It is not only a metaphor. It goes deeper, and it touches the core of
our civilization and what it means to be human. Religious groups are
adaptive units subject to evolution. They are based on replicating
entities shaped by group selection.
First I want to say that true Christians are wonderful people, they are
a blessing for everybody. Those who really read the bible every day and
practice it, not the ones who only pretend to be it. Jesus must have
been a wonderful person, too, someone who loved everyone, men or women,
old or young, rich or poor. And when he died this horrible death at the
cross his followers must have thought this can't be true, such a
wonderful person doesn't deserved this. And some of his followers had
the idea to write his story down.
When human beings are really governed by love, you indeed get a society
worth living in. "thou shalt not" and "eye for an eye; tooth for a
tooth" is the Old Testament, the foundation of the Jewish religion. The
main commandment of the New Testament is love (Matthew 22, 36-40): "Love
the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your mind. And [..] love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and
the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Christians live in bubble of politeness, but rich people, too. See e.g.
http://www.vice.com/read/filthy-lucre "If you have money, you can pay to
live in a bubble of politesse. Excellent wine choice, sir. Here's your
gift bag, madam. Often, you don't have to pay for it [..] Soon, you
think this treatment is earned." Rich people pay much money to live in
this bubble of politesse and politeness. Living in such a bubble can
indeed make you believe you are worth it, and those with money usually
think they deserve it. Although they themselves behave quite contrary:
arrogance is not uncommon among the rich.
Christians have discovered much earlier a way to get along with each
other without money, and how to make this miserable place a bit less
miserable. Religions are not ancient nonense, they contain ancient
wisdom how to make a life worth living. They consist of rules and
instructions which are thousands of years old and still work.
You know, the holy book which is read every saturday (in the Jewish
religion) or sunday (in the Christian one) is in fact nothing else but a
bundle of instructions how to create a group of people which get along
with each other. The preacher who preaches a sermon is like someone who
translate the genes of the holy script. He reads the genetic information
(the DNA) and creates a message (the RNA) so that the believers can
translate the information into behavior. The behavior of the church
members is the protein which is generated. Church service is the
expression of cultural genes, and religious groups are adaptive units
subject to evolution and group selection.
There you have it, the mystery of religion. From a sociological
perspective it is quite obvious. All the basic religious terms are
related to group terms:
god: group
sin: breaking the rules of the group
blessing/curse: wish to be included in/excluded from the group
heaven/hell: being loved/hated by the group
prophet: founder of the group
priest: maintainer of the group
holy (profane): something which belongs to the group (or not)
holy book: history and blueprint of the group
prayer: conversation of individual and group
word of god, commandment: laws of the group
baptism: gain a new existence as a member of a group
This doesn't mean that we all have to eat only "kosher" things now,
though ;-)
See also
* Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912
* Randall Collins, "Sociological Insight", Oxford University Press, 1992
* David Sloan Wilson, "Darwin's cathedral", University Of Chicago Press,
2003
-Jochen
On 01/20/2014 10:40 PM, glen wrote:
On 01/20/2014 12:39 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
http://blog.cas-group.net/2013/07/fascism-and-cancer/
Great post! But, as usual, the metaphor prevents me from thinking more
than it helps me to think.
It seems fairly obvious to me that cancers are failures at the cellular
scale. (Am I wrong?) The coarser and finer constructs are all useful
mechanisms that only go bad when the cell scale goes wonky. In order to
make this metaphor between totalitarianism and cancer into a useful
thinking tool, we have to identify the analog of the cellular scale
within the totalitarian system. Does the cell map to the individual?
... if not, then what?
If we push the metaphor, I would argue that the humans that constitute
totalitarian regimes are _normal_ humans. The merged sub-systems that
you're mapping to tumors aren't (to my mind) like tumors at all.
They're more like resonant frequencies than misgrown tissues. This
brings us back to Arlo's concept of kindling homogenously strapped to
the handle of an ax. It's a systemic pattern that, if broken, could
snap back to a healthy regime. That's definitely not the case with
cancer. Just breaking the resonant pattern so that the cells can float
around amongst the their healthy brethren won't do much good at all, and
would probably make things much worse.
But I suppose you could counter with the idea that the individuals who
have been _trained_ by a resonant frequency like capitalism are (over
time) broken/damaged by that coarser forcing structure. But I think the
cause vs. effect is flipped for the two systems, making the analogy fail
in an important way. In one the resonant structure causes the broken
individual. In the other, the broken individual causes the neoplasm.
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