Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.

Thoughts on Assimilation August 27, 2015

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine".

I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover.

The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our world-conquering success is our ability to cooperate, especially on large scales, with individuals who are unrelated. Like any good thesis, it raises more questions than it answers--many of the same questions raised by "Dragon Theory".

Exactly what is meant by "cooperation"? Several threads of cooperation come to mind and all of them promote "assimilation" - surrender of individual human nature to an artificially created entity.

• Trade. There is plenty of evidence that humans are traders by nature, quite willing to barter with strange humans rather than simply stealing what they want. Trade is the mother of "economy" -- a slippery slope leading to the idea of money. The more a person depends on trade the more a person becomes defined by economic principals. A person becomes poor when he measures himself by the degree to which he participates and relies upon the money economy and that participation is slight (the famously large part of the human race that lives on less than a dollar a day).
• Conquest, loot and pillage. A very popular form of human cooperation which is made possible when individuals think and act as members of a gang or army. The degree of coherence and assimilation often determines the "success" of the conquering hoard. In many cases, it defeats enemies who are "weak" only because they are less organized, less assimilated. The Mongol "hoards" are my favourite example of a "war machine", which assimilated most of the civilized world by means of a very short list of operating rules - laws which explicitly overrule such human qualities such as mercy, fallibility and judgement. 

There are obviously many other forms of assimilation that humans are good at (religion comes to mind), but I will pass over these to focus on one that has, until today, escaped my notice: language.

It seems that language is the key to the unique degree of cooperation that Marean talks about. Today, I started to wonder if, by learning a language, we automatically become assimilated into something that has a life of its own. This is an idea that is hard to discuss using language itself, like fish discovering water. Do we surrender something of ourselves by learning to describe our experience in the same way as those around us? Without realizing it, do we learn to ignore every aspect of our experience that cannot be communicated and discussed with those around us who speak the same language?

Western philosophers assume that all truth is accessible to language. There are notable exceptions. Wittgenstein claimed that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. Of course, we can't say just what is passed over. But we can ask if the same things will be passed over by speakers of different languages and whether there are important things that will be passed over by any speaker of any language.

I have been a computer programmer since there were computer programmers, I have seen the evolution of computer languages over half a century. "Languages" like FORTRAN and COBOL barely deserve the name of language. Modern languages, like Java, make it possible to express ideas that could never be expressed in COBOL or FORTRAN - ideas that are, in many cases, very difficult to express in "human" languages. For me, it's quite natural to see that language defines a world of ideas that can be expressed and also a (presumably larger) world of ideas that cannot be expressed. Moreover, as a follower of Zen and Tao, I'm quite aware that the world is larger than the world of human ideas, whether these ideas can be expressed in language or not.

Returning to the issue of assimilation, is language the necessary mechanism of all assimilation? Noam Chomsky famously claims that the ability to form ideas that can be communicated linguistically is an innate quality of the human brain. Does this mean that we are "hard wired" to be assimilated?

Human languages are famously sloppy, fuzzy and ambiguous. Computer languages are none of these things. The use of "language" to describe both systems is an analogy only, but the language of Mathematics is closer to the computer side of the analogy than the human side. What is more, hardly any scientific knowledge is respectable these days unless it can be mathematically described. 

Again, we are faced with the problem of a fish discovering water. It seems that we are totally immersed in a world that is described (or lied about) exclusively in language. If, for the moment, we imagine a world outside of that world of language, we come to understand what we mean by being assimilated by language.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgment rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action - for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

- Truth Dig

What would be the alternative? How does the fish walk up on the beach? One hint is the idea of aesthetics. Anyone who appreciates art understands the futility of describing its meaning with words. Yet there is meaning. To the Western mind, a "philosophy" is something constructed out of words. This includes Western religions, such as Christianity, whose "theology" rests firmly on centuries of arcane interpretations of ancient stories. Other traditions, especially Tao and Zen, specifically eschew words and even human ideas in general to promote an aesthetic -- a way experiencing the world wordlessly.

This points to a way of escaping assimilation (at least this type of assimilation), which is to cultivate aesthetic sense. This is to value our direct experience of the world and to be skeptical of attempts to draw us into the herd by means of language. We need to be skeptical of "reasons why", interpretation, valuation, analysis and synthesis. Actually this isn't such a huge leap. We have just been sold the idea that things are not "real" or "important" unless they can be boiled down to language. Most of us understand quite clearly that this is wrong but (of course!) we have problems saying just why this is. 

Perhaps the world we "pass over in silence" is the important one. Perhaps it is where we can discover who we really are.

Note to self: comment on "Monkey Sphere and Echo Chamber"