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

by Robert N. Bellah

  My point is that the axial age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but also has given humans the power to destroy their environment and themselves. Both kinds of theory have criticized but also justified the class society that first came into conscious view in the axial age. They have provided the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. But the legitimation crisis of the axial age remains unresolved to this day. One must wonder what kind of transformation state societies would have to undergo, what kind of cosmopolitan institutions would have to limit and partly replace them, for that resolution to become imaginable.

  As I already suggested in mentioning Aristotle’s Lyceum, which was modeled in part on Plato’s Academy, the second great consequence of the axialage breakthroughs was the creation of institutions that would keep the traditions alive and shelter their adherents from the surrounding world, relaxed fields within the “gentle violence” of established social orders and sometimes the not so gentle violence in times of political turmoil. In India the hereditary caste of the Brahmins carried the tradition, or important parts of it, though later adherents of Vishnu or Shiva founded their own associations. The Buddhists created a new kind of institution, the monastic order, which may well have influenced the emergence of Christian monasticism in the West some centuries later. Educational institutions were important in all the cases, and we refer to “schools” that carried distinct traditions particularly in the classical Greek and Roman world, the Stoics and the Epicureans, for example, and in China, the Confucians, Mohists, and Daoists, though, perhaps under the influence of Buddhism, the Daoists later established religious institutions somewhat different from schools.59

  Israel is a particularly interesting case because of its later history as a diaspora rather than an empire. In a sense, Judaism came closest to being a realized utopia, though under the most difficult of conditions. As an often-persecuted minority, Jews were deprived of independent political power, though in both Christian and Muslim societies they often had significant ties to power holders. Under the best circumstances, however, Jews were able to establish their own self-governing communities under the protection of the ruling powers; these communities lacked state power, particularly military power, but had their own judiciary bodies to maintain order within the communities. The strongest sanction tended to be expulsion from the community, because violence was in the hands of the surrounding political order, though expulsion was a grave sanction indeed.60 When I liken these communities to axial utopias, because within them life was guided by the Torah, however problematic external relations might be, I mean to say they had some similarities to Buddhist and Christian monastic communities, in that in these communities too the religious life and ordinary life were more closely identified than in most historic societies. It is perhaps ironic that as a result of the great emancipation of the Jews in modern times, the immemorial hope of return to the promised land could be combined with modern nationalism to create the state of Israel, which is no more utopian than any other modern nationindeed, which faces all the tensions between ethical ideals and practical exigencies that are endemic to state organization.

  To trace the great network of religious institutions that grew out of the axial traditions in later centuries, the Christian church, the Islamic Ummah, the Buddhist Sangha, and their related educational institutions, including the Islamic madrasas and the Christian universities, using their relatively relaxed fields for great cultural creativity, would take us well beyond the scope of this volume. But all of them, in one way or another, kept the religious utopian idea alive within their not always entirely relaxed boundaries.

  Metanarratives Again

  Let us return to an issue I raised in the Preface: How can we undertake, as I have done, a metanarrative, even an evolutionary metanarrative, when such narratives have most frequently in the past been used to justify the winners and vilify the losers in history viewed as the struggle for existence. Thomas McCarthy, in his recent book Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, has raised these issues sharply, yet has affirmed, even in the face of great difficulties, the value, even the inescapability, of what he, following Kant, calls universal history.” In responding to him I hope to clarify where I stand. There are three great defects with most attempts at this genre, coming, as they largely do, from Europe and America.

  1. There is a strong tendency, even in Kant, the most universalistic of early modern philosophers, to deal with humanity in terms of a radical dichotomy: us (Europe, later Europe plus America) versus them, and divided not only culturally, but alas, even by Kant, The white race is taken to be superior, even biologically superior, to all the others, though the other races can sometimes be seen as capable of learning to be more like Westerners. Even when the distinction between human groups is seen culturally rather than racially, dichotomy is still the primary way of categorizing: civilization versus barbarism. When distinctions between the less civilized were made, the distinctions between them were still minimal: “Orientals” may be superior to primitives, but they are still categorized as sharing a single, static, and, in particular, despotic culture: thus Oriental despotism. One needs look no further than Edward Said’s Orientalism to see how recently such a dichotomy has dominated Western

