After being asked how people came together to build cooperative societies beyond kinship, Haidt asserts that “morality” was the key:I hate this notion that "religion" is an ancient evolutionary construct that arose to bind people together. First of all, "religion" is a modern notion; this category is not recognized by most societies we know about, including China and Japan as recently as AD 1850. Second, as Campbell points out, the religions of hunter-gatherers have very little moral content. (What was the common morality of the Mongol empire?) Third, religion, despite what secular professors like to say about it, is not a social phenomenon, but something that resides primarily within the minds of believers. People believe things because they make them feel better, not because they want to be part of a big group. (Much more on this here.)
A big part of Haidt’s moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the “psychology of sacredness,” the notion that “some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure.” If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.
If we take ethnohistoric hunter-gatherers for our model of how people formed larger and more cohesive groups in the ancient past, Haidt’s “morality” answer is patently wrong. These groups were held together by kinship ties first and by extended or fictive kinship second. Their “religions” (i.e., shamanisms) weren’t grounded in morals and weren’t much concerned with morals. While such groups had moral norms and ethical rules, these weren’t twined with supernaturalism and had an independent, non-spiritual basis.
Large communities held together by religion-faith-morals are a recent development in human history, no more than a few thousand years old. The kind of community that Haidt describes is a post-Neolithic formation that has its origins in the Axial Age. So does the idea that religion is a matter of “faith.” These are not ancient or evolutionary ideas. Moralizing gods and religions are relative newcomers to the supernatural world.
Haidt’s mistake here is a common one: observe modern or relatively recent cultural formations and then uncritically project them back into the ancestral or evolutionary past. This mistake has other consequences, which are evident in what Haidt calls “innate” or evolutionary moral foundations: “care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.” These “innate” concerns sound suspiciously modern; I suspect at least a few are products of post-Neolithic and Western societies.
I think all of this is modeled on the survival of the Jews and the extraordinary expansion of Islam, and those are very interesting historical events. But they are not more important than, say, the survival of the Kurds or the Han Chinese, or the extraordinary expansion of the British empire.
hi. pls check your link (much more on this here). it seems a bit malformed.
ReplyDeleteI don't disagree with your hostility to the evolutionary religion argument, but it seems to me that, in your zeal, you're making overly clear separations where none exist. Surely kinship systems entail moral aspects almost by definition, and many of them also entail aspects that seem "religious." Likewise, it seems way out of line to claim that religion is a category that is or was "unknown" in China or Japan. There clearly were categories of things that look like temples, things that look like rituals of reverence toward supernatural beings, and things that look like systems of belief and/or morality; Chinese and Japanese movements in these veins often argued with each other as to their truth value; and people whom one might as well call prophet types would come up with new versions of these things that they thought were terribly important and world-changing. Either these are religions, or they're in another category that you're going to have to teach us not to call religion (and good luck with that).
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me indisputable that religion-like phenomena are very, very widespread among humans, and that no one has come up with a good explanation for why this is so. The fact that these religion-like phenomena exhibit tremendous variety--some teach elaborate moral systems, others rely heavily on assent to specific intellectual propositions (which they might or might not combine with the elaborate morality), others on child-toward-parent-like loyalty and respect for specific sacred things/places/acts/beings (which they might or might not combine with elaborate morality or theology, etc.), and so on and so on--only makes the question more difficult. The task of answering it will not, I think, be helped either by overprivileging one aspect and making it falsely universal (as Haidt does) or by trying to say that religion-like things that do not share a particular feature (say, an elaborate moral teaching) are so different from one another that we should put them in separate categories.
I struggle with defining religion as a category of human experience. In its modern meaning, the word is recent; in the middle ages, to be "religious" meant to belong to an order of monks or nuns. Neither Chinese nor Japanese had such a word until the late 1800s, and they developed such a language mainly in response to Christian missionaries. "Buddhism" is a modern coinage, a word that existed in English before it was used by any follower of Buddha.
ReplyDeleteBut, yes, hunter-gatherers have supernatural beliefs, moral codes, and rituals. The question is whether such things are inherently related to each other, in a way that evolution could act on. I say they are not, and the combination of them in a single sphere of activity called "religion" is historically recent.
The other question is whether religion is uniquely effective as a way to bind people together for common action. I say it is not; the Mongol empire was as unified and effective as the Arab empire, and modern nation states are more so.
Link died when my domain name expired; it should be back up today.
I too struggle with a definition of religion as a category of human experience, as any serious person would. But I would say that we are trying to see if it can be described in a way that is meaningful for a generalized social-anthropological discussion by persons in our circumstances (that is, persons who seek to understand, in a relatively disinterested way, its place in human society in as general a sense as possible).
