Religion, Emergence, and the Origins of Meaning: Beyond Durkheim and Rappaport 9789004293762, 9789004293656

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Religion, Emergence, and the Origins of Meaning

Philosophical Studies in Science and Religion Series Editors Dirk Evers (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) James Van Slyke (Fresno Pacific University, usa) Advisory Board Philip Clayton (Claremont University, usa) George Ellis (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Niels Henrik Gregersen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) Antje Jackelyn (Bishop of Lund, Sweden) Nancey Murphy (Fuller Theological Seminary, usa) Robert Neville (Boston University, usa) Palmyre Oomen (Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Thomas Jay Oord (Northwest Nazarene University) V.V. Raman (University of Rochester, usa) Robert John Russell (Graduate Theological Union, usa) F. LeRon Shults (University of Agder, Norway) Nomanul Haq (University of Pennsylvania, usa) Kang Phee Seng (Centre for Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong) Trinh Xuan Thuan (University of Virginia, usa) J. Wentzel van Huyssteen (Princeton Theological Seminary, usa)

VOLUME 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/pssr



Religion, Emergence, and the Origins of Meaning Beyond Durkheim and Rappaport By

Paul Cassell

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cassell, Paul, 1964 Religion, emergence, and the origins of meaning : beyond Durkheim and Rappaport / by Paul Cassell.   pages cm. -- (Philosophical studies in science and religion, ISSN 1877-8542 ; volume 5)  Originally presented as the author’s thesis (Ph. D.)--Boston University, 2012.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-29365-6 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29376-2 (e-book) 1. Religion-Philosophy. 2. Emergence (Philosophy) 3. Durkheim, Émile, 1858-1917. 4. Rappaport, Roy A. I. Title.  BL51.C385 2015  210--dc23 2015009784

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877–8542 isbn 978-90-04-29365-6 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29376-2 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgements VII

Part 1 The Emergent Dynamics of Religion 1 Religion as an Emergent Phenomenon 3 Introduction 3 An Overview of the Argument 6 Background to the Emergent Theories of Durkheim and Rappaport 9 Assumptions I will Make in this Study 12 2 Rappaport, Revisited 21 Introduction 21 Rappaport’s Theory of Religion 23 An Alternative Account of Rappaport 32 The Example of Haitian Voodoo 40 Summary 41 3 Emergence and Semiotics – a Primer 44 Emergent Systems 44 Semiotics 53 Important Ideas from Other Theorists 63 Summary 73 4 Religion’s Emergent Characteristics 74 The Importance of Human Culture 74 The Emergent Dynamics of Human Culture 82 Teleodynamic Religion and the Role of Symbolic Reference 93 Semantic Closure, Strange Loops, and the Creation of a Social ‘Self’ 101

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Contents

Part 2 The Emergence of Meaning in Religion 5 David Sloan Wilson and Daniel Dennett – Religion without Meaning 107 Wilson’s Thesis 107 Is Religion Best Assessed by a Biological Theory? 112 Daniel Dennett’s View of Religion 116 Response from an Emergent Approach to Religion 123 6 Émile Durkheim and the Emergence of Meaningful Social Agency 127 Emergence and Cultural Sociality 127 Why Religion? 131 The Problem with Durkheim’s Conception of Religion 135 Durkheim and Emergent Meaning 139 7 Varieties of Religious Meaning 141 Religion Offers ‘Therapeutic Truth’ 141 Social Orientation 148 Emergent Selves needing Orientation 150 Different Ways of Considering the ‘Spiritual Map’, and Their Implications 154 Summary 161 Appendix: Confucianism as a Test Case 165 Works Cited 182 Index 192

Acknowledgements This book is the result of a Ph.D. dissertation completed under the guidance of Wesley Wildman, of Boston University’s Graduate Division of Religious Studies. I will always be grateful for the disciplined critiques and patient encouragement he offered as I worked my way through what was then called the ‘Science, Philosophy, and Religion’ program at bu. Wesley’s commitment to scientific plausibility and precision served as a constant spur to my thinking, and I engaged in many fierce debates with him – mostly in my imagination – about the contents of this book over the years. Thank you, Wesley, for being the watchful advisor you have been. The hard work of turning a dissertation, written for a couple of specialists, into a book with a (hopefully) larger readership was done while serving as Post-doctoral Fellow in Science and Religion for the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University. Director Hava Tirosh-Samuelson’s wise counsel and subtle prodding kept me on track and motivated to finish the work, and her encouragement to take my ideas public at various forums at asu gave me important feedback from many, varied sources. I am especially grateful for the feedback I received from Shade Shutters at asu’s Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, as well as for the personal support I received from Ilene Singer and Dawn Beeson of the Center for Jewish Studies. Terrence Deacon’s monumentally important book, The Symbolic Species, served as the initial spark that turned a vague idea I had about religion into a plausible thesis. I have based my approach to the study of religion on his more recent work re-conceptualizing emergence theory, and his decision to serve on my dissertation committee gave me the motivation to produce a work that truly honored his insights. I don’t know how many times I came up with what I thought was an original insight, only to find it already stated – and much more brilliantly – in some paper or other by Terry. Robert Neville, Adam Seligman, and Garth Green (all at bu when the bulk of my dissertation was written) each contributed critical insights to my thinking. Bob Neville introduced me to C.S. Peirce, Adam Seligman to Roy Rappaport and Émile Durkheim, and Garth Green to the German Idealist tradition. I would never have been able to see how symbolic reference, ritual formality, and human subjectivity are so wonderfully tangled together in religion without their influence. Many of my fellow students in the religious studies program at bu were critically important, intellectually and emotionally, to this work getting done.

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Nik Zanetti, Yair Lior, Ben Thompson, Nat Barrett, Per Smith, Josh Reeves, and Rick Peters all contributed to this work in some way. A few kind Bostonians also deserve mention. Mat Berman was (and remains) a great friend and critic, and Glen Hodges, besides being another great friend, was a wise sounding board for most of the ideas presented in this book. Larry Margulies, owner of the Pavement coffee shops in Boston, provided the comfortable space and iced coffees that fueled the project. I am particularly grateful to Dave, Kristin, Aidan and Maddie Wensel for letting me live in their home when funds ran out, as well as to Dave, Grace, Ben, Patrick, Elizabeth, Nicholas, and Claire Schmelzer, who did the same. It was Kent Schwager’s honest, loyal, and passionate criticism of my religious beliefs in the 1990’s that “first interrupted my dogmatic slumber” and eventually led me to graduate school, and it was his generous financial support in the fall of 2000 that gave me the opportunity to put on paper the preliminary ideas that would become this book. Finally, I’d like to thank the three who have contributed the most personally. My parents, Rod and Evelyn Cassell, have supported me in every way possible over the years, and I am grateful for their love and encouragement. And Laura Cassell, my best friend and biggest cheerleader, gave all of herself in support of my dreams. I thank you with all of my heart.

part 1 The Emergent Dynamics of Religion

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chapter 1

Religion as an Emergent Phenomenon

Introduction

The central argument of this book is that recent developments in emergence theory, a theory developed to explain the presence and features of life and mind in the universe, provide important insights that help explain the presence and features of religion. Religion, like life and mind, exhibits features that on the face of it seem to challenge the sufficiency of scientific explanation, inviting the traditional conclusion that it requires explanation in terms of nonphysical, divine causes. An emergent theory of religion would seek to give these surprising features their full due, even as it denies that they are caused by something outside of nature. Modern emergence theory was developed to make sense of the surprising qualities and capacities of life and mind; an important conclusion of the theory is that these qualities and capacities are correlated with specific types of systems that utilize signs – things that refer to other things. From an emergence perspective, nature is viewed as having the potential to stumble upon systems whose organizational dynamics use signs to maintain themselves and navigate their environment, without the need for divine help. I will argue that religion is an example of this potential. Emergent accounts attempt to provide natural explanations for what has traditionally begged for supernatural explanation. It has long been thought that living organisms need explanation beyond simple matter and mechanical laws of interaction to capture what makes them alive.1 Human minds have also suggested explanation in terms of something ‘extra’, such as an animating soul.2 Rather than appeal to supernatural causes of life and mind, emergence theorists have attempted to capture the dynamical logic of such phenomena, and articulate how this dynamic can come about in ways consistent with the 1 For a history of such accounts concerning life, see Glacken (1967). For a recent acknowledgement of the ‘problem of life’ from the perspective of a physicist, see Davies (1999). 2 Western traditions and many Eastern traditions have accepted the reality of a nonphysical soul as defining a human person (see Murphy (2006) for an overview of Western positions, and Cope (2000) as representative of a Hindu perspective). It should be noted that even forms of Buddhism that deny the reality of the soul do not deny the stubborn belief in the reality of the soul, which is the point.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293762_002

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second law of thermodynamics, a law which states that the entropy of an isolated system irreversibly evolves toward a state with maximum entropy. Religion represents a third example of a phenomenon that has traditionally been explained in terms of supernatural causes. The ‘divine’, conceived as a non-material but efficacious cause, is perhaps the key idea distinguishing religious forms of human sociality from other forms.3 Like the ‘life-force’, or the ‘soul’, divine ‘Beings’ and ‘Ways’4 are invoked to account for the psychological and social effects of religious participation. What an emergent account of religion calls attention to is the possibility that there is no preexisting divine that religious communities interact with, just as, presumably, there are no preexisting souls that give each human being their uniqueness and subjective experience. Rather, both ‘the divine’ and ‘the soul’ represent emergent qualities that arise as a result of the organization of dynamical interaction. As emergence theory has been developed in recent decades by theorists such as John von Neumann, Howard Pattee, Douglas Hofstadter, and Terrence Deacon, two important theoretical convictions stand out. The first is that when something is composed of many interacting parts, the characteristic features of the phenomenon are not solely determined by the features that the parts alone, in isolation, demonstrate. The organization of the way parts interact with each other over time matters, because how a system is organized results in different global and systemic properties. The second theoretical conviction is that unexpected qualities and capacities arise in certain classes of phenomena that are organized in such a way so as to take advantage of encoded memory. And since any form of encoded memory is a sign of something other than itself, some theory of reference – a theory of how one thing can refer another thing to some third thing – becomes necessary to understand such phenomena. These theorists developed these convictions as they noted difficulties in standard scientific explanations of the origin and development of life, and the origin and development of the human mind in its networks of relations with other minds – two of the most important events in the history of Earth. Life 3 Philosopher Daniel Dennett, for example, says that the “core” of religion is that it “invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do” (2006, 11–12). 4 Throughout this book I will follow the conclusion of the Comparative Religious Ideas Project suggesting religious cognitive content falls along a spectrum between two ‘poles’. One pole views religious content as ‘ontological ultimates’, while the other views such content as ‘ultimate ways or paths’. Thus, the general term ‘divine concepts’ and the correlative phrases ‘the divine’ and ‘divine Beings and Ways’ will be used to cover both of these poles. See Neville and Wildman (2001, 209); for a fuller explication of this project’s conclusions, see Neville (2001).

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and mind share a common pattern of organization in that they both use signs involving symbolic reference, embodied in the referential capacity of dna and human languages. This capacity is central to the way lineages of living things reproduce themselves and adapt to their environments over the course of evolution, and to the way human brains create a sense of self and negotiate culturally-shared accounts of the natural and social worlds. Human minds, in addition to demonstrating adaptive intelligence, demonstrate other surprising capacities, such as subjective experience and the ability to register qualities such as value and meaning. Apart from the few researchers investigating nature from an emergence or ‘semiotic’ perspective,5 research has largely ignored how symbolic reference is expressed in biology and brain functioning. Like life and mind, scholars have noted that religion is defined by symbol use of some sort, though I suggest the use of this term has not been adequately defined and delimited. A central goal of this book will be to explain the emergent qualities of religion which distinguish it from other social forms by explaining the way symbolic reference guides the dynamical organization of religious communities. This represents a very different strategy from materialist reductionist approaches to explaining religion and the other phenomena noted here. Griffin (1997) points out that at the birth of modern science, early theorists decided to separate the capacities of matter from the capacities of a Divine Creator. Matter was considered incapable of producing the effects seen in life, mind, and religion, thus necessitating appeal to the Creator to account for such phenomena. Though later scientists lost the conviction that appealing to God was useful, they failed to reassess the capacities of Nature lost in the early-modern metaphysical bargain. The capacities and features of life, mind, and religion were simply assumed to be accountable by mechanistic explanation. The stubborn resistance that such phenomena have shown to mechanistic explanation, however, has rejuvenated theories of nature able to account for them.6 Simply put, the metaphysical options available to explain the features of nature that scientific explanations leave out are to appeal to a divine cause that is responsible for what science ignores, or to develop more fruitful and complete 5 ‘Semiotics’ is the name given to the investigation of sign use. See Favareau (2007) and Deacon (2012) for recent accounts of the conceptual problems that have plagued investigation of natural phenomena that utilize ‘signs’. Pattee (1995) has noted that the only place semiotics appears in the biological sciences as now practiced is in theories of the origin of the genetic code. There, the physical and logical basis of the distinction between matter and symbol, and the question of how matter and symbol are related, is discussed. 6 See Nagel (2012) for a recent overview of the way this problem forces reconsideration of our views of nature.

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accounts of the capacities of the natural world, such that life and mind do not seem to be strangers in that world.7 This second metaphysical option is precisely what emergence theory is designed to do.

An Overview of the Argument

This book is not the first to argue that emergence theory might be relevant to explaining religion. Two of the most important works in the history of religious studies – Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity – explicitly analyze religion in terms of earlier forms of emergence theory. The recent improvements made to the theory since Durkheim and Rappaport published can be used to illuminate their arguments and render their claims about ‘sui generis properties’ and ‘cybernetic social dynamics’ more precisely and more fruitfully.8 Durkheim and Rappaport give powerful reasons for thinking that the social and psychological effects of religion represent new capabilities and qualities of human social systems, distinguishing religion from more mundane forms of sociality, which is precisely what justifies the field of religious studies as independent from psychology, sociology, and political science.9 But Durkheim and Rappaport did not yet possess the conceptual tools needed to link meaning and reference to the emergent dynamics they saw in religion. Modern emergence theory is able to characterize different kinds of emergent systems in 7 The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has devoted much of his career to demonstrating the explanatory dilemma implicit in assuming ‘dumb matter’ can explain mental phenomena. See Peters (2011) for an enlightening analysis of Plantinga’s strategy, why he has been so successful, and why reconceiving nature is the key to getting out of the intellectual bind that materialist reductionism has put us in. 8 Sawyer (2002) has shown that Durkheim uses the phrase sui generis as a technical term indicating his utilization of an early emergence theory paradigm. Rappaport’s term ‘cybernetics’ is synonymous with what the theorists I draw upon mean by ‘emergence’; both terms refer to how relational and organizational features of an aggregate play a causal role in system dynamics, resulting in new system capabilities and qualities. 9 This claim is complicated by the way Durkheim, as founder of the field of sociology, theoretically articulates his beliefs about the relationship of religion to political society. Durkheim’s explicit conflation of religion and political society is due, I suggest, to his inability to theoretically articulate a distinction between these, which he otherwise suggests. That he wants to distinguish these – or at least that we may want to on the basis of his argument – can be seen in the examples he gives to illustrate what he means by religion, and by his tortured explanation of how a religious totem functions. I will argue this in Ch. 6.

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terms of the different ways they use signs to reproduce their own internal dynamics in relation to an external environment, and thus create meaning. This means that recent advances in emergence theory are extremely promising for interpreting religious sociality, in which meanings and beliefs play vital roles. This will allow us to push beyond Durkheim and Rappaport’s views of religion. Historically, emergence theorists have walked a conceptual tightrope; on the one hand, they have argued that scientific accounts of life and mind are incomplete; on the other hand, since they reject pre-existing spiritual causes of such phenomena, they have needed to invoke something else to fill the explanatory gap. Early emergentists appealed to new causal forces in nature, such as ‘configurational forces’ in chemistry, to account for things like biological life. However, invoking new forces has not proved convincing; physicist Paul Davies explains, “wishy-washy talk of global cooperation is no substitute for observing a real, honest-to-goodness force that moves matter at a specific place . . . The history of science is littered with failed forces or causative agencies (the ether, the élan vital, psi forces . . .) that try to explain some form of emergent behavior on the cheap” (2006). More profitably, other emergentists have focused on the organization of life and mind to explain their apparently non-mechanistic features, conceiving that in some systems, the unorganized dynamics of interacting parts can become self-simplifying10 in robust and discernible ways. In these cases, organization emerges when relational and interactive dynamics constrain the degrees of freedom that otherwise would exist among the parts composing the system. The chief advance of recent emergent theorizing – particularly theories coming from Howard Pattee, John von Neumann, Douglas Hofstadter, and Terrence Deacon – has been to recognize that there are different types of emergent phenomena, and to notice that in one of those types, some form of memory is responsible for the system’s organization. When we apply this insight to understanding human sociality, we can theorize that there are different emergent types of human sociality, some of which involve memory, as is the case when language and culture mediate human sociality. Analyzing the different ways memory can function to produce human sociality may lead us to identify one particular form that corresponds to what we mean by ‘religion’. I argue that there are three different classes of specifically human sociality, corresponding to the three ways memory can function to produce human sociality. None of these types would be possible without symbolic language, and together they determine the ‘possibility-space’ for socio-cultural development. 10

The term is from Deacon (2012).

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Each class is an entailment of the formal organizational features of sharing a language. These three classes are: (1) the fundamental, ineliminable equality of all language users as participants in a ‘community of interpretation’, which necessarily flows out of the interchangeability of hearer and speaker, interpreter and producer of linguistic utterances. Our ability to become a conversation partner with any other with whom we share a language – whether powerful, rich, and gifted, or powerless, excluded, and challenged – and to be able to ‘speak up’ for one’s self vis-à-vis another who might dismiss our status as persons, is a formal result of being a part of a community of interpretation. Participation in such a community means we do not have to depend on another to grant us our identity as equals; it is implicit in the capacity to enter into a conversation with another. As language-sharers, we are all equal partakers of humanity. (2) A culturally passed-on form of sociality that results from the linguistic ability to represent sociality itself. We can theorize about sociality, the way our groups should be structured, and even the reasons why we should band together in groups in the first place, producing a cornucopia of social forms. We can identify with a nation-state, types of political organization, an ethnic group, our fellow employees, those with whom we share musical tastes, gustatory tastes, and sexual tastes; our economic class, our sex, our age; we can organize teams, boating trips, political revolutions, and online-communities. All of these are made possible as we allow ourselves to be guided by a shared linguistic map of social space, both as it currently exists, and as we might want it to exist. (3) Sociality that is organized with respect to the divine, as we affirm and embody specifically articulated divine Beings and Ways. In religious communities, a formal feature of symbolic reference – encoding – allows our sociality to be embedded in our individual relationships with an unseen divine order. This gives religious communities their unique organizational form, their unparalleled authority, and their robust persistence. These statements about religious sociality will be explicated in great length in the chapters that follow. Each of these forms of culturally-enabled human society – as we exist in our humanity or humanness; as we exist in our socio-economic-political organization; and as we exist to embody the divine – represents a formal type of social organization that depends upon the way language allows us to represent such forms of social organization. We can thus distinguish (a) the fundamental ‘humanity’ of a person, from (b) her membership in the Communist Party of Soviet Russia, from (c) her being a part of the Buddhist Sangha, on formal grounds. This, I propose, represents the critical contribution of recent emergence theorizing, which will allow us to go beyond the proposals of Durkheim and Rappaport.

Religion As An Emergent Phenomenon



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Background to the Emergent Theories of Durkheim and Rappaport

Early religious studies scholarship attempted to focus on qualities of religion that seemed unique to religion, which are precisely the qualities ignored by those who attempt to account for religion reductionistically. Mircea Eliade, claimed, for example, that A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it – the element of the sacred. ELIADE 1963, iii

This assumption was strongly criticized by philosopher Daniel Dennett, calling it a “pre-emptive disqualification” that protects religion from outside criticism and fruitful reductive analysis (2006). While reductionist analysis of religion in terms of its parts is an important first step to making progress in understanding religion (and any phenomenon, for that matter), the point of emergence theory is that behaviors of parts alone, in isolation, are not always the sole determinant of the characteristic features of a phenomenon. Organization matters, and is seemingly implicated in the unexpected qualities and capacities that arise in certain emergent phenomena. Focusing for a moment on just the question of organization (and not the surprising qualities that can accompany it in certain cases), Bechtel and Richardson have helpfully explained some of the intuitions behind emergent explanations. They write: [T]here is no way to know how systems are actually organized until successful scientific models are developed, and so it is appropriate to focus on the way scientists anticipate that the systems in which they are interested will work. It is this anticipation that determines their research program. If they anticipate that the functions performed by the independent parts are the primary determinants of the behavior of the whole system, then they will develop a reductionistic research program. If they anticipate that organization is the primary determinant, and the parts independently contribute little that is of interest in explaining the behaviors of the system, they will develop a quite different program . . . The middle position in which the contributions of the parts are recognized, but the organization is understood to generate unanticipated behaviors

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in the whole system, usually develops later, after those pursuing the more reductionistic path discover that the parts are insufficient to explain the behavior of the system and turn more to examining how the organization of the system might affect the activities of the parts (1992, 267). It is perhaps easy to see why a merely reductive account of the human mind/ brain or of the ongoing process of biological evolution would be resisted; to characterize the brain as only parts interacting mechanically, without reference to larger organizational dynamics or the unexpected experiences that arise from its functioning, does not seem fecund enough to account for the phenomenon. Durkheim and Rappaport felt the same way about religion. Why did they think that religion would best be explained as a holistic, systemic outcome of people relating to each other via ritual and shared religious concepts? Durkheim took seriously the fact that religious people believe they are participating in something greater than themselves. He viewed the fundamental dispositions of worship, awe, and the perception of majesty as those most characteristically evoked in religious community participation, and thought that explaining why these dispositions should arise in such a setting demanded looking beyond the individual human psyche. He argued human culture produces a large-scale, inter-individual social mind, a “consciousness of consciousnesses” that is the object of religious sentiments. Rappaport noted that what to some appear to be religion’s great weakness – the non-empirical character of mythological beliefs – can, through religious community participation, become the conceptual center of a highly adaptive, robust, and long-lived system of human social interactions. The effects of these tightly integrated community dynamics would have important effects on human psychology, he argued, inspiring religious emotions. I am convinced Durkheim and Rappaport were on the right track about religion when they articulated the surprising features of religion. Stausberg (2009), in a recent summary of current ‘theories of religion’, states explicitly what these might be. First, theories of religion must explain why religion can be so importantly meaningful to individuals. Specifically, I suggest they must explain why the experiences resulting from religious participation can be such a powerful source of personal transformation, and why religious practices convince people that they are a part of something that transcends normal, mundane, individual, and corporate experience, both causally and in terms of value. For example, what unites the otherwise disparate traditions of Haitian Voodoo and Chinese Confucianism is a belief in the value and efficacy of interacting with the divine, seen in experiences of possession by the ‘lwa’ spirits in Voodoo, and in experiences of the ‘great flood of Chi’ uncovered through proper

