hand is not a bat's wing is not a porpoise fin, but holding them up to the light to search for related morphological processes is a valuable exercise - although, again, it is highly out of fashion.

Well to me, the idea that people have COMPLETELY different mental operating systems is far more exciting than the idea that we can just categorize human behavior into these neat little datasets.

Society over the past several thousand years has grown to a lot of common ways of organizing people. The big megalithic bureaucracies that are nation-states are more similar than different.

This is one reason I liked the film Apocalypto, they showed just how different the people actually were. To the point that they were like aliens next to one another. Regardless of whatever historical merits it may have lacked...

Yeah, I agree for the most part. Although I think Campbell would have agreed as well, being a big fan of Spengler. Spengler believed that different peoples, when in their cultural periods, were as different in mental sets from one another as humans and aliens, but that once they hardened into their late civilization phase, they fell into more or less recognizable patterns. So the Homeric Greeks are incomprehensible to us on a deep level, but the late Romans thought basically the way we do. I can buy into that, especially reading someone like Seneca or the various letters Cicero sent around during the civil wars. They could have been written yesterday.

[Endovelico]

Nobody in the humanities is a scientist. You really only have two types of people working in the humanities: people in the field collecting data, and storytellers.

This seems to me a tiny little bit arrogant, isn't it?...

Social sciences are not exact sciences, they tend to be probabilistic, and your success working in that field depends very much on how familiar you are with the behavioural approach, with psychology and biology. You can't deal with social phenomena until you understand a bit about what makes people tick. Once you understand that, you can start finding meaningful patterns in the fields of sociology, political science or economics. And you can start predicting - within certain margins - how people will act and why. And once you set certain objectives, you may even know, with a certain degree of confidence, how to achieve them. The difficulty is that society is not confined as a laboratory is. You deal with large numbers of individuals, who possess free will and don't all react in the same manner, which accounts for the margin of error. But competent scientists will still be able to make meaningful predictions. What confuses some people is the fact that predictions are usually made by unschooled people, like politicians, journalists and commentators. Their rate of failure is so high that it gives the impression that social sciences are not really scientific. It's like watching witch doctors at work and coming to the conclusion that medecine is not a science.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Yeah, I don't mean that humanities scholars aren't brilliant people or that what they do isn't important. In my opinion it's more important than the hard sciences, probably. The problem seems to be that, at some point, we decided that only science created valuable knowledge, and everyone started aspiring to be "scientific". Psychologists, historians, anthropologists, economists... people who have no business calling themselves scientists and who drain the meaning out of their own fields when they attempt to do so. That's not to say that many of these people are not capable in various scientific fields. But 99% of what they do is draw correlations and then wage political fights over whose explanation is going to hold sway. And this is massively important, it is one of the forces that motivates a society and drives it forward; gives it context in the present and orients it for forward action.

In order for the social sciences to be considered actual sciences, you would have to believe that, slowly but surely, they are shaving away layers of error and gradually getting closer to the truth. And if you believe that, then I don't know what to tell you. They do not proceed according to falsification, but according to fashion.

And, no, I don't think it's arrogant for me to say that the humanities are not "scientific". On the contrary, I think that, given our failures at engineering outcomes in our own society and era, and given our abject failure to understand the motivations behind our own thoughts and behavior, it is hubris to think we can begin to really understand the societies and psychology of others. Again, that doesn't mean that I don't think the fields aren't useful: they are useful socially and politically, especially in an age deprived for the most part of convincing religious mythology.

[Parodite]

I don't think it is impossible to do science on human societies and culture. On anything in fact. Collecting data for one is an important feature of any science. Then constructing a theory is equally part and parcel of the scientific method. To then devise experiments to test the theory in a controlled environment where you isolate one or more variables however, is more challenging. I would think some of the "hard" sciences are of great help though, especially biology.

