The general consensus among physical anthropologists is that religion co-evolved with language. By religion, they mean belief, not the highly complex and abstract stuff we now think of as religion. Early humans probably started with supernatural ideas about the forces controlling the parts of the natural world they could see. Then maybe more abstract ideas about what happens to people when they die and the need to properly handle the dead. This is all speculation, but that’s where the evidence seems to point.
Whether or not belief is baked into our genes is debatable, mostly because we don’t know enough about the human genome. The news makes it sound like science has unraveled the mysteries of human DNA and we’re on the verge of creating super babies, but nothing could be further from the truth. There’s also the fact that people continue to insist that believing in Progressive mythology is rational while being a committed Christian is delusional. Once again, Progressive orthodoxy hinders science.
When religion is treated as a subset of mass movements, then the genetic argument for belief becomes more promising. The person who is always caught up in one cause or another is well known. It is not unusual for someone to start out in one thing and end up in its opposite. The Christian, who gets into radical politics and ends up as a spiritual gluten free vegan into hot yoga. Some people are highly prone to getting caught up into mass movements, while others are disinclined to join anything, even when they agree with it.
The true believer latches onto a cause, in part, because of a deep belief in magic or the super natural. The crazy cat lady into aroma therapy will have a long list of wacky reasons why certain smells have magical powers, but it’s still just magic. She does not know. She believes and she gets satisfaction, a psychic reward, by exercising that belief. Half of Iceland believes there are invisible elves on the island, even thought no one has seen an elf. They are invisible, after all. It just feels right to believe they exist.
The ruling class of America seems to be particularly prone to belief in the supernatural, despite their alleged love of science and reason. You see this in their obsession with racism. Our betters talk about racism as if it is a demon spirit. The anointed, invested with the spirit of good-think, are tasked with exhorting the rest of us to resist the Dark Lord of Racism. You see it in this post the other day by VD, regarding the hysteria at Duke Divinity School. Anathea Portier-Young sounds like she is organizing an exorcism.
“Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history. To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort” (REI). Phase I provides foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism. It helps individuals and organizations begin to “proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.” It is the first step in a longer process.
Puritan ministers use to talk like that about Satan. Racism is no longer just normal clannishness based on race. Now it is a magical, almost indescribable, force that creeps up on little cat feet to possess the soul of those who are not vigilant. These seminars all have a revival quality to them. The participants are inducted into secret rights that allow them to resist the Dark Lord of Racism and all his works. The exhortation to go forth and preach against the temptations of racism is right out of 17th century Salem.
The late great Eric Hoffer observed that mass movements can get along without a god, but they must always have a devil. Modern Progressives have only a muddled sense of a deity, but they have a devil, as well as a list of lesser demons that do his bidding. Racism is the arch demon in the cosmology of the Left. It is why everything they don’t like is associated with racism. Trump, for example, is one of the least racist guys in public life, but they swear he is the soldier of the Dark Lord of Racism.
The ruins at Göbekli Tepe are interesting for a number of reasons, but one of them is what they suggest about the nature of man. It was assumed that human organization was either out of self-interest or out of a sense of cooperation. It was homo economicus or homo reciprocans. The fact that pre-settlement people came together to build what looks like a religious site, suggests that neither is true. A desire for purpose, beyond the material, may be the force that drives human cooperation beyond the bounds of kinship.
Our ruling class has the same desire for a purpose beyond their extravagant lifestyles as Cloud People. These are people who fully committed to the meritocratic, managerial system. They are true believers. Having abandoned Christianity long ago, the ruling class lurches from cause to cause, looking for a reason to cast themselves as on the side of angels, in the great moral struggle that is the human condition. Lacking a deity, a light to give them purpose, they settle for demons they can slay.
The point and shrieking race police could be nullified by everyone wearing a scannable barcode revealing their genetic lineage. The evolutionary dead ends are long gone or living in an undiscovered isolated location.
I am late to the comments on this one, but Z Man, are you familiar with the works of either Eric Voegelin or Rene Girard?
Not as much as a should be. Why?
Their work is directly relevant to many of the themes of this post. Firstly, Girard’s theories on human desire and the origins of culture and religion tie in to the first few paragraphs of your post, and Voegelin’s theory of gnosticism dovetails nicely with the second half of your post.