  2. This basic dichotomy can be put into time, sometimes evolutionary time, as a distinction between earlier and later, with the later, namely us, distinguishing ourselves from the others by a higher degree of progress. All existing societies can be arranged in terms of stages of progress, with Europe or Euro-America at the apex. Imperialism was justified as educational, bringing the possibility of liberty, after a suitable (long) period of tutelage, to those without it. Again we are disappointed to find John Stuart Mill, who most of his adult life worked for the East India Company, as did his father, James, giving eloquent expression to such views, and in his great essay On Liberty, no less. Freedom, we find, is “meant to apply to human beings in the maturity of their faculties,” whereas “despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” British rule in India is, in Mill’s words, “good despotism.” After all, “the greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East.“64

  3. Past or present horrors can be justified as necessary preconditions for a better (democratic? socialist?) future. McCarthy notes that Walter Benjamin was particularly eloquent in finding unbearable “the thought of history’s countless victims being nothing more than stepping stones along the path of development.“65 McCarthy notes that both Kant and Mill said repeatedly that no act that infringes on the dignity, much less the existence, of another human being is ever morally justified. Yet each of them, and countless others less schooled in moral philosophy, found ways of justifying the unjustifiable. This part of our (Western) heritage, in McCarthy’s view, calls not only for apology, but for reparation for those who are still suffering from the results of what we have done.66

  Yet in spite of this crushing indictment of most existing metanarratives, McCarthy still believes that the very idea of developmental change is inevitable and irrepressible in the light of the fact that human capacities really have grown dramatically over historical time and that, like it or not, we are all moderns now, though in practice cultural differences will always remain. Furthermore, “it has proven dangerous to leave this field to those who misuse And McCarthy gives us a recipe for the kind of metanarrative that we still very much need:

  Kant’s understanding of grand metanarrative-universal history from a cos
mopolitan point of view-as the object neither of theoretical knowledge nor of practical reason, but of “reflective judgment,” was closer to the mark. On his view, while such metanarratives must take account of, and be compatible with, known empirical data and causal connections they always go beyond what is known in aspiring to a unity of history. And that can best be done from a point of view oriented to practice: grand metanarratives give us an idea of the kinds of more humane future for which we may hope, but only if we are prepared to engage ourselves in bringing them about.68

  In measuring this book against McCarthy’s standards, let me try to show how in several ways I have tried to meet them. There is no dichotomy in my book. Although the book is inevitably written from the point of view of a particular present, its narrative stops 2,000 years ago. It does not deal with culture wars (except, incidentally in Chapter 2, the culture war between some kinds of religion and some kinds of science) or the “clash of civilizations”-for one thing, Christianity and Islam are not even discussed, as they are outside the temporal parameters of this book. Nor, indeed, do I treat modernity, though perhaps much about it is implied. It is not that I have nothing to say on these matters-I hope to say more about them-just that in this book “modernization” is not an issue. If “we” means Westerners, and Israel and Greece are “our” predecessors, I have certainly not favored them. They get less space than China and India, I have tried to treat all four axial cases with equal respect and value them for their remarkable achievements. And if for Mill the “whole East” has no history, I have tried to show just what a vivid and dramatic history China and India, and their predecessors throughout the world, natural and cultural, have had.

  As for homogenizing the “Other,” again I have everywhere tried to avoid doing that. I have shown great inner diversity even in two of my tribal societ ies, the Australian Aborigines and the Navajo, and certainly in the archaic and axial societies, where deep inner tensions are what fuel the emergence of new insights and creative novelty. Nor have I treated the past, again biologically or culturally, triumphally. Throughout Chapter 2, I tried to show that the distinction between “higher” and “lower” is always relative, that the bacteria, for example, could be seen as the most successful of all forms of life, and that we have no grounds for sneering at the dinosaurs. And though I gave most space to the axial age, whose leading figures are still present in the lives of any educated person, I did not disparage pre-axial cultures, but tried to show the inner value and meaning of each of them.

  Finally I did attempt a universal history (though only 4 billion less 2,000 years long) that shared Thomas McCarthy’s criteria of the kind of history we need. I did not shy away from the fact that natural selection is the primary mechanism of evolution, biological and cultural, but I was concerned with the emergence of “relaxed fields” in animal play and human culture, where the struggle for existence or the survival of the fittest did not have full sway, where ethical standards and free creativity could arise, forms that in many cases did turn out to be selected, as they had survival value, though they arose in contexts where the good was internal to the practice, not for any external end. Nor did I claim that all was for the good or deny that history is full of horrors. I showed that the good guys often lose and the bad guys often triumph.

