Review of The Elephant in the Brain

Simler, Kevin, and Robin Hanson. 2018. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

For the sake of retaining important arguments of this book, I have written a partial summary of The Elephant in the Brain. This is not a comprehensive book review. Significant arguments and large portions of the book are neglected. Rather than properly summarizing the book, I wanted to highlight parts of the book that I found especially striking.

The Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hanson is a book about human nature. The authors of the book nicely state their thesis in the introduction: “We, human beings are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it” (4). The authors hold that through the process of evolution that humans—highly complex, intelligent, and extremely social beings—have  developed  a set of behaviors of which we are unaware because it is socially advantageous for us to be unaware of them. Self-deception is part of our brain’s evolutionary strategy so that we can better deceive others. Deception is a hidden and explicit part of our conscious life. For example, a little reflection, what we term “white lies” is a euphemism for convenient deception: since people are judging us at all times, and we want people to like and trust us, people emphasize the good parts of themselves and downplay the negative parts. While we speak about some of our behaviors as if we are being generous or altruistic, we are in fact acting in our self-interest. What is surprising is that we do this unconsciously as well.

Titled The Elephant in the Brain, the book is referring to the expression of the unspoken but obvious issue confronting people: our self-centeredness/selfishness.  The book follows recent psychology and evolutionary psychology studies. This work is a great complement to the Moral Animal by Robert Wright, another book about our evolutionary heritage. Both books nakedly expose humans as driven and dominated by base motives (sex, domination, status, and the need for social bonds in friends/alliances). Evolutionary psychology asserts that we are driven to bond, compete, and mate in a complex web of social interactions, and this explains much of human behavior—in fact it determines a significant amount of it. One of the main takeaways from this book is that we think and feel that we are autonomous, but really, we are subject to hidden drives and repeating behavioral patterns. It rejects the blank slate theory of human nature without bothering to say so—it is just too evidently proven false to those working in evolutionary psychology. There is such a thing as human nature shared across the species and all cultures.

The book starts by setting the basic assumptions: we are species that evolved from small primate bands of 20 to 50 people over many millennia. Human nature is a product to a process that remains in the dark abyss of the past.  With evolution as a theoretical tool of analysis, psychologists hope to unearth and explain many of our behaviors. We can see reflections of ourselves in other primates who have shared a similar evolutionary past, such as chimpanzees—our closest relatives. For example, social grooming is major element of human behavior, just like chimps. We talk, laugh, and attend social events to fill a deep need inside of us. Similarly, chimpanzees spend their time grooming their allies/friends as a form social bonding (chimps pick bugs out of each other’s hair). We spend our time talking to one another in endless loops. Both acts serve as a way of social bonding and alliance forming that satisfies a deep urge within us. We need to talk to others and are compelled to do so. Notably, higher-ranked individuals receive more grooming than lower-ranked individuals. Those who do more grooming, have greater survivability and a better chance to spread their genes. Next time you are sitting around a cafeteria table, notice how much attention and conversation the highest status individual receives…

First and foremost, the competition for mates is a kind of foundation of our common human nature that is shared across all cultures. Like chimpanzees that fight and strut around in front of their peers, much of our behavior fits into a social web of interactions. Like chimps, a lot of energy and time is spent competing for “prestige status” (23).  Our evolutionary forbears competed for scarce resources and they wanted four things: “food, sex, territory, social status” (30).  Humans acquire these resources by cunning, cleverness, and display. Critics will rightfully note that in evolutionary psychology, everything boils down to survival and sex. Humans are all too animal underneath our dynamic and complex cultural displays. We unconsciously compete for these resources in social groups—money, status, and career success being the most important. Why are we so ambitious? Why do billionaires always need more? A kind of instinct for social status drives them on. Further, social competition provides an explanation of why our brains developed and became as large and complex as they did.  We need to keep track of everyone’s hidden and deceptive motives to help ourselves gain a social advantage. Much of what we and like do is about self-promotion. While we think we are enjoying the pleasure of conversation, we are in fact engaging in constant social competition and self-promotion. Indeed, most of human conversation is spent gossiping about one another. Dunbar showed in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (1998) that 65% of human conversation is gossip. The great merit of gossip is that helps humans keep track of who is honest and who is cheating—who we can trust. Further, gossip causes people to protect their reputations so that their social status is not damaged by other people. Gossip is also about coalition building and bonding. Considering how much negative gossip is exchanged between people, it is clear to me that much of gossip is about demoting the status of someone else, promoting oneself, while reinforcing the alliance with whom one is gossiping.

We also unconsciously transmit social information through two significant signals to others: domination and prestige. We unconsciously seek prestige or domination. Domination, although reduced through the power of socialization and law, is still real in social environments where a person acts to intimidate or overwhelm a competitor (the threat of physical violence, wit, mockery, intellectual superiority, controlling all the space of conversation…etc.). Prestige, the much more civilized signaling, can take several forms such as beauty (everybody wants to be friends with the beautiful people), wealth, athletic ability (why do we like games so much!), generosity, and  being fun and humorous, artistic, kind, intelligent, etc. I do not know how many times I have inserted my education, job, or travel experiences into conversations with people I just met that ultimately are a kind of strutting and display about my social status.

These signals have two ends: assessing the fitness of potential mates and forming social coalitions with others. We are constantly judging and being judged (just try to stop judging or saying negative things about others for a day). As social animals we assess the assets and value of others in microseconds by the signals that others display to us. When we form a friendship, really what we have done is form a kind of political alliance, and as our friends become friends, we have formed a coalition. These coalitions help us subvert and put pressure on dominance hierarchies.

