Cosmic Society

Towards a Sociology of the Universe

Peter Dickens, James S. Ormrod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415545921
• eBook ISBN: 9781134189809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Space weaponry, satellite surveillance and communications, and private space travel are all means in which outer space is being humanized: incorporated into society's projects. But what are the political implications of society not only being globalized, but becoming 'cosmic'?

Our ideas about society have long affected, and been affected by, our understanding of the universe: large sections of our economy and society are now organized around humanity's use of outer space. Our view of the universe, our increasingly 'cosmic' society, and even human consciousness are being transformed by new relations with the cosmos.

As the first sociological book to tackle humanity's relationship with the universe, this fascinating volume links social theory to classical and contemporary science, and proposes a new 'cosmic' social theory. Written in a punchy, student-friendly style, this timely book engages with a range of topical issues, including cyberspace, terrorism, tourism, surveillance and globalization.

1 The cosmic order, the social order and the self

About this chapter

This chapter looks at humanity’s imaginative relationship with the universe at different times and across different societies. At a philosophical level, we are concerned with different ontologies and epistemologies of the universe. In this context ontologies are theories about the kinds of things that exist in the universe. Epistemologies are theories about how we can gain knowledge of the universe. At the ontological level, sometimes the universe has been seen as the realm of spirits, gods and other unobservable entities and divine processes, at other times as consisting largely of material processes such as are observable on Earth. At an epistemological level, there has been a movement between accounts derived from abstract reasoning divorced from observation and theories derived from and checked against empirical evidence. On the basis of these different philosophies, which themselves have important social roots and implications, a number of different models of the universe have been produced. These theories themselves have a dialectical relationship with the society that produced them and with understandings of that society. A further dimension to these relationships is the self. ‘The self’ as both understood and experienced has historically varied as humanity’s relationship to the universe has been envisaged in different ways.

In writing this chapter, we have been fortunate that there are available a number of scholarly and insightful accounts of the social roots and consequences of different historical cosmologies, and a few that trace some sort of social history of cosmology. Our aim has been to provide snapshots from these different (and often disconnected) accounts in constructing our own impression of what a historical sociology of the universe might look like. There are doubtless many accounts we have omitted, and certainly there are many places where we have made quite gross use of lengthy works. The original texts are highly recommended to the interested reader. As we approach the present era, we have not made any great attempt to situate our commentary within the established field of the sociology of science. Readers familiar with this field will recognize in our account an ‘externalist’ theory of science; one stressing the social conditions and power relations in which science is conducted. For those wishing to make these connections, David’s (2005) Science in Society is an excellent starting point. Too often the progress of scientific knowledge is presented as an ‘internal monologue’ in which old theories are simply steadily built on by new ones, with no reference to social factors. Stephen Hawking borrowed Newton’s phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ as the title for his series of books about the great thinkers in physics and astronomy. We reject such a picture (as, for example, does Hoffman 1959). There is much that could be said on our subject from an ‘internalist’ position as well: one stressing the way in which science itself is done (an interesting relevant starting point is ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel et al.’s 1981 paper on the discovery of the pulsar) and battles within the scientific profession (see Mitton (2005) on the confrontation between Fred Hoyle and Martin Ryle). There are certainly many directions in which this summary account could be taken. As critical realists, however, we do not see science as merely a social construction.

Models of the social order and models of the cosmic order

Our understanding of the cosmos may have advanced a great deal since the supernatural understandings of Durkheim’s ‘primitive’ Aboriginal tribes, but they still reflect and constitute the society that produced them. The best theories, however, are those that speak to the real empirical world and are not expressed through the language of social ideology, myth and misrepresentation. Unfortunately, too often our understanding of the cosmic order has reflected and been reflected in our understanding of the social order to the benefit of those in power at the time. The manner in which models of social order and social interactions themselves influence our understanding of the order of the natural world has become a well-established concern of sociologists of science. Darwin’s theory of natural selection can be seen, for example, as mirroring Hobbes’ political theory and developments in an increasingly competitive English capitalist society (Dickens 2000). These theories about the natural world in turn are used to give added legitimacy to the social order, to the extent that Western society lives by the myth that capitalism is the ‘natural’ order of things (Hughes 2005). For those who benefit from the established social order, cosmic parallels are likely to be highly attractive.

