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

by Robert N. Bellah

  It is poignant to remember that for Max Weber it was not just Protestant Christianity, but what he called “ascetic Protestantism,” by which he meant mainly Calvinism, that set the standard for stimulating rationalization, particularly but by no means exclusively, in the economic sphere, and against which all other religions were to be measured and found more or less wanting, beginning with Catholicism, but then going on to the religions of China and India. It is true that Weber didn’t really like ascetic Protestantism, which he called “a religion of universal unbrotherliness,” and which was not compatible with the figures he took as representing religion at its best: Jesus, Francis, and the Buddha. Still it was ascetic Protestantism that did most to further the spread of rationalization throughout human life, a process about which he had many doubts (the “iron cage”) but that he thought was inevitable and, on the whole, for the best.71

  Yet the twentieth century began to see the emergence of a new point of view, one that could understand and appreciate all religions on their own terms and that was not driven to set up one as the apex, either because it was the best, or because it was the most historically progressive. I am not thinking here primarily of “new age” consciousness, which proclaimed that “all religions are different paths to the same God,” though the appearance of such opinions was indicative of a new cultural situation. Weber satirized the cultural elite of his day for “decorating their souls with antiques drawn from all the world’s religions,” and much of what was happening was indeed foolish, especially the inevitable tendency to read what one wanted to find into other religions rather than to try to understand them in their own terms. Nor am I thinking primarily of inter-religious dialogue, important though that is, in which we recognize each other’s right to existence, and to defense if under persecution, although we may still continue to believe that our own religion is the best one-though surely such dialogue is a great advance against earlier tendencies.

  What I am thinking of now is the increasing number of serious students of religion who can accept religious pluralism as our destiny without making a claim to the superiority of one tradition. In the middle of the twentieth century a great step forward in this respect came in Karl Jaspers’s The Meaning and Goal of History, where he used the phrase “axial age” to apply to several great traditions that emerged in the first millennium BCE, taking the Christian idea of Jesus Christ as the “axis” of history and generalizing it to include the other great traditions of that early

  The person who taught me most about the acceptance of other religions is Wilfred Cantwell Smith, both in his scholarship and in his person, expressed in his lifelong work with Muslims. Smith, in his own idiosyncratic way, believed that all religions are historically related but that “essentializing” them as a series of “isms” fails to appreciate their enormous variety, within as well as between the traditions we distinguish. So it is our task, right down to the individual believers who are never exactly the same as any other believer even in their own faith, to try to understand such believers in what they share and do not share but above all in their terms, not ours. In the book where he spells out his own position most fully, Toward a World Theology, he uses the term “God” as the basic reference of all religions, though recognizing the difficulties in so doing. But his use of the word “God” in this context is not Christian in any exclusive sense and does not require a belief in Christ or the Trinity, though Smith identified himself as a Christian. Smith wants to include the whole of human religiosity in his perspective without privileging any one tradition or any kind of tradition.77

  I have also been influenced by Charles Taylor in his work on multiculturalism, but particularly by his treatment of other religions, sometimes only incidentally, in A Secular Age, where he uniformly takes them seriously in their own Herbert Fingarette has spelled out as well as anyone the position I am trying to describe:

  It is the special fate of modern man that he has a “choice” of spiritual visions. The paradox is that although each requires complete commitment for complete validity, we can today generate a context in which we see that no one of them is the sole vision. Thus we must learn to be naive but undogmatic. That is, we must take the vision as it comes and trust ourselves to it, naively, as reality. Yet we must retain an openness to experience such that the dark shadows deep within one vision are the mute, stubborn messengers waiting to lead us to a new light and a new vision …

  We must not ignore the fact that in this last analysis, commitment to a specific orientation outweighs catholicity of imagery. One may be a sensitive and seasoned traveler, at ease in many places, but one must have a home. Still, we can be intimate with those we visit, and while we may be only travelers and guests in some domains, there are our hosts who are truly at home. Home is always home for someone; but there is no Absolute Home in

  Perhaps this last claim, that there is no Absolute Home in general, would be the most unsettling to many believers and will rouse the cry of relativism about Fingarette, but also about the others I have mentioned. But the relativism charge is really inapt in every case. One can make judgments of better and worse with respect to any religion, but they are more likely to be on point if one has seriously tried to understand them in their own terms.