One of the shocking claims by Simler and Hanson is that we are hardwired to be cheaters and manipulators, but since manipulation and cheating are obviously one of the negative signals that people report in gossip, people have to be exceptional manipulators and cheaters. In fact, the gain from cheating in evolutionary terms is so useful that the brain has evolved for us to be unaware of the fact that we are manipulating others. Cheaters and manipulators are in an arms race with the brain’s powers of social detection. This is most significantly seen in the human ability to violate social norms (especially when no one will know about it) and then painlessly providing a convenient rational justification.

Since we have an inherent tendency of cheating and manipulation, Simler and Hanson paint an unflattering image of humanity:

“So we brag and boast, shirk and slack off, gossip and badmouth people behind their backs. We undermine our supposed teammates, suck up to our bosses, ogle and flirt inappropriately, play politics, and manipulate others for our own ends. In short, we’re selfish. Not irredeemably selfish, just slightly more than our highest standards of behavior demand” (70).

We routinely act uncharitably all the while deceiving ourselves into thinking how fair and just we are. Interestingly, there have been several theories postulated as to why we do this.  Freud argued that self-deception was an inbuilt coping mechanism. Otto Fenichel argued in a similar vein that self-deception was to preserve our self-esteem. The New School, as presented by Simler and Hanson, argues that self-deception is to heighten our powers of manipulation in the social competition for prestige and status. Because lying is hard to pull off, those who engage in self-deception are much better at providing believable signals to others. Studies have shown that people under controlled conditions fail to recognize their baser motives and rather provide social congenial reasons as to why they like one thing over another. I can only imagine that this is perhaps why so many violent people are able to obtain relationships with others—they believe themselves that they are not actually a violent, immoral person. The brain determines the object of a person’s desires, beyond the control of the individual, and the mind constructs a social convenient and acceptable reason to understand why it desires the object (102). Bias, prejudice, and selfishness can all be conveniently rationalized and excused.

Interestingly, there are detectable signs that betray our powers of manipulation.

HOW BODY LANGUAGE BETRAYS US

We are especially unconscious of our body language, which provides clues to the actual inner turmoil of our social interactions. When we are not interested or unsupportive, we often look away, but when we are supportive and in agreement, we look at the person and even give positive gestures such as nods. When we are supportive, our posture is open and inviting, but if we are in not supportive, we are closed and appear directed elsewhere. If we are truly supportive, we often mirror the person with whom we agree. Further, we use physical contact with pats, hugs, kisses, cuddles, handshakes, etc. I have read elsewhere that American men actually touch each other more often than woman because of handshakes and high-fives. Men have built a whole culture of physically touching one another to support and bond with one another.

LAUGHTER

Ever notice that someone that does not like you will not laugh at your jokes, while your partner, mother, or friends somehow find you remarkably funny? This is an obvious signal of social support. Laughter is often an involuntary behavior. In practice, laughter is a tool used for social networking. It allows us to flirt, bond with people, mock our enemies and mark out lines in our social groups of who and what is a target of derision.  Mockery also signals who we are closest to because, when face to face, we can only comfortably mock and poke fun at friends—for anybody else, mocking them is deeply insulting and a sign of rejection. People who do not know us, should not be mocking us. Finally, laughter allows people to explore topics that are taboo or forbidden. If we are joking about a subject, no one is sure what the person who made the joke really thinks about the subject. Socially disapproved ideas can be denied. We can hide behind humor as we talk about uncomfortable, taboo subjects while limiting the social cost.

CONVERSATION

Conversation is one of the great pleasures of life; the reasons for this, however, are quite base. Talking is the most significant and common form of social bonding. Intuitively it seems like we use conversation to share information, but this is not really true. If it were, we would spend more time asking questions and listening to others—which we do not really do. We talk so others can listen to us and we are compelled/excited to hear the sound of our own voice. Indeed, I would say it is a relief and gratifying to express our own opinions—something egotistical and narcissistic is driving us and it gives us great pleasure when we finally get to share our thoughts. I would confess that when I am filled with a response, it is increasingly difficult to listen. Really, we are constantly showing off. We just want our own turn to talk to show off what we can do. Unconsciously, we are signaling our sexual/social fitness. The evolutionary driver for how we speak is to recruit potential mates and allies. Conversation appears as if it is for information sharing, but really the subtext suggest that is a way for us to show off our own wit, status, and intelligence as signals of domination and prestige. Conversation is a contest to show the breadth of knowledge we have—the best conversationalists always have something insightful to say on any subject. Listeners will come to understand how impressive a tool-kit of knowledge the speaker has and will want to mate with this person or be their ally (friend). Ultimately, we seek prestige and recognition for our egotistical selves—always trying to increase our position and status. The clear lesson for me, assuming all this is true, is to be better at listening to others and learning from them because it is actually very difficult.

 EDUCATION

Lastly, I found many of the claims and observations about education very striking and surprising. Simler and Hanson  argue that school is really a time for sorting out people, some will go to the assembly line and others will get to be the managers. They claim that we are not at school for actual knowledge retention. As a teacher, I feel this is an effect of education, but I find it laregely overstated. In my opinion, the student’s awareness grows whether they remember everything or not.  Simler and Hanson argue it is less important that student’s remember everything than that they show they are better than their peers. Consciously we say it is about learning, but unconsciously we want to create a hierarchy of students. Education focuses more on providing us a credential than teaching us the most productively, claim Simler and Hanson. School demonstrates how well we perform in a directed and controlled environment that focuses on merit and talent. This allows later employers and prestigious schools to continue to find bright students with the correct work ethic of success. More than that, education is about state building and creating a loyal and productive labor force. It is the civilizing force of society. It is critical for civic society that everyone buy into the social program. So it is also a massive socialization project. The people who are best at school are better at doing what they are told. Of course the payoff is as significant for the individual as for the society: through education civilization reduces violence and cultivates politeness, etiquette, and good manners. Of course, historians familiar with the history of nationalism know this. It is the project of the state to lift people above the irrational rabble and create conformed, conscientious, enlightened citizens/subjects.

