Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Disrupting & Inventing “Religion”

January 27th, 2012 · Classifications, Definitions

When I teach my anthropology of religion course the first order of business is to define and disrupt “religion” as a category. I begin by having students identify everything they consider to be “religion.” Our list grows and all the usual suspects make their appearance. After the list has been compiled, we then ask what they all have in common. The commonalities are turned into another list which we can then use to identify something as “religion.”

In conjunction with this exercise, I have students read Andrew McKinnon’s pitch for a Wittgensteinian language game and non-essentialist approach to “religion,” and another by Ake Hultkrantz which contends that the key concept in “religion” is the supernatural. Because both articles deal with notoriously tedious definitions and theory, there have been complaints about how much time is spent on these matters. Like Justice Potter Stewart and porn, students sense they know “religion” when they see it.

Because spending the first week of class delineating the Western history and genealogy of “religion” is not an option, I’ve been searching for a solution and seem to have found one. A recent article by Jason A. Josephson, “The Invention of Japanese Religions,” makes most of the needed theoretical points simply by telling the story of how “religion” has been rendered in Japan. My sense is that students would prefer reading a concrete historical narrative or an actual case that deals with the category-concept of “religion.”

Josephson argues that the Japanese lacked not only a word but also an idea of “religion” that corresponded to the Western construct, so it had to be invented. During the late 1800s there was considerable debate about how “religion” should be rendered in Japanese:

Japanese intellectuals and policymakers proposed over half a dozen possible translations for “religion.” When faced with the European term, even Japanese scholars educated abroad had to go searching for equivalents, and they proposed several different contenders and tried to hang different understandings of religion upon them.

It seemed that “religion” could be a type of education, something fundamentally un-teachable, a set of practices, a description of foreign customs, a subtype of Shinto, a near synonym for Christianity, a basic human ethical impulse, or a form of politics (among other possibilities). This is clear evidence that it is glib to talk of Japanese religion projected back through the centuries.

What is more, not only did Japanese intellectuals produce different terms for “religion,” they also debated which indigenous traditions and practices fit into the category. It was not clear to them what religions there were in Japan. The sole “religion” on which everyone could agree was Christianity. More than anything else, this clearly demonstrates the foreign nature of the category.

This is a nice contribution from Josephson, whose “When Buddhism Became a Religion” I’ve long admired. I wanted to assign that article for my course last year but we simply ran out of time and never arrived at Buddhism in Japan.

Reference:

Josephson, Joseph A. (2011). The Invention of Japanese Religions Religion Compass, 5 (10), 589-597 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00307.x

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Philosophical Crazyism & Common Sense

January 23rd, 2012 · Atheism, Philosophy

If you haven’t been following 3:AM’s interview series, you should. The Brian Leiter interview was one of the most cogent assessments of philosophy I’ve read in years, and the recent Eric Schwitzgebel interview is on par. Both reward close reading and deserve extended comment, but I want to touch briefly on Schwitzgebel’s assessment of the relationship between what he calls “common sense” and metaphysics:

My suggestion is this: Common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There’s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It’s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can’t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.

Common sense, as Schwitzgebel frames it, has “everyday practical interactions with the world.” If we put this in broad evolutionary terms, this is the sense of self formed over millions of years in mostly African environments. The brain-mind which gives rise to “common sense” evolved to handle all sorts of practical and social problems, none of which have anything to do with metaphysics. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a mismatch between the commonsense mind and the metaphysical mind.

Left Fork: Ancestral Mind/ Right Fork: Metaphysical Mind

Knowing that the mind which evolved in ancestral environments is capable of metaphysics doesn’t mean it is good at metaphysics. And if we take the history of metaphysics as a guide or proof, it doesn’t appear we have made much progress or come into closer contact with the singular “Truth” which seems to be its goal.

For me the more fundamental question revolves around what Schwitzgebel calls an “ambitious, broad-ranging, self-consistent metaphysical system.” Why is this desirable? Why is it needed? What would it do?

The quest for a single consistent system seems to be a psychological need which finds its greatest expression among metaphysicians and religionists. I’m not sure why such a system is good or needed for the rest of us.

Why not have one “system” for one class of problems and another “system” for another class of problems? There are different approaches to different problems.  What causes the impulse towards unification, systematization, and consistency? Like Nietzsche and Emerson, I’m suspicious of systematizers and consistency.

