Religion in Human Evolution

Robert N. Bellah

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780674252936
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia delle religioni

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year
Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution."Of Bellah's brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly…Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book's subject as well as its substance, and that is 'magisterial.'"
—Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review " Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the 'reflective judgment' of one of our best thinkers and writers."
—Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

1

Religion and Reality

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.¹ 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 non-ordinary 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.²

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 a fundamental 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 epoché 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.⁵

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 epoché 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.⁷

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).⁹ 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.

Being cognition is defined in sharpest contrast to Deficiency cognition on every dimension. When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself, not a means to anything else, and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space. Maslow does not identify B-experiences exclusively with religion—they may occur in nature, in relation to art, in intense interpersonal relations, even in sports.¹⁰ But because B-experiences are so frequently reported in religious literature, they may provide an initial mode of entry into the particular way that people experience the world religiously, even though it is certainly not the only way and we will have to broaden our phenomenological description of religious worlds as we encounter particular religions in more detail.

Herbert Richardson, drawing on such writers as Charles Peirce and Friedrich Schleiermacher, describes something similar to Maslow’s B-cognition when he points out the cognitive aspect of feeling. Feeling, he says, “perceives by participation. Just as feeling is a perception of a whole, so a whole is that which is perceived through participation.”¹¹ According to Richardson, aesthetic and some other kinds of knowing involve a feeling of a finite whole, whereas religious knowing involves the feeling of an infinite Whole. He gives as examples of our “affectual communion” with a finite whole the feeling of “the immensity of the ocean,” or “the presence of another.” Jonathan Edwards, as quoted by Richardson, describes the feeling of an infinite Whole:

There came into my soul, and was, as it were, diffused through it, a sense of the glory of the Divine Being; a new sense, quite different from anything I ever experienced before … I thought with myself, how excellent a Being that was, and how happy I should be if I might enjoy that God, and be rapt up to him in heaven, and be as it were swallowed up in him forever!¹²

Edwards’s feeling of union with the infinite Whole, which he experienced as participation in the life of God, was accompanied by two other feelings that both Richardson and Maslow argue often accompany such experiences: the general rightness of all things, and personal well-being.

Václav Havel in his letters written from prison describes such an experience in entirely nontheistic terms:

Again, I call to mind that distant moment in [the prison at] Hermanice when on a hot, cloudless summer day, I sat on a pile of rusty iron and gazed into the crown of an enormous tree that stretched, with dignified repose, up and over all the fences, wires, bars and watchtowers that separated me from it. As I watched the imperceptible trembling of its leaves against an endless sky, I was overcome by a sensation that is difficult to describe: all at once, I seemed to rise above all the coordinates of my momentary existence in the world into a kind of state outside time in which all the beautiful things I had ever seen and experienced existed in a total “co-present”; I felt a sense of reconciliation, indeed of an almost gentle consent to the inevitable course of things as revealed to me now, and this combined with a carefree determination to face what had to be faced. A profound amazement at the sovereignty of Being became a dizzying sensation of tumbling endlessly into the abyss of its mystery; an unbounded joy at being alive, at having been given the chance to live through all I have lived through, and at the fact that everything has a deep and obvious meaning—this joy formed a strange alliance in me with a vague horror at the inapprehensibility and unattainability of everything I was so close to in that moment, standing at the very “edge of the finite”; I was flooded with a sense of ultimate happiness and harmony with the world and with myself, with that moment, with all the moments I could call up, and with everything invisible that lies behind it and has meaning. I would even say that I was somehow “struck by love,” though I don’t know precisely for whom or what.¹³

Here we find experiences of participation, of the rightness of things, and of personal well-being, similar to those we found in Edwards. Wallace Stevens has put such experiences in poetic form on several occasi...