 If we take the claims of this research seriously, we cannot escape our narcissistic and egotistical urges, but being aware of our base motives might make us more humble, more generous to people we are not bonded with, better listeners, and less deceptive.

For more on this topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4lEvvY1r5U

and

What is religion? the Sacred: Eliade

In getting back to the  Eight Theories of Religion by Pals, I am going to talk about Mircea Eliade–a theorist who I find difficult to give a fair evaluation of because he theorized from the point of view of religion being true. Unlike the other theorists so far discussed (Tylor, Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, and Marx), Eliade viewed religion positively.

Eliade resisted a reductionist theory of religion as Karl Marx and Durkheim had done. Understanding religion by one overarching theory failed to understand the complexity of the religious experience.  Religion is autonomous. It is not a psychological by-product of another reality.

Born in Bucharest in 1907, he had one of his formative moments while studying in India. In 1928, he took a trip to India to study with Surendranath Dasgupta, with whom he studied until getting into an affair with his daughter. Probably not the best idea. In India, he came to the conclusion that “sacramental experience” can change life; that symbols are the key to spiritual life; and that one could learn a lot from studying the heritage of folk religion.

In his scholarly work, Eliade was influenced by the theory of religion given by Durkheim; this is most evident in his book The Sacred and the Profane (1957) where he took the definition of the sacred from Durkheim.  The sacred is the extraordinary, supernatural, and momentous separating us from the profane. The profane is the normal, banal, quotidian.

Eliade’s notion of religion was different than Durkheim’s in that he thought the sacred dealt with the supernatural, which was closer to the definition of Tylor and Frazer.  Durkheim thought religion ultimately dealt with the social. Eliades’ sacred is the encounter with otherworldly experience (he was channeling the idea of Rudolph Otto here) and is a thing in-and-of-itself.

To understand religion clearly, we must step out of modernity and into the archaic. Among archaic societies, the sacred was integrated into the social. For example, archaic people built their towns around a sacred center or in a design that symbolized the divine order. Archaic people sought to create a mirror image of their divine mythologies.

They wanted to live in the sacred because they sought to remedy an element of the human condition: the feeling of being estranged–disconnected. Being thrust into the world, we are aware of an absence at the core of our being, a kind of separation that needs to be repaired.  We have a sense we are not in the place we are supposed to be.  We feel a lack, an insufficiency. Eliade gave this the elegant name the “nostalgia for Paradise”.  This was Eliade’s description of spirituality and it characterizes the need and desire to return to the gods or the supernatural.

In a kind of Jungian way (that Joseph Cambell would also later borrow), Eliade suggested we tap into a deep spiritual reservoir connected to us all. Spirituality is a real experience, not something reduced and explained away by psychology. In his mind, humans are spiritual animals–for Eliade, I believe, this is a hidden proof of the truth of a greater supernatural order.

Eliade argued we must study religion through “phenomenology” that examines a thing through comparative analysis and by what the appearance of religion presents to us.  Eliade was looking for general commonalities shared across cultures and religions. He looked for them through indirect expression: through symbols and myth. He explored this in his book Patterns. He used examples such as Sky Gods, the Sun and Moon, water and stones, etc. that showed similarities across cultures. For example, for the gods of the sky, their stories and myths symbolized the reenactment of the human drama of life, birth, and death.  Personally, I am not sure how this is any more impressive than storytelling in general–unless Eliade would have suggested all of our stories are looking to reconnect us to something greater (the social to Durkheim, the supernatural and sacred to Eliade).

One of Eliade’s most important books was The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949). His thesis in this work stated that “the one theme which dominates the thought of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish history–all of history–and return to that point beyond time when the world began” (Pals 179).  We all possess a longing to return back to the beginning, to creation, to be with god.  Religion and ritual allow  us to reenact these desires.

Interestingly, Eliade said one reason for the myth of eternal return is that humanity has an intuition that life is an empty spectacle and a pointless exercise.  This is the “terror of history” said Eliade.  Ordinary life is insignificant and we are unable to find any true meaning in history.  Archaic people overcame this feeling by creating meaning outside of history. They denied the meaninglessness through symbols and myths that refer back to a primordial state of perfection.

A major turn in the history of human consciousness occurred when Judaism declared that the sacred could be found within history as well as outside it. The next major shift happened recently, in modern Europe and America.  Something quite new to human history emerged–secularity, by the denial of the value and  existence of the sacred altogether.  In embracing an entirely secular life, the secular western subject must create meaning entirely themselves. For example, coming after WW2, Eliade saw Marxism and fascism as representing two attempts to create a secular, profane meaning in history.

Eliade thought the loss of the sacred was a true loss, expressing his doubt that modern replacements could satisfy the human personality. His major contribution was to read religion through a process of interpretation via symbols and universal characteristics. To Eliade, spirituality and religion are real phenomena that have structured and upheld human society. The loss of the sacred is a human loss.

Take it as you like. I think in refusing to be a reductionist, Eliade actually refused to see the totality of the phenomenon he sought to understand. It would be more impressive to combine, add to, and modify the prior theories than to dismiss them. He ironically saw religion through another form of limitation, ignoring the realities that create what the sociologist Berger called the “social construction of reality.”

The quiet religious conflict in France

Outside the terrorist attacks of radical Islamic ISIS supporters against secular France, there is an inconspicuous, time-worn, on-going religious conflict between Catholicism and unbelief.  The forces of division in France divide four ways: Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and secular.