Although systematizers are often associated with metaphysics-religion, they also appear in science-atheism. The latter, with whom I often sympathize, have an unfortunate tendency to overstate the case and overestimate what is known. For them, Schwitzgebel has this crazy advice:

You can’t do an empirical study, for example, to determine whether there really is a material world out there or whether everything is instead just ideas in our minds coordinated by god. You can’t do an empirical study to determine whether there really exist an infinite number of universes with different laws of physics, entirely out of causal contact with our own. We’re stuck with common sense, plausibility arguments, and theoretical elegance – and none of these should rightly be regarded as decisive on such matters, whenever there are several very different and yet attractive contender positions, as there always are.

I conclude that regarding the fundamental structure of the universe in general and the mind-body relation in particular something that seems crazy must be true, but we have no way to know what the truth is among a variety of crazy possibilities. I call this position “crazyism.”

Crazyism appears to have great promise; I predict that positivism writ large will eventually prove it true.

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Cosmos & Evolutionary Progression

January 20th, 2012 · Evolution, Philosophy

Ever since humans began thinking and talking about the world, they have had ideas about its nature and cosmic placement. Cosmological thinking surely goes back to the Upper Paleolithic and has been fodder for debate for perhaps 45,000 years. Systematic thinking on the subject began 2,500 years ago when a group of thinkers (mostly in Greece) whom we now call philosophers began recording their speculations about the cosmos.

Philosophy and cosmology have long been linked and in some ways are the same subject. Knowing this, it is slightly odd to see a piece over at the Atlantic subtitled “The New Philosophy of Cosmology.” Because philosophy has been doing cosmology for a long time, this implies that it is now doing it some new kind of way. Perhaps. It could be that theoretical physics has run up against a wall and philosophy is required to re-think foundations and ask fresh questions.

Several such questions were posed to NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, who had some interesting things to say. I encourage you to read the entire interview but want to extract these nuggets for brief comment:

You have others saying that time is just an illusion, that there isn’t really a direction of time, and so forth. I myself think that all of the reasons that lead people to say things like that have very little merit, and that people have just been misled, largely by mistaking the mathematics they use to describe reality for reality itself. If you think that mathematical objects are not in time, and mathematical objects don’t change — which is perfectly true — and then you’re always using mathematical objects to describe the world, you could easily fall into the idea that the world itself doesn’t change, because your representations of it don’t.

This has long been one of my pet peeves: just because mathematics can accurately describe and predict certain things, it doesn’t mean that the universe or reality is itself nothing more than the unfolding of some quantitative essence. In fact there many things that math can’t describe or predict. Math is an incredibly useful and revealing technique for describing certain aspects of the universe; it does not constitute reality. Math is not a metaphorical god, though the theologically inclined often fall into this kind of tautological thinking.

In another portion of the interview, Maudlin comments on evolutionary process:

When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you’ll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value.

We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

Here Maudlin describes another error often made by the theologically inclined. An anthropocentric view which places humans at the center of everything creates the illusion that evolution is directed toward some goal. It isn’t. Life began on earth some 3 billion years ago and after 3 billion years of evolution, the vast majority of life forms remains simple. We live in a microbial world, not an intelligent one.

If microbes could write evolutionary history, things would look much different. In the absence of such a history the next best thing is Stephen Jay Gould’s Full House (1997), which shatters the illusion that evolution is progressive. The greatest frequency of life on earth, in terms of biomass and diversity, remains firmly against the left wall of minimal complexity, close to where it began:

Graph Depicts Mode or Frequency of Both Past and Present Life Forms on Earth

The preceding post prompted this observation from my blogging friend Tom Rees: “The graph does show that evolution is directional. Complex brains have to build on less complex brains.” Without the accompanying text from Gould’s Full House, I see how it could be interpreted this way. So let me summarize and gloss the arguments which explain the graph:

Directional evolution is in the eye of the human (or primate or mammal) beholder. The mode of life — its greatest frequency, biomass, and diversity — is up against (or near) the left wall of non-complexity. It started there, and after evolving for over 3 billion years, it has remained there. This doesn’t look very directional.