ReplyDeleteIn this sense, it seems to me you're defining religion as what early modern Europeanists mean by "confession," in the sense that Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Catholicism all are called confessions. But modern discussants need not be bound by such a concept. In my broader but still inchoate sense, in seems to me undeniable that there were such things in East Asia, in the ways I have described, regardless of what they called themselves. (As a friend of ours likes to point out, the Greeks had no word for literature.)
Ok, but among hunter-gatherers, or ancient Greeks, which acts were "religious" and which were not? One way of saying that a Greek state declared war was "the Athenians made sacrifices to the gods about Sparta." So was declaring war a religious act? Peace was declared by pouring libations; was that a religious act? Were the tragedies religious texts, or something else?
ReplyDeleteAmong some tribes, hunting is surrounded by taboos, rites, and prayers to a very great degree; does that make hunting a religious act? Or was it about getting food? If it was both, as I would maintain, then how can we distinguish a religious sphere of life?
I am not really trying to be obstreperous; I find these questions very hard. In some moods I think that religion was, until 1700 or so, just one way of looking at human behavior.
Well, I'm always wary in discussions like this of stepping on mines. But I would say that the presence of supernatural beings (something one would of course need to define and which I'm certainly not ready to define rigorously yet, but anyway) certainly looks like an important sign of a religious act, belief, ritual, etc. So sacrificing to the gods would make their declaration of war rituals religious. That said, there is the phenomenon of things people have stopped paying attention to, until someone calls attention to them. For example, I'm pretty comfortable that our money isn't religious, even though it invokes a supernatural being. But it might become implicated in that sphere if someone tried to get the "In God we trust" taken off our money, with the inevitable furor this would entail.
ReplyDeleteOn the hunting, one thing I would say is that, if a certain act can sometimes be done with religious aspects, and sometimes not, then that is significant. For example, crusades were obviously religious wars in some sense; but wars between Christian authorities were supposed to be initiated with defiances, lists of grievances that might be written without any "religious" content whatever; of course, those latter wars might be accompanied by prayers, assertions that God was on one's side, etc. But crusades and wars between Christian authorities would still seem to be different.
I would also say that a serious understanding should proceed as little as possible by metaphor. Physics includes beliefs about this world and possible other worlds, how worlds came to be and where they might be going, as well as rituals to a certain extent. But it's not a religion--at least, I'm not much interested in an understanding of religion that would include it as one. In this sense I would say the supernatural aspect (recognizing again that I'm not ready to propose a definition of that, which would simply be to set up a more or less easy target for the sport of others) is a sine qua non. Watching Leno before bed every night may be a ritual, but it's not a religion.
Certainly "relations with supernatural beings/the supernatural world" is one way to define religion. A possible problem is that one of the main categories of being included in rituals worldwide is "ancestors," and in some cultures (e.g., China) those recognitions seem not much different from the way we in America honor our "Founding Fathers."
ReplyDeleteMore interesting to me is the way ritual is usually entangled with everyday life. The rituals of hunter-gatherers tend to be done before hunting or at mealtimes or at the birth of a child, and often they have no separate place to do them (temple or church). Other rituals are like carnivals, and it looks like people do them mainly for fun.
So religion, to use an undergraduate word, is one aspect of life. Hunting has a religious aspect; so does partying. If you ask some hunter-gatherers about who they are, some will talk in religious terms; Innuit are likely to mention Sedna, for example. For others the only "supernatural" being who would appear would be their great ancestor, who may for all we know be a real person. I think the Hebrews were the Children of Abraham for centuries before they developed their strong relationship with their god.
So if religion is not a separate thing but one part of how people do things and think about things, how could evolution act on it? Maybe public rituals helped bond groups like, say, Athenians, into a cohesive group and this helped them fight better. But I say that the supernatural aspect of those rituals is only one part of them, and they can also be seen in other ways -- as emotional experiences, civic theater, art, and so on. There have been peoples who made participating in the shared religion a requirement for citizenship, e.g., the Roman empire, the Greek city states, and Louis XIV. But I don't see that they acted more effectively in common than other groups that did not use religion in that way, e.g., modern France or Japan.
Well, from the beginning I've been happy to dismiss Haidt's argument. Clearly humans are intensely social animals, and we can carry our social bonds out in religious ways or not, with the religious ways being in no obvious way more effective than other ways. My objection was to too-readily saying that religion was a category with no meaning in a range of cultures where it seems to me that that is not true.
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