While the conflict of the Reformation between the protestants and Catholics is long over, religious tensions in France are clearly high after the terrorist attacks. Tensions between Jews and Muslims in France are said to be similar to that of the  tensions between Palestinians and Jews in Israel (source RFI.fr).

What goes unsaid is that the traditional religion, Catholicism, has also been a target of palpable discontent.  Across France, Catholics have seen an increase of  vandalism against their holy sites.  At the same time, vandalism that targets Jewish religious symbols has also risen, but not as much as it has against the Catholics. See the pictures here.

Since 2014, it is a growing trend that the three faiths have seen vandalism rise against their respective places of worship and burial, according to the Minister of the Interior. Of the 807 attacks to religious sites, 673 targeted Catholic sites. The majority of targets are not against symbols of Muslims or Jews but Catholics.

For the Jewish sites, the minister said that 61 synagogues, a community center, 6 cemeteries, and 2 monuments have been damaged (against 26 for 2013). For Muslim sites, there is a light decrease of desecration in 2014: 60 mosques, several rooms of prayer, as well as 4 Muslim squares in a cemetery (against 75 in 2013).

Unless the three religions are targeting one another, which is possible, one can speculate that there is a backlash of not just one religion against another but a growing discontent against all religion.

The Veil and Secularization in France: Scott and The Politics of the Veil

In 2004, the head of the committee in charge of the evaluation of Muslim girls wearing the veil (or headscarf), in French schools, Bernard Stasi, concluded that “the veil stands for the alienation of women”. The students in the French public schools needed to be assimilated into French culture and protected from the negative influences of their families. According to this point of view, that traces its origins back to the Enlightenment, the headscarf was seen as a denial of freedom and reason.  French secular values have their origin in the 1789 French Revolution, which embodied the Enlightenment in its quest to realize the values of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Since this time, French political history has been marked by the attempt to achieve the universal values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. A key moment in this struggle took place in 1882 with the introduction of free, compulsory, secular primary and secondary education. Another occurred in 1905 when  the French Third Republic emancipated itself from catholic cultural domination with the separation of church and state.  More recently, in 2004, the Sarkozy government, targeting the headscarf worn by Muslim girls,  banned conspicuous religious displays by students in public schools. And in 2011, Sarkozy effectively banned the burqa, citing security reasons. The attitude in France is that religion is and should be mostly a personal and private affair.  However, the secular state has come across new tensions with the outspoken religiosity of incoming immigrant populations.  Poverty and lack of opportunity make these groups feel targeted and marginalized (watch episode 35 of VICE for one look at it if you have HBO).  Since the ISIS terrorist attacks  in January and  November of 2015, France has found itself even further divided and confronted with its secular and universal values in relation to immigration and Islam.

In France, the laws that separate religion from the state were drafted to protect the individual from the encroachment of Catholic influence (and thus any and all religious influence). It was seen by early twentieth-century radical republicans as a means of emancipation. One could say it was the freedom from religion. In the US, the laws of separation were drafted to protect religious liberty by preventing a state religion from oppressing other forms of religious worship–the freedom of conscience (or freedom of religion).  This simple formulaic description does much to describe the different attitudes of American and French people.

Taking a pause from blogging about the different theories of religion, I am going to outline the book by Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (2007). The book represents the critique by the American progressive left who seek to expose the contradictions and tensions within  French  secularism and islamophobia in general. French secularism has traditionally been embraced by the political left as a guarantee of freedom from religious control and influence in the public sphere.  However, with new waves of immigration and growing cultural diversity, the far right has used secularism as a tool to deny and reject difference rather than guarantee it. For example, the  Front National uses secularism as a primary value in its discourse to harass Muslim immigrant populations. This intolerance symbolizes the insecurity of French identity. By outlawing the headscarf in the classroom in 2004, the Sarkozy government was protecting the sacred space where French citizens are formed and assimilated.

Using the 2004 prohibition of wearing the headscarf in public schools as her example, Scott contends in The Politics of the Veil, that in the process of supporting universal rights, French society has promoted illiberal policies that ostracize Muslim minorities.  She notes four underlying problems within French society’s treatment of Muslims: an undercurrent of racism, an intolerant secularism, an overly abstract conception of individualism, and an anxiety about female sexuality.

The main punch of Scott’s argument is that French society is blind to its own racism, which is a legacy of its colonial past.  Imperial France sought to instill French values and civilization to its colonies that by default treated other peoples as backward and ahistorical. The French saw themselves on a civilizing mission to bring republican, secular, and universalist values.  All of this ended with the vicious wars that preceded decolonization.  In a twist of fate, after the colonial war in Algeria, former colonized people received special rights of access to France.  Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans, the people of the former colonies, began to migrate into France. Now Islam and the veil took on a new meaning. It began to symbolize the fear of reverse colonization–that France would become North African and Muslim from successive immigration waves. This is the message today of members of the far right like Marine Le Pen and the Front Nationale, and argues Scott, this is the true basis for racism behind the intolerance. The laws against students wearing the veil in the classroom are at once a sign of this racism and the affirmation of traditional French, secular, republican identity.

What French liberal values fail to register was that the veil took on several meanings. While it could symbolize the values of a patriarchal religion that placed women in an inferior position, it also became a symbol of freedom and liberation from French domination that sought to unveil Muslim women.