Toward the left side of non-complexity and non-intelligence, we have microbes and, moving toward the right, we have insects. In terms of numbers, species, biomass, and diversity, these are the dominant forms of life on earth. These forms are still evolving, but they aren’t evolving towards complexity or intelligence.

Our multicellular prejudice — our love for big things that we can easily observe — causes us to focus on the right side of complexity and intelligence, and then claim that these relatively few and non-diverse species indicate evolution is directional. I don’t see how we can justify this argument.

Isolating a single and uncommon strand of evolution, such as the right tail of complexity or intelligence, doesn’t make evolution directional to the right. The fact remains that the isolated right tail of evolution is dwarfed by the diversity and mass of life to the left, which is non-complex and non-intelligent. This mass of life to the left has not been static either; it too has evolved — it just hasn’t evolved towards complexity or intelligence.

I’m not sure what the rationale or argument would be for mono-focusing on the right tail, which is an evolutionary outlier, and not considering everything to the left. If we look at the whole or entire picture of evolutionary life, it is non-directional. If evolution were directional, then all forms of life would show movement toward the right or towards multi-cellularity, complexity, sentience, and intelligence. That hasn’t happened and isn’t happening.

Have complexity and intelligence evolved? Yes. Does this mean evolution is directional? No.

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Atheism, Orthodoxy & Funerary

January 14th, 2012 · Atheism, Morality

Terry Eagleton has taken aim at Alain de Botton’s oxymoronic new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion. Eagleton is bulls-eye on the book, which basically argues that although religions are false they are still useful and we can learn from them. Eagleton correctly points out that this sort of thing is often done, and basically consists of looking at the good things and ignoring all the bad things. Thomas Jefferson’s expurgated Bible comes to mind, as does Karen Armstrong’s ecumenical urge to reduce all religions to ethical golden rules. These are the kinds of sanitized and banal books that drive new atheists insane.

As Philip Kitcher reminds us, people can be ethical and moral without religion. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Most primates, humans included, are intensely social. It’s impossible to be social without simultaneously behaving in ways that are considered “moral” or “ethical.” This aside, there is little to no evidence that religious people in modern societies are more ethical-moral than non-religious people. Moreover, there is little to no evidence that Axial or “ethical” religions have made people or societies more ethical-moral than previous peoples. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were no more or less ethical-moral than “modern” people who have lived in settled societies during the past 10,000 years.

If Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks knew anything about evolutionary ethics and the ethnohistoric record, he wouldn’t be writing silly articles arguing that modern religions are the existential glue that hold societies together. This sort of argument is typical of apologists who believe that history and civilization essentially began with the movement toward angry gods and moralistic religions.

Elsewhere, Juliane von Mittelstaedt reports on ultra-orthodox Jewish women in Israel who cover themselves from head to toe in up to 27 layers of clothes. It is part of a larger story on the fractures these fundamentalists are creating within Israeli society, which is something that caught my attention previously in Ultra-Orthodox Slackers.

Several aspects of the Mittelstaedt story intrigue. First, it appears that most of the women wearing all these clothes have suffered serious abuse; the covering up thus seems linked to shame. Second, ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel routinely harangue female soldiers. This is unreal, coming from losers who are exempt from military service. This is a good time to compare and contrast.

Someone in the story astutely observes that if some of these zealots didn’t have religion as cover for their obvious madness, they would probably be institutionalized. While witnessing the antics and ideas of American evangelicals, I’ve had occasion to observe the same sort of thing.

In this mordant piece on the future of funerary, Max Rivlin-Nadler begins with the premise that the industry is in crisis because Americans are becoming more secular and fewer people are willing to pay for the bells and whistles of religious funerals. As evidence of increasing secularism, he notes that some 25% of Americans no longer claim affiliation with a church. As Rodney Stark has been saying forever, just because people don’t go to church or identify with organized religion, this doesn’t mean they are becoming secular. Most are not atheists or non-believers; they simply have alternative “spiritual” beliefs and don’t identify with institutional religion. When funeral directors realize this and begin offering non-traditional “spiritual” funerals, they will be able to tap what Rivlin-Nadlin characterizes as the “secular” market.

