Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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It is with his discussion of ritual that Geertz shows us most directly what is characteristic of religion as a cultural system and what makes it different from other spheres, for ritual is not just religious beliefs but religious action. Geertz sums up ritual in a way I could not improve on: “In ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world, producing thus that idiosyncratic transformation in one’s sense of reality to which Santayana refers in my out of the context of concrete acts of religious observance that religious conviction emerges on the human plane … In these plastic dramas men attain their faith as they portray it.“25 The part of his epigraph to which he refers is this: “The vistas [that a religion] opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in-whether we expect ever to pass wholly over into it or no-is what we mean by having a religion” (George Santayana, Reason in Religion).
To illustrate his point, Geertz, as he always did, gave examples of how rituals create worlds. His most extensive example is from Bali-the ritual combat between Rangda, the queen of the witches, evil, terrifying, Fear itself, and Barong, a kind of farcical sheepdog dragon, who attempts to defend the villagers against Rangda, in a ritual that ends inevitably in a draw. In the course of his discussion, Geertz describes the many ways in which the combat between Rangda and Barong sums up central concerns of Balinese culture, but he concludes:
It is in the direct encounter with the two figures in the context of the actual performance that the villager comes to know them as, so far as he is concerned, genuine realities. They are, then, not representations of anything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they become-nadi-themselves part of the realm in which those presences exist. To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether he thinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy.26
But then Geertz reminds us that however real the world of religious symbols may be to those who participate in it, no one, not even a saint, lives in the world of religious symbols all the time, and most of us live there only at moments. The ritual is over and fields have to be tended and children fed. The world of daily life returns with its brackets perhaps dented, but not entirely missing. Yet when enough people have entered that other world, then the world of daily life to which they return is never quite the same again. As Geertz says, “religion is sociologically interesting not because it describes the social order but because it shapes it.“27
How religion creates those other worlds and how those worlds interact with the world of daily life is the subject of this book. Like Geertz, I cannot imagine making an argument about symbolic forms and their enactment without illustrating them. If all that is necessary is the argument, this Preface might suffice, or come close to it. But if one wants to understand religious symbol systems in their variety and in their development, there will have to be extensive illustrations. Even in my first two general chapters there are many brief illustrations, but beginning with Chapter 3, on tribal religion, I will offer more extensive descriptions that will become progressively longer as I deal with religion in the chiefly archaic and axial societies. Even so, the long chapters on the four axial-age cases are hardly scratching the surface, as are the earlier ones as well. They tell just enough, I hope, to help the reader, if only for a moment, actually experience what living in those worlds might be like.
I can imagine that there will be readers who will like the cases and throw away the argument, and that is fine with me. I have even thought that might be the way Cliff Geertz would have read my book. But I cannot make the argument I want to make without the illustrations, and so the book is rather long. On the other hand it is not long enough: it leaves out the last 2,000 years. But if I tried to give the major religious developments of the last 2,000 years the same degree of attention that I gave to earlier religions, inadequate though that is, the detail I would have to master would overwhelm me. I would need another lifetime or a phalanx of collaborators. At most I can hope to write another book of modest size that will try to show some of the linkages from the axial age to the modern era, dipping only occasionally into deep detail. We will see.
I have given some idea, however preliminary and inadequate, of what I take evolution to be and what I take religion to be. Now, perhaps even more cryptically, I will try briefly to say how they come together. I agree with the opening sentence of Geertz’s epigraph from Santayana: “Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.” My attempts to describe carefully a variety of religions in all their particularity should give evidence of my agreement, but I also believe that there are types of religion and that these types can be put in an evolutionary order, not in terms of better or worse, but in terms of the capacities upon which they draw.
In trying to describe such an evolutionary order, I have found Merlin Donald’s scheme of the evolution of culture particularly convincing. Donald shows how, in the coevolution of biology and culture, three stages of human culture-mimetic, mythic, and theoretic-developed over the last 1 or 2 million years.28 The evolutionary process starts from the baseline of episodic culture, which we share with other higher mammals-that is, the capacity to recognize what episode the individual is in and what happened before in similar episodes that might give a clue as to how to act now, even though lacking what is called autobiographical memory in which the episodes are strung together in a larger story. We then proceed to mimetic culture, possibly as long as 2 million years ago with such species as Homo erectus, in which we use our bodies to enact past and future events as well as gesture for communication. Mimetic culture, though primarily gestural, was by no means silent, and in all likelihood involved music as well as some beginnings of linguistic capacity, though very simple ones. Dance may be one of the earliest forms of such mimetic culture, and dance is basic to ritual in almost all tribal societies, so, though we can only imagine what it was like, some kind of religion may well begin in those early days. What is important to remember about Donald’s scheme is that though he speaks of stages, earlier stages are not lost, but only reorganized under new conditions. Thus even in our highly verbal and, to a degree, abstract culture, gestural communication remains basic, not only, obviously, in intimate life, but in public, in our grand spectacles of sport or politics.