[Endovelico]

Let's take political science. Some people who consider themselves political scientists and who will say that Man is naturally well disposed, inclined to solidarity, eager to promote democracy and defend human rights, are not doing science, they are selling ideology. They fail to recognize that we have a few million years experience surviving in a hostile environment, and that we only succeeded because we could be mean and violent, selfish as needed, authoritarian and hierarchical. Of course solidarity and cooperation were also useful, under certain circumstances, but only in moderate doses. If you ignore this and fail to realize that those survival mechanisms are genetically transmitted, there is no way you are going to do science. Understanding human nature but also realizing the role of ethics and where it comes from, are essential to start being able to look at human relations on a scientific manner. I try to do that in my own field of science, and I found out that there is very little people do which surprises me. The trickiest part is assessing how far people will let themselves be ruled by ethical considerations, especially as our sensitivity to ethics is evolutive. As we realize ethics can be beneficial to the community we tend to integrate it in our instinctive behaviour, but it's difficult to assess when the turning point has arrived. And there will always be situations in which going back to the old ways seems more adequate.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Let's take political science. Some people who consider themselves political scientists and who will say that Man is naturally well disposed, inclined to solidarity, eager to promote democracy and defend human rights, are not doing science, they are selling ideology. They fail to recognize that we have a few million years experience surviving in a hostile environment, and that we only succeeded because we could be mean and violent, selfish as needed, authoritarian and hierarchical. Of course solidarity and cooperation were also useful, under certain circumstances, but only in moderate doses. If you ignore this and fail to realize that those survival mechanisms are genetically transmitted, there is no way you are going to do science. Understanding human nature but also realizing the role of ethics and where it comes from, are essential to start being able to look at human relations on a scientific manner. I try to do that in my own field of science, and I found out that there is very little people do which surprises me. The trickiest part is assessing how far people will let themselves be ruled by ethical considerations, especially as our sensitivity to ethics is evolutive. As we realize ethics can be beneficial to the community we tend to integrate it in our instinctive behaviour, but it's difficult to assess when the turning point has arrived. And there will always be situations in which going back to the old ways seems more adequate.

A big part of what the humanities do for us is to help us integrate the information about ourselves and the world that science provides, and to put it into a context that is coherent and meaningful. But that doesn't make the humanities science.

And if you are able to look at people and not be surprised by the way they behave, it is due to a wisdom you have gained through experience over the course of your life. For every social scientist who is able to take a measured view of human behavior, there is one who is basically autistic. I would offer that men with immeasurably greater understanding of human nature than you or I have existed who had never heard of social science, or science, for that matter.

[Parodite]

A big part of what the humanities do for us is to help us integrate the information about ourselves and the world that science provides, and to put it into a context that is coherent and meaningful. But that doesn't make the humanities science.

Not sure this is always true or the complete picture of what the humanities do.

The simple fact of collecting more data, as also the humanities do, means we will look at a bigger map and of a higher resolution afterwards. The brain is the default tool that integrates sensory information into the evolving patchwork of differences and similarities that make the world as we know it, meta-knowledge derived and put into the abstract included. It will process new data as it does with any new data: integrate it into, ad it to the existing map.

Without doing "official science" we in fact do science every moment of the day by comparing differences and similarities that are themselves dynamic and transient, but from which the brain nevertheless constructs theories that hold true long enough over time to create stable visual models, sounds and other experiences. When a theory is tested and confirmed often enough (no black swans encountered that falsify the theory) it solidifies into fact and knowledge.

Collecting data, creating theory and doing experiment as a science, is very much an extension of the brain and the senses that provide it with input from the world around. It builds on the scientific method already in place for millions of years.

I make this point, not to be fooled into thinking that the scientific method is some kind of up-in-the-air cultural behavior invented be clever folks who pulled that rabbit out of their magic hat they found in a dusty attic, performing acts of novel inspiration enabled by Gods from the beyond.