Girard died just a few years ago. There is a new book out, in the format of an interview/discussion with him, discussing evolution and his theories on the origins of human society and culture. I haven’t read it yet, but plan to and thought you might be interested.
Thanks. I should get to know both much more than I do.
Great post as always. How about a post on the best places (on the web?) to get actual news. We were created to worship God and that’s why you’ve got to believe in something if God is not at the center. We are hard-wired that way, every human, but it’s not in the genome it’s in the soul, spirit the inner man apart from the body. Thanks for all.
thetimguy
Believing in ‘science’ while having no knowledge of science is not restricted to journalism.
Nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of God.
“Phase I provides foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism. It helps individuals and organizations begin to “proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.” It is the first step in a longer process.”
Phase 4 I assume is when they pass out the Kool Aid.
This essay is great. But we’re still left with the question of how does one fight a religion that has no god, or has a god with no name? The right wing blogosphere consensus seems to be that you have to beat it with an alternative mass movement, one that can confer social status effectively to its adherents.
Trouble is that seems impossible.
Why do you assume it is a “religion?” The example of religion as defined above as providing a context for as TomA describes above “Religions have persisted (in all their various flavors) because they “work” in the sense that they successfully imbue our youth with knowledge that aids their ability to survive and thrive in a world of hardship and existential threat.”
Does mental illness qualify as “religion” when it’s history is fraught with constant failure wherever it treads? Does it successfully imbue anyone, anywhere with the “ability to survive and thrive in a world of hardship and existential threat?” Some always point to the Crusades as the dark time of Christianity, but when the death toll is tallied throughout history in the last century, what ideology has resulted in the exact opposite of survival and thriving people?
The Left may win battles but they have not won the war. The Left is on a precipice when their brand of mental illness is finally being inoculated by reversals in the social fabric. Law and Order, the economy are starters. Next will be education and welfare. The long game. Racism is the boogey man of the Left. It cannot be defeated. It is a feature of the human experience, a consolidation of personal experience draw from one individual into a group expression, similar as any other entity that thinking creatures will identify as problematic. Some say, “if the shoe fits, wear it.” If we are talking about survival instincts here, and when you have been burned many times by the same thing, you tend to, at a minimum, shy away from similar looking threats. Not all snakes are deadly but many people have a natural aversion to snakes.
Not all blacks are bad but when the experience of people has been weighted on the negative, then who can blame them for “shying” away and being cautious about engaging with them. This applies, as much as the Left wants to ignore it, any group of people. You want to call reactions based on experience “racism,” go ahead. I call it survival instincts and if the person feeling discriminated against feels so, they only have their own to blame for setting up the game. So is racism a “ritual that precedes religion” as TeaPartyDoc says, or is it something else? Reactions are one thing. Taking the offense against people to preclude them from an education, livelihood, or other human endeavor is wrong. But it does take two to tango. The devil works both sides, at the same time.
I believe some of the legends/folklore/religion of the past was an exercise in “I have a secret, follow me and I might let you in on it”. A means of social ordering.
The cloud people of today are trying to do the same thing, but it is more difficult when information is freely shared and many are sceptical.
Then there is the punitive stirring of the social pot to turn people against each other. This is where the sexist/racist thing comes into play, and the Progs are the foolish willing vessels of such poison.
Trump is the devil because he is kryptonite to the sexist/racist thing. The grown up version of “ignore your little brother when he tries to mess with your head”.
“The Secret Knowledge”…recovering progressive David Mamet.
I think I have commented on this before, but the evolution of complex language skill enabled our species to pass wisdom from generation to generation via the reprogramming of our youth during their formative years postpartum. As most parents understand, just saying something wise to a child will not embed, consequently other techniques involving repetition and ritual are needed in order to make it stick. The most successful of these practices evolved into religious beliefs and traditions. Religions have persisted (in all their various flavors) because they “work” in the sense that they successfully imbue our youth with knowledge that aids their ability to survive and thrive in a world of hardship and existential threat.
Religion, folklore, superstition and so fourth are terrifically efficient ways to transmit acquired knowledge from one generation to the next. The obvious example of how this works is in the use of mnemonic devices to aid memory. “Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach” was one I still remember from grammar school ((Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species). Humans are good at remembering stories and songs as they fit our natural pattern matching ability. Bake a lesson into a story or song and it becomes easily transmitted to the next generation.