Sometime between 250,000 and 100,000 years ago, full grammatical language developed, making complex narratives possible. Perhaps fully developed autobiographical memory depends on grammatical language and narrative and so emerged only then, or perhaps it was already foreshadowed in the mimetic stage. Donald calls the new stage mythic. Myth greatly ex tends the capacities of mimetic ritual in terms of what it can enact, but it does not replace it. All cultures that we know of have narrative culture intertwined with mimetic culture. I have tried to illustrate religions that are primarily mimetic and mythic under the rubric of tribal religion, being fully aware of how treacherous the word “tribe” is. But even when religions move to include a theoretic dimension, mimetic and mythic culture in reformulated ways continue to be central; humans cannot function without them.
As society became more complex, religions followed suit, explicating, in their own way, the enormous differences between social strata that replaced the basic egalitarianism of forager tribes. Chiefdoms and then archaic kingships require new forms of symbolization and enactment to make sense of the increasing hierarchical division of social classes in terms of wealth and power. In the first millennium BCE, theoretic culture emerges in several places in the old world, questioning the old narratives as it reorganizes them and their mimetic bases, rejecting ritual and myth as it creates new rituals and myths, and calling all the old hierarchies into question in the name of ethical and spiritual universalism. The cultural effervescence of this period led to new developments in religion and ethics but also in the understanding of th
e natural world, the origins of science. For these reasons we call this period axial.21
This brief picture of the evolution of religious symbol systems, which it will take the whole book to flesh out, provides one consolation about stopping where I do. I end with the axial age, the emergence of theoretic culture and the reorganization of the relation between mimetic, mythic, and theoretic elements that that requires. The last 2,000 years have seen an enormous development of all the resources from which religion draws. It is also the story of how the theoretic becomes-partially, never totally-disembedded from the mimetic and mythic. Though I cannot tell that story nor consider the achievements and predicaments to which it has led, I will at least have given an idea of all the dimensions in play. Some have suggested that we are in the midst of a second axial age, but if we are, there should be a new cultural form emerging. Maybe I am blind, but I don’t see it. What I think we have is a crisis of incoherence and a need to integrate in new ways the dimensions we have had since the axial age. I will return to this issue in the Conclusion.
It is out of the series of evolutionary developments leading to the emergence of theoretic culture that the various worlds, the “cultural systems” of which Geertz speaks, became more clearly defined. But following his logic we can ask, what was the relation of these new developments, these new capacities, to the world of daily life? If we see the world of daily life as the world of Darwinian survival-as to some extent we must-how, we might ask, could humans “afford” the luxury of spending time on alternative worlds, on dance and myth, even on theory, when there was hunger and danger all around them and the necessity to procreate if their lineages were to survive?
Just to suggest the kind of luxury I am referring to, how can people have created the aesthetic sphere, the nonutilitarian sphere par excellence? Let me take a passage from the poet and critic Mark Strand to illustrate the point:
Something beyond knowledge compels our interest and our ability to be moved by a poem … The poem is bound by a schema that is no less true for standing apart from what science tells us is true … A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.30
Because we are too busy living? Exactly. How is it possible for us to have that life? It seems that there are a variety of ways in which evolution has allowed living creatures to outwit Darwinian pressures and “have a life” after all. Or maybe. As we will see, every attempt to avoid Darwinian selection can be co-opted; every effort to avoid function and adaptation, if it is at all successful, will be recaptured by what it was trying to escape, if I can speak anthropomorphically about large evolutionary tendencies. But maybe not entirely. It may even turn out that it is “functional” to have spheres of life that are not functional.
While reading a number of recent publications by biologists at work on things of interest to me, I have been interested to find them using the computer language of “online” and “offline.” Online is the world of daily life, of what is immediately before us, of Darwinian pressures with a vengeance. Online is the world of foraging, fighting, fleeing, procreating, and the other things that all creatures must do to survive. Offline is when those pressures are off and there are other things at work. I have often found that articles or books about offline things such as sleep or play begin with qualifying statements such as “Sleep is not well understood,” or “Play is not well understood, some people even argue it doesn’t exist.” No one begins a discussion of forag ing techniques with such a disclaimer. Of course, when it comes to particular subjects, even in the world of grim survival, saying that something is not well understood is, to me reassuringly, common. But when applied to whole fields, it is mainly the offline fields that are so described.