The primitive universe

The branch of the social sciences that has previously taken most interest in societies’ relationships with the cosmos has been historical and contemporary anthropology. Anthropologists have read ‘primitive’ societies’ supernatural beliefs about the cosmos as a way of understanding how the more general belief systems and social organization of the society were constructed.

Our sociological understanding of cosmology and religion in primitive societies stems largely from Durkheim. He noted that Australian tribal societies (the most primitive available to study) were divided into clans, and each clan had a totem or emblem; ‘a species of material things’ with which it has ‘a special relationship’. The problem lay in explaining how this totem became sacred. His answer was that, especially during times of communion, members of the clan felt the effects of the power that their social group influenced over them and their dependence on it, but that this power was ‘too circuitous and obscure, and employs psychical mechanisms that are too complex to allow the ordinary observer to see whence it comes’ (Durkheim 1915: 209). Unable to grasp the nature of this power, they attributed it to some external object – the totem that represents the clan.

It was in fact rare, says Durkheim, for a celestial body to be a totem. They were usually plants or animals. But the cosmos was later divided so that each thing belonged to a particular clan. Where two opposing phratries (each containing various clans) existed, opposing elements were divided between them – the Sun to one phratry, the Moon to the other, for example. The ordering of the cosmos therefore both reflected and helped to create the horizontal stratification of Aboriginal society. One of Durkheim’s main concerns was with how the individual relates to the group. Individual and collective identities were, in his opinion, fused in traditional and tribal societies, this resulting from people’s close relations with their universe.

The universe of primitive societies was experienced very much as one alive with powers and to which its members were related. Other authors have stressed the extent to which the universe was experienced as a subject dominating human affairs and something that evoked a great deal of fear.

Given that it is a ‘theory’ resting on nothing but accidental relations, the intimate cosmology of the savage is a kind of spiritual terrorism. The savage is helpless in the face of nature. Divining relations within it, he represents these unsystematically as the controlling spiritual forces to which he also is subject …. The savage creates for himself an uncomfortable cosmos.

(Ferguson 1990: 33)

Yet it is a cosmos to which these reverent ‘savages’ relate collectively. Rituals were directed at influencing the will of these cosmic entities (see Tylor (1994) or Holbrock (2006) on African tribes).

However, Durkheim does note that the degree of sacred force (wakan or mana) seen to be inhabiting each object and person is not the same. Women and young men not initiated into the religious order were profane, whereas older men, and priests in particular, were the most sacred. Women and the uninitiated were not allowed into certain sacred places, and, where the tribe acknowledged a god, they were not even allowed to know its name. Apart from this, there is limited discussion of social power and the division of labour in Durkheim’s account of primitive religion and cosmology. This is perhaps because he believes central authority to be at best ‘uncertain and unstable’ in totemic societies (1915: 233).

Cosmological societies

It was with culturally more advanced ‘archaic societies’ that social divisions arose based on those who had privileged access to the heavens (Parsons 1966). According to Parsons, these societies developed as particular lineages grew more powerful through marriage alliances. The result is a kingship lineage in which the king becomes the ‘fountainhead of socio-cosmic order’ (ibid.: 50), and in which ‘a cosmological cultural system is generally interpreted for, and ritually mediated to, the society as a whole by specialized temple priesthoods’ (ibid.: 52). These temples became central units of social and economic organization, and priests became powerful figures freed from manual labour to conduct rituals for the rest of the population. This is the emergence of what we call ‘the cosmic elite’. The power of the elite was considerable in these societies in which the organization of space and time was oriented to the heavens, through architecture, ritual and the calendar.