What I find  missing  from Scott’s analysis is a more thorough explanation of the origin of the anticlerical (those against the political power of the Church) Enlightenment values of the radical republicans who sought not just to limit and marginalize Catholicism to a separate sphere but to secularize and educate the populace with universal and republican principles. The French republican tradition still manifests these anticlerical roots. Radical republicans in the Third Republic (1870-1940) did not believe in the liberty of independence in-and-of-itself and saw Catholicism as the standard bearer of obscurantism; radical republicans promoted the liberty of thought and perfection. They believed that a person could only become free once he or she had successfully accessed the sphere of critical reason. This would allow them to become a citizen of good laws, access rationality and be able to enter the circle of public deliberation. A citizen properly educated would be able to access the truths of Universal Reason that permitted each citizen the liberty of thought and perfection. People must be taught to be free, and sometimes, they must be shown how to emancipate themselves from their own false/irrational beliefs (Phillipe Portier lectures 11-26-2014). This stands against American secularism and the liberty of conscience. In French early twentieth-century anticlerical, republican eyes, the liberty of conscience protects obscurity by impeding the progress of each person to properly access the sphere of reason. Rather than being freed from superstition and backward traditional practices, the liberty of conscience allows such practices to spread and propagate.

Scott articulates more clearly the tensions between individuality and universal values. She notes that there is a powerful fear of having French society fractured into cultural pockets that weaken the link that ties people to the nation. French values of fraternity and equality must be protected from special treatment of particular groups who seek to distinguish themselves from being French. Above all the French Republican tradition, going back to the laws created during the Third Republic, was built to create French citizens first and foremost. Individual identity and difference are a private affair. Individuality must by partially sacrificed for the public good so that everyone belongs and shares the principal values of the Republic. Only this will create public harmony.  Scott says that “French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality” (12). One could say that French culture is in the business of consciously producing Frenchness (as are all states and culture-the French just do it with added self-awareness).

Critics such as Scott and the political theorist William Connolly  argue that the French model of Secularization produces intolerance and discrimination by favoring a secular mode of life over the free expression of different religious convictions. In this analysis, the secular mode of life supported in France is not truly neutral.  The Stasi commission that created the 2004 law “revealed the absolutist nature of their beliefs and their fervent nationalism.  The school was a ‘sacred’ space; secularism was ‘un meta-idéal humain’…” (98) This critique contends that no true neutral space can exist and that the best way to compensate for this truth is to promote a space for pluralism and the freedom of conscience. Muslims should not be forced to hide their religiosity but allowed the freedom to express it individually.

The third thrust of Scott’s arguments is a critique of French individualism that sees each person as an autonomous being whose  “choices did not define them but were expressions of the rational beings they already were” (125).  This individualism, far from being real, is a liberal western construction according to Talal Assad and Saba Mahmood. Mahmood suggests we see the self instead as a product of “habituated learning” with no distinction between an inner and outer self, and not subdivided by the dichotomy of the secular and the religious.  Scott also suggests an alternative conception of the self by Michael Sandel– the encumbered self that is held by duties it “cannot renounce, even in the face of civil obligation that may conflict” (125).  Basically, Scott says it is an injustice that those who cannot  neatly separate their public secular responsibilities and their private religious convictions are excluded by French political discourse.

While I find such arguments appealing to my liberal values of social justice, I am struck by the fact that people do change their religions and beliefs and the ontological self developed by Mahmood appears to me to be suspect (but that is another topic).

Lastly, Scott takes aim at the paradoxical values of western female sexuality. Feminism sought to liberate the body from the control of others by removing restrictions.  The ability to show one’s body is part of the equality among men and women. Yet the West has ambivalent feelings. They want to free the body, but not too much.  When high school girls started wearing g-string underwear with low cut jeans and shirts, many people in France thought this was going too far. Western feminism is faced with the resulting tension of liberating the female body that permits men to further exploit it as an object. Indeed, covering the women, Scott says, deprived “men of an object of sexual desire and undermined the sense of their own masculinity” (159). In contrast, the traditional Muslim perspective sees female sexuality as dangerous to social order; it maintains that there is a difference between the sexes–they are not held to be equal.  In France, emancipation reinforces women’s body as a sexual object of men’s gaze, which nonetheless plays an important part in the construction of sexuality.

Scott’s main argument is that the laws prohibiting the wearing of the headscarf in school are really the manifestation of racism and intolerance against Muslims. In 2004, French society hid behind secular laws with the result that it oppressed a religious minority by claiming the veil “was considered inimical to French custom and law because it violated the separation of church and state, insisted on differences among citizens in a nation one and indivisible, and accepted the subordination of women in a republic premised on equality” (2). This conclusion, however, was based on an abstract individuality that does not take into account the “encumbered self” or the self of “habituated learning” that cannot be separated into the simplistic formula of private and public or sacred and secular. In maintaining secularism as an absolute value, French law has denied a more tolerant and pluralistic public space that allows greater tolerance and freedom of conscience. French secular law hoped to save the girls from the obscurity and oppression of traditional communities. However, the practical outcome was self-defeating. In this, Scott and the critics are right: French secularists undermined their own secular, republican values by throwing out of the schools the very same children it most wanted to reach.

The veil in public schools raises the questions of what are the limits of universal values and  how should society  protect minority groups and individual difference. A couple of years ago, I asked a woman from the Netherlands whether she thought her country deserved the reputation for tolerance that it holds. She said that the people of the Netherlands are actually only tolerant in so far as they are patient enough to wait for the time it takes people to assimilate and become like themselves…

What is religion? The opiate of the oppressed: Marx

In the next chapter of Eight Theories of Religion, Pals considers Karl Marx’s analysis of religion. Marx’s influence is, of course, enormous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He is best known for his theory of history (historical materialism) and for providing a total system of thought (that curiously resembles a religion in its own way, with its sacred readings, heroes, need to convert others, etc).  However, his focus was on how society changed over time and Marx never wrote a thorough account of religion. Rather his analysis of religion was a token element in his larger analysis of economic and material life.