Take sleep, for example. It seems to be close to universal among all organisms. In organisms without brains we cannot scan for brain waves that indicate sleep, but we can observe quiet withdrawal. So we all seem to need it. It is apparently necessary for survival: I have read that rats who are continuously kept awake die in about two weeks. But exactly what is going on isn’t clear. And sleeping is expensive. Sleeping animals are more vulnerable to predators than wide-awake animals. We can’t do any foraging or child care or procreating when we’re asleep. Yet we need it and we do it.
Then there is the further problem of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, only discovered in the 1950s, which seems to be the part of sleep in which dreams occur. Human babies need a lot of it. About 80 percent of their sleep is REM sleep, whereas for human adults it is only about 20 percent. But what are dreams about? There is no agreement that I have found, even though in a variety of cultures dreams have been taken very seriously and have influenced daily life, sometimes significantly. REM sleep seems to have to do with learning; with consolidating memories, sorting out important memories, and removing evanescent ones; or with creativity. So there are functions, yes, but exactly what functions is not so clear. Sleep is a luxury that turns out to be a necessity even if we still don’t understand it too well.
What about play? Play is the luxury of luxuries. No daily-life concerns allowed. You can play-fight, but if you bite too hard, the game is over. You can play at sexual intercourse (with your own or the other sex), but if you really try to do it, the game is over. Play is not universal; it is especially well developed among mammals and birds, particularly among intelligent and social mammals and birds, though it is also found among fish and some reptiles, and even insects have something that might be considered play. Play is largely, but not exclusively, an activity of the young. It is commonest in species that continue child care for a long time so that the young of the species are not directly involved in the quest for survival: they are fed and protected and have the energy for just having a good time, or so it seems to us.
Play is, of course, expensive. It makes playing animals vulnerable to predators and keeps them from helping to forage. So we have many theories of the functions of play-it is exercising the muscles, it is learning to be social, it is learning to outwit the other players, and so on-yet few observers doubt that it includes an element of sheer joy that is seldom seen in other things animals do. Johan Huizinga wrote a famous book, Homo Ludens, “The Playing Human,” that still has a lot to teach us.31 He even saw play as involved in the origin of culture.
One final example. Derek Bickerton, the evolutionary linguist, has argued that the origin of language occurred ofine.12 The cries of other primates are not words; they are commanding vocal gestures, which we can translate as “Danger! Predator!” or “Come here! Food!” but there are no words for danger, or predator, or food. There is no semantic content other than a terrified scream, on the one hand, or a joyous one, on the other, no words that could then be used to discuss the possibility of predators or food when there is no predator approaching nor any new discovery of food at hand, offline, so to speak. How did we ever get offline enough to invent language, which is talk about things, not an immediate intervention in the world, or not necessarily so? Bickerton has his own answer, but for now, just the idea that something as “functional,” as “adaptive,” as language originated offline, so to speak, boggles the mind.
What I am suggesting is that the capacity to go offline in a number of ways, which is present even in simple organisms but much more extensive in complex ones and especially so among humans, may be one of our greatest capacities of all, and that religion, along with science and art, may be the result of that capacity to go offline. I’m not denying function and adaptation. The ethologist Gordon Burghardt has a theory that there is primary play, which is just play, and then there is secondary play, which in a variety of ways has become adaptive.33 Maybe some such distinction could be made in other spheres.
What all this means for religion, is that in this book the search is not
to find the ways in which religion is adaptive, and thus a good thing, or maladaptive, and thus a bad thing, or even something that developed in a spandrel, a kind of empty evolutionary space, and is neutral with respect to adaptation. I want to understand what religion is and what religion does and then worry about its consequences for the world of daily life. The consequences are enormously important, and the question of whether they are adaptive or not cannot finally be avoided. But adaptations can be found for almost any phenomenon-biologists call them just-so stories. They are not the place to start; the reality of life in the religious mode is where I will begin.
There is one more point that, though I touched on it earlier, I need to emphasize in concluding: religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better. We have not gone from “primitive religion” that tribal peoples have had to “higher religions” that people like us have. I think it is that problem that worried Cliff Geertz when I talked about religious evolution, because the idea of religious evolution had in earlier days so often been couched in those terms. 14 Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used. It is worth remembering, as Stephen J. Gould pointed out, that complexity is not the only good.35 Simplicity has its charms. Some relatively simple organisms have survived in more or less the same form for hundreds of millions of years. The more complex the species, the briefer its life. In some cases this is because species have changed into even more complex forms, yet extinctions have been massive. There have been several species of the genus Homo; now there is one. The one remaining species may be partly responsible for the extinction of its last remaining relative, the Neanderthals. The more complex, the more fragile. Complexity goes against the second law of thermodynamics, that all complex entities tend to fall apart, and it takes more and more energy for complex systems to function. I will have more to say about all that in Chapter 2.