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deference in the Confucian tradition. Both the divine ancestors in Voodoo, and the Mandate of Heaven in Confucianism, are held to be causally active in the world; significant investment of time and energy is made to get in tune with their activity. The question a naturalistic, emergent theory of religion must compellingly answer, then, is why it is that religion makes people believe that divine ‘Beings’ (typically in Western religious traditions) and ‘Ways’ (typically in Eastern religious traditions), are real, when by all accounts they do not impact mundane sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Second, Stausberg suggests theories of religion must explain the long-lived, intense social structure of religious communities. Religious communities are, more than any other form of sociality, powerfully ‘sticky’, and can survive for orders of magnitude longer than other social forms. David Sloan Wilson, a biologist who studies the evolution of group behavior seen in such phenomena as ant colonies and bee hives, sees a similar dynamic occurring in the longlived, highly social behaviors seen in religious communities. We can understand this when we consider examples such as the Lemba people of southern Africa, a group of ‘black Jews’ whose ritualized oral history claims they left Palestine thousands of years ago, and have managed to maintain their Jewish identity and their roots over that time, apparently without the help of writing. Genetic analysis has confirmed their story; as a group they contain a particular genetic marker identified with the priestly tribe of Jews at the same frequency as modern day Jews, and their highest ranked priestly clan shows the genetic marker at the same frequency as the paternal lineage of modern Jews identified with the tribe of Aaron.11 Further support for the peculiar robustness of religious sociality comes from evidence suggesting that prehistoric peoples in Europe, Africa, and Australia were practicing a form of Shamanism involving transformation into animals at the same ritual locations for multiple tens of thousands of years. It is possible – and even likely – that the San people of South Africa have practiced the same or highly similar religious practices for 50-75,000 years.12 ‘Historic’ religions have traditions going back thousands of 11 12

See Parfitt (1997; 2002), Thomas et al. (2000), and Le Roux (2003). The evidence here is inferential, but it is growing in significance. Current genetic evidence suggests all people alive today are descendants of the San people of Southern Africa (Wells 2003; Behar et al. 2008), groups of which left Africa in independent waves beginning 62-75,000 years ago (Rasmussen et al. 2011), first to Australia, later to Asia and Europe. Cave paintings in France and Spain dated to 35-40,000 years ago have been convincingly described as representing shamanistic religion by virtue of their similarities to recent shamanic religious art of the San (Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998). Recent discoveries of cave art in Indonesia, also dated to about 35-40,000 years ago, is almost identical thematically to both San art and the cave art of France and Spain (Aubert et al. 2014). Religious

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years. These facts point to the social structure of religion as being particularly effective in grounding human sociality, and long-lived in their continuing impact. Durkheim and Rappaport both explicitly explain religion as an emergent cultural phenomenon, suggesting that emergent dynamics can be seen in the way shared mental conceptions act as memory to affect human social dynamics. They make this argument by pointing to the central place ritual and myth play in religion. The systematic linkage between myth and ritual, meaningful individual experience, and powerful group commitment and longevity is central to both thinkers, and clearly marks what any theory of religion must attempt to explain. Both of their theories, however, have conceptual problems that ultimately make them fall short of their expressed goals. The chief failure of Durkheim’s account is that the categories he had available to explain systemic organization are insufficient for understanding human sociality; he is not able to theoretically distinguish politics from religion. The chief failure of Rappaport’s account is he does not adequately explain how ritual and myth function dynamically in religious communities to create meaningful religious experience. When we take into consideration the strengths and failings of the emergent theories of Durkheim and Rappaport, we can specify more exactly what the task of this book should be: to clearly elucidate how religion is more than an assembly of single traits, distinct from other social forms such as politics, and defined by the systematic relationship between ritual, myth, meaningful experience, and persistent, long-lived social dynamics. While the approaches of Durkheim and Rappaport are important, promising, and powerful, the conceptual apparatus of their theories cannot hold the weight of their goals.

Assumptions I will Make in this Study

Stausberg notes that prior to the last half of the 20th century in the West, most accounts of religion understood it as the human response to an independentlyexisting, superhuman or supernatural world. The starting point for analysis wall art in Australia is also seen as similar to San shamanistic religious art, and is dated to at least 20,000 years ago (Taçon 2009). Unless the practice of painting shamanistic art on walls and in caves in Europe, Africa, Indonesia, and Australia was discovered independently, these practices suggest common origins for a style of religion that was carried by the San’s ancient ancestors as they left Africa, and is still practiced by modern San. Other cultural practices of the San show conservation over the course of at least 50,000 years of material culture (d’ Errico et al. 2012).

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was the nature of the divine, conceived as really existing in some way or another, to which religious belief and practice was but a reaction. As the plausibility of the transcendent world has been increasingly called into question, however, academic ‘theories of religion’ put forth in recent decades have sought to explain religion not by referencing a pre-existing, transcendent world, but by explaining the tendency of people to believe in or act according to such a world. A growing number of them explicitly seek to understand religion from within the framework of the evolutionary history of human nature; religion is viewed according to its possible adaptive function in support of human social systems, or how it may result from the nature and function of the human brain. This book will broadly work within this tradition, while expanding upon it in important ways. I will defend this approach for the rest of this chapter. I embrace a naturalistic stance when attempting to explain religion for two primary reasons: first, there are problems with viewing the divine as preexisting human interaction with the divine; and second, I have a basic epistemological temperament that holds that explanation should begin without such assumptions. The primary problem with viewing religion as a reaction to an independently existing, transcendent world is the difficulty of accounting for why there are very different religious communities with wildly varying religious beliefs. Attempting to explain this from within a theological tradition is daunting; if religion is a reaction to something out there that predates and causes religion, then why the different beliefs? Several ways of accounting for this uncomfortable fact have been offered by those who entertain a real transcendent world, ranging from the most superficial in-group, stamp-your-foot triumphalism, to metaphysical systems of extreme beauty and plausibility. In evaluating these, I will simply follow Knitter (2002) in his account of the choices available. ‘Replacement’ models claim that there is only one true religion, the one that is held by the community in question. All others are in error, and need to be replaced. ‘Fulfillment’ models claim that there is some truth in other religions, but that they are best completed by the truths of the community in question. ‘Mutuality’ models claim that though there are ‘many faces of the divine’, there is a basic unity to the different beliefs that exist. And ‘Acceptance’ models claim that there is no underlying unity to the different beliefs that exist; we need to simply accept this as a fact about the disjunctive nature of the divine and/or the limits of human knowledge, and move on. Each of these models may be painted as consistent with a perspective that holds there is a real transcendent world; the important point to make is that each of these models produces outcomes that many find fatal to the position. These include the inability to see anything good (or anything good that is important) in another religion (the failure of the first two positions), the

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inability to say hardly anything at all about the divine (the failure of the third position, as scholars have found there is precious little in common in the world’s spiritual traditions), and the implication that the divine doesn’t really exist in a way we can know (the failure of the 4th position). Knitter appropriately titles his closing chapter “An Inconclusive Conclusion”; if the divine really exists prior to human religious exploration, we need to make a choice between several bad options to account for the discrepancies in religious belief. If the divine actually exists independent of human experience, then, as I see it, one of four things must be true. Perhaps the divine has distinguishable features, but (a) is not as causally effective at revealing itself as we might have hoped, perhaps being limited in some way, leading to all this confusion, or (b) has inexplicably withheld those features from most of humankind for most of human history. On the other hand, perhaps (c) the divine has such little positive content that most of what religious communities say about the divine is false or otherwise misleading. Or, (d) perhaps the divine is so large and broad, it is beyond the capacity of humans to engage with meaningfully, and we have simply been unable to apprehend it correctly. We experience the divine as having widely disjunctive characteristics, like Saxe’s poem of the six blind men of Indostan who came upon an elephant, and independently described it as a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. Not surprisingly, the ‘moral’ of Saxe’s poem is that So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen! As I noted in the introduction, what an emergent account of the divine calls attention to is the possibility that there is no preexisting divine that religious communities interact with, just as there are no pre-existing souls that give each human being their uniqueness. Rather, both represent emergent qualities that arise as a result of the organization of dynamical interaction. This seems a fruitful explanation of a fact that seems to otherwise haunt our accounts of the divine. A second reason for embracing a naturalistic ‘theory of religion’ has to do with parsimony in explanatory assumptions, and what I can only call a ‘scientific temperament’. This is a more subtle point; it has to do with what counts as an adequate explanation, and rests on the perceived value of not adding

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features to explain a phenomena above what is necessary to account for it. This perspective is an extension of Occam’s razor, which claims that the simpler explanation is to be preferred over the complex. I know of no better account of what makes for an adequate explanation than the writings of Robert Boyle in the 17th century, who defended why he adopted the mechanical philosophy as an explanation for chemistry over and against Aristotelian and alchemical explanations.13 He argued that ‘explanation’ depends on making sure that that which carries the most explanatory weight is something we can understand clearly and precisely, is sufficient to explain the phenomena (but is as simple as possible), and is not precariously assented to. Explaining chemical phenomena in terms of ‘simple, dumb, passive, matter in motion’ better exemplified these conditions in the 17th century than did explaining them in terms of ‘sympathies’, or the mystical properties of sulfur, mercury, and salt that exemplified the Christian Trinity, as others attempted. Appealing to things themselves unclear, unintelligible, or as complicated as that which is being explained just does not sit well with us as an explanation. So it is with explaining religion; if we can ‘build up’ religious belief and practice from below, utilizing features that we know about from lower-level sciences, we will have done something that sits better with us as an explanation, as compared to alternative explanations that rely on transcendent entities that do not seem simpler than what is being explained, and that themselves need to be explained. Note, however, that there is an important caveat in Boyle’s list of features of a good explanation; this caveat will allow us to distinguish between ‘naturalistic’ theories of religion and emergent naturalistic theories of religion, as an alternative to invoking transcendent causes. The caveat is this: Boyle says the terms of explanation used must be “sufficient to Explicate the Phaenomena.” A typical scientific strategy of explanation, as Boyle and others at the origins of modern science made clear, was to invoke a metaphysic of ‘monistic materialism’ when explaining the natural world. ‘Monistic materialism’ can be understood as the view that matter is simple (not internally complex), passive (not active), dumb (not ‘knowing’ what to do), and is purely objective, meaning it contains no subjective elements and is only related to other bits of matter externally. Thus, all that is relevant to a scientific explanation of anything involving matter are the laws of physics and mechanical laws governing interactions. And what goes for matter also goes for all that is composed of matter. This conception of matter has certainly been adequate to explain most of the phenomena of the natural world. But Boyle hesitated about using the mechanical 13

A really nice compendium of his writings can be found in Boyle (1965).

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philosophy to explain such features as biological fitness and the human mind. A mechanical view of ‘matter in motion’ reduces matter to something dumb and purposeless; life and mind are not dumb and purposeless. This, for Boyle, necessitated the conclusion that a simple view of matter in motion needed to be supplemented by belief in a transcendent Creator. Boyle thus spun the cost of his characterization of matter as a benefit to his theological convictions: ‘simple, dumb matter in motion’, while sufficient for explaining many things, cannot explain the intelligence and fitness of life, nor willful conscious experience and a subjective viewpoint. God, thus, is the predetermining architect of matter in motion, accounting for the features of human experience and biological life matter-in-motion cannot explain. This line of argumentation suggests a very important conflict between two different ideas of what it means to explain something by reference to something ‘simpler’. It is obviously simpler to explain chemistry in terms of ‘dumb matter in motion’, than to appeal to unseen ‘sympathies’ and the intentional and mental characteristics of matter; but this is because the phenomena seems amenable to such explanation. The conscious, intentional experience of human beings does not appear to be amenable to such an explanation, and yet – and this is the source of the conundrum – our minds seem to be linked in some way to the matter that composes the nervous system. The alchemist, with an eye on the mind/brain problem, thought it was a simpler explanation to build into nature, at the ‘lowest’ level, mental and intentional features necessary to account for the features seen at ‘higher’ levels, such as a human person. Why not say that the simplest parts of nature are a ‘microcosm’ of its most complex? Why explain the lower levels in terms that we already know fail to explain its higher forms, and then, as a sort of deus ex machina, invoke God to save the day? Which explanation is really simpler in the end? It is possible to view the alchemical and classical Aristotelian view that the basic entities in the world have both material and ideal components as the simplest explanation, since to do so builds into them the capacity to produce the kinds of phenomena at higher levels we know exist. Counterintuitively, if we don’t want to have to rely on external deities and divine entities to explain the higher level phenomena, we have to build into the lower level those features that will let the higher level come to be naturally, adding complexity at the beginning, but reducing it in the end.14 I suggest emergence theory takes a step in this direction; here, I want to explain how I think it does so, and where the open questions lay. This will help 14

Thomas Nagel (2012) does a nice job of analyzing this position with respect to explanations of human conscious experience.

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explain some of my arguments later, when it comes to accounting for religious experience. Historically, emergence theory has had two primary ‘poles’ of concern. The first is to account for dynamical organization, and how it helps explain the behavior of systems such as living organisms and human minds. This dynamical organization results not just from the characteristics of the parts, but from their relational and interactive effects. The second historical ‘pole’ of concern for emergentists is to make room for new qualities – such as subjective human experience – in scientific accounts of the otherwise ordinary chemical processes defining human brains.15 The first concern might be considered emergence theories’ scientific concern, the second its philosophical concern.16 Evan Thompson (2007), writing on behalf of a group of biologists and systems theorists trying to take the philosophical concern more seriously, summarized it with respect to human brain functioning as follows: Because consciousness is already “presupposed as an invariant condition of possibility for the disclosure of any object,” there is no way to step outside of experiencing subjectivity so as to effect a “mapping of it onto an external reality purged of any and all subjectivity.”17 Thus, the phenomenal world is richer than any scientific explanations of that world conceived along the lines of monistic materialism. On the other hand, Thompson notes that all the evidence suggests mind depends upon matter and life. So Thompson suggests that the scientific plan of attack for making sense of human experience needs to start from a “recognition of the transcendental and hence ineliminable status of experience,” but search for the principles that can “integrate the orders of matter, life, and mind, and account for the originality of each order.” This concise statement suggests that metaphysical presuppositions about the nature of ‘nature’ necessarily need to move beyond monistic materialism. Further, there is an important implication of this statement relevant to the question of understanding and explaining religion. If religion can be characterized as an emergent phenomena when our focus is on its dynamical organization, and if that characterization can be coordinated with the formal dynamic accounts of human mental life and the intelligence of biological evolution, then we might want to be open to considering the potential for some unique kind of new ‘experience’ at the level of religious community dynamics, an emergent order of nature more comprehensive than individual minds. 15 16

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See Beckermann et al. (1992) for sections that trace these different concerns. Chalmers (1996) has memorably united these different characterization as the ‘easy problem’ (the scientific concern) and the ‘hard problem’ (the philosophical concern), proposing that they are correlated with each other. An argument anticipated by Berkeley (2004/1713).

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To be clear about what is being suggested here, it is important to address head-on a critique of emergent theorizing that is relevant to this argument. McLaughlin (1992) writes in his analysis of the history of emergence theory that early emergentists tried to explain the causal efficacy of things such as chemical ‘wholes’ with respect to their atomic ‘parts’ by appealing to new forces, such as configurational forces, to account for the top-down influence of the whole on its own parts. However, this perspective on emergent causal powers – at least when considered with respect to chemistry and biology – has been unconvincing, as my reference to the Davies quote above (p. 4) indicates. The proper way to conceptualize the causal entanglement of wholes and parts at the level of chemistry and biology has been most convincingly worked out by Terrence Deacon (which I will recount in Ch. 3), and the important point is that it does not involve new causal powers. If religious community dynamics were only compared to the emergent dynamics of biology and chemistry, we would have no reason to think that the divine could be characterized as a ‘topdown’ causal force acting on the community’s constituent parts. But it is a much more complicated and opaque problem to theorize the causal relationship of subjective conscious experience to the neural correlates of brains that ‘have’ these experiences. This problem has generated an entire field of disputants, arguments, and counter-arguments, and if the 2014 Towards a Science of Consciousness conference is any indication,18 the field at present is hopelessly entangled in problems that refuse coherent answers. This suggests a more interesting and potentially more relevant comparison to religious community dynamics. The question of whether non-physical ‘things’ like experience and subjectivity can affect physical things like brains may have a correlated question with respect to religion: is the divine, conceived as a type of non-physical thing like consciousness, causally efficacious in human affairs? I will not be solving the problem of consciousness in this book, nor the problem of divine causality, but will instead be working to substantiate the intriguing correlation just mentioned. If we find that religious communities and the dynamics underlying conscious experience share a common organization, then the criticism of emergence that McLaughlin underlines with respect to biology and chemistry may not be damning to the question of the causal action of divine Beings and Ways, with respect to the consciousnesses that perceive them. The ‘problem of divine activity’ might share more in common with 18

Perhaps the pre-eminent forum for theorists working on this topic, this conference is hosted by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. The 2014 conference was held April 21-26 in Tucson, az. Abstracts and some videos of speakers can be seen at http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/2014TSCmainpagearchives.htm.

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the problem of subjective causality than with the causal interactions of biology. This suggests that if we were to ever resolve the ‘problem of consciousness’, that resolution could be relevant to the ‘problem of divine activity’. It is indeed possible that a careful study of the phenomenology of religious experience might reveal insights that go beyond what is considered possible by those studying consciousness and its connection to neuronal function. A position that takes religious phenomenology seriously might suggest that ‘conscious interaction at a distance’ is possible, that shared subjective experience is possible, and thus that these kinds of experiences may need to be taken into account when we think about the problem of consciousness, and even the nature of matter itself. Deacon, when considering the implications of the relationship of mental experience to emergent dynamics, speculates  . . . that there could be emergent levels of sentience above the human subjective level, in the higher-order dynamics of collective human communications . . . Of course such a sentience could only arise if these human interactions constituted a higher-order [emergent] individual; a reciprocally organized, self-perpetuating complex of [lower-level emergent] processes. deacon 2012, 565

This comment, when put in conversation with Thompson’s statement concerning human mental experience (p. 11), suggests it might be wise to keep metaphysical presuppositions explicitly vague when attempting to explain the individual and group experiences encountered in religion, which seem to transcend mundane psychological features; multiple interpretations of these phenomena are possible. We may find that the ‘data’ of religious experience is amenable to explanation in terms of human psychology (such as explaining it as a species of hypnotic suggestion or placebo effect); but we might find that at least some of these experiences go beyond such explanations, requiring explanation in terms of the experiences possible at a level of organization higher than the individual and psychological. An emergent approach to religious community dynamics should be open in principle to such speculation, and that is the approach that I will take in this book. I realize I am walking a fine line here. On the one hand, I am arguing that natural – not supernatural – explanations of religion should be entertained. On the other hand, I am suggesting that our conception of ‘natural’ needs to be broadened to include the experience of human subjectivity, and if suitably argued, at least the possibility of a sui generis level of (something like)

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subjective experience at the level of group religious dynamics, justifying belief in the realty of divine Beings and Ways. Even if one ignores the metaphysical issues involved (the philosophical concern of emergence theory), investigators should at the very least consider the possibility that the different component ‘parts’ of religion may be interdependently related to each other, explaining what is unique about religious community dynamics, psychologically and socially (the scientific concern of emergence theory). These considerations explain why I am willing to adopt naturalistic explanations for religion, but at the same time think it necessary to supplement them with emergence theory. From this perspective, religion – in all its fullness and strangeness – represents an intensification of processes already seen occurring in nature; emergent dynamics can explain at least some aspects of religion that defy materialistic and mechanistic conceptions. In the next chapter, I will offer an account of religion that focuses only on the dynamical organization of religious communities, not on its metaphysical interpretation, which will be reserved for Ch. 7. The account I offer will be deeply influenced by emergence thinking, without explicitly acknowledging how emergence theory is working behind the scenes, organizing the account. This should allow the reader to assess the product; hopefully, the value of the product will justify further chapters where the theoretical underpinnings of emergence are articulated in relation to leading reductionist accounts of religion. I will articulate my emergent theory of religion in conversation with Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, which inspired the account in the first place. So to Rappaport we turn.

chapter 2

Rappaport, Revisited Introduction Roy Rappaport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity is perhaps the finest example in print of the fruitful application of emergence theory to religious community dynamics. Rappaport writes that there are “cybernetic1 processes at the very heart of religion’s relationship to society and its evolution.” Rappaport draws heavily on the thought of Gregory Bateson;2 following Bateson, he argues that cybernetic systems are identified by two chief characteristics: they are adaptive and self-regulating, and they result from a circular causal structure. Adaptive, self-regulating systems are those that organize matter and energy transactions by their own activity, and in which some parts of the system are held relatively invariant, insulated from perturbation by a ‘protective belt’ of more variable components. A circular causal structure means that the system regulates itself based on both internal and external constraints, sampling both its own self-states and its environmental conditions reciprocally. Rappaport argues that the survival of a ritually-defined community depends on its ability to persist by adapting to different environmental and cultural contexts. For this to happen, the most central beliefs made sacred by ritual must be largely empty of specific political, economic, ecological, or moral content, since if they are too closely tied to such concerns, they might be viewed as counterproductive to human flourishing at a later time or in a different cultural setting. Mythological concepts, precisely because they are not about mundane human concerns, or even about material entities, avoid such over-specification; thus, beliefs about the non-material divine support a ritual community’s adaptive capacities. Rappaport therefore offers theoretical reasons for distinguishing more and less adaptive versions of ritual communities. Groups that use ritual to ‘make sacred’ political or other mundane content are inherently time-bound 1 The terms emergence, systems theory, and cybernetics are largely interchangeable, though these terms have different historical trajectories. Each term references a concern for how relational and organizational features of an aggregate play a causal role in system dynamics, resulting in new system capabilities and qualities when compared to the aggregates’ unorganized state. 2 For an example of the kind of argument relevant to this discussion, see Bateson (2000/1972).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293762_003

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and culturally inflexible.3 A religious community, on the other hand, is an adaptive organism whose proper functioning is due to the fact that its most basic representations are empty of directly meaningful social content. Rappaport is not content to describe religious communities as cybernetic systems. He specifically wants to discuss them as adaptive systems similar to biological organisms. He defines as living “any association that can be shown to have inhering in it as a unit distinct processes at least occasionally initiated in response to, as response to, and in attempted correction of, perturbation.” Thus, for Rappaport, biological organisms and religious communities are living things, because they both exemplify membership in the class adaptive systems. The family resemblance Rappaport sees between religious communities and biological organisms allows him to make comparisons between the evolutionary processes guiding each kind of adaptive system through time. He describes the relationship of people bound to each other by the same rituallyestablished first principles as “communities as fundamental in nature as those defined by descent from common ancestors” (1999, 326). He suggests religious communities change their sacred myths in response to environmental pressure in a manner “formally similar to that prevailing in genetic processes.” And for the same reasons that all living things are thought to descend from earliest life, he suggests “it is plausible to think that, despite the birth of gods and their banishment, [the continuity of religious communities] has remained unbroken from the moment when first our ancestors spoke words in ritual” (1999, 341). I will argue in this chapter that Rappaport does not adequately connect the relationship of his functional theory of adaptive sociality with participants’ individual psychology and spirituality. My goal will be to provide a clearer conceptualization of religious communities as they involve beliefs, ritual, and individual religious experience. Rappaport sees religion as a result of ritual, which establishes the collective acceptance of fundamental postulates such that orderly social life can proceed as if there is absolute truth (Paul 2002). The ritual form is stable and consistent enough to maintain culturally important reference values as a “social control feature” within human social groups.4 Why is ritual needed to play the role Rappaport says it does? Rappaport sees ritual as reducing the differences between people caused by the “genetically unbounded human imagination.” Linguistic symbol tokens are manipulable independent of what they reference; this makes it possible for people to imagine possibilities outside of what is 3 Here I have in mind things like Soviet Communism, which Tumarkin (1983) has done a remarkable job of analyzing in terms of its pseudo-religious organization. 4 This is David Sloan Wilson’s term; see Ch. 5.

