Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Read online

  From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

  Robert N. Bellah

  Preface ix

  Acknowledgments xxv

  1. Religion and Reality 1

  2. Religion and Evolution 44

  3. Tribal Religion: The Production of Meaning 117

  4. From Tribal to Archaic Religion: Meaning and Power 175

  5. Archaic Religion: God and King 210

  6. The Axial Age I: Introduction and Ancient Israel 265

  7. The Axial Age II: Ancient Greece 324

  8. The Axial Age III: China in the Late First Millennium BCE 399

  9. The Axial Age IV: Ancient India 481

  10. Conclusion 567

  Notes 609

  Index 715

  Very deep is the well of the past.

  THOMAS MANN, Joseph andHis Brothers

  Those moments which the spirit appears to have outgrown still belong to it in the depths of its present. Just as it has passed through all its moments in history, so also must it pass through them again in the present.

  HEGEL, Reason in History

  When one reads the poems and the writings of the ancients, how could it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one should try to understand the age in which they have lived. This can be described as “looking for friends in history.”

  MENCIUS 5B:8

  This is a large book about a large subject. It is therefore incumbent on me to give the reader an explanation of why it is so long (it could be many times longer), a road map, and a response to certain objections that may leap to the mind of some readers. I will begin by using the three epigraphs above to give an idea of what I am trying to do.

  Mann’s metaphor of the past as a well, in the opening sentence of his book, is complemented immediately by his second sentence: “Should we not call it bottomless?” It becomes clear in the long prologue that starts with these sentences that Mann is afraid, as he embarks on a story that reaches back into the second millennium BCE, that he will fall ever further into the past, lose his grip on each ledge that he reaches for in order to try to stop his fall, and instead plummet ever deeper into what appears to be bottomless. Among other things he shudders at the thought of falling below the human altogether into the deep crevasses of biological evolution. Toward the end of the prologue he becomes preoccupied with another fear: that the past is dead and that to fall into the past is to die. But just as he completes the prologue he comes to the truth that guides his enterprise: he thinks about time. “The past of life, the dead-and-gone world” is death, yet death, because it is the eternally present, is life. Thus of the past he writes, “For it is, always is, however much we may say It was.”’ Girded with the thought that the past is, and therefore though apparently dead is also alive, he is ready to embark on his sixteen-year project of writing a book that even in the one-volume edition is over 1,200 pages long.

  Hegel, we might say, picks up Mann’s metaphor of the well and uses it in a way that Mann doesn’t: the well as a source that gives us living water, without which we would die. Hegel is our modern Aristotle who took the effort to think about everything and put it into time, development, and history. For Hegel, we cannot know objective spirit, what we would call culture in the deepest sense, without knowing its history, even though we may think, wrongly, that we have outgrown it. Unless we pass through all the moments of the spirit’s history in our present, we will not know who we are, will not be conscious of subjective spirit-that is, of our present cultural possibilities.

  Finally, Mencius suggests that in history we can find friends who, if we make the effort to understand them, can help us on our way.’ The passage in the epigraph is preceded by the thought that a “Gentleman”-the English term used to translate the ancient Chinese term junzi for a man of superior social status, which Confucius had transformed into a term for a man of superior ethical quality-would seek to befriend other Gentlemen in his own village and state, and even the whole empire, but also in history itself. Mencius is reminding us that we can find friends from whom we can learn all the way into the deep past.

  Eric Hobsbawm has suggested that the acceleration of cultural change in our most recent past has threatened to cut us loose from history altogether, “snapping the links between generations, that is to say, between past and That would threaten the entire project to which I have just shown Mann, Hegel, and Mencius contributing, and call into question who we are as humans or where we want to go. No past, no future: it’s that simple. One might also say, no present either. Cultural vacuum. Not likely, but even a threat of such a thing has to be taken seriously and has been countered of late by the call for deep or big history. David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History and Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain may be taken as signs of the time’ What Christian and Smail do is link us back to our history as a species, one species among many, all of which are our relatives, right back to the unicellular organisms of 3.5 billion years ago. And Christian goes even further than that, starting with the big bang of 13.5 billion years ago and ending with a universe that will have decayed into a state of “featureless equilibrium” billions of years hence. Both Christian and Smail are historians, and both recognize that they are breaking rather strong taboos in their profession, rejecting the established view that history begins with texts and so is only about 5,000 years old, and that anything before that is to be left to biologists and anthropologists. I follow them, rather modestly confining my concern to one subject area, religion, though in premodern societies that is quite an inclusive category, and to our own species, with only a glance into our biological ancestry, and ending, not with the present, but with the first millennium BCE, for reasons I will explain later.