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Altruistic Infants Aren’t Little Devils

January 4th, 2012 · Evolution, Morality

Someone forgot to tell a group of 15-month-old infants they are flawed and that without proper (religious or moral) instruction, they will be unfair and selfish. Rather than being born this way, they appear to have been born another way: with built-in expectations of fairness and a willingness to share. These are the conclusions reached by Marco Schmidt and Jessica Sommerville in a recent study (open) of 47 infants, the majority of whom consistently showed surprise at unfairness and demonstrated a willingness to share.

The authors investigated infant sensitivity to fairness and willingness to share using two experiments. In the first, infants watched a film showing someone dispensing milk and crackers to two people sitting at a table. In one scene there was a fair or equal distribution and in another the distribution was unfair or unequal. This is a standard “violation of expectations” or VOE paradigm in which infants look significantly longer at something that surprises them. The second experiment was a straightforward sharing task in infants were given two toys so they could express a preference for one. They were then asked to share a toy. The infants could choose to share the preferred toy, the other toy, or none.

In the first test, the infants looked significantly longer at the lopsided outcome. This suggests that the unfair distribution sequence violated their expectations of third-party fairness. In the second test, 68% of the infants shared at least one toy. Of these sharers, 32% shared the preferred toy and 37% shared the other toy. Remarkably, the altruistic sharers also looked at the unfair film longer than their non-sharing counterparts. Natural sharers appear to expect fairness in others and are surprised when it isn’t forthcoming.

The authors were testing the hypothesis that fairness and sharing appear early (and reliably) in development as a result of selection: “At an evolutionary level such preferences may have been crucial for our hominin ancestors to enable and maintain cooperation in small groups, and later, in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, to introduce norms (e.g., how to share spoils after a group hunt) that fostered group cohesion, and to motivate group members to enforce those norms.” These traits, in other words, would have been adaptive in both ancestral and later environments.

These findings support the hypothesis. By 15 months of age, infants have at least a rudimentary sense of fairness and expect resources to be shared equally. A basic sense of altruism is already prevalent at this early stage of development. This suggests to the authors that “infants evaluate events along morally relevant dimensions” before they receive cultural training reinforcing these tendencies.

Infants are not little devils and indeed appear to be part angel. But as all parents know, they can be a bit of both at times. Because neither purity nor impurity accurately describes infants, the best representation might be this:

Reference:

Schmidt, Marco, & Sommerville, Jessica (2011). Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants PLoS ONE, 6 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023223

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Spirit-Poltergeist Television

January 1st, 2012 · Magic, Paranormal

Over the past five years I’ve spent far too much time watching an endless series of television programs about ghost hunting and spirit hauntings. They all promise the same thing: actual evidence that ghosts or spirits exist. I’ve yet to see a single show which has produced the goods.

One of the most recent and seemingly popular follows a female spirit-medium as she walks around spooky places and talks about the ghosts-spirits with whom she supposedly is interacting. As far as I or anyone else can tell, the whole revolves entirely around her imagination and storytelling. The ratings were apparently good enough for another season. This tells us pretty  much everything we need to know about the viewing audience.

Because these spooky-supernatural programs are so predictable and formulaic, I had never bothered to consider the genesis and evolution of the genre. Fortunately for us, Adam Curtis has posted a brilliant multimedia piece on the genealogy of spirit-poltergeist shows in the United Kingdom. It’s a fascinating romp through the sociocultural thickets of psychic-TV, a place where fiction makes fact and viewers fall prey to the War of the Worlds chimera.

All this aside, Adam’s Medium and the Message blog is a fantastic find; he has an astute eye for weird cultural detail and his mixed-media storytelling really pushes the boundaries. Spend some time with The Bitch, The Stud and The Prawn and you’ll know what I mean.

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Structure & Function of Creation Myths

December 30th, 2011 · History, Hunter-Gatherers

Creation myths do psychological and cultural work. Because all known societies have creation myths, the number and variety is staggering. There are entire encyclopedias of creation myths and even dictionaries for creation myths. Given this seemingly endless variety, it is unsurprising there have been several kinds of efforts to impose order on the mass. Folklorists have categorized creation myths by thematic type. Philologists have arranged them into putative family trees, rooted by the hypothesized and long lost Ur-creation myth. Psychologists have classified them in correspondence with archetypes. Anthropologists have grouped them according to geography.