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proportioned by channels of sense perception, and outside of our needs and interests as biological organisms (Deely 2001). We can live through alternative characterizations of reality, not just our direct experience of it; we can inhabit worlds of our own creation. Science fiction, fantasy, mythology, metaphysics, utopian literatures, political theory, trans-human speculation – all are made possible by language. This creativity carries with it, however, the potential for chaos in human social forms, due to the fact that it is possible to invoke very different selection principles to organize human experience and the values relevant to sociality. Rappaport calls these different ultimate selection principles – ideas of what constitutes the beautiful, good, and true – logoi, or liturgical orders. He argues that they are at some levels incommensurate, and thus outside of clear normative judgments. Humans require some mechanism to establish logoi and coordinate social forms other than consensus or force. That is what ritual provides. When symbolic communication emerged, Rappaport argues, ritual was put to a new use; it wasn’t used to merely promote interindividual trust and mutuality, as it is in animals like baboons (Watanabe and Smuts 1999), but to validate mutual conventions, making them certain and unquestioned. Rappaport writes, “the replacement of genetic determination of patterns of behavior by their cultural (verbal) stipulation has conferred an unparalleled adaptability upon human kind…But…their members are no longer genetically constrained to abide by their conventions…[ritual] is a functional replacement for genetic determination of patterns of behavior” (1999, 417–8).

Rappaport’s Theory of Religion

Though he never offers an explicit definition of religion in Ritual and Religion, Rappaport seems to think there are two defining characteristics of religious communities: 1. 2.

Religious communities foster alternative forms of consciousness in at least some individual participants that motivates their enthusiastic participation. Religious community social dynamics are adaptive and self-regulating, explaining the unprecedented persistence of religious traditions across time, geography, ethnic location, and cultural change.

Rappaport argues that alternative forms of consciousness result from the heightened sense of unity produced by ritual, and that the unprecedented persistence of religious traditions is the outcome of the way both ritual and myth

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affects social dynamics. What Rappaport fails to notice is that ritual and myth also have profound effects on the psychological life of individuals, which means he misses an opportunity to demonstrate how the same formal features ground the psychological and the social. By explicitly theorizing the psychological effects of ritual and myth, we will be able to see how divine ideas, individual experience, and adaptive, self-regulating social dynamics are coordinated into a mutually reinforcing set. Specifically (and going beyond Rappaport’s argument), we will see that ritual and myth do three things: they invite intense and meaningful reconstructions of personal identity according to paradigmatic examples; they act as a form of encoded social memory by organizing human relationships according to a ‘spiritual map’; and they provide the cognitive framework that makes religious community organization robust, adaptive, and reproductive. My task in this chapter will be to first identify how Rappaport characterizes the divine concepts that make up myth, and what he means by ritual. Then, I will examine how he believes these combine to secure the adaptive and selfregulating form of religious community dynamics. Next, I will investigate how Rappaport (incorrectly) thinks ritual produces alternative forms of consciousness, and offer an alternative account based on the impact of ritual and myth on the psyches of ritual participants. Lastly, I will theorize how myth acts as a form of encoded social memory, organizing human social relationships according to a ‘spiritual map’. Myth – Ideas about the Divine Rappaport argues that a very special set of ideas are central to religion’s characteristic coordination of public sociality. He uses several different terms to characterize these features – canonical messages, liturgical orders, logoi, Ultimate Sacred Postulates, Cosmological Axioms, dominant symbols, material metaphors. Some of these are distinguishable from others, while some seem to be synonymous terms. I will distinguish the two most important, Ultimate Sacred Postulates and Dominant Symbols,5 and suggest that these two together compose what we typically mean by divine Beings and Ways such as Yahweh, the Tao, and Qi. 5 More often than not, Rappaport uses the term Cosmological Axioms to refer to the complement to Ultimate Sacred Postulates; I have chosen to use Dominant Symbols because (1) he uses it at times, (2) other theorists of religion have used the term in a manner similar to the way Rappaport uses Cosmological Axioms, and (3) Dominant Symbols calls attention to their metaphorical quality better than does Cosmological Axioms, which (I think, misleadingly) draws attention to their discursive quality.

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According to Rappaport, conceptions of the divine are meant to describe real, nonmaterial causes that ground both human experience and the natural world. Ideas of the divine define the fundamental character of the cosmos; their objects are not determinate things here-and-now, but rather foundational principles that stand outside of time and space. Their significata are spiritual, conceptual, or abstract, and they necessarily require symbols to be represented. The divine is characterized as being hidden to normal, biologicallygrounded experience, yet causally active in the natural world. For example, the ‘Tao’ is characterized as being something that cannot be directly indexed through any normal human experience, and ‘Yahweh’ is the transcendent creator of all things that stands outside of time and space. Though hidden from normal experience, these ‘absent’ divine Beings and Ways are characterized metaphorically by examples taken from common human experience. For example, the Tao is characterized by the ‘effortless action’ of a Tai-chi master whose disciplined self-control and self-denial demonstrates that ‘chi’ is flowing freely and without interruption through the master. And Yahweh is characterized by the liberation of the people of Israel from slavery, demonstrating Yahweh’s ability, intentions, and personal agency. For Rappaport, all ideas about the divine can be viewed as having two aspects. One aspect is the specific, tangible, characteristic events and examples that make known the divine, and that contribute to the complex of meanings that make up a divine name. What is meant by ‘Yahweh’, for example, involves the moral interpretation of the history of a particular people, concerning some particularly important events. That history and those events represent what Rappaport calls the Dominant Symbols (dss) that describe and characterize the divine. The second aspect of divine ideas, what Rappaport calls the Ultimate Sacred Postulates (usps), names the unseen, abstract, nonmaterial posited cause or presence found in the characteristic events and examples that make up Dominant Symbols. In the case of Yahweh, the posited abstract and ideal cause is an unseen, moral agency that transcends any and all particular tangible events or examples used to point to Yahweh. Any event deemed a manifestation of Yahweh is not Yahweh in toto, but rather a particular manifestation of Yahweh, who remains ‘in another realm’.6 It is this ideal, abstract and nonmaterial cause that Rappaport claims is the Ultimate Sacred Postulate. 6 This phrase, biased as it is by Western metaphysical assumptions about ‘reality’, is extendable in the direction of Eastern metaphysical assumptions. That is, whether the abstract ideal realm is viewed statically as a kind of ‘Being’ that exists some where that transcends the world of the mundane, as it is in most western metaphysics, or viewed dynamically as a kind of ‘Path’ or ‘Way’ that exists in some particular whens that transcend mundane happenings, the

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Rappaport’s point in making this distinction is that divine ideas involve reifying a purported abstract and ideal cause or presence found in a type of event, quality, experience, or natural phenomena, as distinct from merely acknowledging the existence of particular token events, qualities, experiences, or natural phenomena. As an analogy, consider that some physicists of a Platonic persuasion might view the ontological status of laws of nature, such as the Schrodinger equation, as causing the events under its purview.7 The events that predictably happen according to the description given by the law happen because of the law. Similarly, some mathematicians of a Pythagorean persuasion might view ‘threeness’ as an abstract quality that exists ideally, and cannot itself be pointed to, though one can point to any number of specific examples of three things. To call any token of three things an example of ‘threeness’ is not to say that ‘these three things here’ exhaust or are themselves ‘threeness’, which exists over and above any particular manifestation of three things. These examples clarify what Rappaport means about usps. When a Hindu claims ‘this fire is divine; it is Agni’, this particular fire, here-and-now, does not exhaust what is meant by ‘Agni’; rather, it partakes of the divine fire Agni. If the meaning of Agni was exhausted by this fire, here-and-now, ‘Agni’ would simply be the name for ‘this fire, here-and-now’. usps name the ‘type’ that grounds what any particular token partakes of but does not exhaust. Without specific Dominant Symbols, a usp would have no meaning at all. ‘Yahweh’ is a nonsense word, signifying nothing, outside of an account of Yahweh’s agency, concerns, and dealings with a particular people. usps are, strictly speaking, ‘empty’ because they name that aspect of a divine concept that is ‘not used up’ by particular manifestations of its dss; there is something posited as left over after any and all particular manifestations of the divine are accounted for. Given the close connection between abstract types like laws of nature and ‘threeness’, and divine concepts like ‘Yahweh’, how does a divine concept differ from an abstract type? Rappaport claims divine concepts are types that represent the character of the cosmos as a whole, at its most basic; they are meant to govern nature, the personal, and the social in their totality, in their unity. Abstract concepts, on the other hand, are only meant to represent limited, local manifestations of the cosmos. Nature, human experience, and social life should all profoundly demonstrate the truth of divine concepts. Religious communities celebrate when it appears that this happens; when nature, ideal realm is held to be distinguishable from the normal beings and processes of life. For a fuller explication of this, see Cassell (2012, Sec. 6.2). 7 See Balashov (2003).

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human experience, or social life fail to indicate their ‘ground of being’, religious ‘work’ is usually performed to address the failure. To summarize the distinction between usps and dss and how together they represent divine ideas, Dominant Symbols reveal and characterize the divine Being or Way and its effects, and Ultimate Sacred Postulates name and point to the unseen divinity. During a Catholic Mass a divinity is addressed that can neither be seen, heard, touched, smelled, nor addressed physically. However, holy places, holy sounds, holy music, and holy words and addresses take the place of this absence (R.S. Murphy 1979). The divinity’s purported agency is reified by usps, the divinity is known through dss. The Ritual Form Having discussed Rappaport’s characterization of mythological divine content, I now turn to his understanding of ritual. Ritual, for Rappaport, gives a form or structure to human behavior, and sets apart certain ideas and content as special. Ritual is “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers” (1999, 24). In ritual, a pattern of relations between individuals is made distinguishable from the individuals themselves; individuals may come and go, but the form of the ritual they participate in remains the same. Ritual acts as a ‘backbone’, a permanent and authoritative procedure by which individuals engage ideas and each other over time in a guided, structured way. The form of ritual is distinct from the content of ritual, and communicates something about that content that cannot be communicated in any other way. The performance of ritual ‘frames’ whatever symbolic content is contained within it. That frame communicates certainty, importance, specialness, and public acceptance, regardless of the private stance of a ritual participant towards those beliefs. Acceptance of ritualized content protects that content and makes it resistant to change; ritual establishes what is ‘center’ and what is ‘periphery’ in cultural systems. Depending on what symbolic content is made central, social structures of great longevity can result. Metaperformativity Possibly the most important idea Rappaport contributes to the understanding of religion is the concept of ‘metaperformativity’. This is Rappaport’s term for the way ritual and myth together establish both the existence and authority of divine Beings and Ways for a community. Rappaport explicitly relates metaperformatives with Austin’s (1962) concept of ‘performative utterances’. A performative utterance is a particular kind of linguistic utterance that makes a truth claim, but the verification of the truth of that claim does not depend on

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its correspondence with some external reality. Rather, by virtue of the authority invested in those making such an utterance, it creates the truth of its own pronouncement. Statements such as ‘the bar is closed’, ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth the Second’, and ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, uttered by the correct person in the correct situation, create truth by their pronouncement. Metaperformatives go beyond the creation of mere conventional truths; they define the character of the cosmos in which those truths have their place. They establish the understandings that define states of affairs that regular performatives rely on, such as marriage as a sacred institution. The metaperformativity entailed by ritual involving myth is built on at least three features. First, ritual participants are inherently stating their acceptance of the divine by their participation in ritual involving myth. As Paul (2002) notes in his review of Ritual, to perform a ritual involving myth is to indicate, both to oneself and to others, acceptance of that order, thereby obligating the performer to believe the central message of the ritual. Second, through participation in ritual, a performer becomes fused with the message about the divine that is being communicated by the ritual; by enlivening the ritual through participation, the participant both transmits and receives the message of the ritual. To perform a ritual is to ‘breathe reality’ into an unseen metaphysical order, by demonstrating it as active and authoritative socially. Rappaport says that Ultimate Sacred Postulates are “not merely claimed, postulated or advanced, but…constituted by the performativeness intrinsic to liturgical orders themselves.” The truth of the divine “is established in the mode or manner of their expression” (1999, 278–9). Within human social systems, their truth is ontological rather than epistemological: “If no one any longer recited the Shema,” Rappaport writes, “‘The Lord Our God the Lord is One’ would cease to be a social fact, whatever the supernatural case may be” (1999, 295). Third, the metaphysical order presented and accepted through ritual performance is indicated to be without alternative, and changeless. Through its invariance, ritual performance declares what is true; it does not question or offer alternatives to what it presents. Performance of ritual implies a meta-message for what it encodes: “This is the Word.” Metaperformativity establishes the collective acceptance of fundamental cosmological postulates such that orderly social life can proceed as if there is absolute truth (Paul 2002). Metaperformativity, in sum, means that the social authority of the divine claimed in ritual is demonstrated through ritual; performance of ritual enacts within human sociality the society-organizing truth that it claims. A common trope of Hollywood story-telling highlights the idea of metaperformativity: a group of teen-age kids stumble upon a dusty old book of ancient rituals for summoning long-dead gods and demons. They ‘for fun’ decide to

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perform the ritual; the god or demon appears, not respecting the fact that the group conjured the demon for amusement, or in an unbelieving way. The kids are now obligated to the demon, because they have summoned it through the ritual. While Rappaport does not think that metaperformativity summons preexisting ontological entities, he does claim that it has profound social and psychological effects that makes it seem like it does. This is the essence of an emergence approach to religion. Metaperformativity supports Adaptive, Self-regulating Communities The central theme of Rappaport’s book is metaperformativity’s impact on the self-persistence and adaptive nature of religious social organization. The survival of a ritually-organized community depends on its ability to persist by protecting its identity on the one hand, while simultaneously being able to adapt to different material and cultural situations on the other. How does the ritualization of divine concepts support these seemingly conflicting demands? First, note that metaperformativity insures that ideas of the divine are set apart from normal discourse, and repeatedly re-entered into the thought-life of a community through ritual performance. Ritual performance insures that ideas about the divine are remembered and viewed as special. This insures that the identity of the community is protected and robust. However, if this is the case, doesn’t this act as a strong buffer against change? How does this formal structure allow adaptation? The key is noting the hierarchical nature of ideas of the divine as they function in ritual. Rappaport argues that ritual establishes Ultimate Sacred Postulates at the unchanging center of the conceptual structure of a religious community, surrounded by ‘protective belts’ of layers of concepts and principles that are more changeable. This form of organization allows a religious community to respond “homeostatically to perturbations by modifying their symbol systems in order to maintain the truth value of certain fundamental propositions” (Parmentier 2003). The first such protective belt is the Dominant Symbols that characterize the nature of the divine; Dominant Symbols rarely change in the course of the evolution of religious communities, although they can occasionally be added to or subtracted from. At the next layer are things like ritual prescriptions, taboos, commandments – rules for living in accordance with Ultimate Sacred Postulates, as made known through Dominant Symbols. These can change even more often than Dominant Symbols. Even more peripheral (and more changeable) are sanctified forms of sociality like political agreements, compacts, and rules for economic exchange that ultimately rely for their justification on usps and dss in some manner; and even beyond that are sanctified tokens such as vows, pledges, promises, etc. Rappaport notices that propositions

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closer to the center of this hierarchy of sacredness are general and important, and towards the periphery they become specific and pragmatic. For example, Dominant Symbols are mere metaphors; at best, they only suggest which concrete commandments, ritual prescriptions, taboos and such should be authorized. At the center, most vague of all, stand Ultimate Sacred Postulates, which do not refer to anything in this world, by definition. usps are nonmaterial and without character in and of themselves. Rappaport notes that this ‘emptiness’ of meaningful content at the center of a religious community is crucial to the community’s adaptability. “Ultimate Sacred Postulates do not in themselves specify particular social or material goals, or the proper means for fulfilling them. Specifying nothing they can apparently sanctify anything” (1999, 428). The conceptual organization of a religious community is built around an empty placeholder, similar to the numeral 0, insuring its longevity in the face of variable conditions. Like a biological organism, a religious community can adapt to different niches and changing conditions in the larger cultural and social environment; the survival of the religious community as such is the central effect of its organizational form. Rappaport offers an example of such flexibility: Christian Kings in Europe were obligated for centuries to pray for people through the ‘laying on of hands’ against a disease called scrofula. When new medicines and models of disease were developed, the practice fell out of favor, without affecting the divine nature of kingship. However, later, in many countries, even the divine nature of kingship fell out of favor, without affecting the acceptance of Christian divinities. This demonstrates the capacity of religious ritual to stabilize divine beliefs, while allowing variation in what it actually means to practice belief in the divine. Ritual Invites Alternate States of Consciousness Concerning the Divine Having explained Rappaport’s view of myth, ritual, metaperformativity, and how metaperformativity supports an adaptive and self-regulating social system, I now need to explain how Rappaport thinks ritual fosters the other key aspect of religion as he understands it: the alternative forms of consciousness that, in at least some participants, motivates enthusiastic participation in religious community life. Rappaport argues that the ritual entrainment of a group causes non-rational numinous experience, which validates by association the ideational content of ritual. The highly coordinated social behavior found in ritual dissolves normal consciousness into a kind of shared consciousness wherein the larger entity of  the social unit becomes dominant. He thinks the ‘revelation of hidden

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oneness’ is the core meaning of communitarian ritual. This meaningfulness makes ideas of the divine feel true by simple association. Rappaport writes that divine concepts “seem to partake” of the meaningfulness and authority of the profound experience of oneness. He admits that it is “logically unsound” to draw conclusions as to the truth of divine concepts from this association. But since it “does not trouble the faithful,” it shouldn’t trouble us (1999, 405). This, in my opinion, is not only an incorrect description of the alternative forms of religious consciousness characteristic of religion, but represents a missed opportunity to bind together more tightly his account of adaptive sociality and his account of alternate states of consciousness in the individual. Implicit in some of the key themes of his theory is an alternative account of the way metaperformativity invites alternate states of consciousness, which would strengthen his account of the emergent nature of religion. Notice, however, that even with its shortcomings, Rappaport’s explanation of meaningful religious experience allows him to argue that ritual links together the individual and the social group in a way that is mutually beneficial to both – a central idea behind cybernetics and emergence theory. Because ritual performance, for Rappaport, generates numinous experience, and numinous experience generates commitment to an adaptive hierarchy of conceptions crowned by usps, ritual connects both individual experience and adaptive sociality in a way that mutually reinforces each. The individual finds usps meaningful, and the social organization founded in ritual is robust, adaptive, and long-lived. Summary of Rappaport Rappaport’s fundamental contribution to religious studies is that he offers a profound theory as to why religious communities are the oldest, most robust and adaptive form of sociality on earth. These characteristics are entailments of ritual formality, as it sets apart mythological ideas about the divine. Because ritual, as it frames divine ideas, produces a type of performative utterance – what he calls a ‘metaperformative’ – it produces an adaptive and self-regulating system of social relations that resists change in some areas even as it allows changes in others, and brings participants into a demonstration of the truth of the divine, having a powerful effect on the psyche. This is the core of Rappaport’s theory (Robbins 2001). It is instructive to note how Rappaport’s conception of ritual complements and completes Geertz’s famous definition of religion (1973), which is: (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. The

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problem Geertz’s definition faces is this: how does a system of symbols cause powerful moods and motivations and clothe them with factuality such that they seem realistic? By themselves, I do not believe symbols can do all that he asks them to in this definition; only in combination with the metaperformativeness of ritual can symbols have such effects. Religion is not just a system of symbols; nor is it merely ritual behavior. As Lambek notes, language and embodied performance combine to make religion (Robbins 2001). According to Rappaport, religious communities are ritually-structured metaperformative utterances embodying the divine, which does (3) and entails (2), (4), and (5) of Geertz’s definition. Geertz senses a problem in his definition; he suggests in the same chapter that he offers it that imbuing sacred symbols with persuasive authority is the name of the game. He also says that ritual is involved in creating a worldview and ethos, as well as the authoritative experiences that confirm that worldview and ethos. But curiously, ritual is missing from his definition of religion. Rappaport puts ritual at the foundation of religion, but as Keane notes, this is a characterization that both mystics and modernists might reject (Robbins 2001). What about beliefs, morality, and alternative experience? I would argue, following Rappaport, that unless these are taken up by social forms that entail metaperformativity, they are not, in themselves, religion.

An Alternative Account of Rappaport

As I mentioned in the last section, Rappaport explicitly argues that the meaningfulness of myth is borrowed from the numinous experience of ritual; there is nothing about divine ideas in themselves that contributes to the powerful experience found in religious ritual. I believe this is a mistake; by drawing on the very categories Rappaport so carefully develops with respect to the social aspects of ritual, I will demonstrate that an alternative theory of religious experience is implicit in his own account. Further, this account is strikingly amenable to characterization as an emergent system that takes advantage of memory, and specifically, one that takes advantage of encoded memory. The religious experiences of individuals in religious groups is a direct result of myth, which, further, acts as encoded social memory, strongly constraining religious community dynamics according to a ‘spiritual map’ that is implicit in those experiences. Rappaport, because he thinks the content of ritual borrows its meaningfulness from ritual performance, argues that negative political ideology can be experienced numinously just as easily as divine ideas, through their association with ritual (e.g. the “numinousness of the Nuremberg rallies” (1999, 404)).