  One thing that both Smail and Christian take for granted, with which I very much agree, is that history goes all the way back and any distinction between history and prehistory is arbitrary. That means that biological historythat is, evolution-is part of the human story all the way through, though quite a long time ago it gave rise to culture and has coevolved with it ever since.5 That will inevitably raise questions that I can deal with at length only in Chapter 2, which is devoted to religion in the context of human evolution, but that I must address briefly right from the start. Mann in his Prologue to Joseph and His Brothers was especially frightened of falling in the “bottomless” well into the prehuman vortex of evolution. He need not have been. Even though he wrote that book from 1926 to 1942, before the great advances in evolutionary theory that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century, there was still enough available for him, if he had had the time, to find that he had many friends among nonhuman organisms. It was known then, for example, that the atmosphere of the earth, with its plentiful supply of oxygen, was not present in the early years of our solar system, and that it developed only because unicellular organisms in the primeval sea had discovered how to use photosynthesis to feed themselves, thus producing a surplus of oxygen that, over the course of a billion years or so, created an atmosphere in which multicellular life-plants, animals, and otherscould begin to inhabit the land masses that had previously been barren rocks. A little vote of thanks to these tiny microscopic creatures, without whom nothing presently existing on dry land would be here, might have been fearlessly offered.

  Most worrisome to many who fear the merging of evolution and history is the belief that they are based on two incompatible methodologies: evolution is natural science, rigidly deterministic and reductionist, allowing no freedom or creativity, whereas history is a humanistic study in which hu
man freedom is at the center, in both its marvelous creativity and its terrifying violence. Grim determinism is not missing in some forms of neo-Darwinism, might I say the fundamentalist forms, in which the subject of evolution is genes, selfish genes at that, and organisms are only vehicles at the mercy of the blind forces of selection through which genes relentlessly propagate themselves. Richard Dawkins, particularly in his widely known book The Sefsh Gene, is the best-known proponent of this view. In that book he writes, “We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. I shall argue that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior.”’ Dawkins’s views attracted widespread attention after the publication of The Selfish Gene, but since then other, competing views have gained

  Most students of evolution continue to believe, contrary to Dawkins, that it is the organism that evolves, not just the genes.’ Mary Jane West-Eberhard emphasizes the role of the organism (phenotype) in its own evolution: “I consider genes followers, not leaders, in adaptive evolution.“9 Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, in their important book The Plausibility of Life, develop a conception of the organismic control of variation: “On the side of generating phenotypic variation, we believe the organism indeed participates in its own evolution, and does so with a bias related to its long history of variation and selection.”” Of particular importance are the behavioral and symbolic aspects of evolution, which build on genetic capacities but are themselves not genetically controlled, as it is there that we will probably find most of the resources for religion-cultural developments from biological beginnings.” The evolutionary linguist Derek Bickerton suggests just how far back we must go to find these beginnings. Speaking of language but implicitly of culture, he writes: “The trouble with almost all previous attempts to look at origins is that they do not go back far enough. If we were to understand thoroughly all that language involved, we would probably have to go back to the birth of the lowliest animate creatures, for language depends crucially on a matrix of volition and primitive consciousness which must have begun to be laid down hundreds of millions of years ago.” 12

  A very suggestive elaboration of the degree to which organisms participate in their own evolution, an important kind of behavioral evolution, has been offered by John Odling-Smee and his colleagues in their book Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution. Odling-Smee et al. argue that we cannot understand evolution unless we see how actively organisms create the conditions for their own evolution. Natural selection is indeed blind, yet paradoxically it leads to purposive action: “If natural selection is blind, yet niche construction is semantically informed and goal-directed, then evolution must comprise an entirely purposeless process, namely, natural selection, selecting for purposive organisms, namely niche-constructing organisms. This must be true at least insofar as the niche-constructing organisms that are selected by natural selection function so as to survive and reproduce.“13 Therefore Dawkins’s argument that the unit of biological selection is the gene and that the organism is a “throwaway survival machine” is fundamentally mistaken. If the organism can learn, and that learning can change its environment and thus the survival chances of its offspring, then it is the organism, though to be sure it includes the genes (Odling-Smee et al. call it the phenogenotype), that is “the central unit” of evolution.14

  There are a number of continuities between humans and nonhuman mammals and birds, some closely related genetically and some fairly distant, that I will discuss further in Chapter 2, but among them are empathy, including occasional empathy with members of other species, a sense of justice, and the capacity for many forms of cooperation.” Play, found only in mammals and birds, with perhaps a few exceptions, is a particularly significant evolutionary heritage, as we will see. All is not rosy: aggression and violence also evolve, with the particularly nasty result that humans and our nearest primate relative, the chimpanzees, deliberately kill other members of their own species.

  What evolution as a whole means gets us into large issues, which almost inevitably become issues of ultimate meaning that overlap with religion. Some scientists have expressed “awe” at the immense process of evolution extending over billions of years. Whether awe moves us into another realm than science is something we will have to consider later. Even when evolution is declared meaningless, as when Dawkins writes, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference,“16 that is a kind of religious position: the ultimate meaning of life is that there is no meaning. Perhaps Dawkins too has moved into another sphere.

