Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  Genetic change is slow; cultural change is fast, at least in biological time. By now it is obvious that cultural change can be fast in any kind of time. Once the offline achievements of science get translated into technology, then, as they say, all hell breaks loose. Technology takes the possibilities of science and brings them to bear on the world of daily life, with dramatic consequences both for human beings and for the biosphere. For one thing, the sudden growth of the world’s population, itself only possible because of technology, has, in my own lifetime, almost outstripped the population growth in all previous history, from the hypothetical “bottleneck” population of perhaps 10,000 humans at the end of the last ice age to well over 6 billion now and 12 billion before we hardly know it. The enormous need for energy, so long available apparently endlessly directly from the sun through photosynthesis, has driven us to tap the enormous but finite and nonrenewable resources of the sun stored in fossil fuels, all to maintain our everincreasing complexity.

  We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our own adaptations. Our technological progress is geometric. It would be hard to argue that our moral progress is even arithmetic. As one who has lived through one horrifying decade after another for eighty years, I confess that I cannot see much in the way of moral advance. There is an irony here, as moral sensitivity has grown steadily in the last hundred years. We are far more sensitive to the needs of whole categories of people that were previously despised and repressed. Yet our growing moral sensitivity seems to have occurred in a world of widespread and undiminished moral horror. Yes, there are the bad guys to blame, and Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and so on were very bad. But it was not they who invented and used the atomic bomb to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them women and children. No one’s hands are clean if we look at the recent history of the world with any seriousness.

  Religion is part of this whole picture, a very complex part, leading sometimes to great moral advances and sometimes to deep moral failures. But that religious evolution is simply the rise, onward and upward, of ever more compassionate, more righteous, more enlightened religions could hardly be farther from the truth. No serious reader of this book can think it is a paean to any kind of religious triumphalism. Or any other triumphalism. Technological advance at high speed combined with moral blindness about what we are doing to the world’s societies and to the biosphere is a recipe for rapid extinction. The burden of proof lies on anyone who would say it is not so. We can hope for and work for new directions that could change our course, but self-satisfied we cannot be.

  This book asks what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living. It is an effort to live again those moments that belong to us in the depths of our present, to draw living water from the well of the past, to find friends in history who can help us understand where we are. It is not a book about modernity. But surely, as Leszek Kolakowski has eloquently put it, modernity is on trial.36 I cannot in this book give an account of that trial. All I can do is call up some very important witnesses.

  I want to thank my wife, Melanie, who has been the first reader and editor of everything I have ever written, including, of course, this book, which she finished not long before she died. I also want to thank the coauthors of Habits of the Heart-Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton-for, year by year, chapter by chapter, at our annual meeting, reading and commenting on this book. William Sullivan has been particularly helpful with this book and with all my work for many years, as has Eli Sagan; lively discussions with both of them have deepened my work in many ways, even when I did not do exactly what they suggested. There have been others who have read all or some of the chapters and have helped me: Renee Fox, Hans Joas, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Steven Smith, Arvind Rajagopal, Harlan Stelmach, Yang Xiao, John Maguire, Samuel Porter, Mohammad Nafissi, Matteo Bortolini, Wade Kenny, and perhaps others I am overlooking. To all of them I owe a special debt of gratitude.

  I could not have written this book without the expert scholarship of scholars in the many fields the book deals with. In some cases they have helped me with detailed criticisms of my drafts of particular chapters, which have been much improved by their help. They will be mentioned by name in the relevant chapters. Among those who have had a pervasive influence on the book as a whole, I must give special mention to Merlin Donald for his theory of cultural evolution, and Gordon Burghardt for his work on animal play and its evolutionary implications.

  I must thank two extraordinary editors without whom this book would never have been completed: Douglas Mitchell at the University of Chicago Press, who believed in the book when it was only a dream in my head, and Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press, who saw the book through to completion in its final form.

  I also want to thank the John Templeton Foundation for supporting my work on this book since 2004. Their generous grants helped me in many ways and prevented a long process from becoming even longer. Among their staff I am particularly grateful to Paul Wason and Drew Rick-Miller. I am also grateful to the Foundation for funding a conference in 2008 at the Max Weber Center at the University of Erfurt, under the chairmanship of Hans Joas, on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences,” in preparation for which the participants received the four chapters on the axial age in this book. I thank the Committee on Research of the University of California, Berkeley, for modest research grants from the very beginning of this project. I have depended greatly on the wonderful library of the University of California, Berkeley, supplemented by the excellent holdings of the Graduate Theological Union Library. It has been a rare moment when neither of these libraries could supply what I needed.