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I suggest, contra Rappaport, that ideas of the divine are especially effective in promoting a specific kind of numinous experience, in a way that political ideology is not. In effect, I will define religious experience as a function of the formal effects of ritual and myth on the psyches of individuals. Scholarly understanding of ‘religious experience’ varies widely;8 my use of the term here follows Wildman’s (2011) analysis of ‘intense’ experiences and how they are related to what McNamara (2009) calls ‘decentering’. Wildman suggests that an adequate phenomenological analysis of religious experience actually reveals experiences that fall under several conceptual categories. He distinguishes ‘vivid experiences’ from normal or mundane experience. Vivid experiences are “relatively unusual, typically colorful states of consciousness” that are either extremely significant or extremely strange. The border between these vivid and mundane experiences is “set by our physiology in interaction with our environment, which allows certain habits to form, including expectations for what is normal, unproblematic, and deserving of no special attention.” A subset of vivid experiences he describes as intensely, existentially significant; these ‘intense’ experiences are “sometimes anomalous and sometimes not, sometimes religious and sometimes not, but always…related to matters of ultimate existential concern” (2011, 77–79). These intense experiences are characterized by strength of feeling and the interconnectedness of ideas, memories, and emotions; they have significant social and personal effects. Wildman argues that an important example of an intense experience is found in the neuropsychological concept of decentering, which McNamara introduces to describe how religious participation may meaningfully reconstruct personal identity. McNamara argues that the evolved biological role of the brain’s ‘executive self’ is to inhibit desires and goals that are inconsistent with a single, unified consciousness and a unified set of goals. However, the executive self does not possess enough agency to bind and own all the intentional states associated with the brain. It usually does so well enough to prevent problem-states like Multiple Personality Disorder, but not well enough to prevent angst and a sense of personal failure and suffering. McNamara suggests that the problem of the divided self, as it appears to us in self-consciousness, is a fundamental problem religious communities prescribe solutions for.9 8 See James (1985/1902), Proudfoot (1985), and Saver and Rabin (1997) for different takes on the subject. 9 While I am not confident that each and every motivation that people have for seeking religious experience is covered by this account, I do think the idea of decentering cuts a wide swath through many of the most relevant examples of religious experience, applicable to many different religious communities and the alternative experiences they cultivate.

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McNamara explains that the sense of self is malleable; brains can and will reorganize to accommodate multiple personalities. Further, he notes that religious narratives and practices offer interpretations and models about what is possible for the self, and define what the self most truly is. The highest global standard for a self is the divine Being or Way that a religious ritual is oriented towards. Religious practices encourage the taking up of that global standard; both private religious practices and participation in public rituals promote continuous transformation of the self towards those ideals. These narratives and practices integrate conflict concerning the present self into a resolution of that conflict in a truer self, which is experienced as relatively conflict-free. As evidence for this interpretation, McNamara notes that the brain systems crucial to a sense of self are precisely those that are implicated in certain religious experiences, a subset of the kind that Wildman characterizes as ‘intense’.10 He analyzes this kind of religious experience in terms of decentering. Decentering involves a temporary relaxation of central neurological control that leads ultimately to greater self-control. It puts the individual in a receptive and integrative mode, and provides the protective cognitive scaffolding necessary to promote integration of cognitive and emotional content in service of a newly developing self. According to McNamara, decentering occurs in four stages: some impasse occurs in the experience of the present self because of conflict or conflicting desires. It could be a sense of personal defeat or failure, or a discrepancy in a person’s self-concept when compared to reality. Following this sense of failure of self, a suspension of agency (which might be facilitated by religious practices such as fasting, asceticism, ritual performance, or drug ingestion) decouples the current self from control over executive resources. The current self is placed in a ‘suppositional logical space’. Next, potential alternative selves are searched until a solution to the problem is discovered. These can come from a stock of existing identities, narratives of others, mythology, history, fiction, or dreams. In a religious context, the ideal self can be a deity or other supernatural agent, made particularly salient in a religious ritual. Finally, the old self is integrated into the new self via narrative devices. Importantly, decentering does not occur in working memory; it is not merely ‘trying on a new self’. It can be a conscious experience, but it is not something initiated by the actor; rather, it is experienced as something that happens to a

10

McNamara’s analysis does not distinguish between the different phenomenological types of religious experience Wildman analyzes, but Wildman sees McNamara’s account as being primarily about intense experiences involving existential ultimacy. See discussion in Wildman (2011, 77–94).

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person when the current self is suppressed in some way and guidelines for alternative selves are ready at hand to be taken up. McNamara’s proposal offers us a way to understand how the Balinese, for example, should have such profound ‘direct encounters’ with divine presences like ‘Rangda’, as Geertz (1973) recounts, and the Maring should have such profound experiences of ‘Smoke Woman’, as Rappaport recounts. These represent decentering experiences where possession by a divine agent is expected and desired. But is there anything in Rappaport’s theory that would explain why religious community participants, above others, would expect, invite, and value such experiences? Metaperformativity Facilitates Decentering One outcome of Rappaport’s understanding of ritual, which flows from its definition, is that to participate in a ritual is to perform invariant sequences of acts and utterances that the performer did not encode and that the performer does not have the authority to change. This means that ritual performance involves an implied ‘speaker’ or ‘revealer’ of the ritual. He writes, “The very invariance of ritual proposes…an agent to whom the efficacy of performativeness intrinsic to ritual’s language can be attributed” (1999, 398). In a regular performative utterance, such as a ritual in service to the social contract (e.g. a presidential swearing-in ceremony), the implied speaker of the ritual is ‘us’, all who adhere to the contract and from whom the authority of the contract ultimately flows. However, in a metaperformative utterance, when ritual is combined with myth that specifies an unseen, immaterial divine cause, the proposed ‘speaker’ of the ritual is named, described, and held to be different than the group who is performing the ritual. The identity, reality, and authority of an extraordinary speaker is claimed.11 Notice how the presence of Ultimate Sacred Postulates is responsible for this.12 usps like ‘Yahweh’ and the ‘Tao’ are placeholders for non-material causes held to govern the natural and human worlds. Ritual metaperformativity involving usps implies that nonmaterial Beings and Ways are the extraordinary speakers of ritual, and that they theoretically should be ultimately meaningful to human life. Participation in ritual also implies that these non-material Beings and Ways have been accepted as real by the participant. More than that, the very act of participating in ritual fuses the speaker with the message of the ritual, as the participant embodies and enlivens the divine reality. The divine 11 12

Even impersonal visions of the divine can ‘speak’ through ritual. These facts about the cognitive implication of divine concepts were anticipated by Proudfoot (1985).

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‘speaks through’ the ritual participant, through the participant’s very practice. This means that decentering is suggested by the very act of ritual participation. In ritual, one is submitting one’s self to the divine Being or Way implicated by the ritual, and that divine being or path is embodied in the ritual participant’s actions. Thus, what Rappaport missed in his account of religious experience is a possibility implied by his own theory: in ritual metaperformativity, normal self-identity is suppressed, and a door opened for the divine to be experienced and lived through a new self, experienced in decentering. Ideas of the divine do not merely insure that some extraordinary speaker is causally active in ritual; they imply that a specific extraordinary speaker is active. This is an entailment of the Dominant Symbols associated with the usps. Through Dominant Symbols, the nature of the divine being or path is established, not just the divine’s existence. The usp (the Lord, the Tao) is authoritatively characterized. For example, what is ‘announced’ in certain Jewish rituals are not just usps such as the Yahweh’s name, but in addition a plethora of Dominant Symbols connected to the usp, such as the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law, establishing the circumstances, reasons, and terms of the Lord’s relationship to Israel. Similarly, for the Confucian community, the idea of Qi is captured by Confucius’ acts of deference in Book 10 of the Analects, suggesting how “harmony that is achieved through patterns of deference” allows one to become “a co-creator of cosmic proportions in nurturing the processes of heaven and earth” (Ames 2003). The important point is that myth delimits specific possibilities for divine manifestations that can potentially be experienced in the right circumstances. To have an experience of Yahweh or Qi is dependent on having a catalog of appropriate experiences that can be considered legitimate tokens of Yahweh, or Qi. For one to experience a miraculous healing from God means that one’s concept of God includes the possibility of miraculous healings. And if decentering is invited, a very specific ideal type of the self will be taken up. Divine concepts, thus, can bias one towards a posture in life that looks for, expects, and facilitates such experiences. This is not to conclude that such experiences are purely a matter of interpretation, as Proudfoot (1985) argues. I will take up more metaphysically daring interpretations of this theme in the last chapter. To summarize, in every ritual act involving myth, there is an implicit set of claims being made by participants. First, that the divine exists, and exists in certain ways, with certain specific characteristics. Second, that one is accepting the authority of the divine. And third, that one is embodying or ‘channeling’ the divine through ritual practice; one is submitting one’s ego to an extraordinary causal influence. Religious ritual invites the suppression of one’s normal sense of self, and decentering in a particular direction. This is why, in

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exceptional circumstances, religious communities that do not explicitly invite decentering processes can be potent locations from which such experiences can flow. This fact was registered by Viktor Frankl (2006/1946) a psychologist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp. He noted that in some cases, the extreme conditions forced upon Jewish prisoners there released profound manifestations of Jewish piety in the form of charismatic experiences, lying latent in the Jewish traditional religion forming the background of the secular Jews brought to Auschwitz. This religious training provided the scaffolding for meaningful, anomalous interaction with the divine, as conceived through Judaism.13 The important contribution of non-material usps to the decentering process is what they deny and rule out to normal experience, and thus what they make room for in anomalous experience. By acting as a placeholder for a purported nonmaterial causal influence, metaperformativity involving divine 13 This is an important point that suggests a response to a potential criticism of the view I am developing here. Boyer (2001) argues that overemphasizing ‘spectacular’ experiences when considering religion gives the impression that there is a ‘pure’ form of religion defined by these special kinds of experiences that exceptional people have, and that the masses degrade. Boyer’s take is that the exceptional experience is merely an outlying form of mundane religion that is not much more than a conglomeration of biases resulting from our evolutionary history. In response, I argue that it is the outlier who is held up as the paradigmatic religious practitioner in most religious communities, and in exceptional circumstances such as Nazi concentration camps, the outlier might be held up as the norm. The ‘heroes’ of religion – those that found movements, re-inspire old movements, and are deemed as especially ‘blessed’ – are those that in some way or another are held to be particularly close to or possessed by the divine. Saints and prophets, as well as Christs, Sages, and Bodhisattvas, are those whose exemplary embodiment of the unseen divine set the ‘plumb line’ for everyone else. What inspires and (re)produces the ‘religious life’ is the way ritual makes divine concepts present, alive, and meaningful for participants, and this involves decentering at some level. Furthermore, while Boyer may be correct in asserting that most people do not have spectacular decentering experiences, this does not mean that the experiences of the majority do not involve decentering. Decentering can be “familiar and perhaps highly ritualized and deliberately cultivated,” besides being experienced as something unusual, unfamiliar, and unexpected (Wildman 2011, 88). I suggest that when decentering is experienced anomalously, the conscious mind is strongly displaced, translating into more spectacular manifestations in line with McNamara’s account. When experienced in familiar and deliberately cultivated ways, as Wildman draws attention to, decentering never completely or even primarily displaces the conscious mind. Spectacular cases may draw more attention to the ‘activity of the divine’, which is why they are held up as exemplars, but the ‘work’ of decentering can take place in more mundane ways.

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concepts creates a ‘specified absence’ in the psyches of ritual participants.14 The psyche experiences an absence because its own role and the role of normal, pragmatic experience is purposely diminished; it is a specified absence because specific Dominant Symbols delimit the types of possible experiences one might have of the divine that fill the space vacated by normal experience. As an account of how ‘Rangda’ and ‘Smoke Woman’ can be meaningful presences to their respective communities, I suggest this explanation is much more promising than Rappaport’s emphasis on the association of divine concepts with ritual. Rappaport acknowledges that metaperformativity is at the heart of religious community’s adaptive, cybernetic organization, but he doesn’t recognize that it might also be the source of religious experience. Decentering Links the Psychological to the Social by a ‘Spiritual Map’ In this account of religious experience, ritual and myth produce both the adaptive organization of the community, and the psychological experience of individuals concerning unseen causes. This represents an advance of Rappaport’s theory. What still needs to be clarified, however, is the claim that myth represents encoded social memory, organizing human relationships according to a ‘spiritual map’, and that this map connects the psychological dynamics of individuals and the social dynamics of religious groups in a mutually reinforcing set. We can describe myths as encoded social memory because their authoritative role for the religious community is indirect, stemming from their role in producing religious experience, not from any understanding reached during normal, pragmatic consciousness. In other forms of sociality, what serves as memory does so directly. Participants in a nation-state, for example, build their individual and corporate identities as a result of concepts and roles that are pragmatically and directly about sociality. Constitutions, such as the us Constitution, give direct terms and reasons for the political relationships between people. The nation and the individual have been linked together by key documents that pragmatically act as social memory.15 On the other hand, religious initiations, confirmations, and public and private decentering experiences don’t depend upon pragmatic and direct concepts and roles to connect people to each other, but on locating the individual 14 15

The term is Deacon’s (2006). Margaret Archer (1995), using an emergence paradigm to examine sociological phenomena, argues along the lines I am suggesting here. Though she doesn’t explicitly thematize the idea of social memory (in fact, her argument would be greatly strengthened if she did so), she describes the mnemonic effects of rules, constitutions, and roles admirably.

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in relationship to an experience of the divine, which in turn locates the individual to the community. Myth guides and biases the decentering process, which acts as a system of exchange connecting individuals and others in a group defined theologically. For example, when individual Native Americans pursue and experience animal ‘spirit guides’ in their vision quests, these experiences bond the individual to others in the community according to the way the relations between the various, theologically-described spirit guides are experienced, not according to the natural relations obtaining between the community. The community’s future is guided by the terms and possibilities inherent in the theological vision of ultimate reality, and the way those possibilities have been taken up in individual experience. Without at least some participants experiencing the divine, religious social organization would not long persist. Ritual and myth produce direct expectations of the divine’s involvement in religious social groups. Csordas (2001), reflecting on Rappaport’s theory, proposes that some experiences in the psyches of individuals act like a ‘transducer’, connecting the ideal world of the sacred with the material world of existence. He offers Catholic Charismatic ‘words of knowledge’ and Native American Church ‘physical signs’ as examples of such transducers. These sanctified forms of numinous experience give specific, mediating knowledge to individuals and their communities, at a level far more specific than myths do. Similarly, Wikstrom (1990) suggests that the ‘play’ of religious imagination connects individuals, the divine, and the social group together. I suggest that what creates the capacity for such experiences – whether conceived of as imagination, or perhaps as something parapsychologically more potent – is precisely the expectation that the divine is what mediates the relationship of individuals to each other. Even spectacular manifestations of the divine may occur as all are coordinated by the organizing potency of this specified absence – like spokes of a wheel coordinated by the hole of a wheel’s hub. It is important to note the synergistic effect of ritual and myth on individuals and groups: it is this synergy that gives the ongoing dynamics of a religious community its systemic and emergent character. Each individual’s experience of religious decentering confirms the community’s story of ultimate reality, even as it contributes a new strand and a new potential vector for that story to grow and develop in open-ended ways. As ritual and myth are made individually meaningful through decentering, community ritual dynamics are reinforced and a metaphysical order is established; as community ritual dynamics are reinforced and a metaphysical order is established, individuals are continually re-invited to access transformative decentering experiences that have a definite character, as well as community support. Each provides the condition for the other’s continued existence.

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The Example of Haitian Voodoo

Perhaps the best example I have found in the anthropological literature analyzing a religious community in terms that suggest this revision of Rappaport’s theory is Lowenthal’s (1978) analysis of a Haitian voodoo service (sèvis). Against functional explanations of religious participation prevalent in some approaches to religious studies, he suggests we need to notice the nature of the rewards motivating individual participation. Lowenthal analyzes Voodoo, known for its practice of spirit possession, in terms of the relationship between religious belief, sociology, and individual psychological experience. He notes what is definitive of spirit possession (a decentering experience) is its presence in collective performances (ritual) and its origin in a belief in spirits (myth). Together, these three influence both the psychological organization of individuals, and the social organization of the community. This analysis makes for a highly instructive account of what I describe as metaperformativity. In what follows I will trace key moments in his account almost word for word, paraphrasing slightly and changing the order for clarity: A sèvis [ritual performance] is structured, organized, and experienced in relationship to two things – basic theological tenets concerning the lwa (ancestor spirits), and a particular aesthetic principle governing collective performance. The aesthetic and performative feature of a sèvis is tied integrally to its theological and devotional ends. The folk theory of possession is responsible. The lwa themselves know how they want to be honored, and assert themselves in services to secure their desires. This is why possession is central to the sèvis. To induce possession is the goal, as it demonstrates the pleasure of the lwa at the sèvis. During sèvis, participants are in the presence of supernatural beings; they are natural and real, the dance itself demonstrating how real they are. The “concept of possession and a principle of performance together constitute the essential features of the cultural context within which each sèvis unfolds.” A ‘hot’ sèvis is an involved and enthusiastic service, when the happiness of people and the happiness of the lwa are obviously manifest. A ‘hot’ sèvis is not just one that has been effective at bringing on trance, however. Rather, a ‘hot’ sèvis “helps to create a subjective reality for the sèvite in which the essence of worship comes to be participation in the collective creation of song and dance.” For those unpossessed, dancing is not dancing for the lwa, but dancing with the lwa – they are sharing in the act of aesthetic creation with the gods themselves, making it “perhaps the ultimate satisfaction of voodoo worship…no performances equal in

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intensity, enthusiasm, and involvement those which include the lwa as participants.” “Haitian aesthetic sensibilities are closely tied to the notion of full participation in the act of creation, rather than to passive contemplation or appreciation.” A sèvis involves individual creativity and collective participation. There is a holistic, social component – implying the presence of both human and spiritual persons – that makes the individual dances meaningful in a way they wouldn’t be otherwise. The sèvis is a ritual performance that orders the relationship of humans and spirits, stipulating what form of organization and tone of interpersonal relations and cooperation matter. The “theological and experiential significance of worship within this religious system emerge from the ritual process which successfully articulates this set of culturally patterned expectations with a particular mode of collective participation.” emphasis mine

In Lowenthal’s account, notice how myths about the lwa – non-physical, spiritual beings – organize both individual psychological experiences involving decentering, and indirectly create a social form biased by the particular tone of voodoo Dominant Symbols. Individual Haitians don’t gather together for the sake of sociality; they gather together to experience the lwa, whose presence at a sèvis provides an experience of profound aesthetic harmonization of the individual, the group, and the divine. Dominant Symbols include the aesthetics of singing and dancing with the gods, and the personal characteristics of the lwa as given by voodoo belief, leading to their appearance as particular personalities in individuals experiencing decentering. The Haitian sèvis is organized around a ‘specified absence’ created by ritual and myth. The metaperformativity of the sèvis creates the expectation of specific alternate states of consciousness, guides them, and makes ritual gatherings an attractive and valuable fact of Haitian life, due to the collective experience of many individuals. The sèvis will continue to organize Haitian life as long as it continues to adapt to changes in custom, culture, people groups, and geographical location as needed. Summary Myth references divine Beings and Ways considered as nonmaterial causal agencies that manifest in paradigmatic ways. Ritual is an embodied, participatory activity that ‘frames’ and sets apart whatever cognitive content is indicated

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by it. Together, ritual and myth have three important effects on individuals and groups. First, they establish the authority and indicate acceptance of the reality of the divine. This implies – and may invite – the suppression of normal self-identity, and a psychological experience called decentering. Decentering is a neuropsychological term that captures how, in a religious context, religiously-inspired visions of the self can replace – either spectacularly or in more deliberate and mundane fashion – the ‘self’ of a ritual participant. The way decentering is experienced will be biased and directed by the paradigmatic examples of the divine. Second, decentering experiences invited by ritual and myth ‘decode’ mythological social memory, creating groups who relate to each other through their common relationship to the divine. It is the relationship of each to the divine that will define proper individual and social behavior, and in collective group gatherings, will make room for subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations of the divine. Third, since the subjects of myth are ultimately ‘not of this world’, the divine can never be exhausted by or finally limited to any material or cultural manifestation of human life. Indeed, the divine can be used to support or criticize almost any possible sociocultural manifestation. Communities defined by their relationship to the divine have a robust, adaptive, and reproductive organizational structure, and can continue to exist across great expanses of time and cultural change. These three effects of ritual and myth link together individual psychological experience and social organization in a mutually-reinforcing set, where particular kinds of individual experience justify participation in the ritual group, and participation in the ritual group re-invites particular kinds of individual experience. This view of religious communities explains why religious communities exhibit the abstract, formal structure of an adaptive, self-reproducing biological organism. It also begins to suggest why religious beliefs are meaningful to individuals, as well as why they occupy a central place in religious groups. Ritual and myth produce a robust, conservative, but adaptive social order, and a creative, meaningful, and experientially potent ‘psychic order’. This, in my view, is the proper way to take Rappaport’s insightful application of emergence theory to religious community life and extend it. A potential criticism of this approach is that it overemphasizes decentering religious experiences, prevalent in only a subset of religious communities and participants, and is thus not characteristic of ‘religion’.16 It also might be criticized for being too theoretical, too abstract, or too imperialistic to make sense of actual religion ‘on the ground’. To assess these complaints, I will use the perspective generated in this chapter and apply it to a test case that might give it 16

As I noted in fn. 13.

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difficulties – the case of Confucianism. The experiment, however, will be set aside to Appendix, as some readers more than others might be interested in the details of the examples and arguments offered. Now, we will move to a consideration of the assumptions of emergence theory that have been in the theoretical background of the account of religion I have offered in this chapter; my hope is that the account of religion offered has been compelling enough to warrant the tour.

chapter 3

Emergence and Semiotics – a Primer In the previous chapter, I did not specifically couch my account of religion using explicit emergence and semiotic categories and terms. In this chapter, my goal is to make clear what I believe is ‘state-of-the-art’ emergence theorizing, in order to gain the perspective necessary to distinguish an emergent approach to the study of religion from other naturalistic theories of religion that have appeared recently (D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell will be used later in this book as sophisticated representative examples). I will primarily be utilizing the recent work of Terrence Deacon as he draws on the thought of philosopher C.S. Peirce; but I will also investigate three complementary ideas relevant to the discussion: J.L. Austin’s performative utterances, Howard Pattee’s semantic closure, and Douglas Hofstadter’s strange loops. As a result of this chapter, we should have tools to better understand the dynamic relationship between the mnemonic function of myth and ritual; the robust, adaptive, and long-lived persistence of religious communities; and the meaningful transformative experiences and altered states of consciousness religious communities cultivate in individuals.