Hillary spouted data in the campaign, Trump told stories to create a narrative. See the university exercise where the roles were gender reversed in a play. Stories are powerful things, as the human brain wants to knit things together.
Re God or culture genes: They may even exist. But once you know that there are ~10k human genes and ~126k human proteins*, supposedly uniquely coded by those genes, then you know *science*, even if loved far beyond mere human sexual intercourse, has a **long** way to go before it can even understand, much less engineer the human genome.
If you have any grasp of information theory, that is. And genes *are* information, albeit with four primitive values instead of two.
It’s almost as though there were a simple, supra-materialist explanation of all this incredible complexity but stiff-necked human pride won’t let Cloud Folk accept it. Because to accept all the wonder they’d have to bend the knee themselves instead of demanding it be bent for them.
* From Wiki
I think they would rather cut off their noses than bend the knee.
Even now, the more primitive in the world believe in voodoo and curses. That caused a female relative of a friend’s house servant in Nairobi to believe she had fallen ill because someone had put a curse on her. When she died, they found that she was indeed cursed. With AIDS.
From the looks of the elf-door in the linked Atlantic article, perhaps our host has ethereal kin in the land of fire and ice. The fact that the letter “Z” is no longer used in modern Icelandic deepens the mystery.
Sannleikurinn er þarna úti.
And it will set us free.
your description of these people makes them sound like macrophages
Z: Our ruling class has the same desire for a purpose beyond their extravagant lifestyles as Cloud People. These are people who fully committed to the meritocratic, managerial system. They are true believers. Having abandoned Christianity long ago, the ruling class lurches from cause to cause, looking for a reason to cast themselves as on the side of angels, in the great moral struggle that is the human condition. Lacking a deity, a light to give them purpose, they settle for demons they can slay.
Hoffer: It’s disconcerting to realize that businessmen, generals, soldiers, men of action are less corrupted by power than intellectuals… You take a conventional man of action, and he’s satisfied if you obey. But not the intellectual. He doesn’t want you just to obey. He wants you to get down on your knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love. In other words, whenever the intellectuals are in power, there’s soul-raping going on.
Hoffer did not know that America’s mid-century intellectuals would evolve into the cult of modern progressivism, and that that cult would try to dominate our culture and force us to change the way we think and feel (to get down on our knees and praise the one who makes you love what you hate and hate what you love).
I agree that moral struggle defines us as humans. That implies that we have souls. The struggle against the Cult is the struggle against soul-raping.
One of your best.
When you are the god anything that frustrates your desires is a demon to be destroyed.
I think Gobekli Tepe was a nightclub with a Neolithic temple motif.
“The general consensus among physical anthropologists is that religion co-evolved with language. By religion, they mean belief, not the highly complex and abstract stuff we now think of as religion.”
People have also seriously proposed that language emerged from ritualistic dance-chants, so maybe ritual precedes belief. Or maybe the inclination toward ritual and the inclination to imagine that there are conscious beings behind the scene, whose intentions explain everything, are two separate things that combine to generate religion — belief and ritual reinforcing each other. So you’re right to emphasize the ritualistic character of Portier-Young’s seminar: it’s an “exorcism”, just as you say.
If you read some of the older literature on ancient religious practices like The Ancient City by DeCoulanges, Religion in Greece and Rome by Rose, or Greek Folk Religion by Nilsson, you get the impression that ritual preceded belief, although none of these authors come out and say it. What these by a try to do is peer back through the written record we have to try and see the origins of what we have fairly direct evidence of. A sort of anthropology by inference. What emerges by this method is a religion based on maintenance of the household and the agricultural homestead, probably beginning with keeping the home fire burning, keeping out of trouble with the neighbors by having well established boundaries, while keeping track of the growing seasons so as to know when to plant what.
In all of these cases what you begin with is a set of rules for practical living that are of existential importance. Being such, they are easily transferred into personified deities that command respect and compliance in ritualized survival practices. Having the practice enforced by a personal god that will punish or neglect to bless facilitates teaching children the importance of doing the necessary things by fear of unknown punishments by those even more powerful than their parents. And when these rituals are no longer necessary for survival, the original reasons for their practice having been forgotten they continue on as religious practices or festivals.
