On religion, tribalism, and the madness of civilization

 by John MacBeath Watkins

Let us think of mankind in the state of nature, a clever, naked primate living in a small troop. It finds a way to communicate better than most mammals, inventing words to describe objects, not just sounds that describe feelings or suggest actions.

Consider the word 'tree.' All the aspects of treeness are addressed in the word, yet the word applies to all trees, not to a specific example with its particular shape and smell.  Our primate has created a category to think with, a word that holds within it all trees, and which gives each tree an aspect it never had before.

For most of humanity's existence, we have not organized our life around reason. We must ask ourselves, how did our primate feel about this new essence of treeness. It would feel as if the tree now had a new, non-physical existence. This might be poetically understood as the spirit of the tree. The next step is to try to understand the spirit of the tree, what it feels, what it desires, and how we might appeal to the spirit of the tree for the things we need from trees.

Soon, the brook no longer babbles aimlessly or meaninglessly, it has something to say, and perhaps the tree sways in the wind because it likes to dance. Or perhaps its movements have purpose, and the trees will march to avenge the blood of a person loved by trees.

Here we have the beginnings of religion. As people consider the spirits around them, some become more important than others. A dryad may be the spirit of a single tree, which will not be equal to the importance of the spirit of the sun, who is a god.

We also have the beginnings of the dual nature of humanity, the very strangeness of being human, living in the animal world of birth and death, and at the same time in the ethereal world of language and ideas. This new world, this life of the mind, is shared by all who have language, even if it isn't the same language, because the essential nature of this new world is that we all know ourselves not just as animals, but as minds. This world of language and ideas is the essence of what we call civilizations, a sort of shared hallucination that there is a world beyond the animal world.

We can think of this as the madness of civilization. This madness makes us act in ways no other animal would. In addition to the selfish genes that have shaped us to reproduce strings of genetic information, we also carry selfish memes, strings of information carried in our minds and in our stories that have shaped us to reproduce them as well. These memes may be ways of expressing ourselves, they may be ways of shaping tools, or systems of logic, or systems of technology. The madness of civilization has caused us to send people to the moon, to build monuments to our egos, to fight wars and poison our home planet. We cannot escape our shared hallucination, nor should we want to, because it has given us the tools to support more people that the planet could without this crazy structure of imagination, reason, spirituality, technology, and language.

But it all goes back to language and the strange new world we discovered with it, a world where everything has an existence beyond its concrete physical presence.

As troops of primates move around, our primate meets other primates, who have their own understanding of the spirits and the gods. They compare notes, discover that each troop knows one of the spirits better than the other, and each adopts from the other any useful intelligence on how to get along with the spirits and navigate their strange existence. The gods are mythopoetic, creatures of emotional and metaphorical truth. One could suppose that they are real, and language gave us a way to see them, although this is not necessary for this theory to work.

The stories the troops share are sometimes an excellent guide to how to live, teaching behaviors that may not be based in logical truth, but behaviors that are useful to the troop. The stories of the gods are shared around the campfire, and perhaps troops from all around meet up to each champion their own god and share their spiritual knowledge. The troops form troupes, that is, theatrical groups to declaim the stories of their tribe's gods and to persuade others that theirs is the right way to live. The players become priests, the troupes become churches, and there is a permanent structure to keep their gods alive.

The gods are closely associated with the tribes, but as long as each tribe is willing to recognize the puissance of other tribes' gods, the size of the civilization can become bigger. Troops join together to form tribes, tribes join together to become nations.

Now, the nation can function in a couple of different ways. It can be inclusive, adopting new gods as they are encountered, which increases the size of the spiritual community by minimizing the friction between competing beliefs, or it can come under the sway of one god, who becomes so important as to be capitalized as God. Imagine someone who feels strongly about their tribe and has fused their tribal identity to one God.  They can build an exclusive tribe based on religious identity. When ancient Rome was expanding, it was inclusive in many ways, religion among them. When it was falling apart and needed to defend itself from outsiders, it became monotheistic. Polytheistic religions can also become ossified and unaccepting of outside influence, and act just as monotheism does.