These efforts, while interesting and instructive, haven’t really grappled with the ways in which particular kinds of creation myths perform particular kinds of psycho-cultural work in the present. I have yet to see, for instance, an analysis of the ways in which the Edenic creation myth, in its structural and thematic details, frames a particular kind of individuated self and conditions a particular kind of collective culture. I suspect there are constitutive links between certain kinds of myths and certain kinds of identities. Identifying and tracing these links would seem to be a fruitful task but may be much easier said than done.

If links between particular kinds of myth and particular kinds of culture exist, the search for connections would begin with a thematic classification and mapping of the myths. This has been done for the creation myths of North American Indians. Anna Birgitta Rooth examined over 300 creation myths collected from North American natives and discerned 8 thematic types:

1. The Earth-Diver: this myth involves some being, often an animal, who dives to the bottom of an ocean to get sand or mud from which the earth and its denizens are created. It is found all over North America except for Arizona and New Mexico (i.e., the Puebloan area). Interestingly, the earth-diver creation myth is also widespread in Eurasia.

2. The World-Parents: this myth tells of a sky-father and earth-mother who jointly produce the earth and all living things. This usually involves the earth-mother giving birth and the fertility symbolism is heavy. This myth is found primarily in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. Similar myths can be found outside of North America in Japan and Polynesia.

3. The Emergence: this myth involves a hole in the earth or a cave from which humans and animals emerge to the present world. It is found primarily in the southwest Puebloan area with some spillover the the adjacent Plains. This is the primary form of creation myth found in Meso-America.

4. The Spider as First Being: in this myth the spider is the first being who spins a web that holds the earth together or makes it firm and thus makes it possible for other beings to exist on it. How these other beings come into existence is highly variable, but the spider is at the center of the entire cosmology. Versions of this myth can also be found in south America and China.

5. The Fighting or Robbery: this myth recounts the heroic deeds of a culture hero or transformer who steals the earth and its creations from greedy, pre-existing beings who have been hoarding for themselves. The transformer then gives these gifts to humanity. This is the most common form of creation myth among Northwest Coast Indians and finds parallels in northeast Asia.

6. The Ymir: in this myth the world is created from the corpse of a dead giant or a dead man or woman. The skull is made into the sky, the bones become rocks, the hair becomes vegetation, and the blood becomes water. It is found throughout the North American continent. It is similarly widespread in Eurasia, and has interesting parallels with the Edenic myth.

7. The Two Creators Contest: this highly varied myth involves two creators, often siblings or relatives, who engage in a contest to “make” the best things with the result being the creation of the world and its contents. In some variations the world is created as a byproduct of a contest between the two. This myth is found in all areas of North America and has parallels in Asia.

8. The Blind Brother: this myth tells of two brothers who rise from the depths of the ocean bringing people with them. One brother tricks the other in a way that results in blindness; the blind brother in his anger then visits hardship on the people who have come to earth. This myth is found only in southern California and Arizona, and it told in adjacent parts of Mexico. Its distribution seems limited to these areas.

Rooth includes maps for each creation myth type showing where they can be found; although she doesn’t provide a single comprehensive map, a composite overlay would show that the myths have geographic clusters but don’t seem to correlate to any particular kind of culture (i.e., woodlands, coastal, horticultural, nomadic, Plains, Puebloan) or language area. As a cultural diffusionist writing in the 1950s, Rooth does find some attenuated connections which she describes in very general terms.

Her classifications and maps clearly indicate a complex history of migrations and contacts. The latter has resulted in several kinds of syncretic creation myths, many of which can be found in roughly similar forms outside of the Americas or in the Old World. It would take a tremendous effort to test the hypothesis that certain kinds of cultural structures correlate with certain kinds of creation myths. It could be done using the Human Relations Area Files, which codes for cultural variables but not necessarily for kinds of creation myth.

Because I don’t think this will be done anytime soon, where does this leave us? Probably nowhere. I can’t discern even the barest hints of a relationship between the structure of these societies and types of creation myths. What I have learned is that the Edenic myth, though dominant in some parts of the world, doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to types and varieties of creation myths. They seem limited only by the imagination, which is to say not limited at all.