Emergent Systems

Terrence Deacon1 has been one of the ablest recent expositors of emergence theory, a theoretical approach that has roots going back at least to John Stuart Mill, and addresses issues that have been discovered and re-discovered a number of times in the past 150 years.2 In this section, I will outline the key features of Deacon’s theory, to be followed by a similar look at semiotics. 1 In this section I will be chiefly drawing on Deacon’s earlier papers on emergence (Deacon 2006; Goodenough and Deacon 2003; Deacon 2003a; Deacon 2003b; Weber and Deacon 2000; Deacon and Sherman 2007; Goodenough and Deacon 2006; Deacon 2000; Deacon, Cashman, and Sherman 2006; Sherman and Deacon 2007), where he attempts to describe the categories necessary for understanding the phenomenon, and his recent book, Incomplete Nature (2012), which addresses fundamental issues in emergence theory in a much deeper way. 2 See Clayton (2006), McLaughlin (1992), and Juarrero (2010) for a history of emergence theory. Issues related to emergence are also discussed in the fields of cybernetics, philosophy of mind, and dynamic systems theory, and in the study of complex adaptive systems, group selection, and superorganisms.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293762_004

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Emergence Complements Reduction In Deacon’s hands, emergence is not a new ‘field’ of the sciences, nor does it introduce new forces or entities into established scientific fields. It is more like a metaphor change, a change in perspective that draws attention to problems previously ignored, and asks questions previously unasked. The metaphor change suggested by emergence allows Deacon to ask how it is that the entities and processes investigated in physics can be organized into living organisms exhibiting functional adaptation, and into human persons who can engage the natural world with intelligence and intentionality. Deacon’s version of emergence draws attention to organization rather than to component parts, and tries to account for the increase in organization exhibited over time by some systems, particularly those that manifest self-serving organizational dynamics. Emergence theory emphasizes certain aspects of phenomena usually ignored by reductionist approaches. Deacon suggests what a few of these aspects are: • While reductionist approaches give us a ‘cast of characters’ that make up all phenomena, characterizing parts and their potential for interaction, emergence approaches focus on how contextual relations between aggregates of component parts and external objects matters to what happens across larger spans of space, time, and referential fields. • Reductionist approaches give us the basic physical laws describing cause and effect that apply to all parts everywhere; emergence approaches focus on novel arrangements of causality which sometimes appear, without invoking unprecedented physical laws. Emergence is the attempt to tell the story of how matter/energy and form interact to produce complexity, function, and intentionality across the ‘hierarchy of the sciences’ – from physics, to chemistry, to biology, etc. Emergence approaches acknowledge that what is known at any lower level science underdetermines what would count as knowledge to a higher-level science. To know that the theoretical entities of a higher level science are made up of the theoretical entities taken from a lower level science (which reductionism as a strategy demonstrates) does not give an account of what specifically characterizes the way those characters interact at a higher level, and why. • Reductionist approaches focus on parts in isolation, what they are intrinsically. Emergence approaches focus on how those parts interact causally in systems, and are often reflected in “research paradigms sensitive to systemic factors” (Deacon 2003b). Systemic emergent effects are often the most critical causal processes behind phenomena to be explained. • Reductionist approaches are concerned with the specific material composition and causal processes underlying a particular phenomenon;

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emergence approaches are interested in phenomena demonstrating the same systemic causal dynamics operating in diverse domains, and across different structural implementations, which is what motivates the idea that these phenomena are relatively independent of specific material composition.3 • Reductionist approaches tend to prioritize isolated, closed systems in order to understand their lawful behavior; emergence approaches note that open, far-from-equilibrium, thermodynamically self-simplifying systems can also serve as the means for perpetuating and maintaining form across time. Emergence Involves the Spontaneous Recruitment of Self-simplifying Tendencies If in Deacon’s hands emergence is a complement – not a competitor – to a reductionist perspective, he argues that the fundamental advance it makes is that it offers conceptions that overcome the misleading ‘machine metaphor’ usually invoked to describe complex systems. At one time, organized systems like biological entities were viewed as machines not unlike intricate clockworks, resulting from the intelligent foresight of an intentional designer. The idea of intelligent foresight has been replaced in the sciences by the ‘blind luck’ aspect of random variation in Darwin’s theory. However, the idea that a complex organized system is ‘highly machined’ is still widely held. Thus, we currently think in terms of random machines. Machines are necessarily delicate, precise, task-specific organizations of causal processes; they are not robust. Deacon thinks we need to replace the ‘highly machined’ aspect of the metaphor with the idea of self-simplifying processes. This term, which Deacon explains is more descriptively accurate than the more commonly used term ‘self-organizing’, describes systems where constraints on the otherwise possible degrees of freedom of aggregate parts are replicated in a consistent manner. Thus, such systems are ‘simpler’ with respect to all possible interactions of the components parts, as a result of the way constraints are passed on again and again within the system. Self-simplifying processes provide better intuitions for gaining insight into the ordering impetus of complex systems like biological organisms than do ‘machined’ processes. First, machines involve pre-specified specialized parts brought together in a highly constrained order to form a whole, which suggests that only highly unlikely chance events would allow organized complex systems to exist. Self-simplifying processes, to the contrary, are first naturally-occurring dynamic wholes which only later separate 3 Thus, Deacon argues that emergence is related to the logic of functionalism.

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out into specialized parts. Second, a machine is not allowed to vary physically. It must always act consistently with an externally determined order, its function. Self-simplifying processes, on the other hand, recruit spontaneous intrinsic tendencies, which can and will vary, and use them in novel ways. Only later are varieties of self-simplifying processes made subject to selection. Third, a machine whose outputs-to-inputs are determined in advance is informationally static. It is like a deductive proof – from its inputs, its outputs are necessary. The opposite is true of a self-simplifying process. At the core of such a system is a fundamental informational openness, a vagueness of determination, an incompleteness. By having no ‘preset’ inputs tied to preset outputs, a self-simplifying process can find use for noise, while machines must have noise eliminated for the sake of predictability. Noise for a machine is a problem to overcome; for a self-simplifying process, it can be the ground of novelty and variation. Deacon notes that natural selection, a process considered critical to understanding biological organisms, already assumes the existence of processes of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, self-maintenance, reproduction, and adaptation that it improves upon but cannot explain. Thus, self-simplification should be considered a primitive feature of both biology and information and natural selection derived features. This conceptual shift towards understanding biology as self-simplifying processes upon which natural selection acts makes clear that the full plan of an organism does not have to be encoded in a genome. In the place of a fully specified genome, genes need only act as biasing mechanisms that “coax otherwise spontaneous processes down predictable pathways” (Deacon 2000). Emergence is about Relational Properties, Not Constituent Properties As mentioned above, emergent approaches to the sciences distinguish between the material features and specific properties of constituent parts, and the relational, configurational, and topological features of aggregates. A focus on the topology of relations suggests emergent phenomena are not new things, but stable, robust patterns of dynamic processes where relational properties dominate over constituent properties. Bickhard and Campbell (2000) have given a nice picture of this; they write, “Flames, waves, vortexes – none are supervenient on underlying constituents. They are more like knots or twists in an underlying flow – nothing remains persistent other than the organization of the knot itself. They are topological entities, not substantive entities.” As Deacon notes, new relational properties, not new substances or physical laws, are what justify the connotations of the word ‘emergence’. Formal or pattern novelty is generated via relations.

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Deacon Identifies Three Types of Emergent Systems Deacon offers a general definition of emergence as unprecedented global regularity generated within a composite system by virtue of the higher-order consequences of the interaction of component parts (2006, 122). In Deacon’s theory, this definition covers three types of emergent phenomena; the distinction between these three types represents the novel contribution of Deacon’s approach to emergence theory. The three-tiered characterization suggests a way to distinguish a hierarchy of ‘natural kinds’, a hierarchy of ontology. The first two emergent types distinguish between intra-level relations, the third emergent type marks the transition to a new ontological level (Graves 2009). These intra- and inter-level distinctions suggest how wholes differ organizationally, not materially, from each other and from parts. At each level, what is ‘determined’ to happen at the level of physics is less relevant for understanding future states of the system than relational properties at some higher level of assessment.4 Deacon labels the three types of emergent dynamics homeodynamics, morphodynamics, and teleodynamics. Homeodynamics Homeodynamics is the simplest and most basic form of emergent phenomena; a key example is a gas settling into thermodynamic equilibrium. In homeodynamics, aggregated elements dynamically interacting in an improbable state spontaneously move towards a more probable state. This spontaneous movement results in a dissipation of constraint, as physical dispositions such as 4 Van Gulick (1995) has argued that ontological levels studied by the special sciences can be defended from reductionist claims by noting how the causal powers of objects described at these ‘higher’ levels are explained by the organization of the causal roles of the constituents. The special sciences pick out stable recurring sets of boundary conditions for physical forces. They isolate a level of causal order and regularity in the natural world. According to Van Gulick, there is much to be said about considering these patterns as real: they are stable and recurring; they are stable despite changes in their underlying constituents; many are selfsustaining and self-productive in the face of perturbing forces; it is the larger context of their patterns that affect which causal powers of their constituents are activated or are likely to be so; and the selective activation of causal powers of parts can contribute to the maintenance and preservation of the pattern itself. Following up on this line of thought, Deacon considers his chief task in Incomplete Nature to explain how organization can consistently and spontaneously arise in nature, and how determinism at one level of explanation can ground a spontaneous tendency at another level. For the sake of thinking about emergence theory and religion, I will simply assume that Deacon’s account of emergent phenomenon is correct, without focusing too much on the kind of details Deacon is concerned with in his book. See Cassell (2013) for my take on what his book adds to the emergence discussion.

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velocity, charge, and energy become maximally uncorrelated through the repeated interactions of many components. Although the local, mechanistic interactions of parts are potentially time-reversible, the overall effect of these interactions on the aggregate is an irreversible movement to maximum entropy. In homeodynamics, aggregates ‘fall towards regularities’ by virtue of statistical canceling effects that reduce difference, leading to systemic relational properties. Structural and thermodynamic effects are averaged (Graves 2009). Consider the state of liquidity. Liquidity is not a property that applies to individual molecules, only to aggregates in constant interaction. Relational molecular properties are responsible for liquidity, as opposed to intrinsic molecular properties such as mass or charge. In repeated molecular interactions across spatial scales, “the specific unique features of individual molecules (e.g. their charge, geometry, orientation, momentum, internal vibration, etc.) distribute in such a way as to cancel one another in aggregate, thus . . .  converg[ing] to similar results across a wide range of substrates and modes of interaction” (Deacon 2006). The fact that relational properties are separable from intrinsic properties means liquidity can be realized in many different ways; different micro-configurations of the same molecules can demonstrate liquidity, as can different kinds of molecules altogether. As Deacon writes, Liquid properties supervene5 on lower-order properties, including their interaction effects, and are therefore entirely determined by them. And yet we require a separate explanation for the fact that these properties are also to some extent independently converged upon despite a diversity of substrates. Liquid properties reveal an independence from the details of matter and energy with ascent in scale, even though these details contribute to the particular values of liquid behavior parameters. deacon 2006

The relational characteristic of liquidity (and other homeodynamic properties) explains why liquidity requires a separate explanation from merely pointing to intrinsic constituent properties. It is the interaction dynamics of components which determines the properties of liquidity. 5 According to David Chalmers (1996), in a supervenience relationship there can be no upperlevel property change without some kind of lower-level change. While noting property differences between levels, supervenience claims that fixing lower-level facts simultaneously fixes higher-level facts. Supervenience as a concept is meant to remove any sense of mystery surrounding the high-level phenomena; it eliminates the idea that something extra is going on.

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Morphodynamics The logic of morphodynamic emergence is built upon interactions that pit two or more homeodynamic tendencies against each other. Often called self-­ organizing or self-simplifying systems, an example of this class of emergent phenomena is a whirlpool in a stream. The self-organization of morphodynamics can be characterized as ((Homeodynamics) + iteration). There are two conditions for such interactions. First, the system must experience a constant source of outside perturbation. Second, the system’s geometry of causal interaction must force two or more homeodynamic tendencies of constraint dissipation to repeatedly interfere with each another, the results being iterated in a kind of feedback loop. When these conditions hold, organization at a higher level can arise. This higher-level organization represents the most efficient way to dissipate lower level constraints, as the feedback constantly ‘piles up’ the results of previous interactions (a ‘compound interest effect’). Morphodynamic systems are not organized according to any force or law – there is no ‘law of whirlpools’ that needs to be articulated to understand the phenomenon. So why does the higher-level organization repeatedly and robustly appear, often in very different substrates (weather patterns, water in a stream)? In systems where outside perturbation causes parts of the system to continually interact with each other, from a statistical point of view, the vast majority of specifiable behaviors exhibiting any degrees of freedom would be matched by their opposites. No large-scale tendencies of behaviors would develop. But when certain features in the overall organization of the system slightly constrain the possible interactions present, some behaviors will be cancelled out by their opposites less frequently (and note the negative logic of this characterization). As a picture of this, recall the common explanation given for why toilets flush in a clockwise direction in the Northern hemisphere: it is due to the slight rotational effect of the turning of the earth on the individual water molecules. This effect, however slight, constrains movement in one direction slightly more than it constrains movement in the opposite direction; in the context of the repetitive, competitive dynamics of too much water trying to go down a pipe, this bias can create order. The order arises as most of the competing movements cancel each other out, and the movement slightly less opposed begins to dominate. Since the circular causal structure of the dynamics of interaction mean the results of the past are ‘fed-forward’ to affect the present, these slightly less opposed ways of dissipating constraint will gradually bias the entire system’s organization. Though the initial occurrence of these lessopposed behaviors of constraint dissipation is purely a matter of chance, the overall pattern of constraint dissipation will be predictable and robust. In morphodynamics, “something irreversible happens . . . [t]he propagation and

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amplification of form and constraint result in asymmetric emergent constraints that converge toward global attractors” (Graves 2009). Teleodynamics6 Properties such as function, information, meaning, reference, representation, agency, purpose, sentience, and value first arise in the natural world with teleodynamic emergence. The most profound examples of teleodynamics are biological evolution and human thought. In far-from-equilibrium conditions, teleodynamic systems arise as two or more morphodynamic, self-organizing systems become mutually self-supporting. They become correlated with each other by restraining the other’s tendency towards dissipation, either by maintaining the other’s particular dynamic architecture, or maintaining the farfrom-equilibrium conditions they need to exist. Importantly, it is the relationship of constraint interdependence itself that is preserved in such systems; neither the specific material/energetic components of the correlated states, nor even the specific morphodynamic systems themselves, need be preserved. Because of this flexibility in component processes and parts, teleodynamic systems can evolve; they are capable of exploring possibilities for constraint interrelation. Alternative versions of a teleodynamic system can be sampled randomly as long as the parts continue to constrain each other, and arrangements that more effectively do so given their context will replace alternatives. To explain how mutually beneficial constraints can explore possibilities, Deacon offers an analogy taken from the process of writing his book: Though my fingers never evolved for linguistic communication, the moment I began to use them to type words on a keyboard, they came to function for this end . . . the constraints of linguistic communication by computer fit with the constraints of finger movement control . . . The potential of my fingers to assume this function was simply not excluded by the constraints they acquired due to natural selection . . . It didn’t require work to bring this function into existence for the simple reason that this convergence of constraints wasn’t excluded (2012, 542). The possibility for fingers to be used to communicate via computer is not eliminated by the constraints of either finger or keyboard architecture. This is a 6 It is very hard to follow the logic of teleodynamic interactions from a verbal presentation, though I will attempt in what follows to present it clearly. Deacon and Sherman have produced a short video demonstration of an ‘autogen’, which is helpful to grasp the concepts involved, as well as their interdependence. [See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBiKO4-96Ko.] 

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picture of the way teleodynamic systems evolve, as randomly generated features that arise in a system may, in some contexts, contribute features and dispositions that lead to system preservation better than others. Since these novel features and dispositions that contribute to survival are not designed into the system according to a model or plan, but are merely not eliminated from the system, we should consider their role in the system as exemplifying a general type or a function. For example, a variety of kinds of sensory equipment can facilitate environmental awareness for an organism, including equipment that sees, hears, and touches. These randomly originated features are not eliminated because they facilitate sensitivity, but they are not designed for what they specifically do. The abstract and unspecified nature of the class of such novel contributions to constraint preservation is what is referred to by terms such as ‘function’, and ‘purpose’. Though it doesn’t require work to explore alternative arrangements of constraints (that happens by accident), when alternative versions of interrelated morphodynamic processes are in competition for thermodynamic resources, those that represent more effective self-preservation in their context will replace others. This drives these systems towards fit interrelatedness with their environmental context. Growth in fitness is the heart of teleodynamic work, and it describes the growing variety and fitness of organisms to their environments, and the growth and fitness of arguments and thought processes to what needs to be explained or solved. Significantly, Deacon notes that in some teleodynamic systems certain parts of the system can become ‘bottlenecks’ of constraint, widely biasing the dynamics of the entire system. Such bottlenecks can function as a kind of system memory if they are faithfully reproduced, storing constraints on system behavior. An example of such a bottleneck is the dna found in biological organisms. These bottlenecks of constraint, if they can vary to some degree, may produce different ‘versions’ of system dynamics, some of which may out-reproduce other versions. The combination of variation in the memory component, and environmental selection pressures on the different products of constraint, means such a dynamic can explore the possibilities of system organization. The differential preservation of constraints produces contextually useful, functional variants with respect to something else – their environment. The variations of stored memory can be viewed as representing features relevant to the system’s persistence. Thus, semiotic processes can arise in teleodynamic systems.7 The boundary of a single teleodynamic system is extended in space and time. In the case of simple biology, the teleodynamic unit is a lineage of 7 Semiosis will be explicated in the next major section of this paper.

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organisms, not a single organism. Though teleodynamic phenomena like biological organisms and intentional human agents are conventionally thought of as materially bounded, they are defined by a fundamental incompleteness, a perpetually updated relational connection to something else. This ‘something else’ is their own future interactions with their environment. The circular causality of their dynamics, their ability to re-enter informational components into that circular causality, and their potential to vary is what gives them their ‘future-and-other-oriented’ organization. Discordant alternatives to their organization with respect to these characteristics will fail to persist. Rather than being designed positively to achieve their target state, teleodynamic phenomena ‘fall’ toward their target state through a process of exploration and selection-producing feedback. The selection dynamic in teleodynamics can be compared to the canceling dynamic of self-undermining chaos leading to stable dynamic patterns in homeo- and morpho-dynamics. Summary Each type of emergent phenomena – homeo-, morpho-, and teleo-dynamics – is the result of interaction and relational effects, and what we consider emergent about them falls out of interaction. Relational properties distributed across the many interactions of a closed set are averaged in homeodynamics; in morphodynamics a circular causal structure leads to amplification of certain interaction constraints and biases, and in teleodynamics a circular causal structure combined with a type of memory means interaction constraints and biases are sampled and re-presented. Note how in all three emergent categories, the ‘negative causality’ of what is left over after other things are canceled – what Deacon calls least discordant remainders – play a crucial causal role in the production of form. Lawful behaviors usually studied in reductive scientific accounts are not enough to account for the form of emergent phenomena; stable relational characteristics and properties emerge when variations of interactions between lawfully-behaving parts cancel each other out (homeodynamics), selectively amplify as a result of what other interactions are canceled (morphodynamics), and become interdependent, explore variations, and are selected from (teleodynamics). Semiotics As Deacon has pointed out, the memory component of teleodynamic systems requires semiotic analysis. Semiosis, particularly as it is conceived by American

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philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914),8 is not just a study of reference, but is part and parcel of a phenomenological and epistemological standpoint built around the ‘action’ of signs. I will focus on two critical aspects of semiotics: Peirce’s analysis of the signs into three types – icons, indexes, and symbols; and the process of interpretation, which is central to understanding how a sign ‘acts’. Terrence Deacon has, in his analysis of these three types of signs, contributed convincingly to their respectability in terms of the sciences, and I will follow both Peirce and Deacon in explicating them. Further, I will highlight one of Deacon’s central themes: that the ‘action’ of signs results from the fact that certain dynamic systems interpret. Anything can serve as a sign of something else; but only certain systems can take some things as standing in a relation to other things. Peirce’s Categories of Signs A quick word about Peirce’s phenomenological theory will suffice to ground our discussion. Peirce categorized the world of phenomenal experience into three categories; these categories were not proposed to tell us what is in the objective world independent of the mind, nor were they proposed to catalog the mind’s own workings in developing experience. The three categories were meant to express the three ways a mind can be in relation to its object, and to “express the interweave of mind-dependent and mind-independent relations which constitute human experience” (Deely 2001). The key to this is signification – how one thing refers to another thing for some third thing. Signification accounts for how we experience our world, as anything experienced at all is experienced because signification makes present one thing through another thing (and this is true even at the level of sense experience). Corresponding to each of the three categories of experience is a characteristic kind of sign, embodying experience in the way it represents something other than itself. Each type of sign captures different aspects of experience, and brings the mind into relationship with those aspects in the same way that the sign itself is in relationship with it. Peirce called these three kinds of signs icons, indexes, and symbols. According to Peirce, none of the three kinds of signs function as signs unless interpreted. This is what gives a sign its peculiar, non-causal relationship to its object. Importantly, though Peirce explained signs with respect to mind, he did not think that semiosis was limited to just human mental life; he thought it part-and-parcel of biological 8 Key works exemplifying his thought include (Peirce 1998a) and the two-volume collected papers, (Peirce 1992; Peirce 1998b).

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development and evolution, an insight that has been followed up through the emerging field of biosemiotics.9 Icons of Qualia We are all familiar with caricatures of people that represent them by looking like them in some way; reversing that logic, iconism in Peirce’s sense is the fact that an interpreting system takes different things to be ‘the same’, despite the differences between them, even if those differences are merely differences in time and location. Deacon gives an illuminating example of this most important type of sign, the basis for all other signs. He writes, Consider camouflage, as in the case of natural protective coloration. A moth on a tree whose wings resemble the graininess and color of the bark . . . [can] escape being eaten by a bird if the bird . . . interprets the moth’s wings as just more tree . . . If the moth had been a little less matching, or had moved, or the bird had been a little more attentive, then any of the differences between the moth and the tree made evident by those additional differences would have indicated to the bird that there was something else present which wasn’t just more tree . . .  Iconism is where the referential buck stops when nothing more is added . . . Whether because of boredom or limitations of a minimal nervous system, there are times when almost anything can be iconic of anything else (stuff, stuff, stuff . . .). deacon 1997, 74–6

Icons are not a feature of the universe; they are a feature of experience, which interpreting systems create out of the individual elements of the universe. Iconism turns a universe of infinite, individual, never-repeating, unrelated disjuncts into things exhibiting self-similarity, and from this field of self-similarity – the ground of experience – all further discriminations of reality flow (Peirce 1998a/1902). The fact that icons create the necessary background for all other determinate experiences is related to an insight of Gregory Bateson (2000/1972): we only know the differences between things that we presuppose as most basic; substances are the basic things that we don’t know, yet presuppose as the ground for differentiation. Just as a physical map is a systematic way of distinguishing changes in features that are left undetermined and undefined by the 9 See Barbieri (2007).