In Egypt the king was considered to be divine – a god among men. Born of the gods, the pharaoh was the link between the divine, the human and the subhuman worlds:

Only through the divinity of his kingship and its intimate associations could human beings relate themselves to the divine. Ordinary people could not participate in the sacred order, they could only be articulated with it.

(Parsons 1966: 54)

In a highly stratified society, the pharaoh therefore stood quite apart from the rest of society, though he could delegate his charismatic powers to priests. Rituals conducted by the priests were seen as necessary to manage both social and natural processes. Maat, the cosmic order, had to be preserved through actions, an order which, as Parsons argues, was a projection of human interests. In Mesopotamia, the priests had a slightly different role in interpreting the universe to the people, especially through astrology and the search for omens in the heavens. Their kings were not considered divine in themselves, and thus the human population was subject to the will of the gods. This was also common in American civilizations such as the Aztecs, whose priestly interpretation of a comet led them to accept the Spanish invasion (Prescott 2002). North suggests that astrology first existed in Babylonia 1500–1250 BC. Originally, according to this belief system, celestial bodies were deities and their movements assumed to have Earthly effects ‘in matters of love, war and so forth’ (1994: 30). This belief itself largely disappeared, though astrology remains highly popular.

Priestly interpretations of the universe were taken on trust, and, despite making observations of the stars and planets, the Egyptians made no attempt to model the universe.

Despite the great cultural wealth and length of time over which the heavens were scrutinized by the Egyptians, not to mention the respect in which they held many celestial objects, except in the case of the calendar it does not seem to have occurred to them to seek for any deeply systematic explanation of what they observed.

(North 1994: 16)

One might expect what Parsons called ‘advanced intermediate societies’, which had abolished the notion of a divine king, to become more egalitarian. In fact, in some societies, Parsons argues, an even more marked dichotomy emerged, based on having ‘the capacity and opportunity to act directly in terms of the new conception of the ultimate order’ (1966: 70). Those without this capacity were excluded from the social order in a way that had not occurred in less advanced societies. In China, for example, the Emperor, not being divine himself, along with the mandarin class, had to impose ‘a culturally-defined, ultimately grounded pattern on the society’ (ibid.: 72). However, Davidson (1985: 24) talks about a time when the Emperor would meet people whilst facing south beneath Shang-ti, the god of the pole star; thus, his audience would face ‘both the Earthly throne and the God of the pole above’.

In the Chinese case, this meant a dialectic developed between the dichotomous cosmic order of yang and yin and the social order of binary opposites and superior–inferior relationships, including male–female and upper status–lower status (Parsons 1966: 73). The founder of structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss, noted a similar opposition between primitive societies’ construction of the Sun and Moon. He identifies two ways in which the opposition of Moon and Sun marks important social and cultural distinctions. In these cases, ‘the Sun and the Moon are commutative in function of more fundamental oppositions which they make it possible to express’ (1968: 216). The first is that they may mark the physical order, by being ascribed particular genders and by describing a (sexual) relationship between them. The second is that they may mark the moral order, as each is characterized by a distinct set of attributes. For example, ‘the Sun is thoughtful, careful, efficacious. His brother Moon acts without due consideration and makes all sorts of blunders, often fatal, which his elder brother must then repair’ (ibid.: 217). The gender order is here made through a fundamental division of the universe. Furthermore, it is not simply a benign division as in Durkheim’s account, but a division capable of expressing qualitative differences also found on Earth. This gendered division of the universe appears to have been common amongst early societies, and can be combined with a concept of patrilinear hierarchy that bridges the sacred and profane worlds as in Parsons (1966). In Andean cosmology, for example, Illapa was the male god of thunder and lightening from whom powerful groups could supposedly trace their descent, whereas Pachamama was the female god of Earth and generative forces.