All of this does little to explain the three great religions of our day as the above apply only to pagan religious practice. It does, however help in understanding the evolving practices of the universities and elites. With the progress of technology and diffusion of knowledge and access to it the average person sees less and less need for an aristocratic elite that determines our mores for us and demands tithes of increasing severity to certify educational progress that we could acquire on our own, or much less expensively, in an unregulated system.
Thus we see the increase in religiosity among the otherwise heathen.
teapartydoc, I don’t understand your last two paragraphs, from “All of this does little to explain …” to “… among the otherwise heathen.” Would you mind explaining further?
Doc;
Good point about using the supernatural to reinforce parental authority, It used to happen here, too. Now, Cloud Culture seeks to destroy parental authority (apparently to pave the wide path of depravity). The results are everywhere to be seen. Not an improvement.
I’d point out that in Christianity, the elaborate theology emerged before the Gospels (the letters of Paul predate all the gospels). You are right in that family, and society order is emphasized, but order on the political level is explicitly divorced from divine qualities.
@TeaPartyDoc – “you get the impression that ritual preceded belief, although none of these authors come out and say it”. Reminds me of the ancient saying in the Catholic Church, “Lex orandi, Lex credendi” – roughly, the rule of prayer is the rule of belief. Liturgy & ritual preceded theology.
About exorcising the evil spirits of ‘racism’: It does seem that these Cultural Marxists are entirely too familiar with what used to be called ‘familiar spirits’.
Great final paragraph.
Religious belief probably does confer an evolutionary advantage, and (much to the chagrin of liberals and pure materialists) even a scientific advantage. Certain priests in antiquity constructed models of the world and astronomical tools (for astrological reasons) that are almost as accurate as our most advanced technologies today. Actually, there is some debate, but based on changes in true north, some of these models are exactly as accurate as ours or even more-so. The people who made these inventions/azimuths did it to commune with their gods or for crop-planting reasons, but these druids and Egyptians did a hell of a lot more to advance science than Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, or Richard Dawkins.
One way to think about belief is it makes sociability possible. It provides a set of rules and a transcendent authority behind those rules. When the great whisperer says to never go over the river into the forest, there’s no reason to debate it. Everyone agrees. It’s aslo a highly potable reservoir of knowledge. Instead of having to recall a long list of details about why we no longer try to cross the river and enter the forest, we have a simply, entertaining tale that explains it.
As someone who shares your admiration for the early astronomers/astrologers, I might even go so far as to say that religious belief and scientific exploration are motivated by the same human impulse to understand the world they live in. The language of science – mathematics – was developed almost entirely to explain astronomical observations. And why were early astronomers so interested in explaining the movements of the stars? It’s because they believed that somewhere in those motions were signs from the gods that would tell humans how to live their lives. Science and religion for the ancients were essentially part of the same discipline. Even when the scientific “revolution” began in earnest in Europe with Newton’s Principia, I think the leading physicists and mathematicians of the day tended to be devout – if eccentric – Christians. Mathematics was proving to be so fantastically successful that it was seen as a confirmation of some divine intelligence that man was becoming increasingly privy to.
> Racism is no longer just normal clannishness based on race.
Indeed. And yet in response to (or perhaps independently from) the radical shift in understanding race from the left by the likes of Montagu, Mead and Boas, many on the right have adopted a sort of Nietzschean view on blood, soil and race, where mathematical models like Hamilton’s rule are practically exalted into catechisms of spiritual belief. This tendency predates modern population genetics, of course — the most notorious example being “Positive Christianity.”
By the way, I take it you’re familiar with Dual Inheritance Theory? It applies the tools of population genetics to studying cultural transmission as an autonomous heritable substrate of its own. It’s a good solution to some of the determinist paradoxes that arise from more simplistic sociobiological reasoning.
Just so nobody else has to spend time googling “Hamilton’s rule” (as I just did) the Wiki thumbnail is: “According to Hamilton’s rule, kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor.”
I’m very much a gene-culture guy. It seems to me to be obviously right. Humans are somewhat unique in that we can and do alter the environment in which we continue to evolve.