Mike,
A superb piece of writing!
(Also, it was good to hear Julian Jaynes mentioned again! Somehow his book
is lasting. I came across someone on one of my dogwalks recently who was
reading him.)
Keith
At 03:54 27/11/2009 -0400, you wrote:
Steve Kurtz <[email protected]> wrote:
>
http://www.alternet.org/story/144174/is_belief_in_god_hurting_america?page=entire
>From the article:
"Popular religion," Paul proposes, "is a coping mechanism for the
anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment."
Paul, who was criticized, mostly on statistical grounds, for a
similar study published in 2005, says his new findings lend
support to the belief that mass acceptance of popular religion is
determined more by environmental influences and less by selective,
evolutionary forces, as scholars and philosophers have long
debated.
In other words, we're not hardwired for religion.
Steve again:
> I disagree with the statement that this might mean we're not 'wired'
> for religion. The expression of that wiring can vary with cultural
> and environmental circumstances.
The notion of being "hard-wired for X" is pretty ambiguous. To say
that we're hard-wired for vision is, roughly, tautological. To say it
of religion is way off at the other end of the ambiguity scale.
Ambiguity notwithstanding, I think it must be reasonable to say that
we're hard-wired for language. Julian Jaynes' concept detailed in his
"bicameral mind" book is controversial but it does make sense that
there was a point -- well, an epoch -- in the evolution of human
language capacity in which a constellation of features appeared. A
canonical list of such features is beyond my wit. Say, very loosely,
ability to articulate self-awareness, ability to abstract, to
hypothesize and (to make a subtle distinction) the ability both to
lie and to utter counterfactuals.
I think it was Gregory Bateson who said that he would believe that an
AI -- an artificial intelligence -- was really conscious in the human
sense when its reply to something said to it was, "That reminds me of
a story."
What we became hard-wired for -- the innate capacity, the emergence of
which Jaynes was trying to get a handle on -- is stories. Yarns.
What the story teller does is create a coherent stream of language
that, from his point of view, maps his internal experience of the
world. The same cognitive apparatus allows (or causes) the listener
to construct his own fictitious -- today we'd say "virtual" --
experience. And stories don't have to be "true" in any objective or
even logical sense. Look at how the "stories" on TV absorb our
attention so easily and so totally, exploiting the intrinsic
("hard-wired" if you will) response to stories.
I think religion and ideology, patriotism and valor, literature and
filial piety, bar fights and family loyalty -- well, here's another
list that is beyond me -- all these emerge from stories. I think
that telling stories and listening to stories is the cognitive
mechanism at the core of practically every socially complex behavior.
To get back, very slightly, on topic....
The dogmata of market capitalism and Soviet communism, of Roman
Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, Chicago School economics and
American exceptionalism all have gaping lacunae, counterfactuals and
contradictions but dammit, they all have *great* stories.
Of course, stories aren't the whole of psychology any more than libido
or language are. But if you're looking for an underlying mechanism
that explains why the Chicago School or the Bush(43) administration or
the present teabagger opponents of the present US administration have
covens of leaders and flocks of followers, I suggest it's because they
have and propagate good stories. One might even look to the lack of
good stories to explain the present weakness of the Canadian Liberals.
Fundamentalist Christians take biblical accounts to be literally
true and lament that "liberal" Christians believe that the stories of
the Bible are metaphors and fictional yarns that are somehow edifying.
At the other end of the spectrum, Unitarian Universalists believe just
that. (Correct me if I'm wrong: I know about fundamentalists but not
much about UUism.) I surmise that in econmics and politics, we are
asked to be fundamentalists, to believe that the stories are literally
true. That may have been okay when the stories accumlated on their
own and were about King Arthur or Robin Hood or George Washington or
Louis Brandeis. But it's no longer okay when our stories are crafted by
highly trained career maniplators of money, power and public opinion.
If we allow our collective, shared library of stories to be
overwhelmed by ones constructed, explicitly and with enormous
expertise, in the interest of the corporatist agenda, we submit to the
management of a major aspect of being human to that agenda.
It doesn't matter whether the story tellers are ad agencies,
economists, political ideologues or the chairman of the Fed. If we
imbibe thier carefully fabricated stories without looking critically
at what's on the ends of our forks, we'll end up drinking their
Kool-Aid. We're hard-wired that way.
FWIW,
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020/>www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906557020/>/>,
<www.handlo.com> _______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