  The Practical Intent

  As for the “practical intent” of this book, which McCarthy takes as the only justification for universal history, I have tried to show that the evolution of life and culture gives no ground for any kind of triumphalism. I do believe we need to speak of evolution, which is the only shared metanarrative among educated people of all cultures that we have, but in a way that shows the dangers as well as the successes in evolution and that is not afraid to make distinctions between good and evil.

  So let me turn to a startling example of what deep history can show us about the moral situation humans are in today and about the changes we need to make. There have been at least five major extinction events-defined as events that involve the extinction of at least 50 percent of all animal species-as evidenced in the fossil record of the last 540 million years. The most recent, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event of 65 million years ago, is the best known, as it was then that all the dinosaurs except the birds died out. The greatest extinction event was the Permian Triassic event of 245 million years ago, when about 96 percent of all marine species and an estimated 70 percent or more of land species, including vertebrates, insects, and plants, died out. It is called the “Great Dying” because of its enormous evolutionary consequences.

  As some of us know, and all of us should know, we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction event at this very we have been in it for a considerable time. The paleontologist Niles Eldredge describes this event as one that “threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological He points out that all previous extinction events have had physical causes, including collisions with extraterrestrial objects, great volcanic explosions, or dramatic changes in plate tectonics, but this one has a different cause: “It is the first recorded global extinction event that has a biotic, rather than a physical, cause.“70 That cause is us.

  Eldredge argues that this extinction event began at least 100,000 years ago when humans developed hunting techniques that allowed them to overhunt game species, including, but not exclusively, the megafauna like mammoths and mastodons. Such extinctions occurred whenever humans occupied new territories-as in Australia about 40,000 years ago and in the Americas about 12,500 years ago. Much more recently, when humans arrived in Polynesia they wiped out all the large land bird species.7’

  But the impact of human agriculture on the environment beginning about 10,000 years ago was much worse. According to Eldredge, “Agriculture represents the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billionyear history of life.” This was because humans no longer depended on other species in their natural state, but could manipulate them for their own needs, thus allowing humans to overpopulate beyond any natural ecological carrying capacity. The development of agriculture was “essentially to declare war on ecosystems-converting land to produce one or two food crops, with other native plant species now classified as unwanted `weeds’-and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered pests.“72 The enormous increase in population, which has now reached 6 billion and continues to increase logarithmically, has reached the point where in many places soil erosion is massive, water is in short supply, the oceans are polluted and fish depleted, and the atmospheric changes have led to rapid global warming. Eldredge concludes his article by saying: “Only 10% of the world’s species survived the third mass extinction. Will any survive this one?“73

  Of course we may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life, including our own, by more gradual means. Massive inequalities between rich and poor nations and the diminishing supplies of energy and water could bring on such a fatal conflict. In my Preface I pointed out that our rate of adaptation has increased so greatly that we are having difficulty adapting to our adaptations. All of this should make it clear that, though I do believe in evolution in the sense of increasing capacities, and in stages of evolution going far back in biological time resulting from those new capacities, I have never argued that more is better, that we are the apex of life, or that there is any certainty that we will not sooner rather than later end our own existence and that of most other species, leaving the earth to the bacteria, who, as in Chapter 2 I quoted Stephen Jay Gould as saying, are “the organisms that were in the beginning, are now, and probably ever shall be (until the sun runs out of fuel) the dominant creatures on earth by any standard evolutionary criterion.“74 If there is one primary practical intent in a work like this that deals with the broadest sweep of biological and cultural evolution, it is that the hour is late: it is imperative that humans wake up to what is happening and take the necessarily dramatic steps that are so clearly needed but also at present so clearly ignored by t
he powers of this earth.

  But I would like to close by discussing another practical intent of my work, one less apocalyptic than our ecological crisis, yet one of great importance. That is the possibility we have of understanding our deepest cultural differences, including our religious differences, in a dramatically different way than most humans have ever done before. Ethnocentrism can be found everywhere, so we should not be surprised to find it among our ancestors.

  Great as the major figures of the axial age were, and universalistic as their ethics tended to be, we cannot forget that each of them considered his own teaching to be the only truth or the highest truth, even such a figure as the Buddha, who never denounced his rivals but only subtly satirized them. Plato, Confucius, Second Isaiah, all thought that it was they and they alone who had found the final truth. This we can understand as an inevitable feature of a world so long ago.

  But it is painfully relevant for a book dealing with religious evolution to remember that even the best of early modern thinkers normally assumed the superiority of Christianity to all other religions. For Kant and Hegel, perhaps the most influential of all modern philosophers, it wasn’t just Christianity that was superior, it was Protestant Christianity in particular, a view widespread until just yesterday.