  I have been trying to suggest that evolution is considerably more complex than what some biologists and many humanists think, that there is a place within it for meaning and purpose, and that indeed meaning and purpose evolve. My particular interest in evolution is in the evolution of capacities, which has been a remarkable part of the story: the capacity for creating oxygen; the capacity for forming large complex organisms after a couple of billion years when only unicellular organisms had been around; the capacity for endothermy-the ability of birds and mammals to maintain a constant body temperature that allows them to survive in quite extreme hot or cold temperatures; the capacity to spend days or weeks, in the case of many mammals and birds, or years, in the case of chimpanzees and other apes, or decades, in the case of humans, in raising helpless infants and children unable to survive on their own; the capacity to make atomic bombs. Evolution gives us no guarantee that we will use these new capacities wisely or well. Such capacities can help us or they can destroy us, depending on what we do with them.

  I hope this gives some idea of what I mean by evolution and why I think it is important if we are to understand who we are and where we might want to go. But what do I mean by religion, and what is the evolution of religion? Religion is a complex phenomenon, not easily defined, though I will spend much of the first two chapters trying to define it. Just to get things started I will draw on Clifford Geertz’s well-known definition.17 Paraphrasing him, religion is a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.18 It is interesting to note what Geertz left out. There is no mention of “belief in supernatural beings” or “belief in gods (God),” which many current definitions take for granted as essential. It is not that Geertz or I think such beliefs are absent in religion, though in some cases they may be, just that they are not the defining aspect.

  I agree with Geertz that symbols are basic to religion (as they are to many spheres of human action, including science); that is to say, religion becomes possible only with the emergence of language.” The idea of a prelinguistic religion, as in the notion of “chimpanzee spirituality,” seems implausible to me, though there are developments among some nonhuman animals that provide resources that could contribute to what would become religion among human beings. There is even the possibility that something like religion might have developed in earlier species of the genus Homo, Homo erectus in particular, who might have had some kind of protolanguage, but not full modern syntactical language.

  In his essay “Religion as a Cultural System,” Geertz was trying to specify what religion is in relation to a number of other spheres that are organized by other systems of symbols. Following Alfred Schutz, he contrasts these several cultural spheres to the world of daily life, which Schutz took to be the “paramount reality” of life. As Geertz puts it:

  The everyday world of common-sense objects and practical acts is, as Schutz says, the paramount reality of human experience-paramount in the sense that it is the world in which we are most solidly rooted, whose inherent actuality we can hardly question (however much we may question certain portions of it), and from whose pre
ssures and requirements we can least escape.20

  What distinguishes common sense as a mode of “seeing” is, as Schutz has pointed out, a simple acceptance of the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they seem to be-what is sometimes called naive realism-and the pragmatic motive, the wish to act upon that world so as to bend it to one’s practical purposes, to master it, or so far as that proves impossible, to adjust to it.21

  For Schutz the world of daily life is characterized by striving, by working, by anxiety. It is the premier world of functioning, of adapting, of surviving. It is what some biologists and some historians think is all there is. Among language-using humans, however, the world of daily life is never all there is, and the other realities that human culture gives rise to cannot fail but overlap with the world of daily life, whose relentless utilitarianism can never be absolute.

  There are two more things that we can say now, saving for later a fuller discussion of the world of daily life. In spite of its “apparent actuality,” the world of daily life is a culturally, symbolically constructed world, not the world as it actually is. As such it varies in terms of time and space, with much in common across the historical and cultural landscape, but with occasional sharp differences. Yet because the world of daily life appears “natural,” it involves the suspension of disbelief in the world as it appears. In what Schutz calls “the natural attitude” one “puts in brackets the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears.“22

  What is significant here is that in the various other worlds-cultural spheres, symbolic systems-in which Geertz was interested throughout his life, the brackets that the commonsense world of daily life puts on the idea that anything could be other than it appears have come off. In these other worlds, taken-for-granted assumptions no longer rule. In “Religion as a Cultural System” Geertz compares the religious perspective to two other perspectives besides the commonsensical one in terms of which the world may be construed: the scientific and the aesthetic.23 In the scientific perspective, he says, the givenness of daily life disappears: “Deliberate doubt and systematic inquiry, the suspension of the pragmatic motive in favor of disinterested observation, the attempt to analyze the world in terms of formal concepts whose relationships to the informal conceptions of common sense become increasingly problematic-here are the hallmarks of the attempt to grasp the world scientifically.“24 Rather than pursue Geertz’s to me somewhat eccentric view of the aesthetic perspective, I will return to its distinctive features briefly toward the end of this Preface.