Saw a mouse scanning the kitchen floor, processing the data that its eyes, nose and ears collected at super speed.. having its theories tested continuously. When it detected me, its theory that humans usually mean trouble took control and it gotta hell out of there to a better place. (mice can be domesticated, meaning that the theory that all humans are sh*t can be falsified and if often enough... a new theory emerges that says that human beings are ok-ish or even good as a source of food and shelter)

My theory is ( ) that human beings, like mice, can only act as scientists. It is impossible not to behave as a scientist. We are born scientists. You will always test one theory against another... Even somebody who is psychotic and delusional is doing science, testing theories and creating models.

[monster_gardener]

Thank You Very Much for your post, Juggernaut.

And Thanks for the Book Recommendations.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

I'm remiss for not mentioning Max Weber, who was also a major inspiration for Bellah. But in keeping with my theme, for now I'll stick to what are today considered pseudo-scholars that are more popular among the educated laity than with professional academics.

Julian Jaynes is most famous for his theory of bicameral human consciousness, especially for his idea that modern self-awareness, as we experience and understand it, did not arise until late into historical times, beginning to predominate with the rise of the Assyrian empire and coming to flower by Classical times. I have my issues with that, although not because I dismiss it outright, but because I think he probably doesn't go far enough down the rabbit hole of thinking that the mental structure and basic experience of people from previous historical civilizations was fundamentally alien to our own.

But as to his input on the origin of religion - some of this will not be his original material - but I find some of his approach to be overly complicated (the neurological basis of the bicameral voices, although there are some contemporary scholars who coming around to his idea without knowing it... the recent book Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness, which looks at the state of Jaynes' theories after 30 years of science and scholarship, is worth a read if you cared at all about his Bicameral Mind.)... anyway, some of it is overly complicated, but a lot of his theories on early cognition are surprisingly straightforward and plausible.

For example, he points out that an early human, just emerging from the mists of animal consciousness (Jaynes adopted a theory of consciousness based on language, a la Daniel Dennet, and believed that consciousness evolved partly due to the growth in the complexity and depth of language), did not have the same basic categories we take for granted but were in a very rudimentary early phase of mostly facing basic experience with the most basic attempts at narratization. There is no reason to believe that such a human would naturally assume an ontological difference between different types of experience: so seeing a person alive, then watching them die and decay, and then seeing them again in thoughts and dreams would be an incongruous experience that the fledgling mind would fight to make sense of. Since they wouldn't have a concept of what a "thought" was, or what a "dream" was, and only knew that they were having an experience, they would believe that the dead was returning in some way or another.

He mentioned a theory about how the dead were thought to inhabit the underworld. Humans would sleep at night in the dark, after they saw the sun sink down beneath the horizon. Yet when they dreamed, they would often find their dreams lit, and may have reasoned that they had gone to where the sun had gone, below the earth. If people known to be dead were showing up in dreams, it could account for the first beliefs in passage of the dead to the underworld. Of course these are literary theories, not scientific ones, but they are very interesting, IMO.

He speaks a lot about schizophrenia, and of what used to be a more general phenomenon experienced today primarily by schizophrenics and children, but often by people who are otherwise sane: hearing voices. He brings up a plethora of clinical studies, and overwhelmingly the voices people tend to hear are from dead people in positions of power, most often parents, usually admonishing them or attacking them for not spending enough time or emotion maintaining their memory. Patients would often speak of being incessantly attacked by a dead mother for not having loved her in life, and for disrespecting her memory, for example. Sometimes, the voices would command patients to do things to prove their affection or atone for their earlier lack. To the patients, and this was reported not only by people currently hearing them but also by those who had been "cured" and re-entered society as "normal" individuals, the voices are one hundred percent real, as real as someone sitting in the same room speaking to you. One man told his psychiatrist that to doubt the voice he was hearing made as much sense to him as doubting the voice of the doctor sitting in front of him. Indeed, later research has shown that very often these voices are a result of stimulation of the aural portion of the brain, so they are not just confused thoughts.