Now, there are some interesting things about monotheism. The way it kills off most of the gods makes it the next best thing to atheism, which then has only one god to deny. And, to the extent that religion is a power node in civilization, it represents centralized power which brooks no competition from foreign gods. In Europe, monotheism in the shape of Christianity formed a cohesive spiritual identity for a European community that lacked common languages and unified political leadership. This allowed them to treat non-Christians as heathen followers of false gods. If you have the power of God, you're good, and if you failed by worshiping the wrong god, well, it is up to the followers of the true God to mend the error of your ways.

Another matter of note is that early monotheistic religions were hereditary. Orthodox Jews were organized so that if your mother was Jewish, you were Jewish. I once knew a Zoroastrian who assured me that you could only be a Zoroastrian if your father was one. Christianity changed that, with its imperative to convert the heathen. The Muslim religion followed the same path. Each managed to carve out a recognized region of civilization.

In the ancient and medieval world, kings did not serve their subjects, they served God. Kings were part of this mythopoetic state, relying on the Church for their legitimacy. As the Church became more powerful, wealthy, and corrupt, it undermined its own legitimacy. The Protestant Reformation questioned the ethics, theology, and morality of the Catholic Church. 

One way to work out this problem is with a war, the victor gaining the upper hand and wiping out the followers of the 'other' monotheistic faith. This worked for the suppression of the Cathars, but the schism was too great when the Protestant Reformation cam along. The 30-Years War did not produce a decisive win for either side, and in some countries, Britain notable among them, neither side had a large enough majority to give the king a mandate of heaven. Whichever form of Christianity the king served, a substantial part of their subjects would think they were an apostate.

A new form of legitimacy for leaders was needed. And that is where social contract theory came to the rescue. Social contract theory, the basis for the system we call liberal democracy, posits that religious matters can be left in their own sphere, while the state protects the rights of its citizens to live as freely as possible without interfering with each other's rights. In short, the ruler's sovereignty is justified because the ruler serves the people, not because he or she serves God. 

But the social contract in a secular state does more than that: It strives to give the people living in it the freedom to be fully human, to question, explore, and express themselves in ways prohibited in a more stringent system of control. When secular and spiritual authorities are combined, thought control is the basis for authority. Locke's notion of natural rights, which we now more commonly call human rights, were not a description of natural laws like gravity, which cannot be broken. They were aspirational, the rights we need to fully function as human beings. And to the (imperfect) degree that liberal democracy has made it possible for us to enjoy those rights, it has engendered a blossoming of science, arts, and letter, and of previously unthinkable prosperity, never before seen in the world. We may think our lives are hard, but how many of our siblings died of childhood diseases? When was the last time we went hungry for weeks at a time? We cook with spices even kings could not lay hands on a few centuries ago, bathe in hot water, drink coffee or tea or chocolate without thinking of the luxury they represent.

But what happens to tribalism, the original form of primates forming communities? Polytheism allowed us to unite tribes by recognizing each others' gods, monotheism allowed more centralized control through insisting all within its area of influence worship the same god, but the social contract promises that people can worship as they please while united by a common dream of living together in a system justified by reason rather than faith. 

Those old scripts that have shown persistence in reproducing themselves are still running in human heads. If you lose faith in reason, faith in gods and patriarchs will present themselves as alternatives. The Arab world once spread Greek philosophy and science, Indian mathematics, and its own understanding of astronomy and of new things in the world. When they were pressured by Crusaders from the West and Mongols from the East, there was a crisis of confidence, and a retreat to faith as the only form of truth that was needed.

Something like that could happen in Western society. There are philosophers who speak of a 'dark enlightenment,' an oxymoron intended to conceal the goal of an 'endarkenment,' a sort of counter-Enlightenment that purports to rescue Western culture by attacking 'the cathedral,' that is, the institutions that have advanced the goals of the Enlightenment. Only the most muddled mind could think that attacking the funding of scientific research at institutions like Harvard University is somehow a defense of Western culture, and yet, here we are.

This represents a craven retreat from the bold spirit of inquiry that has made the arts, letters, and sciences bloom and our society prosper. Its advocates would have us cower from the phantoms of imagined threats, hunker in the bunker of tribal prejudice and fear, knowing these are the levers to control us.