  I am far from believing that such an attitude toward the religions of mankind is very widespread. Gross prejudice is not in good repute, to be sure, and many people are able to combine the belief that their own religion is best with the belief that the followers of other religions can also be saved. Nor is the view I am proposing necessarily widespread among religious intellectuals, where there is still a widespread belief that one can give convincing reasons why one religious or philosophical position is better than all the others.

  There are two related reasons why the very idea of a best position must, in my opinion, fail. One is that the variety of differences in the “argument” that must be won or lost are at the level of theory as I have been using it in this chapter. But dealing with other people’s theories means that one has to disembed them from the mix that historical theories are always part of, in particular their relation to embodied practices and stories, Donald’s mimetic and mythic forms of culture, which are reorganized by theoretical innovations but not abandoned.

  Having made this mistake it is almost inevitable that one will make the next one: one will treat the theories of others as if they were answers to questions in our own theoretical tradition. Wilfred Smith taught me, among other important things, that religions don’t differ so much in giving different answers to the same questions as in asking different questions. But if we think the other traditions are answering our questions, then it is only a matter of circular logic that those traditions will turn out to answer those questions less well than our own, which was, after all, designed to answer those questions.

  It is not, then, an argument for relativism to note that universal categories, important though they are in each tradition, come bound up with particularities that give them different emphases. Thomas McCarthy puts it well: “The conceptual point is this: by their very nature, the universal cannot be actual without the particular, nor the formal without the substantive, the abstract without the concrete, structure without And thus it follows that “from our present perspective, it is clear that the irreducible variety of hermeneutic standpoints and practical orientations informing interpretive endeavors, however well informed, will typically issue in a `conflict of interpretations’ and thus call for dialogue across differences.“81

  So the final lesson of this chapter and this book for our present situation in a world of multiple traditions is that theory that has come loose from its cultural context can assume a superiority that can lead to crushing mistakes. The theoretical breakthrough in each axial case led to the possibility of universal ethics, the reassertion of fundamental human equality, and the necessity of respect for all humans, indeed for all sentient beings. And yet in each case these assertions came out of living communities whose religi
ous practices defined who they were and whose stories were essential to their identities. To assume that “we,” particularly if we mean by that the modern West, have universal truths based on revelation, philosophy, or science that we can enforce on others, is the ideological aspect of racism, imperialism, and colonialism. If we could see that we are all in this, with our theories, yes, but with our practices and stories, together, even though we must contend through mutual discussion with abiding differences, we might make just a bit more likely the actualization of Kant’s dream of a world civil society that could at last restrain the violence of state-organized societies toward each other and the environment.

  Preface

  1. Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers (New York: Knopf, 1958), 32-33.

  2. Although I thought I knew the Mencius well, it was only when Yang Xiao called this passage to my attention that I saw that it belonged with the first two epigraphs I long had in mind. See Yang Xiao, “How Confucius Does Things with Words: Two Hermeneutic Paradigms in the Analects and Its Exegeses,” Journal ofAsian Studies 66 (2007): 513.

  3. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), 15, as cited in David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

  4. Christian, Maps of Time; Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

  5. An early trenchant argument for this coevolution is Clifford Geertz’s “The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973 [1962]), 55-83. I am sorry to say that biologists, writing about biological/cultural coevolution based on much more recent work, uniformly fail to cite this important paper.

  6. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), v, 2.

  7. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 618-619, 638-641. Mary Midgley, in Evolution as a Religion (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1985]), argues that the use of an ethical term like “selfish” to describe biological entities such as genes is a category mistake of the first order. See also Joan Roughgarden, The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selshness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  8. Actually, in The Extended Phenotype (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), the book he wrote following The Selfish Gene, Dawkins himself noted that whether you take genes or organisms as the basic unit of evolution is a matter of interpretation, not fact, each being valid in its own right.

  9. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Developmental Plasticity and the Origin of Species Differences,” Proceedings of the NationalAcademy of Sciences USA 102, suppl. 1 (2005): 6547. See also Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

  10. Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 252-253.

  11. One line of thought within evolutionary psychology has argued that several features of religion are genetic, involving “modules” for such things as “supernatural beings.” But many students of psychological and cultural evolution remain unconvinced. That there is a “religion gene” or a “God gene” is most unlikely.