He had rejected religion early in his life.  As an atheist, he believed religion to be an invention of humanity. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,” he declared.[1]  Religion is treated in two different ways, as either the tool of the ruling class or the expression of the suffering masses. This is a functional theory of religion. Marx is not interested in religious content but the roles these beliefs play in social struggle, we discover the key to religion only when we discover what role religion plays socially or psychologically.

His ideas of religion were greatly influenced by the philosopher Hegel. Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, part of the Prussian Rhineland of the time (modern Germany now).  Thus, he studied at the University of Berlin, which had been dominated by the ideas of Hegel and played a central role in Marx’s thought.  Hegel held that mind/consciousness was more fundamental than matter.  Material things and reality were the expression of an underlying universal consciousness that progressed through a dialectic.  As our consciousness changed  and progressed through the process of overcoming inherent problems, humanity shaped and changed material reality. Marx reverses this insight and says that matter comes before mind–the shape of ideas and culture are a product of material reality.

The most fundamental part of human life is our interaction with the material forces of reality. Economic reality shapes and informs culture and society, which is a struggle over scarce goods. As one group gained an advantage over another, history became a class struggle, a perpetual dialectic among the socials classes between those who own the means of production and those who must work.  The economic base produces the various forms of the division of labor, the struggle of the classes, and human alienation. Those aspects that are impacted by the base belong to the superstructure, such as laws, culture, and the arts.  Our cultural and intellectual life is a reflection of our economic organization.

The institutions of human life such as family, government, the arts, philosophy, ethics, and religion are developed to control and maintain the deep tensions that emerge from internal contradictions within the social structure and also between the social structure and the economic base.  The production of artists, politicians, and theologians creates “ideology”, i.e. a systematic defense of the present state of affairs. In reality, they are the expression of class interests that defend the system of privileges.

Religion is an ideology and a product of the tensions between the base and the superstructure. It is a belief system that provides reasons to maintain the status quo in favor of the ruling class. Thus, belief in God or gods is a by-product of the class struggle and an illusion that is detrimental to social health. Further, religion is the expression of an “inverted world” where the pain of humanity seeks solace in another source because it cannot find amelioration in its material conditions. Marx says in one of his many immortal phrases, “Religious suffering is the expression of real suffering, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of the heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”[2]

Consequently, the social effect of Religion is social pacification. It is a mystification that keeps people from seeing the truth of reality. Marx’s view of religion was significantly influenced by the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. In 1841, Feuerbach published his book The Essence of Christianity, a philosophical attack on Christianity that blamed it for alienating human consciousness.  Feuerbach argues that Christian theology proposes an alien being that possesses our most highly held personal qualities such as “goodness, beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love steadfastness, and strength of character and project them onto God” (Pals).  Rather than attribute these qualities to ourselves, they are attributed to a God. In reality, the subject of theology is humanity. In looking for heaven, humanity found a reflection of itself.

Marx accepted Feuerbach’s critique, seeing religion as a mystification that alienated humanity from the truth of its condition. Religion is just the expression of the greater distress of the economic and material alienation of  humanity. Marx did not blame the problems of society on religion. The problem is not state religion but the mystifications that hide the causes of inequality and suffering. Religion is the mere surface problem because the true problem is social injustice.

[1] Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

[2] Karl Marx, “Toward A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” Selected Writings, 28.

 

What is religion? a way for society to worship itself: Durkheim

The next theory of religion from Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion comes from Emile Durkheim, a sociologist born in 1858 in Strasbourg, France. Durkheim provided a powerful and influential theory.

An advocate of the scientific method, he wanted the study of society to be as scientific as possible. He approached the question as a nonbeliever, although his father had been a rabbi, and he had been greatly influenced by a Roman Catholic school teacher in his youth.

The study of the human being had to be done scientifically, which Durkheim called sociology, whose purpose was to uncover the social facts of humanity. Social facts are the fundamental and collective elements that shape and influence our lives. A social fact, although intangible, is a real mass phenomenon manifested by the whole that affects individual consciousness. People always belong to something and this social identity precedes individual identity. A person cannot simply be reduced to biological instinct, individual psychology, or personal interests. We are far more the products of society than of our individual choices. The fact that this idea sounds so mundane  today is just an indicator of how influential and successful this point of view has become.

In looking at religion in terms of its social impacts, Durkheim asked why is religion so important and prevalent in human affairs? What function does it play in the life of the individual and in the workings of society?

In his work The Elementary form of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim concludes that religion is more than just the separation of the natural and the supernatural. Rather, religion is the institution that divides things between the sacred and the profane. Sacred things merit our respect because they are set aside as superior, powerful and forbidden to normal contact. The profane is the mundane, everyday, and practical. Sacred things always concern the group while profane things are less important, smaller, often individual matters. Religion resides within the sacred. Durkheim defines religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden.” The purpose of the sacred is to “unite into one moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them” (Durkheim).

Durkheim dismisses the idea that religion has its origins in magic. Magic is a private matter. Religious rituals and beliefs manifest when people invoke the group or collectivity. A magician might have clients, but he or she does not have a congregation. Durkheim suggests that theories about magic and animism misunderstood the function of religion. Further, he critiques the theory of religion by Tyler for being insufficiently scientific. Rather than giving a conjecture about how people invented the gods in the time before the historical record, as Tylor did, Durkheim stated we should look at the evidence available now for the “ever present causes” and find its “elementary forms.”