  These are my debts to the living. Probably my debts to the dead are even greater. I owe a great deal to Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. That will be more obvious in the case of Durkheim, because I am closer to him in my sense of calling as a sociologist and an intellectual. Almost every line, however, displays a hidden debt to Weber, whose work was much closer as a model for me than Durkheim’s. I have decided not to mention every idea I have borrowed from Weber, or the instances, many fewer, where I disagree with him-that would virtually be a book in itself. Much as I admire Weber, I do not share his cultural pessimism (Kulturpessimismus), though I respect it and am often tempted by it. I don’t agree with the idea that we should forget our founders (I have been impressed by the many biologists who never fail to remember Charles Darwin), but I do agree with Clifford Geertz when he argued at several points that we social scientists have much to learn from historians, philosophers, theologians, and natural scientists and that merely adding footnotes to the founders will not get us far.

  I must mention the three great teachers who taught me face-to-face but who are no longer living: Talcott Parsons, Wilfred Smith, and Paul Tillich. Parsons handed on to me the great sociological tradition, because he lived it and practiced it. Wilfred Smith taught me, paradoxically, that the religion of each person, group, or tradition is unique and can never be captured adequately with general terms such as “Christianity” or “Confucianism,” right up to the term “religion” itself, while at the same time teaching me that religion is one because every expression of religion is historically related, somehow, to every other. And Tillich taught me to see the “dimension of depth” in every cultural expression and that Christianity is not “belief in the unbelievable” at a time when I thought it was. I could mention my friends Clifford Geertz, Kenneth Burke, Edward Shils, and legions of others who were present in my life and from whom I learned much. Books, many of them at least, never fail to fascinate and surprise me, but it was the spirit of my teachers that taught me to hear the authors speak, not just watch them lie quietly on the page.

  It perhaps goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that I owe much to the friends in history that Mencius talked about, not least to Mencius himself, but to all the creators of the great traditions that I deal with in
the later chapters of this book, as well as to the reciters of myth and the dancers of ritual in the tribal and archaic traditions, who must remain anonymous, but who have been, not merely my examples, but my teachers in this enterprise.

  Many scholars ask whether the very word “religion” is too culture-bound to be used in historical and cross-cultural comparison today. I cannot avoid the question, but for practical purposes I will use the term, because for the philosophical and sociological traditions upon which this book draws, the idea of religion has been central. The justification for its use will depend more on the persuasiveness of the argument of the book as a whole than on a definition; nonetheless definitions help to get things started. In the Preface I offered a simplified version of Geertz’s definition; here I will begin again with a simplified Durkheimian definition, not incompatible with Geertz’s but opening up somewhat different dimensions: Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred that unite those who adhere to them in a moral community.’ Even this simple definition raises immediately a second definitional issue: What is the sacred?

  Durkheim defined the sacred as something set apart or forbidden. Durkheim’s definition might be widened to define the sacred as a realm of nonordinary reality. The notion of non-ordinary reality, though widely held among a variety of peoples, might appear to be ruled out for modern consciousness. Do we not believe that there is no non-ordinary reality, that ordinary reality is all there is? If so, then cannot both the sacred and religion be relegated to the historic past, to the mistaken beliefs of earlier cultures? But we can draw on Alfred Schutz’s analysis of multiple realities, developing more fully what was sketched in the Preface, to indicate that today we operate all the time in a series of non-ordinary realities as well as in ordinary reality.

  Multiple Realities

  Schutz argues that, methodologically speaking, the paramount reality in which we live is the world of daily life, what Max Weber called the everyday.3 We assume that the world of daily life is natural. Schutz characterizes the world of daily life as the world of wide awake, grown up men. We face the world of daily life with a practical or pragmatic interest. In the world of daily life, the primary activity is to “bring about [a] projected state of affairs by bodily movements,” which Schutz calls working. The world of working is governed by the means/ends schema: we could also define it as a world of striving. The world of daily life operates in standard time and standard space.

  Further, according to Schutz, the world of daily life is based on afundamental anxiety, ultimately, though not necessarily consciously, arising from the knowledge and fear of death. Finally, according to Schutz, the world of daily life involves what he calls the epoche of the natural attitude-the suspension of disbelief in the world as it appears. In the natural attitude, one “puts in brackets the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him.“4

  At this point we have a clear contrast between the world of daily life and the world of religion, where doubt about the world as it appears is often fundamental. For example, the Daoist teacher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), speaking of himself, wrote:

  Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.’

  But we do not have to become so fanciful to see that even in the modern world we do not spend all our time in the world of daily life.

  For example, most of us spend up to a third or more of our life asleep. Not only does sleep rather dramatically suspend our involvement in the world of daily life, but it is also the time when we dream, and dreams clearly do not follow the logic of daily life.6 Dreams, for example, do not operate in standard time and space: they can bring together persons from different times and places in a single interaction.