  12. Derek Bickerton, Roots ofLanguage (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1981), 216. For a fuller development of this idea, see Bickerton’s Language and Species (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 4, “The Origins of Representational Systems.”

  13. F. John Odling-Smee, Keven N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 186; also see table 4.1 on p. 176, which compares natural selection and niche construction. Terrence W. Deacon, in his work in progress, Mind from Matter: The Emergent Dynamics ofLife, stresses the inevitability of teleological thinking where organisms are concerned.

  14. Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, Niche Construction, 365-366; see also 21, 243.

  15. For an accessible discussion of these capacities, see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons fora Kinder Society (New York: Harmony House, 2009).

  16. Richard Dawkins, River out ofEden (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133. I found this and one of the previous quotes from Selfish Gene in Roughgarden, The Genial Gene, but without page citations. I got the books (and several others by Dawkins that she refers to) in order to find the page numbers and ended up reading them. I came to have considerable respect for Dawkins but also to believe that too often he allows his rhetoric to get away from him. I have also learned that biology is a contentious field, more like social science than I had imagined, and that Dawkins’s views cannot be taken as representative of the present state of the field.

  17. Clifford Geertz, especially in his essay on religion as a cultural system, hovers over most of the rest of this Preface in ways that I did not expect he would until I reread that essay in preparation for writing this Preface. I cannot quite forgive Cliff for dying at the age of 80 and thus not being able to read and respond to what I have written.

  18. Geertz’s full definition is this: “Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973 [1966]), 90.

  19. I had originally thought I would remain silent about Talal Asad’s essay on Geertz and his conception of religion, with my silence speaking for itself. Asad’s essay was first published as “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man, n.s., 18 (1983): 237-259, and reprinted in revised and somewhat more moderate form in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27-54. But early readers of this Preface pointed out to me that Asad’s essay has shaped a whole generation’s thinking about Geertz. Although I have read the essay carefully and more than once, I cannot here take the time to refute Asad’s assertions one by one. I can only recommend to serious readers that they read Geertz himself to see whether Asad’s charges apply. Also they might have a look at the references to Geertz in Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) for the difference between Said’s view and Asad’s.

  20. Geertz, “Religion,” 119, citing Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in Schutz’s Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 226-228.

  21. Geertz, “Religion,” 111, citing Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” 208-209.

  22. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” 229.

  23. Stephen Jay Gould was probably getting at something similar to Geertz’s notion of cultural spheres when he spoke of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” nonoverlapping because they are doing different things, one dealing with fact and the explanation of facts, and the other with ultimate meaning and moral value. See Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness ofLife (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002). Whether cultural spheres can ever fail entirely to overlap as they impinge on the world of daily life is open to question.

  24. Geertz, “Religion,” 111.

  25. Ibid., 112-114.

  26. Ibid., 118. Mary Midgley, without mentioning Geertz, succinctly summarizes his point when she says that a religion has “the power to make sense of a threatening and chaotic world by dramatizing it.” Mary Midgely, Evolution as a Religion (New York: Routledge, 2006 [1985]), 18.

  27. G
eertz, “Religion,” 119.

  28. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). He has developed his argument further in A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1999).

  29. The term comes from Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953 [1949]), and will be discussed further at the start of Chapter 6.

  30. Mark Strand, “On Becoming a Poet,” in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, ed. Mark Strand and Eaven Boland (New York: Norton, 2000), xxii, xxiii, xx iv.

  31. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955 [1938]). The English title replicates a usage that Huizinga himself did not approve of. He says he resisted every effort to replace “The Play Element of Culture” with “The Play Element in Culture” in English translation because “it was not my object to define the place of play among all other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play” (foreword, unnumbered page). Could we interpret Huizinga as arguing that “culture” is offline? Every serious book on the biology of play that I consulted cited Huizinga with great respect, viewing his argument as evolutionary.

  32. Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 194.

  33. Gordon M. Burghardt, The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 118-121.

  34. When I first gave an oral presentation at the University of Chicago of what became my 1964 article “Religious Evolution,” Geertz was in the audience. After I finished, he came up to me and said, “I loved your talk even though I disagree with it entirely.” The talk was published as Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29 (1964): 358-374; reprinted most recently in The Robert Bellah Reader, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 23-50.