Reference:

Rooth, Anna B. (1957). The Creation Myths of the North American Indians Anthropos, 52 (3/4), 497-508

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Don’t Seek and You Shall Find

December 27th, 2011 · Cognition, Magic, Paranormal

Some weeks ago Farhad Manjoo penned a techno-robotic piece arguing that independent bookstores are superfluous and should just die. It was one of the coldest things I’ve read in years but it wasn’t surprising. Manjoo’s pleasures in life seem to be efficiency, pricing, and technology. His idea of literary fun is to preview books on Amazon, push order buttons, and consume books — all from the solitary comfort of home or while riding the bus.

Once a month my mastiffs and I walk to our local bookstore, located right in the center of a thriving restaurant and arts district filled with locally owned shops. It’s a daylong affair, punctuated by coffee, conversation, and discovery. The owner whom I’ve known for years is always there; she brims with  obscure knowledge and wonderful recommendations. I’ve read at least 20 books this year I never would have considered or even known about without her. I’ve read another 40 books I never would have considered or known about without spending many hours browsing the shelves and stacks. Many are no longer in print and most haven’t been reviewed.

At the end of a magical day, we go next door with a backpack full of books for beers and some food. The dogs like beer. On one of our recent outings I came across Wish and Wisdom: Episodes in the Vagaries of Belief, published in 1935 by Joseph Jastrow. It is curiously written in Victorian style and on the surface appears to be a series of vignettes demonstrating human folly and foible.

Jastrow, an early pioneer in experimental psychology and eccentric founder of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, divides the book into 7 parts that correspond to 7 psychological traits or propensities. When these traits are combined and not overridden by rationality or reason, the common result is mental error and unfounded belief. According to Jastrow, the traits are:

  • Credulity: The Urge to Believe
  • Marvel: The Appeal of Wonder
  • Transcendence: Escaping Limitations
  • Prepossession: Finding What You Look For
  • Congenial Conclusion: Folk-Mind and Doctrinal Survivals
  • Cults and Vagaries: Strange Solutions
  • Rationalization: Flaunting Reason’s Banner

At the start of each section Jastrow explains what each trait (which can be psychological, cultural or both) means and how it works. Following this prefatory telling, he then shows each trait or proclivity in historical action. There are 3-4 standalone vignettes for each section; some are well known (Madame Blavatsky, Ouija, Numerology, Phrenology, Clever Hans) whereas others are wonderfully obscure and rescued from oblivion (Leo Taxil, Theological Zoology, Astral Chemistry, Jaeger Woolens). The moral of each story is that humans are psychologically prone to wishful thinking and with cultural reinforcement (which is never lacking) we will believe just about anything.

Jastrow was taking aim at all manner of supernatural, mystical, and magical thinking, yet did so in ways that did not directly attack religion. He reasonably surmised that if the religiously inclined were to contemplate his carefully chosen examples they would realize there could be no principled distinction between one form of folly and another. Jastrow’s friendship with William James may have prompted the book and been a gentle rejoinder to the man who turned toward mysticism later in his life.

In closing, Jastrow — a pioneer in the evolutionary study of language — asks why humans are driven by sincere wishes and dubious confirmations. Without any apparent sense of irony, he roots the problem in language:

I place first vagueness, with its symbol, the cloud. If you would impose, be cloudy, vaporous, misty; soar under conditions of low visibility, trailing a smoke-screen in your wake. Erratic beliefs like wraiths shun daylight; clarity is their vital enemy. And man, by the very necessities of his mental existence — by the urgencies of expression and communication — has, in the supreme invention of language, forged the very instrument of his undoing. Words make effective cloud-screens. As indispensably as they express thought when used lucidly they may as effectively mask it, obscure it, conceal its absence.

In all ages, cultists and propagandists of a hollow or shaky cause resort to verbal screenery. The more successful become adept in linguistic obfuscation. My reference is not to the most common employment, the political appeal, nor to rhetoric, which Huxley called the pestilent cosmetic smearing the fair face of truth. My theme is limited to beliefs and faiths which in intent make an appeal to fact. In another reference, I have called this trend the lure of the obscure, accounting for the wide prevalence of the cult of the occult.

This provides a nice sense for Jastrow’s style, which during the 1960s landed him on the required reading list for undergraduate English majors at Harvard. Rendered differently, it’s a clarion call that hearkens back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and forward to Jerry Coyne.