He suggest that perhaps earlier people, whose sense of "real" and "unreal" was not really developed - it's not like they had schools of philosophy dissecting the ontological differences between different experiences - may have been epidemically accosted by vision and voices of deceased ancestors when they were in that crucial period of development between advanced ape consciousness and linguistic human self-awareness. He noted that hearing voices is extremely common among children, and if these voices were not discouraged by the society but thought to be real, even important, there is no reason to think that the "ability" would have faded away as they grew up. If, indeed, these people were suffering frequent assaults by ancestors admonishing, insulting, and making demands, he believed it would explain early burial behaviors: many burials can be identified where the corpses seem to be bound and weighed down with large stones, for example. Jaynes speculated that perhaps these humans, who believed that these people were actually coming back to haunt them, could be held in place. But, as voice-hearing patients often reported, attempts to drown out or ignore their voices, or resist them in general, were usually met with an even greater assault, so it is no wonder that instead of binding, it is far more common to find burials with gifts and other forms of respect. Jaynes believed that this may have been a method that gave people the psychological assurance that they had done their filial duty and allowed their ancestral voices to stop.

Jaynes never mentioned it, but I often think of the saying that knowledge of death is the beginning of philosophy. The common reading is that becoming aware of impermanence, especially of oneself, is the beginning of deep, reflective though. But there is a very Jaynesian reading possible: that once early humans finally became aware that dead people were actually dead, that is when it became possible to interpret their reappearance in terms of spirits or other non-immediate experiences.

He carries on with very interesting stuff about the development of religious ideas, specifically the concept gods --> god ---> God, along with the consolidation of the human ego. He believed the two occurred in parallel and reflect one another. We can get into that later if anyone is interested.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

A big part of what the humanities do for us is to help us integrate the information about ourselves and the world that science provides, and to put it into a context that is coherent and meaningful. But that doesn't make the humanities science.

Not sure this is always true or the complete picture of what the humanities do.

Yeah, I didn't mean that it was the only thing they do.

Without doing "official science" we in fact do science every moment of the day by comparing differences and similarities that are themselves dynamic and transient, but from which the brain nevertheless constructs theories that hold true long enough over time to create stable visual models, sounds and other experiences. When a theory is tested and confirmed often enough (no black swans encountered that falsify the theory) it solidifies into fact and knowledge.

Collecting data, creating theory and doing experiment as a science, is very much an extension of the brain and the senses that provide it with input from the world around. It builds on the scientific method already in place for millions of years.

But this is kind of one of those "if that is science, then everything is science, then nothing is science" things.

[Enki]

Political violence is not the opposite of solidarity, in fact it is dependent upon the highest level of solidarity. This is why Roman legions could act as one versus the individualistic warrior clans they fought. Sure one on one Vercingetorix would have disassembled Caesar, but Caesar's troops were more disciplined.

[Parodite]

Collecting data, creating theory and doing experiment as a science, is very much an extension of the brain and the senses that provide it with input from the world around. It builds on the scientific method already in place for millions of years.

But this is kind of one of those "if that is science, then everything is science, then nothing is science" things.

I would say everything is science but the collected data, the models (theories) created and how they are tested vary. Some people are just not aware of it and think their science is more scientific than others, or that it doesn't deserve it to be called that way.. Or reversely, would consider it an insult.

[Endovelico]

I have little scientific basis to support my idea, but I think both language and intelligence appeared in our species at a level of complexity very close to what we know today. Vocabulary has definitely become more complex, but not the language structure. And although we know a lot more, it doesn't mean we were then less intelligent than we are now.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

I have little scientific basis to support my idea, but I think both language and intelligence appeared in our species at a level of complexity very close to what we know today. Vocabulary has definitely become more complex, but not the language structure. And although we know a lot more, it doesn't mean we were then less intelligent than we are now.

I'm not against that idea, although you would have to assume almost a sort of Teilhard-ian shift, IMO, to explain the massive jump from smart ape to modern human intelligence.