He did this by looking at studies of people living in hunting and gathering societies. His theory of religion is based on anthropological research of the communities in Australia, who practiced a totem religion.  The native Australian people divided themselves into clans that each had an individual animal, plant or object as their totem. The totem animal was sacred and forbidden to eat. The clan was also sacred as it was united with the totem. This was religion in its most elementary form and still in existence in his day.  We cannot know what caused the origin of religion in the past because there is no evidence; therefore, science must then take totemism, the simplest, most basic, original form of religion, as the basis for religion in general and from which all other religions arise.

In totemism, the clans do not actually worship the mundane animal itself, but rather an anonymous and impersonal force that stands beyond the totem and has enormous power. The totem has a physical and moral force over the clan that inspires respect and moral obligation to observe its ceremonies, and most importantly, through the totem, the clan feels a deeply connecting bond and abiding loyalty.

The totem is a symbol of the god and of the clan. Thus, they are really one and the same. Durkheim’s insight was that devotion to the totem was really the way primitive peoples express and reinforce their devotion to the social organism. The function of religion is to provide and reinforce social belonging. Society is an abstraction that exists in the individual consciousness. Religion penetrates our consciousness and provides the social glue for the individual to the group, which is manifested and reinforced in important ceremonies. In the ecstasy of the ritual, they unite and feel connected to the group.

The totem remains the fixed and permanent symbol of the clan. From this the other phenomena of religion follow. For example, the belief in spirits or souls  comes from the totemic spiritual force that is spread out into each individual. As the totem is spread among the group, each individual portion becomes the “soul.” The soul is thus the voice and conscience of the clan, separate from our personal bodies. Likewise, the growth and importance of the clan and the totem make the guardian spirit more and more powerful until they acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.” Indeed, the aborigines also had a notion of a high god that united and stood above the totem gods– a kind of creator god.

Religion fills a primary role in uniting people to a community. When people worship, they are really worshiping the collectivity that reminds them of the importance of the group over the individual. Beliefs are only the speculative side of religion that allow for theological distinctions but make little functional difference. What is important is ritual practice and ceremony for social unity.

What is religion? an illusion: Freud

Sigmund Freud is the next theory that I will paraphrase from Pals’ Eight Theories of Religion. Freud was an atheist and he believed religions were no more than the projection of our unconscious desires and the collection of our ancient superstitions. The interesting question for him was not the truth of religion, for he did not believe it to be true, but why people continued to believe religious claims. In this, he thought psychoanalysis could provide answers.  In contrast, the theories of religion by Frazer and Tylor left this question unexplained.

Taking the western religious tradition as his example,  Freud saw a similarity between the actions of religious people and the behaviors of neurotic patients, which he examined in his essay “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907). Seeing a striking resemblance, he noted how both religious people and neurotic patients placed significant importance on repeating certain activities in a patterned and ceremonial fashion. Plus, they both felt guilt when they failed to perfectly maintain the rules of their rituals. In both types of people, the rituals were associated with the repression of basic instincts. Freud saw that religion required the repression of selfishness, the restriction of the ego-instinct. Just as sexual repression results in neurosis, Freud therefore concluded religion appeared to be “a universal obsessional neurosis.”  In short, religious behavior resembled mental illness.

After taking a pause from the question of religion, Freud would later write three books on the subject of religion, of which we will look at two (omitting Moses and Monotheism due to its questionable historical claims). He wrote Totem and Taboo in 1913. This book provided a psychological interpretation of the life of primitive peoples using psychoanalysis. As the name of the book implies, he examined “totems” and “taboos.” People create totems when they associate themselves with a certain animal that serves as a sacred symbol. A taboo is a behavior that is marked off limits or is forbidden within the group. Freud said that two taboos appeared to be nearly universal: incest and the interdiction to eat the totem animal (except at ceremonially special occasions).

Taking the concepts of taboo and totem, Freud related the origins of religion to his theory of the Oedipal complex: the desire to have sex with one’s mother and to kill one’s father. The roots or the origins of religion go far back in our ancient past when primeval society was dominated by powerful alpha males who had large harems. These over-sized harems had the potential to make their sons and the other males jealous. Because he sexually desired his father’s females, the son banded together with other males and overthrew his father (this is essentially the sexual behavior of chimpanzees by the way). Without the leadership of the alpha, torn by anguish, guilt, and regret, they created in the totem animal a “father substitute.” This led to the commandment: “do not kill the totem animal” that later became “thou shall not kill.” Second, to avoid further conflict, they made it a law that they “shall not take thy father’s wives.” Instead, they would have to take wives outside of the clan.  The totem animal was then projected as the dead father who received divinity. The clan next created rituals to worship him by eating the totem animals flesh that reinforced the commandment to repress their sexual desires.

According to Freud, the murder of the father in the prehistoric clan had tremendous importance for human social life. The emotions produced from this heinous act led to the origin of religion. Freud saw the incest taboo as both the origin of morality and the origin of the social contract because it sought to protect the group. The totem and the taboo were the foundations of civilization. We have only changed the totems (king, republic, constitution, etc.) and adjusted our taboos.

Needless to say, Christians were insulted and outraged by these claims. Ignoring the response, Freud only returned to the subject fourteen years later with The Future of an Illusion in 1927.  Here he argued that religion continued because of the psychological need we had in confronting our helplessness with death and suffering. Instead, we looked for a way to face the hardships of life as we did when we were children–to our parents, and more specifically, our fathers. God became the universal father who saved us from our fears and who rewarded us for obeying the repressive laws of society. Freud said that this was an “illusion,” a belief that we wish to be true. Religion holds its power because it aligns with our deepest wishes, thus religions are the “fulfillment of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”

Freud thought religion was a neurotic relic of our past that humanity had to outgrow so it could be replaced by a suitable and mature rationality. Lastly, this is a functional theory of religion because religion filled an important need in humanity’s early social organization.