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map, when we desire to get to the bottom of signifying relationships, we find the differences between things are referenced in relationship to icons which in themselves remain undistinguished. For Peirce each individual qualitative experience in each sensory domain is composed of icons, and acts as the background against which different registered experiences are noticed. Having a continuous and ongoing experience of the color red, without the experience of anything else, is not registered as ‘red’, but as the background against which the experience of something other than red can be had. An icon ‘refers’ by providing space for something else to be noted; an icon refers in the same way zeros ‘count’. A zero is a number, but a number of a peculiar type; it serves as a placeholder for some potential value, but in itself does not indicate any value. Similarly, icons are the default kind of reference; they are the ground from which other reference flows, but they themselves suggest an undistinguished class, an unproblematic expectation, an empty set, a ‘field’ of similarity. Indexes of here-now Interactions If an icon serves as a kind of placeholder, creating the ground for potential experience by registering undistinguished self-sameness, an index is the form of reference that turns potential experience into experiences had; it references an actual, here-now interaction; it registers known reality. As something exists in its reaction or relation to something else, it can index those things. Consider the pain of being hit in the nose. Against the background iconism of whatever a nose feels like when it is not hit,10 pain indexes some contact, here and now; it says that something has happened, something has changed. The product of an index in the mind is to register difference, change (Peirce 1998a). Indexes are most commonly thought of as associations, and associative learning is how both animals and humans learn indexes. Associations in themselves have no clear connection to causality; that something is associated with something else does not mean they are causally connected. Yet as a ‘first draft’ for registering experience, indexes are those associations that allow us to connect things to each other, whether correctly or incorrectly. There are natural indices that are causally connected to their object (i.e. the symptom of a disease), and non-natural indices that are constructed for the purpose of indicating something (i.e. a weathervane). With human-constructed indices, the ground of reference is selected so that it clearly indexes something for some purpose. Natural indices are more vague, with multiple possible grounds of reference (Rappaport 1999, 62–5). 10

And note that this feeling is precisely the iconic, unindexed, unfelt, but necessary qualitative referential ground from which distinguishable feeling appears.

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Indexes can be ‘chained’ to one another, producing more and more distant connections between their referents. This is the heart of the method of training animals to do more and more complex ‘tricks’ – by gradually increasing the intermediate steps between a stimulus and a reward, the first in a series of complicated behaviors can become an index of the reward (Deacon 2003c). Symbols of Abstracted General Habits As some items of experience exist in systematic relations with other things, they can be represented symbolically, a form of reference that refers neither by a quality it shares with its object, nor by virtue of an associative connection with its object. Symbolic reference depends on the isomorphism between two systems of behaviors – the systemic behavior of natural relations in experience, and the systematic use of symbols constructed to be in relation to each other. A particular symbol-token points to a particular object by occupying a node in a network of symbol-tokens that mirrors the node that the object occupies in its actual relations (Peirce 1998a). Symbolic reference is “a system of exchange between two domains involving a third thing, the way the domains are related to each other” (J.E. Smith 1968, 27). Deacon has analyzed symbolic reference by comparing the semiotic perspective of Peirce and the experimental results of Ape Language Research (alr), particularly the work of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.11 His concludes that  . . . although a symbol token can be a simple object or action that is without similarity to or regular physical correlation with its referent, it maintains its fluid and indirect referential power by virtue of its position within a structured set of indexical relationships among symbol tokens . . .  [I]ts representational power is dependent on being linked with other symbols in a reflexively organized system of indexical relationships. How we come to know the meaning and referential use of symbols involves two interdependent levels of correlational relationships. We individually and collectively elaborate this system by learning how each symbol token both points to objects of reference and (often implicitly) points to other symbol tokens (and their pointings). deacon 2003c, 8–9, italics mine

Perhaps the simplest example of symbolic reference is found in the way a street map refers. One recognizes something is a map of one’s neighborhood by noting the similarities of relations distributed across all the individual 11

See Deacon (1997), Savage-Rumbaugh (1986).

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elements of the map, compared to the relations found distributed across all the individual elements of the neighborhood one is in. No individual elements of a map identifies what it refers to; that this particular ‘X’ represents the intersection of Brighton Ave. and Cambridge St. is not made obvious by anything inhering in the ‘X’ itself. It is the position of the ‘X’ in relation to a host of other represented elements on the map, when compared to the environment, which allows me to say ‘I am at the intersection of Brighton Ave. and Cambridge St.’ Formal mathematical systems give another example of symbolic reference. When defining mathematical objects, a set of axioms might use everyday words like ‘point’ and ‘line’, but their definition within the formal system is not given by what ‘we mean’ by those words but rather is implicit in the totality of all propositions in which they occur. The connection between the terms of the formal system and what ‘we mean’ by it is made only through interpretation, where individual components of the formal system are compared as part of a system to the individual elements of mathematical reality. Hofstadter (1979) gives a great example. When discussing a set of historical mathematical postulates meant to define something very simple and basic to all mathematics, Hofstadter changes the key words in the postulates from what they ‘normally’ are to other terms. He then asks the reader to figure out what the postulates are meant to describe, only by their abstract relational definitions. This demonstrates compellingly how symbolic reference works. In the paragraph that follows, can you tell what the terms refer to? We will replace [the normal term] with the undefined term djinn, a word that comes fresh and free of connotations to our mind. Then [the] five postulates place five restrictions on djinns. There are two other undefined terms: Genie, and meta. The five postulates are: 1. Genie is a djinn; 2. Every djinn has a meta (which is also a djinn); 3. Genie is not the meta of any djinn; 4. Different djinns have different metas; 5. If Genie has X, and each djinn relays X to its meta, then all djinns get X. Peano hoped that his five restrictions on the concepts “Genie,” “djinn,” and “meta” were so strong that if two different people formed images in the minds of the concepts, the two images would have completely isomorphic structures (1979, 216–7).12 If icons of qualia have no intrinsic meaning beyond themselves, and signify nothing but the potential for indication; and if indexes give instances of 12

If you go to the trouble of following the postulates, you might, in an ‘aha’ moment, see that they match our natural conception of the counting numbers, starting with 0.

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factual, here-now interactions, symbols are the form of reference that carries the intellectual component of experience, the intelligibility of experience. Since symbolic signification relies on similarities between patterns of things, not things in their uniqueness, symbolic reference can bring about the achievement of some purpose towards classes of things or behaviors. Consider scientific ‘laws of nature’, which exemplify symbolic reference. No law of nature points only to some event that once occurred in the past, but to what will surely happen in the future, if certain conditions are fulfilled. Symbols represent the patterned, the general, the rational; they register the ‘rules of engagement’ for our experience. Peirce notes that symbols, besides representing general, patterned aspects of nature, create general, patterned behaviors for symbol-users in the world. Symbolic language produces effects in symbol-users that apply to future behavior towards classes of things. For example, Peirce notes that giving is a transfer of ownership, applying across a class of actions, and not a matter of movement in a specific case; to transfer ownership causes implications for future behavior; it is the result of a symbolic convention of social behavior. Consider further the corporation, the existence of which is mediated through symbolic reference; it is a general, habitual, pattern of human interactions, a symbolic reality that has future consequences in both the world of physical events and mental states, though not being either exclusively (Dewey 1958). So in addition to the fact that habits of nature are registered by symbolic reference, symbolic reference constitutes habits of symbol-users. Interpretation Deacon puts great emphasis on the importance of interpretation in his discussion of semiotics. His reasoning is, if it is the case that there is nothing inhering in a sign-vehicle that makes it a sign, then all the work to make a sign-vehicle a sign comes from the side of interpretation. Sign-vehicles don’t do anything; they do not act. He writes concerning iconic signs: Usually, people explain icons in terms of some respect or other in which two things are alike. But the resemblance doesn’t produce the iconicity . . .  The interpretive step that establishes an iconic relationship is essentially prior to this, and it is something negative, something that we don’t do. It is, so to speak, the act of not making a distinction . . .  To clarify the shift in emphasis I want to make from the relationship to the process behind it . . . what makes the moth wings iconic is an interpretive process produced by the bird, not something about the moth’s wings. Their coloration was taken to be an icon because of something that the

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bird didn’t do. What the bird was doing was actively scanning bark, its brain seeing just more of the same (bark, bark, bark . . .). What it didn’t do was alter this process (e.g., bark, bark, not-bark, bark . . . ). It applied the same interpretive perceptual process to the moth as it did to the bark. It didn’t distinguish between them, and so confused them with one another. This established the iconic relationship between moth and bark. deacon 1997, 74–6, italics mine

Keeping in mind that interpretation is the key to the ‘action’ of signs, I want to clarify some distinctions concerning interpretation. There are at least three terms used in the semiotic literature to discuss a halo of ideas surrounding interpretation – interpretation itself, interpreters, and interpretants. I believe at least one more term is justified, which I will call interpretant-vehicles. This means there are at least 4 terms that capture different ideas that all contribute to the concept of interpretation. I will outline the concepts captured by each of these ideas as I plan to use them, with examples taken from the semiotic literature. First, an interpreter is, in the language of systems theory, the dynamic system whose functioning and processes provides the background physical grounds for interpretation to occur. An interpreter can exist apart from any interpretation; to note an interpreter is merely to acknowledge the physical location and organized processes where interpretation is occurring. To use an example that I will continue to refer to in this section, imagine a thermometer where differences of temperature affect the relative expansion of mercury. The interpreter of the thermometer would be that dynamic system that ‘reads’ the thermometer. It might be, for example, some person who would differentially respond to the different states of the thermometer. Second, interpretation results from a history of engagement with two things where one is determined to be isomorphic with the other along some dimension. Peirce, who used the term ‘interpretant’ to cover examples of ‘interpretation’ as I am using the term here, speaks of an ‘interpretant’ as being like an interpreter who says that a foreigner says in his language the same thing that he himself says. To translate, one must know two languages, and conclude sentence A in language X is the same as sentence B in language Y. Interpretation necessarily involves living in two worlds at once, seeing two things at once, such that a comparison can be made, and (perhaps) an action taken that demonstrates the one thing as being the same as the other thing. In our thermometer example, interpretation is the act of taking the relative height of mercury as an indication of the relative temperature of the environment. Prior experiences of changes in mercury expansion as compared to

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changes in ambient temperature have convinced the interpreter that one can be used as a guide to the other. The thermometer now stands for something besides itself; the relational change in height is taken as being ‘the same’ as the relational change in temperature. Prior to being read, a thermometer is a physical object involved in dynamic relations only. When ‘read’, it has become a sign, due to an act of interpretation. Note that a particular act of interpretation may be incorrect – the thermometer might be broken. But due to a pattern noticed in prior engagements with both thermometers and temperature, the two are taken to be isomorphic with each other (Deely 1990). Third, an interpretant is a specific, here-now result of interpreting one thing as signifying another thing. It is this term that is the source of the most confusion in the semiotic literature, because it is often given double-duty (even by Peirce), conflated with interpretant-vehicle as I will explicate that term. I propose that we should consider the interpretant as the action taken that demonstrates that one thing has been taken as the same as another thing. Thus, an interpretant is the meaning, the outcome of interpretation (Deely 1994). When the discoverers of the Rosetta Stone first translated Egyptian by way of Greek, if the Stone had happened to record Egyptian recipes, an interpretant of the Egyptian recipes might be the actual creation of a particular Egyptian dish for the first time in three thousand years. Or it might be merely the imagined smell in the translator’s mind of the delightful dish described, complete with mouthwatering. Or it might be the decision not to record the relevant passages in a journal, since the passage was considered trivial in content. In each case, the interpretant is some produced outcome that represents some respect in which two things are seen as being related to each other. In the case of the Rosetta Stone ‘recipes’, the two things seen as being related are the markings on a stone constituting known Greek, and the markings on the stone constituting unknown Egyptian; the outcome is the different decisions resulting from taking one as the other, such as a way to prepare food based on a 3,000 year old Egyptian recipe. The interpretant is the way some comparison between two things is brought into a kind of unity of completion in some third thing, some outcome in which they both participate. This view of what Peirce meant – at least sometimes – by interpretant explains why he says the interpretant is a sign itself, able to be taken up in future semiosis. A selection among possible alternative responses is made by the interpreter to make this the interpretant of the object rather than that. The action that is the interpretant can itself be interpreted. We can look at the interpretant for clues as to what the object of the sign was, and in what respect that object was taken. The interpreter contributes to the process of making interpretants by making choices as to how to construct the interpretant.

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In terms of the thermometer story I’ve been telling, the fact that a relative rise in mercury is taken as being coordinated with a change in relative ambient temperature says nothing about how this correlation affects the interpreter. The interpretant would be the specific behavioral modification that results from reading the temperature, taken from a pool of possible expectations and behavioral modifications that could potentially result. Is a change in mercury height taken as a sign to turn on an air conditioner? Plant crops? Move to a different climate for a period of time? Investigate a possible malfunction of the thermometer? Launch a space shuttle? Do nothing? Each of these could be the case, and each serves as a sign for some later act of interpretation that attempts to figure out what the sign was about, what object was taken in what respect. Fourthly and finally, we reach the interpretant-vehicle. This concept is necessary to tease apart the two uses Peirce put the word interpretant to.13 An interpretant-vehicle is the physical, structural, embodied connection between two domains that suggests and enables all interpretants, interpretations, and interpreters. It is the ground upon which the sign is seen to be related to something else. In a French-English dictionary, the interpretant-vehicle is the architecture of an entire book where French words are placed opposite English words. Something about the physical structure of the interpretant-vehicle suggests that an interpretant should be created to account for the physical arrangement. Consider the Rosetta Stone again; the physical fact that the lines of Egyptian figures were engraved on the stone in an isomorphic way with the lines of Greek text suggested to the interpreters that the lines of Egyptian be taken as saying the same thing as the lines of Greek, allowing an interpretant to be created which acted as the mediating relationship between the two. Importantly, interpretant-vehicles ‘do their work’ independent of the content they signify; there is something about their physical orientation in space and time that enables their being taken together (Deely 1990). The interpretant-vehicle structurally connects independent domains; it is a kind of coding, and does not change relative to the different uses it is put in creating interpretants. In the thermometer example I’ve been using, the interpretant-vehicle is the physical fact that a scale of numbers representing air temperature is placed next to a tube of mercury, where the height of the mercury corresponds to a different number on the scale. A thermometer joins two 13

At times Peirce describes the interpretant as the objective element of the situation involving representation of one by another, which I think is in conflict with the conception of interpretant just articulated, though it must be said that Peirce is very difficult to interpret at times, and the interpretant I have just offered for this theme in his writings may be incorrect.

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worlds through a code; correlational rules connect a change in mercury height to a change in air temperature. Hofstadter (1979) notes the invariability of the genetic code embodied in trna and ribosomes, relative to the different combinations of nucleic acids linked by the code to amino acids in proteins. This invariable code is ultimately responsible for the referential nature of genes. To summarize this section on the use of different terms surrounding interpretation, we note that it involves (a) some physical fact that connects two domains according to a code (the interpretant-vehicle) (b) which grounds certain expectations, acts, and habits of behavior (the interpretant) (c) of some system in an environment (the interpreter). When the interpreter (d) treats one system of relationships as being isomorphic with another (interpretation), (e) one domain is used by the interpreter as a ‘sign’ of the other domain (semiosis).

Important Ideas from Other Theorists

I said at the beginning of this chapter that I would be using the work of a few other theorists who have helped us think about emergence and semiosis, particularly as they might apply to religious communities. Three of the four I will mention were influenced by the pioneering work of mathematician John von Neumann (1966), who first attempted to capture the logic of biological evolution by noting the interplay of physical processes and symbolic encoding. I will not attempt to explain the work of each of these theorists in full; rather, I will focus on a specific idea they introduce that will help us understand the emergence of human sociality. Semantic Closure Howard Pattee14 was one of the first theorists to follow up on Von Neumann’s theories concerning the dynamics of evolving processes. To introduce his thought, let us note that two contradictory demands are placed on self-­ organizing, teleodynamic phenomena such as life. One demand is that of persistence; such a system must demonstrate continuity and self-identity of processes across time. The other demand is that the system must demonstrate intelligently changing behavior. Together, this means a dynamic system that is conservative and repetitious must also be flexible and interactive. Pattee has argued that there is only one possible way for those two competing demands to be met in a system – a persistent yet potentially varying symbolic ‘memory’ 14

Most helpful have been (Pattee 1969; Pattee 1972; Pattee 1982a; Pattee 1982b; Pattee 1995; Pattee 2000; Pattee 2005; Pattee 2007).

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component must be linked in a closed causal loop with dynamic, material processes that interact with a larger environment. He calls this closed loop of symbolic and dynamic processes ‘semantic closure’. Pattee has argued that this concept is the key logical principle put forward by Von Neumann. The closed semantic loop is what in fact defines the ‘self’ in self-replication. Pattee has strongly criticized two important and influential perspectives on life and mind that only emphasize either material embodiment or symbolic function. He has argued against the perspective of Dynamic Systems Theorists (dst), who suggests that the only model required to understand life is a mathematically-governed physical-law model, and against the perspective of functionalists and computationalists, who disregard materiality as that which function and computation should be abstracted from, not related to. As Pattee sees it, the problems in the approaches of the alternative schools of computationalism and dst are not their obvious weaknesses, but their misleading strengths: they both have the ability to model powerfully the processes under discussion. On the one hand, a logical or computer model of life can mimic everything that can be described using language, lending support to the approach of computationalism. On the other hand, everything composing a symbol system is composed of matter, obeying the laws of physics and chemistry, lending support to the approach of the physical reductionist. Yet each side is incomplete in itself for modeling life, which always involves both material processes and symbolic reference. Both sides ignore the necessary interrelation. On the one hand, functionalists and computationalists believe a symbolically-encoded computer simulation is a realization of the process in question. However, the logical or computer model is not a selforganized system, and the success of such a model is not demonstrated by the impact of the model’s functioning on the persistence of the computer system that models it. Rather, its success is in the eyes of the modeler, who interprets the model as being a good picture of a process. On the other hand, physical reductionists ignore the matter/symbol relationship by believing that symbols are only illusions that do not play any real role; they argue that ideally, a complete physical-law model of these systems should replace epiphenomenal explanations using ‘symbols’. However, this approach cannot account for the multiply-realized concepts such as function, adaptation, and selection, which must be ‘read into’ the systems by outside modelers who do see and use such symbolic and relational concepts (Rocha 2001). Thus, neither the pure functionalist, nor the pure Dynamic System Theorist can account for living things or persons like us. That both approaches can ignore the contribution of the other, and offer what seem on first blush to be complete accounts given their starting points, blinds each side to the fact that a

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complementary approach is needed to gain insight into living and mental processes.15 Pattee argues that the behavior of biological entities is a result of physical law and symbolically-encoded rules. Rocha (2001) says rules are “context dependent constraints which affect the behavior and success of agents in specific environments, and . . . only make sense in these environments.” Consider a biological entity. A ‘rule’ contributing to its behavior above and beyond physical law would be a particular encoded initial condition, selected from a wider pool of theoretically possible encoded initial conditions, that biases its ongoing dynamic development in a direction permitted but not determined by physical law. A lineage of biological organisms develops over time through a ‘culling’ of all possible rules to the few that lead to organism persistence in an environment. Pattee argues that “a productive approach to theories of life, evolution and cognition must focus on the complementary contributions of nonselective law-based material self-organization and natural selection-based symbolic organization” (Pattee 1995). Pattee makes this principle of complementarity a central point in his thought. For him, both matter and symbol, laws and rules, play a role in the emergent evolution of living things and mental processes. And this, in a nutshell, is the idea of semantic closure. Semantic closure is the “autonomous closure between the dynamics of the material aspects and the constraints of the symbolic aspects of a physical organization” (Pattee 1995). Fundamentally, semantic closure involves something that acts as symbolic memory, as well as a closed pattern of recursive iteration (Rocha and Hordijk 2005). Symbol strings are transformed by a decoding process into arrangements of matter, which are transformed by physical laws into dynamic processes that transform symbol strings by a decoding process into arrangements of matter . . . ad infinitum. The symbol/matter complementarity is selfdefining and self-constructing. Pattee points to biology as an example of this kind of closure. He notes that a cell’s behavior is partly defined by symbolic processes having to do with dna base sequences, which are important for the information they embody (not for their chemical effects), and partly defined by material dynamics, such as protein folding (tertiary structure) and protein combinations (quaternary structure). Pattee goes so far as to define life by its semantic closure. The symbols in such a system are interpreted dynamically by the very products they specify. No 15

Pattee has noted that the only place the matter-symbol relationship appears in the biological sciences as now practiced is in theories of the origin of the genetic code. There, the physical and logical basis of the distinction between matter and symbol, and the question of how matter and symbol are related, is discussed.

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external observer needs to interpret them (as is the case with a computer’s symbolic activity). What the symbols represent comes into view functionally, from the cell’s own dynamic interpreting structures (Etxeberria and Moreno 2001).16 Three Criteria of Symbolic Representations Pattee’s characterization has inspired others17 to address some of the issues he leaves undiscussed, such as how we should envision the symbolic dimension. First, a symbol is a functional term, not a thing; certain things function as symbols. Physically, symbols are material structures exerting limitations on the many possible ways natural laws could be obeyed – they represent selections from alternative ways laws can be instantiated. They are made up of matter that always obeys the laws of nature, but in addition represents a constraint to behavior that could have been otherwise. (This is similar to what Deacon meant when he said the memory component of a teleodynamic system is a ‘bottleneck of constraint’.) These symbols are often separated from regular dynamic processes, and thus ‘stored’ in a way analogous to random access memory in a computer. Symbols function as a kind of shortcut, creating conditions that depend for their fulfillment on material dynamics and lawful habits of nature. For example, the genetic ‘blueprint’ of an organism is not a description of that organism, but something different – “encoded initial conditions or constraints for material, developing, self-organizing systems” that interact with the laws of their environment (Rocha 2001). The laws of physics and selforganizing processes give ‘for free’ what does not have to be encoded in genes. In systems that utilize symbolic representation, the symbol’s material dynamics are largely irrelevant. Their dynamic components do not elicit a response from the dynamic components of the system. Rocha and Hordijk call this characteristic of a symbol ‘dynamic incoherence’, and note it is a relative, not an absolute concept; the lack of direct influence of symbols on material dynamics is relative to their much greater indirect influence on material dynamics when a framework of stable decoding machinery mediates between the two. The behaviors symbols produce are significant and functional, since they represent 16

17

Some may think that using the word ‘interpret’ here is a misuse of the term, which should be reserved for human mental life. Pattee, to the contrary, argues that biological life is the first time in nature that the term ‘interpret’ can and should be used, human mental interpretation being a refinement and development of this biological achievement. See Pattee (1982a; 2000). The work guiding my thinking here includes (Rocha and Hordijk 2005; Rocha 2001; Etxeberria and Moreno 2001; Moreno 1998; Etxeberria and Moreno 2001; Moreno and Umerez 2000).

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a selection from a range of possibilities. It is the symbol’s information value – what choice of initial conditions it represents when implemented – that is most relevant to the system. Choices made via selection between possible alternatives are part-and-parcel of what it means for an organism to evolve. Symbol function is internal to an organism, defining it in critical ways, and not an anthropomorphic projection. Rocha and Hordijk (2005) have laid out three key criteria for determining whether a structure is functioning as a symbol:18 1. 2.

3.

The syntactic structure of information in a symbol can be accessed and utilized without reference to its content, and is implemented in nonreactive structures. This is the concept of dynamically incoherent memory. The semantic content of information in a symbol is how its structure is translated to be used to construct dynamic configurations; symbols encode alternative initial conditions for a dynamical system-environment coupling. This is the concept of a construction code. Symbols guide the construction of material structures and processes existing under the constraints of self-organization, and are pragmatically selected in an evolutionary process. This criterion represents selforganization and selection.