Thunder was also a conqueror. And as the emblem of powers that allowed one portion of humankind to control others, Illapa was set off against forces of natural fertility and bounty. Many Andean people conceived of Illapa as the ancestor-father of heroic founders of descent groups whom myth had proclaimed as the conquerors of other native kindreds. These mythic victories made sense of the internal ranking of descent groups which together formed an ayllu, or community. They also help explain why this divinity, as well as the descent groups claiming his direct ancestry, could stand for all the social descent groups which formed a political unit.

(Silverblatt 1987: 22)

The equation of women with the Earth and men with the higher realm of godliness, culture and transcendence is a common theme in anthropology (Ortner 1974). In the Andes this stratification was given a very literal physical translation, as the male heads of household would visit shrines high in the mountains to be closer to God, whilst women were forced to remain in the valleys.

In the case of the Islamic and Roman empires, the failure to unite the cosmic and social (politico-legal) orders is cited by Parsons as a major reason for their fragmentation. Late attempts to deify the Roman emperor to achieve this were laughed at by intellectuals (1966: 92). The account of social power diminishes in Parsons’ writing as the societies he is discussing become more advanced. In our view, the nature of the cosmic elite may change over time, but its power does not necessarily recede.

The Greeks and the growth of abstract knowledge

The search for an Earthly order that replicated the perfect order of the cosmos was a theme further developed later in Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greek philosophers such as Pythagoras (582–507 BC), Plato (427–348 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) were searching for the universal and the harmonious, and the universe was seen as exemplifying just these qualities. The Platonic tradition held that certain geometric shapes (most notably the sphere and the ‘Platonic solids’) had particular aesthetic qualities, and these shapes could be superimposed upon the universe in theory to explain the movements of the stars and planets. The supposedly pure cosmos was made the subject of poetry and aesthetic contemplation, at least by the slaveholders and other dominant classes such as the philosophers. It was a circular explanation without empirical testing. It was assumed that the universe could only have been constructed on the basis of perfect geometry and aesthetic values, and it was up to the cosmic elite to find these perfections in the heavens, which were in turn used as proof of the correctness of the Platonic worldview.

The word ‘cosmos’ is Greek and refers to the world as a whole ordered system. Its opposite is ‘chaos’. The cosmos could, according to the Ancient Greeks, be understood by using logic, reason and reflection. Plato was amongst the first to argue that, whereas the physical world is subject to constant change, the world of ideas is constant and immutable. His pupil Aristotle offered a related picture of the universe, one in which the movements of stars and planets revolve in circular fashion around the Earth. Such geometry was seen as pure and ‘divine’. It contrasted with the sphere of the universe between the Earth and the Moon, which remained chaotic, imperfect and impure. Aristotle recognized and used astronomical observations, including those made by the Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, but nevertheless insisted on the central importance of pure thought and pure geometry in defining the form of the universe.

The philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was amongst the first to eulogize on the subject of the beauty and harmony of a mathematically describable, ordered cosmos. Plato, following Pythagoras, created a series of geometric models of the universe, a set of interlocking spheres representing a geocentric arrangement of stars and planets. Aristotle, one of Plato’s pupils, further developed the notion of a geocentric universe. It took the form of a hierarchical order, each celestial body associated with a spherical layer which contained (and was contained by) another layer (Figure 1.1). The cosmos, according to Aristotle, is divided into the sublunary realm (where all matter is composed of the four elements earth, air, fire and water) and the celestial realms where an element not found on Earth dominates. That element is ether. The heavens are the zone of purity and regular motion. The Earth is the zone of irregular and intermittent motion. The connection between heaven and perfection is further enhanced by its connection with the primum mobile, or prime mover. It operates in the outermos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes and tables
• Prefaces
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: cosmic society
• 1 The cosmic order, the social order and the self
• 2 The outer spatial fix
• 3 Capital, outer space and star wars
• 4 Satellites and social power
• 5 Space tourism and human identity
• 6 Industry and empire in space
• Conclusion: cosmic imperialism and social resistance
• Appendix A: Relevant websites
• Appendix B: The Mass Observation Archive Summer 2005 Directive
• References
• Index