[Ibrahim]

Yeah, I don't mean that humanities scholars aren't brilliant people or that what they do isn't important. In my opinion it's more important than the hard sciences, probably. The problem seems to be that, at some point, we decided that only science created valuable knowledge, and everyone started aspiring to be "scientific". Psychologists, historians, anthropologists, economists... people who have no business calling themselves scientists and who drain the meaning out of their own fields when they attempt to do so. That's not to say that many of these people are not capable in various scientific fields. But 99% of what they do is draw correlations and then wage political fights over whose explanation is going to hold sway. And this is massively important, it is one of the forces that motivates a society and drives it forward; gives it context in the present and orients it for forward action.

In order for the social sciences to be considered actual sciences, you would have to believe that, slowly but surely, they are shaving away layers of error and gradually getting closer to the truth. And if you believe that, then I don't know what to tell you. They do not proceed according to falsification, but according to fashion.

And, no, I don't think it's arrogant for me to say that the humanities are not "scientific". On the contrary, I think that, given our failures at engineering outcomes in our own society and era, and given our abject failure to understand the motivations behind our own thoughts and behavior, it is hubris to think we can begin to really understand the societies and psychology of others. Again, that doesn't mean that I don't think the fields aren't useful: they are useful socially and politically, especially in an age deprived for the most part of convincing religious mythology.

I don't object to the idea that "social sciences" aren't scientific, but lacking that kind of objectivity then how do you compare different religions and to what would you compare them anyway? I've never seen it done without the motivation of setting up a hierarchy and establishing some groups as superior to others, or with the vague goal of generalizing them into a unified theory of religions that's just a lot of generic rambling about "quest narrative" and "rebirth narratives" that means nothing to anybody. You know which one I'm betting on in this case.


As for evolution, our sample size isn't sufficient to make any statements one way or the other. All of recorded or recoverable human human history isn't sufficient to make any evolutionary statements of any significance.


There is no such thing as 'Hunter Gatherer Religion'. Saying there is, is kind of an Orientalizing idea. When people try to compare religious beliefs of that nature they completely deny the idea that it is possible that certain people's in ancient antiquity thought in a way that is completely and totally alien to us.

Like I cannot imagine what it was like in Carthage for the noble class who were willing to sacrifice their first born in order to ensure that Carthage remained victorious and prosperous. Nor can I imagine how that compared to Rome where the entire empire was built on the backs of captive chattel slaves won in battle by Roman Legions. You can compare Athens and Sparta all you like, but their cultures could not have been more different. They were more different at their apex than New York and Shanghai are today.

I started a thread which was later derailed to discuss the validity or presumed validity of people outside of a religion acting as experts on the subject of that religion, and the future of such "outsider" anthropology in professional academics. While I don't share the ethical concerns, I would agree that at best there will be major inaccuracies and misinterpretations. I often use the example of the new ager Western interpretation of Buddhism, but a handy analogy would be between judging another person's marriage and actually being in that marriage. Your example of ancient and essentially "dead" religions is apt. We'll never really know what they were like in practice, we're reconstructing something, and our reconstruction might be totally inaccurate or dead on, we've no way to know.

I think there is also the greater problem of potential coincidence. A civilization, or all of human civilization, may rise of fall because of, in spite of, or regardless of a given religion or religions in general.

[Ibrahim]

I have little scientific basis to support my idea, but I think both language and intelligence appeared in our species at a level of complexity very close to what we know today. Vocabulary has definitely become more complex, but not the language structure. And although we know a lot more, it doesn't mean we were then less intelligent than we are now.

I approach it as an historian, and to my mind the historical evidence supports consistent human intelligence and sophistication of language and thought. All that changes is technical acumen. We're better at using tools, not talking to one another or pondering metaphysical questions. Its all there, as far back as you want to go.

[Apollonius]

I approach it as an historian

Correction: pseudo-historian.