These criteria give specific guidelines for assessing when something is functioning symbolically in a system; we will use these to interpret the dynamics of religious community life in the next chapter. Strange Loops Like Pattee, Douglas Hofstadter19 believes living things exist because of a formal interconnection of an encoded dimension and a non-encoded or ‘natural’ dimension. This, in fact, defines what a self is. Living things, according to Hofstadter, demonstrate a new type of ‘top-down’ causal efficacy. Unlike Pattee, he extends this perspective to the dynamics of human consciousness. He calls such self-referring dynamics strange loops, and says that the ‘I’ – the first-person subjective, conscious experience – is a strange loop. He describes strange loops as “an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upwards’ shifts turn out to give 18 19

Their term for this is ‘material representation’. See (Hofstadter 1979; Hofstadter 2007).

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rise to a closed cycle” (2007, 102). Hofstadter believes the most enlightening strange loop to investigate is seen in the self-reference found in the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem (git) of 1931. The critical feature of this theorem is its incorporation of a self-referential mathematical statement, which in the context of Gödel’s proof has a similar effect as the paradoxical statement uttered by Epimenides the Cretan, “All Cretans are liars.”20 Thus, the theorem involves a “paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop,” where the paradox is the result of self-reference. Instead of walking through the entire logical construction of the proof, I want to highlight key aspects of it relevant to a discussion of semiosis and emergence. The first is discussed by Hofstadter, and it has to do with the role of interpretation. Hofstadter writes that the formal mathematical system Gödel worked with – the Principia Mathematica (pm) of Russell and Whitehead – “though terribly cumbersome, had enormous power to talk about whole numbers – in fact, to talk about arbitrarily subtle properties of whole numbers” (2007, 113). What does Hofstadter mean when he says a formal system can ‘talk about’ whole numbers? Formal mathematical systems are made up of symbols and rules governing the manipulation of symbols. For them to have meaning, such manipulations need to be interpreted as representing computations involving whole number; the dynamics of such a system don’t interpret themselves. A machine can follow these rules for manipulating symbols, without having any idea what they ‘mean’ in a mathematical sense. We have to interpret them as mimicking the dynamics of mathematical reasoning. As Gödel (1965) notes, determining the truth of a mathematical statement requires more than demonstrating a proposition has a certain, decidable formal structure; it also requires “some extra mathematical element concerning the psychology of the being which deals with mathematics.” Thus, to claim that some manipulation of a formal system creates mathematically relevant results is to create an interpretant;21 the interpreter decides precisely how the formal manipulation of symbols maps onto mathematical objects and their relational interactions. 20

21

The mathematical statement that Gödel produced reads, when interpreted into English, “This statement of the formal system of Principia Mathematica has no proof in the formal system of Principia Mathematica.” Thus, to prove the statement true would paradoxically make it false; to be unable to prove it true would be to paradoxically demonstrate its truth. Later theorists, jumping on Gödel’s self-referential trick, learned to produce cousins such as, ‘Some proof in the formal system of Principia Mathematica exists which proves me true’. These sentences, “by merely asserting [their] own provability, actually become provable” (Hofstadter 1979, 542, 709). Recall I defined an interpretant as “a specific, here-now constructed result that is the effect of taking up one thing as another thing.”

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This background information is important to the Incompleteness Theorem because Gödel invented a code (the Gödel code) that allows theorems about numbers in the formal language of pm to be turned into numbers, and vice versa. This trick allowed some particular numbers to ‘say’ things like ‘This statement in pm has no proof’, when interpreted at a higher level as a result of the code. Thus, he made it possible for investigations into properties of numbers using pm to be investigations into theorems of pm at the same time. Notice that this curious result is due to the action of interpretation. Contrary to what we might think, both the lower-level investigation into number theory using pm (which is what pm was designed for) and using pm to make higher-level, meta-statements about theorems of pm (which Gödel brilliantly hijacked pm to do) result from different possible ways to interpret the same symbols on a page. There is nothing in the symbols themselves that determine to what they refer. That is always in the eye of the mathematician, who is the interpreter. But if flexibility in interpreting symbols is the key to Gödel’s theorem, selfreferentiality is the key to a new kind of mathematical truth that Hofstadter thinks mirrors what a ‘self’ is, and this is the second key point relevant to ‘semiotic emergence’. How did Gödel pull off the trick of self-referentiality, the ability of a meta-level statement of pm to say something like “This sentence . . . ?” The crucial mathematical ‘sentence’ in Gödel’s theorem didn’t actually say the equivalent of the English word ‘this’; rather, it described a typographical entity that was identical to itself. Hofstadter offers an analogous English sentence (first developed by W.V.O. Quine) to illustrate how this works. The sentence is: “preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence.” preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence. The sentence makes a truth claim; to confirm the claim you need to do something, namely, act on the instructions in the second part of the sentence. When you have done so, you find that the statement is true, and that the result is the same as the original. Gödel carefully constructed the mathematical equivalent of this sentence so that he could make the equivalent of the part in quotes a number, the other half a statement of number theory in the language of pm, all the while keeping in mind that through the Gödel code, the number was a direct translation of the second half of the statement in the language of pm. Following Gödel and Hofstadter, we can identify two significance implications of this construction. First, using Quine’s English analogy to think about the issue, the same string of English letters can function in two different ways, depending on context: as instructions, and as passive ‘content’ which the

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instructions invite us to act upon. This draws attention to the essential role played by the interpreter. Second, the way these two functional ‘moments’ of the string are related to each other means that its truth claim is about itself, since the curious way it is constructed allows you to interpret the entire string as saying ‘this sentence’. How is it that at one moment the string can function as data, and at another moment function as instructions as to how to act on the data? The key is a cue – quotation marks – that differently guide the effort of the interpreter. In an analogous manner, Gödel in his proof exploits a cue: through the Gödel code, the interpreting mathematician can see the two parts of the statement in the proof as ‘the same’, which then has important interpretive implications. It is that interpretive agility that is so critical to the proof. The second significant implication of the logical structure of the git is that the critical mathematical sentence makes a truth claim about a number, but which, when translated by the Gödel code, is also a truth claim about itself as a mathematical sentence. It is not making a truth claim about some other statement, as would be the case in a mathematical version of a claim such as ‘D’oh!’ when spoken aloud is a funny exclamation. In the git, the mathematical claim is ‘about’ an identical version of itself. It says, in effect, ‘this sentence’, and point to itself as a sentence when it does so. The moral of the story is that a sufficiently flexible symbol system can be turned on itself to assess the truth of itself without reference to outside confirmation, a possibility created by the act of self-reference. A truthful mathematical story can be created ‘on the fly’. That is the heart of the ‘incompleteness’ implicated in mathematical languages by Gödel’s proof – true reference can be created when what is truthfully referenced are the self-referring entities themselves. Performative Utterances The strange result of a self-confirming mathematical statement taking advantage of the possibilities of flexible symbol systems has been studied in other contexts. C.S. Peirce (1998a) analyzed self-referring sentences – English sentences, not the mathematical sentences of Gödel – and his discussion of them may shed light on the issue. Peirce first notes that in general, to judge a proposition requires looking to something outside of the sentence for confirmation or disconfirmation of its truth. If I say, ‘the sky is cloudy’, you would need to look at something other than the proposition – probably at the sky – to confirm its truth. Peirce notes further that the very act of making such a judgment

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as ‘the sky is cloudy’ creates facts in the world. Just like the cloudy sky is a datum in the world, my claim ‘the sky is cloudy’ is a datum in the world. My proposition, once stated, becomes another fact that can be monitored and assessed. Peirce notes that something strange happens when propositions are made concerning propositions themselves, not concerning things in the world outside of propositions. Consider some paradisiacal world, where all the propositions made about things in the world are true. Then consider that in this context, the proposition ‘In our world, there exists a false proposition’ is uttered. Prior to its uttering, there is no such thing as a false proposition. However, in this paradisiacal world, if the above statement is uttered, it becomes necessarily true that there is a false proposition, and it becomes true because the statement is false. Precisely because there aren’t false statements in the world prior to its uttering, the statement is false, and because of its falsity, there are now false statements in the world, making it true. As Peirce says, “the existence of this proposition constitutes the certainty that a false proposition is enunciated, although the assertion of this proposition itself is perfectly true” (1998a, sec. 10). Its utterance creates truth out of nowhere, so to speak. In the paradisiacal world, ‘there exists a false proposition’ performs, enacts, and constitutes the truth of its claim. By being a proposition about propositions, it can be true AND false, in two domains, two hierarchic levels, at the same time. In the real world, where false propositions exist all over the place, its truth would be in virtue of the falsehood of other propositions; in the paradisiacal world, its truth would be in virtue of itself as a proposition, since as a proposition it adds to what is the case about propositions, which is what is under consideration. In the paradisiacal world, the statement would be false when applied to the domain of the world outside of itself, and therefore true in the domain that recognizes ‘itself’ as part of the world. Notice how the interpreter is involved, judging the truth claim made in both cases, whether the proposition is ‘merely’ true about other propositions, or whether the proposition is constitutively true. Propositions don’t enact themselves; interpreters take sentences as claims; they choose to what they will be applied. This is the heart of Gödel’s insight concerning mathematics, what allows Gödel to note the ‘incompleteness’ of mathematics. Because symbols are not attached directly to what they reference, as are indexes, they have a flexibility about them that allows them to be recursive, to be about themselves. Peirce’s proposition is about propositions, which makes it possible for an interpreter validly to take the proposition as referring to itself, in which case a different comparison than normal is made between the proposition and reality; reality now includes the proposition. The utterance of the proposition adds

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information to the world, and it is possible to judge its truth assuming the presence of that added information at a secondary level – or perhaps better, a later time – than at the primary level (at the earlier time of its utterance), when its reference was conventionally taken to be to things outside of itself. The circular nature of self-reference creates a location ‘downstream’ from primary reference from which virgin, secondary-level claims can flow. According to Hofstadter, the simplest, tersest articulation of this kind of performative is the English word, “I,” as in “I am unprovable,” or in Peirce’s example, “I am a false proposition.” This analysis is importantly related to the logic of ‘performative utterances’, which I referenced in the previous chapter. These are a category of linguistic statements that J.L. Austin (1962; 1970) notes have a peculiar quality to them. Though on the surface they look like statements of fact, they are actually a special kind of statement that does not describe or report anything, is not true or false in any traditional way, but does something when uttered that makes it true. To utter a performative is not to describe the doing of something, or to state that the doing of something has been done, but is rather to do something. Examples include saying “I do” in the context of a wedding ceremony, saying “I christen thee H.M.S. Queen Elizabeth” in the context of a military dedication, or when the bartender says, “The bar is closed” in the context of his place of employment. To issue such a statement in these circumstances is to perform an action that makes truth. Searle (1979) argues that the purest form of a performative utterance is one in which a speaker in authority brings about a state of affairs specified in the propositional content of a performative. What is the relationship between the creation of truth in a Gödel-like selfreferential mathematical statement, and the actualization of authority in an Austin-like performative utterance? Both critically rely on the action of interpretation, which thereby creates both truth and authority. The performative utterances of Gödel rely on a single interpreter interpreting symbols as selfreferring to create truth. The performative utterances of Austin rely on multiple interpreters agreeing upon (by submitting to) a symbolically-constructed and shared world, which thereby creates authority. As Searle (1969) points out, performative utterances require constitutive, institutional ‘background’ rules that must be submitted to for the performative to take effect. To effect a marriage by saying “I do” presupposes marriage as a human institution, a non-natural, nonrequired institutional fact, not a brute fact. Obedience to institutional facts is not required, as is obedience to laws of nature. When a duly designated employee says, “The bar is closed,” the authority for that performative comes from the patrons in the bar who interpret that statement as being authoritative, who grant the authority of the bartender as in accord with institutional rules,

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not natural facts. Imagine the employee saying, ‘the bar is closed’, and a patron pulling out a gun and laying it on the table, saying, ‘I say it is open’. This patron is refusing to live by the institutional, conventional, interpreter-dependent rules that grant a performative its efficacy.22 Performative utterances exemplify the fact that “when one enters an institutional activity by invoking [or following] the rules of the institution one necessarily commits oneself in such and such ways, regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of the institution” (1969, 189). (Note the similarity of this claim to Rappaport’s claim that to enter into ritual is to publicly commit to the claims made by the ritual.) Therefore, the key to the authority of a performative utterance, as well as the ability of self-referring statements to create truth, is the action of the interpreter in interpreting symbols. Shared symbols among a community of people allow social truth to be determined by agreement; taking advantage of the flexibility of symbols to self-refer allows an interpreter to create a locus for establishing future truth. Both invent new realms for true statements to be explored. Summary We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. The critical pieces that are relevant in the discussion of religious community dynamics have been presented from different perspectives, with different motivations, and concerning different subjects. What unites each of them is the claim that a circular causal architecture and a form of memory – that necessarily must utilize some form of reference – is responsible for systems that are self-organizing, self-referencing, open-ended, and important. Each of the thinkers above believes a ‘teleodynamic’ is critical to understanding two of the three most stupefying phenomena in the universe – living bodies and human consciousness. Whether this theoretical edifice will make progress in understanding religion, for some the third most stupefying phenomena in the universe, is the topic of this book. With these categories under our belt, I would like to now explicitly connect the theory of religious dynamics I articulated in the last chapter with the themes and ideas of this one, demonstrating how emergence theory is relevant to the study of religion. 22

Hofstadter notes a corresponding example from the world of Gödel and pm. He notes that Lord Russell, one of the creators of pm, never saw the higher-level meaning that Gödel created. By an act of will (or perhaps a habit of mind), he wrote off the higher level as not-existing. That is, as an interpreter, he refused to allow the isomorphic, higher-level coding to be the ground for interpretants. See Hofstadter (2007, 154).

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Religion’s Emergent Characteristics Now it is my task to demonstrate how the emergence categories I explained in the previous chapter map onto religion as it has been conceptualized by other theorists, as well as in my own account offered in Ch. 2. This chapter, more than any other in this book, relies on details that might be overly specific for some readers; they are important for establishing the credibility of my overall argument, but some may wish to skip this chapter and begin Part Two of the book, dealing with the emergence of meaning in religion. For those who think the details might be important, let me say how my argument will proceed. First, I will propose a picture of how human sociality is emergent, in terms taken from our ‘primer’ on emergence and semiotics. I will do this by (a) recognizing the importance of human culture to my account; and (b) analyzing how human culture can demonstrate emergent effects. Then, I will specifically characterize religion as a teleodynamic emergent system utilizing symbolic reference, using the criteria I developed in the previous chapter. I will analyze religion in terms of Rocha & Hordijk’s account of symbols, as well as in terms of semantic closure and strange loops. This will give the details that motivate the conclusion that religion is a teleodynamic system that takes advantage of symbolic, encoded memory.

The Importance of Human Culture

I mentioned in the first chapter that both Durkheim and Rappaport place central importance on myth and ritual in their account of religion, focusing on how these continually re-establish religion’s intense, robust, and meaningful sociality. Since I find their account of ritual and myth convincing, it seems important to articulate how the capacities of human culture ground them. First, in order to address some alternatives, we must ask to what extent the mythological content and ritual behavior seen in religion is the direct result of biological evolution. Did we evolve to have mythological beliefs and perform religious ritual? Or are these side effects of processes and facts that are more general in their application, and that did not evolve to produce mythological beliefs and religious ritual? How one answers this question suggests very different understandings of religion. If mythological belief and religious ritual evolved specifically under biological selection pressure, it suggests that religion

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004293762_005

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is, at root, a biological feature that is explained by the role it plays in supporting the transmission of genes to the next generation. Like color vision and the desire for sex, myth and ritual evolved because they support reproduction. On the other hand, if myth and ritual did not evolve by biological evolution, it suggests either that they appear regularly merely as an unselected side effect of something that is important for biological survival, like the redness of blood; or because they hijack our evolved dispositions effectively, as a kind of virus; or because they create something of value to humans, independent of their role in transmitting genes (or some combination of all three). I think the strongest theories of human cognitive development suggest that mythological beliefs and religious ritual were not selected for biologically. Rather, they exist as side effects of larger cognitive developments in our lineage over the last 150,000 years (at the very least). The key cognitive developments in this period – domain-general reasoning, abstraction, conceptual blending, and symbolic reference – evolved for reasons other than producing religion, and the possibility of mythological beliefs and religious ritual are side effects of these developments. Whether domain-general reasoning, etc., have been hijacked to support mythological beliefs and ritual, or because they create something of value, is a further question that needs to be addressed. Domain-general reasoning is the human capacity to reason in a similar manner across many different kinds of problems we are confronted with, such as the way we are able to similarly navigate sociality, technology, and the natural world. It is also the ability to allow what we learn in one ‘domain’ to impact how we think about another. Mithen (1998) has argued that though humans have dedicated, domain specific mental capacities that speed up the common mental activities we perform every day, what is most characteristic about our minds is our passion for analogy and metaphor, the holistic tendency we have to build connections across domains. Children play with inert physical objects while simultaneously pretending these objects can think and relate socially, are alive and need care, and can participate in conversations. This ability reflects a fundamental feature of the human mind: we can combine knowledge from many domains at will, even incorrectly or playfully. The ability to think across domains and access different ‘mental modules’ at the same time is the heart of domain-general reasoning. To pretend a rock is alive and communicative is not only basic to children’s play, but also to mythological thinking; both represent our ability to reason analogically in all domains. Turner and Fauconnier (2002) note a related capacity of human thought, our ability for abstraction and conceptual blending. We are able to isolate specific elements and features of some phenomenon, take them out of their

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original context, and combine them with isolated specific elements from another domain to create ‘blends’ that represent new thoughts and multiply the capabilities of our reasoning capacities. Grady et al. (1999) offer a simple example: if we take two different mental structures, such as surgeon and butcher, both of which in and of themselves suggest competence and training in a given task, and blend them into a new mental structure such as that surgeon is a butcher, a new implication emerges as a result of the blend – incompetence. Blends of this type support human meaning construction by allowing uniquely human capacities such as hypothetical and counterfactual thought, the creation of negatives, mappings of many sorts, the framing of a problem or question, changeable viewpoint and perspective, and metaphor. According to Turner and Fauconnier, it is these capacities that have given humans our higher-order cognitive achievements, such as the understanding of personal identity and character, the understanding of cause and effect, grammar and language, category extension and metamorphosis, art, fiction, music, mathematical and scientific discovery, religious practices, representation, fashion, advanced social cognition, advanced tool use, etc. This ability undergirds most of what counts as uniquely human thought, including mythological thought. Turner (2003) offers a striking example of how conceptual blends support concepts of justice, which can then, by virtue of a different conceptual blend, be transformed into mythology: Human beings are able to invent concepts like punishment, revenge, and retribution. These concepts are the result of blending. In each case, there is an earlier scenario in which a character does something that is regarded as an offense, and a later scenario in which something is done to that person. If we took the two scenarios as separate, we would have two actions, and the second one (killing, inflicting physical pain, locking someone up, taking money from someone, depriving someone of a right or a privilege, even yelling at someone) could be regarded as a gratuitous offense, no different from the first. But when we integrate these two scenarios into one, we compress the two actions into one balanced unit. This compression does not change the facts of the first scenario, but it does change their status. The emergent meaning for the integration network is very rich. While the two scenarios, each on its own, are offensive, the blend is just, and this has consequences for the two scenarios themselves: because they sit in this blending network, the second action is permissible, and the first offense is removed or neutralized or paid for.

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Then he suggests, If we imagine a just punishment blending network in which the first story has reference to reality but both the second story and the blend are only hypothetical, then the offending party in the first story counts as worthy of punishment . . . Applying this network not to a single person but instead to all of us in the aggregate, we have the familiar grand story of guilty or sinful humanity, worthy of punishment. That is one blending network. Now let us activate alongside that network an altogether different story in which a blameless man is crucified. Now we blend guilty or sinful humanity with the blameless man. In the new hyper-blend, we have the blameless man from one story but the sins of the human beings from the other. His crucifixion, according to the logic of the just punishment blending network, becomes recompense for the sins of humanity. His suffering excuses humanity from bearing the punishment. Conceptual blending certainly undergirds mythological thought, but it also undergirds much of human thought. Mythological thought is a possibility that arises from something more basic about human cognition. Finally, I want to suggest that what undergirds both of these human capacities – domain-general reasoning and abstraction/conceptual blending – is the human capacity for symbolic reference, which was an earlier cognitive achievement that has been extensively developed in our species. This capacity – very weakly shared by a select few species besides humans – has provided the cognitive scaffolding that allows abstraction and conceptual blends to develop, which in turn allows domain-general reasoning to develop. Deacon (1997) has explicated this capacity better than anyone, suggesting symbolic reference not only supports these just-mentioned capacities, but also directly grounds our ability to see ourselves dualistically, as composed of body and soul, and to distinguish between a transcendent world and an immanent world. As I discussed in the last chapter, the basic idea of symbolic reference is that some agent develops the capacity to make a comparison between two independent, systematically organized patterns of relationships, one under the agents’ control, the other less so. Think of how a child learns language. One systematic pattern, the relationship of words to each other, must be seen as mapping onto another systematic pattern, the relationships of pertinent things in the world to each other, and to the child. As word choice and order can be manipulated more easily than things in the world, the process of learning a language is learning the socially-agreed-upon way of mapping relationships implicit in shared experience onto the relationships implicit in the use of words. Word

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use is adjusted to create a better match with the systematic aspects of experience. Once this mapping occurs, the system under the agent’s control – language – can be used to guide the behavior of the child with respect to the world, both in the child’s own thoughts, and in the child’s communications with others. The process I have just described is bigger than language usage, as semioticians have long recognized; biological evolution depends upon a similar process, as the pattern of nucleic acids in dna is used to guide the production of an organism, and thus the interaction of that organism with the environment. The process of natural selection revises the match between the two systems to create a better fit. The term ‘semiosis’ describes all cases where revisable patterns of relations internal to a system reference relations external to the system, in order to guide the system’s behavior. It also describes the growing fitness between the two patterns of relations, internal and external to the system, where the more controllable pattern is used to guide the organism’s interaction with the less controllable pattern.1 Deacon2 claims the capacity for symbolic reference is based upon the development of parts of the brain – particularly the prefrontal cortex – that inhibits the activity of other parts of the brain, such as associative regions. Symbolic reference requires being able to create a mapping between two systems of relationships, and for that to happen, the salience of particular indexes of environmental stimuli (i.e. the associative relationship between a ringing bell and the presence of meat) must be weakened. It is the weakening of indexical relations performed by the prefrontal cortex that allows a child – and not the family dog – to gain the cognitive distance necessary to see the global mapping between a system of words and the systematic aspects of experience. This capacity to suppress certain features of experience to allow other, less obvious features to come to the foreground, is what also grounds the human capacity for abstraction and conceptual blending, and thus mythological thinking. In addition, since our brains are organized for symbolic reference, we have two abilities relevant to religion. First, we have the ability to symbolize ourselves as distinct from our bodies. Symbolic reference allows us to live in a ‘virtual world’ of linguistically encoded conceptions through which our experience of the ‘real’ world is mediated. In this virtual world, we can create narratives about ourselves and our place in the world, our past, our future, and who ‘we’ are. This ‘virtual self’ is clearly distinct from our bodily existence, and 1 See Favareau (2007) for a good introduction to semiotics in its application to biology, not just human language. 2 Mostly in Deacon and Cashman (2009), but also in Deacon (2003d) and Deacon (1997).