What is religion? Animism and Magic: Frazer

Here is the second half of the first theory of religion paraphrased from D.L. Pals work Eight Theories of Religion. James George Frazer (1854-1941) provides the compliment to Tylor. Frazer was the kind of scholar who theorized about the truth of the world from the comfort of his chair and a warm cup of tea. A comfortable way to live, but perhaps one that leads to all kind of endless logomachy (a dispute over words). His most important work was The Golden Bough. The book seeks to resolves a pagan ritual of human sacrifice from an old roman myth.

In order to resolve the puzzle, Frazer examines the origins of religion and magic. To understand the old stories, one has to understand magic. Using a comparative study, Frazer argues that magic works by sympathy. The primitive mind believed that nature functioned by “sympathetic magic,” i.e. the primitive mind would mentally associate two things, which were thought to correlate with physical reality. “Mental connections mirror physical ones” (36). Magic was thought to affect things because of an imitative principle or a contagious principle. It is imitative if two entities are connected due to a similarity or contagious if the two entities are connected by contact.

Pals cites several examples here and it is worth noting several for clarification. For example, when someone plunges a pin into a voodoo doll adorned with the hair of his enemy, he imagines that by contagious transmission he can inflict suffering upon his foe. Or when Pawnee Indians sacrificed a maiden to their field tools, they believed that merely by contact with her blood, the life-giving properties of the maiden would be transmitted to their tools. In certain villages in India, during periods of drought, the people would perform a rain ritual. They chose a boy who wore nothing but leaves and nominated him Rain King.  He would then visit each house so the residents could sprinkle water on him and the rains would return.

Frazer like Tylor sees these rituals as both magic and proto-science. The practice of magic offered a kind of certainty about the natural world. The people who had this knowledge, the magician, the medicine man, the witch doctor, etc.,  usually held a great deal of social power. They  would ally with the King or the chief who would use their services. Sometimes the possessor of magic knowledge became king, wielding magical powers for the whole community.

Being a secular man, Frazer states that magic is a false science that people eventually see through, and in its place arises religion. He adopts a definition similar to Tylor: religion is a belief in spiritual beings. Religious people do not use spells to change the course of nature but use pleadings and prayers to supernatural beings to their preferred spirits or gods.They ask for help and favors and in return they promise to give loyalty, love, and obedience. Like Tylor, Frazer believes in the evolution of human thought and culture; thus he holds that magic and religion are stages of human consciousness.

Where magic sought to manipulate nature, religion is in the hands of the gods. And who knows the will of the gods? Indeed, we are at their mercy. In the political realm, the magician-king becomes the priest-king. Of course, there are endless variations. In ancient sedentary societies, people began to worship seasonal cults and vegetation gods. Out of this came the fertility cults based on the cycle of birth and death, often linked to sexuality. For example, in ancient Cyprus, the god Adonis was paired with Aphrodite around rituals of prostitution and a law that required virgins to sleep with a stranger at the temple before their marriage. The ritual was supposed to encourage the gods to mate so that nature would be reborn. This was a combination of magic and religion, an appeal to the gods through the principle of imitation.

Magic provided the first attempt to explain and control the power of nature. As magic declined religion took its place, but it too was found wanting. With the decline of religion, science has come to the fore. Welcome to the new age…

What is religion? Animism and Magic: Tylor

As a point of exercising the memory, I will paraphrase while determined to keep each entry short,  Daniel L. Pals’ book Eight Theories of Religion (2006).  For those that study religion, the answer to the question “what is religion?”, is an elusive one. The fact that there are eight major theories suggests that pinning the concept down is a tricky endeavor.

The first theory is given by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), who was a pioneer in religious studies for his emphasis on “ethnography” and “ethnology,” terms perhaps familiar to those who have taken an anthropology course. He took these terms to be the “description and scientific analysis of an individual society, culture, and racial group within all of its many component parts” (20).  A completely secular man, he sought to understand religion without reference to the supernatural.

Tylor held that humanity is united by psychic uniformity and intellectual evolution. This meant his explanation would have universal application. Best to always aim big…  Further, he holds that humanity is more or less rational and we use our rationality to explain the universe by making (often faulty) connections between causes.  This is the origin of magic. For example, those who practiced primitive agriculture may have beaten someone to tears to douse the soil and associated these tears as a way to bring forth rain. Magic was a rational effort to influence the world.

For Tyler, religion is “belief in spiritual beings” who act and behave similarly to human beings.  He thinks this is the common factor among all religions. This is essentially animism, the “belief in living, personal powers behind all things” (26). Be it one or many spirits, this is the unifying principle behind all religious practice and belief.

Tyler theorizes that the shadowy landscape of dreams and the confrontation with a self-hood annihilating death inspired people to believe in a soul and in a  reality separate but in contact with our own. This dreamlike reality showed that the person was animated by a spiritual principle or soul. This animism was then extended to other forces in nature.

The world animated by spirits would evolve into certain great spirits being those of Gods, and these gods of the Sun or the planets or the ocean became embodied in stories and mythologies. Animism led to polytheism and then to monotheism. Showing the nineteenth-century penchant for evolution, Tylor says that the continual rationalization of animism led to Judaism and Christianity from a process that started with the first “savage philosopher.”  Higher civilizations led to higher religions.

Ultimately animism is a false interpretation of reality, and Tylor sees the arrival of science as a secular force that exposed religion as an atavistic philosophy. However, animism is a natural parallel to science. It sought to explain and make sense of nature, but it was fundamentally mistaken.

Tylor saw religion and animism as a husk to be thrown off, something that had outlasted its usefulness.