(Inside us and out)
I've been reading a lot of social theory lately, and I came across
this one piece by the great 19th century sociologist Emile Durkheim: The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In it Durkheim talks about
Totems, and how totems are symbols of both the god and the society/clan-
and makes the claim that god and society are one and the same.
His reasoning goes like this: Whether it be Zeus, Yahweh, or animist
spirits, worshippers feel themselves to be dependent on and acted
upon by some superior force. As social animals, the rules of our
society, whatever kind it may be, constrain our behavior. Early people
became conscious of this- and sought to explain why they felt compelled
to act as they did, have the values they did, the taboos, etc...and
since they couldn't conceive that the society is more than the sum
of individuals and their individual desires, they sought mythological
explanations. “As long as scientific analysis does not come
to teach it to them, men know well that they are acted upon, but
they do not by whom.”
The more I think about this, the more I think it makes sense. Society
does to some extent exist outside of us- its more than the sum of
its parts. A fascinating field of study, Emergence, deals with how
complex systems are built from the ground up. This field is really
big in computer programming right now, as its incredibly hard to
engineer complex systems, but surprisingly easy to let them evolve
on their own from simple interacting agents. An example of emergence
is a termite mound. No individual termite carries ALL the instructions
for the mound, which is incredibly large and complex, with networks
of heating and cooling shafts and special chambers for myriad purposes.
No one directs them, plans the building, or organizes it. The queen
is just an ovary, she gives no commands. But somehow, a million termites
with very tiny brains, all acting on simple individual genetic programs,
manage to cooperate to build a large and complex structure. This
is emergent behavior- simple self-organizing agents that produce
complex behaviors.
Now take human society, from tribal to cosmopolitian- no one sits
down and plans the tribe, and how kinship ties will work, and what
marriage practices will be standard, and what rites of passage will
be the norm. Instead, the simple instructions coded into the individual-the
genes and memes- all interact with those of others to produce a working
system. Now the speed at which our system evolves (I don't think
termite mounds have changed as much in the past ten thousand years
as human society has!) is largely due to the second replicator- the
meme. The meme can mutate and spread in the course of an individual's
life, unlike the gene. The meme makes Lamarkian evolution possible-
we discover something this generation and our children will be doing
it.
So human society, built upon two replicators, evolves increasingly
fast. As the individual agents increase in number- when agriculture
began our population explosion- two things happen. The greater number
of interacting agents and the increasing size of the meme pool makes
our emergent behavior evolve to incredible complexity in the evolutionary
blink of an eye- our termite mounds are New York, Tokyo, London.
And like the termite mounds, these complex hives of people function
without any specific central planning. They evolve haphazardly- people
move here, there, someone starts a business here, someone rich lobbies
to have a zoning law changed, a new mayor dedicates a park to win
approval. Yet somehow a functioning collective home emerges. The
city is like an organism- it has metabolic processes, takes in huge
amounts of food and material, excretes huge amounts of waste. Somehow
all of this is managed by the sum of individual actions.
Now, back to the original topic. This emergent behavior results
in society, which is greater than the sum of its parts. Society becomes
a somewhat external force, making us conform to its rules. If you
don't believe this, try violating them sometime. Even if you succeed,
you'll feel the opposition. I wear pants because heterosexual men
in our culture don't wear skirts- and if I started wearing a skirt,
there would be some damn strong pressure to conform. So we have early
humanity, with its big mammalian meme-filled brain, realizing that
there are certain “forces” controlling behavior. Why is
sex with someone other than my mate always punished by mutilation?
Why do we always roast boar but boil mammoth? Why is it good for
the men to wear this head-dress but bad for women? How do I know
that stabbing Mujak in the back is wrong?
And thus we have the first concepts of external controlling force,
upon which we depend. It is the will of the spirits, the gods. The
cultural rules and symbols were already somewhat sacred and unquestionable-
they must be the decree of superior beings. Says Durkheim: “If
an idea is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden
to touch it, that is to say, deny it or contest it.”
At this point the religion memes are off and running, evolving to
go where they may. But they don't really have a niche where they
can grow complex and powerful until civilization kicks off - when
large masses of people require unifying rituals and more complex
rules and taboos. And here still, all the way along, the gods and
society are never far apart. Leaders rule by divine right, some claim
to be gods themselves. Yahweh WAS the Hebrew people- everything that
happened to them was his will, the lands they conquered they conquered
with him, their laws and taboos were Holy Commandments - just as
the laws and taboos of any tribe are handed down by the spirits or
Ancestors-at-large. The cross wasn't just a symbol of Jesus, it was
the symbol of Christendom. The acts of society were still acts of
God or other unseen forces. The untouchable castes in India weren't
filling an undesirable but functional niche to keep their society
functioning, they were suffering because Forces were punishing them
- Krishna says so.
Now fast forward to a modern nation state, where secularism has
taken hold as the political sphere wrests more power from the religious
sphere. And here you will see that the Sacred things are things that
represent society. Take America, which has (in ideal if not practice)
a separation of church and state. What is revered? What values are
shared by the majority, even many dissidents? A
love of country, patriotism, reverence of the founding fathers,
etc. We still worship the force which controls us, and in the absence
of state religion the state IS a form of religion. Who do we blame
when we suffer? The government. Who will help us? The government.
We consider burning the flag “desecration”, for it is a
sacred symbol. What do bickering sides on any political debate in
this country constantly reference? The constitution. They return
to the revered old document like Fundamentalist turn to the Bible.
The original is kept in an vacuum sealed bombproof case that makes
the Ark of the Covenant look laughable. We care for our commandments
more than the Hebrews did theirs. We
refer to the founding fathers like some refer to the apostles. “Well,
Thomas Jefferson believed in God” “No, he was a deist”.
Who gives a shit what a dead man believed? But no, he is Sacred,
its very important what he thought, because what he thought is somehow “correct”.
So to sum up - society is emergent behavior, evolving quickly because
of the replicating power of memes. Society exerts force on us to
varying degrees. People noticed this and began to worship whatever
force it was, building up myths around it which took on a life of
their own. When deprived of religion directly connected to society's
rules, people either revere the state more directly or they seek
to connect the society with their religion- as when US fundamentalists
try exhaustively to prove this place is based on Christianity.
Our behavior is controlled, but now we're smart enough to figure
out how. The myth need not be.
First published on the Forum,
reproduced with the author's permission. |