  We are often involved in activities that deliberately alter the conditions of the world of daily life, sometimes in a way that emphasizes some features of it while ignoring others. Games such as football artificially create a separate reality. Football operates not with standard time and space but with the bounded time and space of the game. Football events occur only on the football field. If, for example, a pass is caught out of bounds, it doesn’t count as a catch, for it did not occur in game space. Game time is one hour, but it is suspended for a variety of reasons and usually lasts about three hours of standard time. Most centrally, football plays with the anxieties of the world of working, the striving for pragmatic advantage. Unlike the world of daily life, one hour of game time produces a clear result: someone wins and someone loses, or occasionally there is a tie. We may borrow a metaphor from football in daily life when we speak in an economic or political context of a “game plan” or a “winning quarterback.” Indeed, for highly paid professional football players the world of the game is the world of daily life. But for the rest of us it is “only a metaphor.”

  What is true of football is true of many other common experiences. When we watch television, or a movie, or a play, or listen to music, we become absorbed in the activities we are watching or listening to. We are diverted from the world of daily life, and that is a major reason we spend so much time at these activities. However, in our society these activities tend to be viewed as “less real” than the world of daily life, as fictional, and ultimately as less important than the world of working. They can be switched off like a TV set and we will be back in the “real world,” the world of daily life. Yet one of the first things to be noticed about the world of daily life is that nobody can stand to live in it all the time. Some people can’t stand to live in it at all-they used to be sent to mental institutions, but today in the United States they can be found wandering in the city streets. All of us leave the world of daily life with considerable frequency-not only when we are sleeping and dreaming (the structure of dreams is almost completely antithetical to the structure of the world of working), but when we daydream, travel, go to a concert, turn on the television. We do these things often for the sheer pleasure of getting out of the world of daily life. Even so we may feel guilty that we are shirking our responsibilities to the real world.

  However, if we follow the analysis of Alfred Schutz, the notion that the world of daily life is uniquely real is itself a fiction that is maintained only with effort. The world of daily life, like all the other multiple realities, is socially constructed. Each culture, each era, constructs its own world of daily life, never entirely identical with any other. Even the meaning of “standard” time and space differs subtly between cultures, and fundamental conceptions of person, family, and nation are all culturally variable. By this I do not mean that the world of daily life even in its cultural variability is not real-it is real enough. But it lacks the unique ontological reality, the claim to be perfectly natural, that it seeks to secure when it puts in brackets the doubt that it could be other. It is one of the functions of other realities to remind us that that bracketing is finally insecure and unwarranted. Occasionally a work of art will break its bounds, will deeply unsettle us, will even issue us the command “Change your life”-that is, it will claim not a subordinate reality but a higher reality than the world of daily life.

  The world of daily life is challenged by another reality much more sober than art, namely science. However closely science may seem to approximate the features of the world of daily life, there is one fundamental difference: science does not accept the world of daily life as it appears; science is premised on a permanent lifting of the epoche of the natural attitude. As William James pointed out in his original discussion of multiple realities, the physicist understands heat in terms not of “felt warmth” but of the “molecular vibrations” that cause that bodily warmth and are the truth of its appearance?

  It is religion, however, that traditionally directed the
most frontal assault on the world of working. As Zhuangzi put it:

  He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in this dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman-how dense!8

  The Buddha proclaimed that the world is a lie, a burning house from which we must escape. Early Christians believed that the world was in the grip of sin and death and would soon come to an end to be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. Zhuangzi’s metaphor of awakening, as though the world of daily life is really a dream, can be found in many traditions, including Buddhism and Christianity.

  Religious Reality

  How can we characterize the religious reality that calls the world of daily life into question? Certainly religious worlds are as variable as the worlds of daily life, and we will have occasion to comment on that variability throughout this book, but as an initial effort to characterize the religious experience of reality I will borrow from the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow in his Toward a Psychology of Being and other works has distinguished between what he calls Being cognition (or B-cognition) and Deficiency cognition (or D-cognition).’ His characterization of D-cognition is remarkably parallel to Schutz’s notion of the world of daily life, for D-cognition is the recognition of what is lacking and what must be made up for through striving. D-cognition is motivated by a fundamental anxiety that propels us toward practical and pragmatic action in the world of working. When we are controlled by Deficiency motives, we operate under the means/ends schema, we have a clear sense of difference between subject and object, and our attitude toward objects (even human objects) is manipulative. We concentrate on partial aspects of reality that are most germane to our needs and ignore the rest, both of ourselves and of the world, but we operate with scrupulous attention to the constraints of standard time and space.