For me, the moral of this story is not that Jastrow prefigured or presaged recent work in the cognitive study of religion, or that he did it in high style with entertaining vignettes. It is that I never would have found this book or known that it existed by searching Amazon. Had I been Farhad Manjoo, this nothing is what I would have found. Support your local bookstore.

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Adaptive Optimization: Code for Design

December 22nd, 2011 · Evolutionary Adaptation, Evolutionary Byproduct

For the holidays I’d like to share this with my theist friends who see hominin evolution progressively unfolding as one adaptation after another, all culminating in the transcendent and numinous splendor of modern humanity:

To tell stories about a world in which all the organic parts are at an adaptive optimum is typical of attempts to domesticate Darwinism’s randomized, liminal world in motion and render it less fearsome. In fact, adaptive optimization covertly restores the pre-evolutionary argument from design, whose affective motive was to make the world (and its Creator) familiar and tame by founding it upon those analogies to the self, reason and human will, that assure the existence of control over Nature’s power and domestication of Nature’s otherness.

This is a slightly revised excerpt from Eric White’s essay “The End of Metanarratives in Evolutionary Biology,” in which he cites Davydd Greenwood’s Taming of Evolution: The Persistence of Nonevolutionary Views in the Study of Humans.

Nowhere are such views or metaphysical narratives more prevalent than among theist scholars who (often with generous funding from the Templeton Foundation) churn out articles ostensibly demonstrating that religion was targeted by natural selection because it is the Greatest Designed Adaptation, ever.

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Creation Myths: Not Just Stories

December 20th, 2011 · Philosophy

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about creation myths. By calling them “myths” it allows us to overlook, dismiss, or ignore them. This is a mistake. We should think hard about what these myths do and how they work. They are not just quaint relics of a pre-scientific past. They are not just stories to be studied as folklore. The universality of such myths is telling us something important about what it means to be human. People apparently need creation myths. Why?

Artist: Tim Mietty

Though there are undoubtedly other reasons, one of the most important surely is orientation. People need to situate themselves in both time and space. Creation myths serve this need: they provide a temporal and spatial anchor. This anchoring effect serves as a powerful reminder that views are never from nowhere. All views are situated. Though philosophers may aspire to the view from nowhere (which is the equivalent of the view from everywhere) this is beyond the capacity and interest of most. This aside, the idealistic and detached view from nowhere surely is an impossibility. All views are from somewhere and in many cases that somewhere is found in creation myths.

Because having a view requires a viewer or agent, the next reason which comes to mind is identity. As individuals, our identities are constructed through memory. This is the autobiographical self. As groups, our identities are likewise constructed through memories. This is the autobiographical culture. Whether dealing with individual memories or group histories, the things that are recalled need not traffic in truth. Indeed, much of what we recall is false. The stories we tell are part fact and part fiction, with varying amounts of each. The important thing is to construct a relatively stable identity. Creation myths serve this need.

While reading about creation myths and origins stories I recently came across this passage written by Roger Lewin:

Every society for which there are records has its version of the “origin myth,” where myth is used to mean allegory, not just fantasy. The product of the unique curiosity of the human mind, origin myths nevertheless tell more than how a particular people might have got here. They encompass a view of the world that tells people how they should behave now they are here. Origin myths are prescriptive, not just descriptive. They present a microcosm of society, of the way men relate with women, of the way “real people” relate with “foreigners,” and of the place of humans in the world of nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that ever since there evolved in the human mind that unique quality of conscious, of reflective self-awareness, origin myths have been central to the intellectual lives of Homo sapiens everywhere.

This is surely correct. It partially explains the incredible staying power of the Edenic myth and why it is defended with such vehemence. For believers, it’s not simply a matter of literalism and the interpretive license which flows from metaphorical readings.

The Edenic myth provides an orientation and identity which evolution apparently doesn’t. This is not to say that human evolution can’t provide orientation or identity, only that some find it profoundly unsettling and distasteful. It is one thing to be made in the image of God, quite another to be an evolving primate. The ontology and metaphysics which attach to Eden are perhaps more comfortable than those which come out of evolutionary Africa.

Reference:

Lewin, Roger (1988). Man’s Place in Nature The Missouri Review, 11 (3), 16-32

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