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undergirds a powerful sense of our ‘soul’ distinct from our body. Second, the bias humans have to learn symbolic language causes us to look for a hidden pattern of systematicity in natural events, even when these might not exist. This, Deacon argues, grounds our spiritual beliefs. He writes, The neuropsychological tendency to incessantly, spontaneously, and rapidly interpret symbols should express itself quite generally as a predisposition to look beyond surface correlations among things to find some formal systematicity, and thus meaning, behind them, even things that derive from entirely nonhuman sources. Everything is thus a potential symbol – trees, mountains, star patterns, coincidental events . . . Symbolic meaning is a function of consciousness and symbols are produced to communicate. So if the world is seen as full of potential symbols, it must implicitly be part of some grand effort of communication, and the product of mind (2003d). When we consider the combined accounts of the work of Mithen, Turner and Fauconnier, and Deacon, I think there is strong evidence that the capacity for symbolic reference, abstraction/conceptual blending, and domain general reasoning define human thought as it is distinct from the mental capacities of our nearest relatives. The possibility of mythological and religious thinking is a result of these capacities, and not the result of a biologically-driven, domainspecific tendency for mythological ideas and concepts. This is not to say that biology, in the guise of our evolved psychology, is irrelevant to religion, however. Human minds are not a ‘blank slate’, and religion not unconstrained by our evolutionary history. On this issue, I am in broad agreement with Kirkpatrick (2008). He has argued (1) that religion is not the direct result of natural selection due to its effects on biological survival and reproductive success; (2) we possess no genes for religion, in the sense of producing belief or behavior unique to religion; and (3) we possess no evolved psychological mechanisms whose primary adaptive function is/was to produce religion. As an analogy, we might consider religion as being like sports. It is doubtful we have any genes that evolved for playing soccer, for example, yet the game is played and enjoyed almost universally. Its appeal is probably due to the fact that it is a cultural ‘package’ that nicely combines evolved physical and psychological capacities and tendencies. While the ability to play soccer well, in addition to the capacity to be interested in the game, is probably moderately heritable, there has never been any direct biological selection pressure for sports. Kirkpatrick further argues that our evolved psychological tendencies have guided the evolution of religion in particular ways, channeling its development.

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He claims that mythological beliefs, though themselves unevolved byproducts of psychological mechanisms for understanding the natural world, have been taken up by cultural evolution in service of social relationships defined by evolved psychological tendencies such as attachment, kinship, social exchange, coalitions, and dominance hierarchies. Thus, to the degree that religious beliefs are involved in regulating social dispositions, they will be strongly constrained towards attachment, kinship, social exchange, coalitions, and dominance hierarchies. While I would not want to argue that religion reduces to the purpose of negotiating social realities, that it does negotiate social realities suggests it evolved culturally as a kind of ‘package’, in part because of this ability, and thus in tandem with our evolved biological dispositions. This will be a theme developed by David Sloan Wilson, as we will see in the next chapter. I have talked a lot about the evolution (in whatever domain) of religious beliefs in the preceding paragraphs. What about the evolution of religious ritual? Donald Campbell (1974), in an important article on the philosophy of biology, notes that independent evolutionary processes – and by this he means genetic and cultural evolution – might discover the same facts simply because representing them would be useful for survival, not because there is a causal connection between the two processes of discovery. He gives the example of the ‘law of levers’, which was discovered by Archimedes 2,000 years ago, and has guided human construction and engineering tasks ever since. Campbell notes that the same principle of engineering was discovered by biological evolution, and has been encoded in genes for hundreds of millions of years. It can be seen in the body construction of any animal – such as the jaws of a beetle – that must ‘throw its weight around’ in any way to accomplish tasks necessary for survival. Two independent processes of evolution have discovered the same idea, and have passed it on in their distinctive forms of memory – dna, and cultural education. This suggests it is not necessary that we assume every cultural manifestations of the law of levers across the world is due to an ‘evolved mental module’ for the law of levers, nor to think these cultures must have a direct educational connection to Archimedes. Why? Because the law is true about the universe at the scale at which living organisms, including humans with culture, must live. This fact about the universe exerts pressure on any evolutionary process that needs to effectively engage its environment. Turning to the practice of ritual, the fact that both animals and humans use stereotyped behaviors for coordinating sociality is uncontroversial. Mating rituals between insects and greeting rituals between humans are clearly connected somehow. But how, specifically? Because we both share a genetic tendency for stereotype? Or because we both share a need for coordinating

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sociality, and exaggerated and predictable behaviors signal intentions, and ‘grease the wheels’ for getting things done cooperatively? If the second, culture might have rediscovered what biology discovered first. Alternatively, what once was a biological tendency might have gradually turned into something that is now culturally preserved in humans for its usefulness, as our biological dispositions have been ‘masked’ by the growth of culture.3 In a thought-provoking paper, Watanabe and Smuts (1999) have argued that certain unrelated male baboons consciously utilize greeting rituals to signal the intent to cooperate with each other in order to steal available mates from alpha males. They suggest that ritual behavior is a useful mechanism that helps establish a clear behavioral signal indicating otherwise unclear individual intentions. Ritual “elegantly establishes a context in which to build cooperative relations: its formalism simplifies and disambiguates interactions; its invariance provides a model for reliability and trust – and ultimately truthfulness.” They suggest that stereotyped behavior creates a frame that allows individuals to explore the possibilities of cooperation and the strength of mutual intentions. The formalism of the behavior itself is useful to the process of communication, as successfully completing a ritual demonstrates the willingness to for two individuals to play by the rules with each other. What all of this means is that ritual behavior might be present in humans because it builds trust, communicates truthfulness, and sets apart conventions established in ritual as binding, and precisely these features were needed at some point in our cultural history. Culture could have re-discovered what biology discovered first, and it is not necessary to assume that human ritual is the result of selection for biological survival. Watanabe and Smuts’ research was guided by an insight they gleaned from Rappaport, one worth considering here. Rappaport claims that what originally motivated the need for religious ritual was the possibility of the deceptive use of language made possible by symbolic reference, as well as the potential for chaos made possible when human linguistic freedom allows us to explore competing, alternative visions of sociality. We needed mechanisms to ground truth-telling and promising, as well as to provide singular visions of social reality that all could buy into. The social need of linguistic humans was the ‘environment’ in which ritual provided robust solutions. I suggest that symbolic culture is free enough with respect to our biological history to be responsible for the robust presence of myth and ritual in religion, as well as for the striking variety and unexpected richness found in religion. 3 See Wiles et al. (2005) and Goodenough and Deacon (2003) for an account of the way masking has given humans increasing control over our biologically-given behavior.

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Sosis and Alcorta (2003) suggest something similar. They argue that empirical investigation of different views of ritual in human culture has discovered some interesting facts that undercut overly ‘biologized’ approaches to religious practice, suggesting the need for accounts that take culture seriously. They have demonstrated that ritual appears to positively impact the longevity of religious communes, but does not positively impact the longevity of secular communes. On the face of it, there is no obvious explanation to account for this discrepancy; the authors of the study turned to Rappaport’s theory to explain it. As a result of the empirical data, they conclude that the longevity and robustness of a religious community is not due to ritual alone, but ritual in its relationship to ideas about the divine, which facilitates an adaptive ‘center’ for religious community organization. Consciously-entertained ritual involving the divine distinguishes religious ritual from animal and secular ritual, and lays “at the heart of [religions] efficacy in promoting and maintaining long-term group cooperation and commitment” (Sosis and Alcorta 2003, 268). If I am correct and religion is primarily a cultural phenomenon, an account of the ‘cybernetic circuit’ of religious dynamics should focus on the dynamics of ritual and myth in its larger cultural environment. Feedback from culture, not biology, is where the cybernetic circuit finds its completion. Things like secularism, other religions, political identities, aesthetic and moral sub-­communities, economic identities, utopian speculation, and scientific narratives are the ‘environment’ of a religious community, which is, after all, first and foremost a linguistic entity that lives in the ‘virtual reality’ of other shared linguistic entities. Only secondarily do ritual and myth have physical and objective social attributes, due to their impact on human minds. Like a corporation, a religious community is not purely a physical entity, nor purely an imagined entity.

The Emergent Dynamics of Human Culture

I stated that my first goal in this chapter is to show how human sociality is emergent, in terms taken from our ‘primer’ on emergence and semiotics. To do this, I said I would first need to show the importance of human culture to human sociality, and then analyze how human culture can demonstrate emergent effects. I have done the first of these; now it is time to discuss how human culture demonstrates emergent dynamics. At some time in the past 4 million years, one genus of great ape – the lineage homo – developed the potential for distributed, symbolic language. The implications of this were nothing short of revolutionary, perhaps as significant as the emergence of life from non-life (or more modestly, as significant as the

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emergence of sexual reproduction) (Tomasello 1999; Deacon 1997; Dawkins 2006/1976). As a result, human beings everywhere now organize and coordinate their sociality through their shared cultures. The presence of hominid language was almost certainly having an effect on sociality even prior to the full development of language about sociality. At first, this influence was weak, probably overshadowed by the sociality given by our biological endowment, but as Goodenough and Deacon (2003) have pointed out, the potential for organizing sociality through language may have ‘masked’ or weakened the force of our evolved social tendencies, allowing humans to construct the sociocultural ‘niches’ in which we currently live. If their account is correct, growing numbers of individuals began to relate to each other through symbolic ‘maps’ of experience, which masked other ways of relating, and put genetic pressure on individuals to have a certain psychological nature: a preference for relating to each other via symbolic maps. We ‘off-loaded’ sociality from genes to symbolic culture, creating our current “hybrid brain-culture” (Donald 2001). This hybrid nature of our sociality shows itself in the two different sources of social processing that social neuroscientists note. These researchers, who study the brain systems and functions undergirding sociality in humans, note that there are fast, inflexible, automatic, implicit social cognitions, and slow, flexible, explicit, and mentally costly social cognitions (Frith and Frith 2008). The fast, inflexible, and automatic social cognitions are those that come from our biological endowment; the slow, flexible, and explicit social cognitions are those that come from our symbolic, cultural heritage. That these two forms of sociality are distinct can be seen when they are placed in forced opposition to each other in laboratory experiments. We can describe the emergent social effects of people sharing a symbolic language, just as we can describe the dynamics of any aggregate in nature when relational interaction produces a system of interacting parts. What do these emergent effects of language-sharing on sociality look like? Homeodynamic Social Effects of Sharing a Language Homeodynamics, you may recall, is an emergent state where aggregates ‘fall towards regularities’ by virtue of statistical canceling effects that reduce difference, leading to systemic relational properties. Homeodynamic social effects of sharing a symbolic language are primarily seen in the ‘averaging out’ effect of language on relations between individuals. How does sharing a communicable language allow this? First, it extends the conditions for sociality by making it possible to share experiences, plans, and ideas with others with whom we would not normally share such experiences. Sociality can extend beyond the biological family or kin group. This can influence actual, physical arrangements

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of people, as groups of unrelated persons grow in size, their coordination coming from their ability to enter into linguistic relations with each other. Second, it extends the quality of sociality, by creating a pool of shared experiences, plans, and ideas that no single individual actually experienced or thought of him or herself. As each language-user participates in refining the same mental map, it creates homogenized interpretations of human experience, making possible a pre-eminent, public, shared perspective on reality which strongly influences individual mental life. Durkheim (1973/1914), when considering the status of the mental life of humans when they share a cultural map of reality, writes, “Because collective, these states of consciousness are impersonal, and turn us toward ends that we have in common with others, and by which we communicate with others.” The shared public model of reality suppresses idiosyncratic private interpretations of experience that are not common or compelling enough to be represented publicly, and a sense of a public, ‘objective world’4 grows. Morphodynamic Social Effects of Sharing a Language Recall that morphodynamics describe the organization that can arise at a higher level because it exemplifies the most efficient way to dissipate lower level constraints, when repeated interactions at the lower level produce feedback that ‘piles up’ those constraints (a ‘compound interest effect’). There are different ways to consider the morphodynamic social effects of sharing a language, depending on whether we focus on its effects on the physical aggregation of biological individuals, or we focus on its effects within the mental world of representations of individuals and their aggregates. We will consider both, because it is the interrelation of these two morphodynamic effects that will become significant in teleodynamic social effects of sharing a language. First, let us consider the morphodynamic social effects of language-use on the physical aggregations of biological individuals, including how it affects the evolution of the brain. To the degree that language supports successful largescale projects, it gives language-users an advantage in reproduction. Provided that reproductive free-riders are punished through policing, the use of language to coordinate large-scale tasks will be adaptive.5 Deacon (1997) has noted that humans are the only pair-bonded primate having significant paternal investment that live in large multi-male groups. He suggests this is related to the fact that through language, unrelated human males can bond together to undertake corporate endeavors, while simultaneously policing mating 4 Even the objective world of common inner experience. 5 This scenario is analyzed in Fitch (2010).

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contingencies. Language, as well as our brain-based expertise in utilizing it, will develop, differentiate, and support ever larger and more complex social arrangements and endeavors. Social organization, social psychology, and linguistic culture will enter into a feedback relationship with each other, causing human culture to grow in importance, our evolved ‘social psychology’ to change as a result, and social forms to develop in new and unexpected directions. This is an example of human ‘niche construction’, the result being our characteristic enmeshment in linguistically-enabled social structures (Goodenough and Deacon 2003). Bickerton (2009) similarly argues that two species without superficial resemblance to each other – ants and early hominids – are actually quite similar in the way they use inter-individual communication to facilitate large-scale sociality. Both species, Bickerton argues, once inhabited a niche of scavenging large animals, requiring complex social recruitment, putting selection pressure on systems of communication. For both species, the advantages of communication ‘fed-back’ to influence their evolved social behavior and physiology. This means, surprisingly, that human existence resembles ant existence more than it resembles great ape existence. Both species have ballooned in numbers; both domesticate animals and plants; both build cities. And the cities of both species, by mere fact of their size, self-organize into necessary and robust types of behaviors, including a full-time division of labor, a soldier caste, and a caste dedicated to city self-maintenance (Campbell 1965; Johnson 2001; Rappaport 1999). In both cases, niche construction, driven by advanced communication, has determined the kind of niche the two species occupy, social behavioral tendencies, and the kind of society that evolved as a result. Bickerton argues that the social control under which we currently labor would have been intolerable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors; for the past 10,000 years, ever since cities and government, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Passivity, compliance, loyalty, and obedience have prospered and been reinforced. Now that we have focused on the morphodynamic effects of language use on our biological constitution and physical aggregation, we can focus on the morphodynamic effects of language use on mental representations of human sociality. In this case, we are focusing on the feedback effects of language on ideas about sociality, not on physical social arrangements and on our evolved brains. From this perspective, we can see morphodynamic effects in the intertwined narratives that grow out of sharing a language and culture with others, as individual self-narratives increasingly embed patterns of social relations. As a bit of background to this claim, Kerby (1991) has explained how our

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individual sense of self (our ‘self’ as it exists in the virtual world of linguistic representation) grows as a result of representing ourselves to ourselves linguistically. We build a selective narrative unity about ourselves through our practice of telling a ‘story’ of our self, our life, and our interests and desires, which we can then use to guide decisions about our future. Our future-self is biased by our representations of our past-self, constraining possible future trajectories of our lives to create coherence. However, we exist in relation with others who are similarly representing themselves to themselves. Thus, our self-narratives can’t help but reflect our relations to others; individual self-narratives begin to be coordinated. Prior to even conceptualizing ‘we’, our many individual “I’s” become entangled, and our sense of self necessarily reflects the influence of other senses of self. Specific roles and relations can become embedded in our self-narratives, mutually defining corresponding relations between individuals. My sense of self as a ‘son’ is intimately tied to a particular woman’s sense of self as ‘mother’, and a class of people’s sense of self as ‘slave’ is tied to another class’s sense of self as ‘master’. Our narratives reflect systematic features of all the shared narratives that interact with each other, growing in mutual coordination and canceling out discordant aspects. In summary, then, there are at least two kinds of morphodynamic, feedback effects of having a language on sociality; one is the effect on physical aggregation, impacting actual social arrangements and our ‘social psychology’; the other is the feedback effect of having a language on the growing coordination of our self-narratives, as they reflect social interdependence. Teleodynamic Social Effects of Sharing a Language We have covered forms of emergent sociality that do not include memory in the two previous examples – homeodynamic and morphodynamic sociality. Now we turn to teleodynamics, where memory can play a role. Deacon has argued that teleodynamics emerge when two or more morphodynamic processes becoming intertwined, each creating the conditions insuring the other’s continued existence. Further, when some aspect of such a system becomes a ‘bottleneck of constraint’, it plays the role of a form of memory, biasing the system in a certain direction, reinforcing the mutual relations between morphodynamic processes, and insuring their replication. Once this memory feature is established, changes in the memory component can profoundly impact the behaviors the system demonstrates, becoming the source of variation of alternative arrangements of behaviors. I suggest that these features of teleodynamics can be seen in human sociality when the two morphodynamic social processes I just outlined get entangled

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with each other, each supporting the other’s continued existence. When the feedback effects of language use on physical aggregation (cities, division of labor, castes, family arrangements, etc.), and the feedback effects of language use on representations of sociality (roles, social scripts, thematized self-narratives that include social relations like ‘son’ and ‘mother’) become entwined, they become mutually self-supporting. Our sense of self and our actual, physical social arrangements act as a redundant repository of the initial conditions that ground this physical/mental hybrid sociality. Representation of ‘self’ and the reality of physical relations between people become interdependent. To summarize this teleodynamic social effect, language use creates physical arrangements of people that go beyond our biological endowment; language use creates individual self-narratives that embed distributed social relations that grow in mutual coordination; these many self-narratives and the physical organization of the species become co-facilitative of each other. The further point I am now suggesting is that in this setting, a memory component can develop that acts as a ‘bottleneck of constraint’ for this interrelated dynamic. I suggest this memory component is the growth of explicit group narratives and representations of sociality itself. Language use not only grounds ‘self-narratives’, but also shared narratives about the social group. These ‘we narratives’ and social representations act as explicit memory that ground our institutions, corporate memory, and national ethos (Searle 1995). What this means is, individual self-narratives share space in our heads with a larger, more comprehensive group narrative or social ideal. The biological aggregation of individuals begins to be represented as a single entity, and the social narrative that develops defines who we as individuals are, as much as our individual narratives.6 For example, during the 1960’s in America, the Vietnam War affected the public political narrative concerning what it means to be American, as well as the private narrative of many individuals who protested against that war and the country’s involvement. These two became tangled in ways that impacted both self-narratives and public policy, as well as the way social life in America was actually expressed. ‘Youth culture’ became a significant fact, overshadowing the impact of the family for many people, and self-definitions such as ‘hippie’ and social narratives such as the ‘lessons of Vietnam’ played a significant role in American identity and political decisions for decades. This even impacted the way Americans handled the 6 As Manchester and Reid (2012) write of Winston Churchill, “In those such as Churchill, history, by way of imagination and discipline, becomes part of personal memory, no less so than childhood recollections of the first swim in the ocean or the first day of school.” Both Royce (1968) and Durkheim (1995) articulated this in one way or another, as well.

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treatment of soldiers returning from the 1991 Gulf War, with the goal of ‘healing the wounds of Vietnam’. Characterizing these very different social dynamics using emergence categories – homeodynamic averaging out effects, morphodynamic feedback effects, and the more complicated, mutually constraining ‘teleodynamic’ effects that can take advantage of a memory component – shows that human sociality can be brought under the general categories of emergence theory in suggestive and ultimately fruitful ways. Chase (2006) and Lior (2014) have made similar, strong arguments about the importance of using emergence categories to understand human sociality, as have the ‘realist’ social theorists such as Archer (1995) and Elder-Vass (2007) (although I believe ‘realist’ accounts would be strengthened if these theorists had a conception of how the memory component of ‘we narratives’ functions in social dynamics). Having broached the topic of the memory component of human sociality, and having given an example of ‘we narratives’ that define corporate identity and national ethos, I want to explain more carefully the different ways that linguistic representations can act as memory in a social system, constraining and biasing the way individual self-narratives are tied to each other, and affecting the actual physical relations between individuals. Recall that in Ch. 1, I argued that there are three different classes of human sociality, corresponding to the three ways memory can function to produce human sociality. These three classes are: (1) the fundamental, ineliminable equality of all language users as participants in a ‘community of interpretation’, which necessarily flows out of the interchangeability of hearer and speaker, interpreter and producer of linguistic utterances. (2) A culturally passed-on form of sociality that results from the linguistic ability to represent sociality itself. (3) Sociality that is organized with respect to the divine, as groups affirm and embody divine Beings and Ways. These three classes of sociality are possible because of the three different ways a memory component can represent sociality. The first class represents the way language use represents our implicit participation in a community of interpretation, utilizing a linguistic term that iconically represents such sociality. The second class represents socially-constructed and culturally-articulated forms of sociality, indexed to the pragmatic interests of individuals in groups. The third class represents a theologically-articulated, encoded symbolic ‘map’ of society, which uses ideas about the divine to coordinate individuals with each other indirectly. Memory Involving Iconic Reference Produces Communitas Josiah Royce (1968/1913) argues that when symbolic language is shared among many individuals, each participant represents an interpreter, whether or not

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this is explicitly recognized. Through language a “community of interpretation” is created, not a mere aggregate of biological individuals. In a community of interpretation, the ‘other’ with whom one shares linguistic communication is implicitly posited as an equal to oneself – equal in the capacity to participate in the linguistic community. There exists a shared linguistic term that represents the individual as he/she participates in the community of interpretation. The term acts as a form of memory, iconically referencing this type of human sociality. The term I am referring to is ‘I’ (and similar terms in other languages). The use of the term ‘I’ is iconic of every other use of the term, across many individuals. The ‘I’ iconically represents the interchangeability and equality of each interpreter in the community of interpretation; it does not represent any specific or determinate person, but merely the general category of persons who participate in linguistic discourse. The ‘I’ designates participation among equals; it represents an undistinguished class. It represents ‘those who have entered into a shared linguistic map’ within the linguistic map. And its shared use grounds a fundamental sense of what is meant by ‘humanity’. Turner’s (1969) conception of communitas profoundly recognizes both the interchangeable, iconic characteristics of the ‘self’ as it is represented linguistically, and the relevant connection between that self and other forms of sociality. I don’t think his descriptions of communitas can be improved upon as a description of the interchangeability of those within a community of interpretation, captured in a memory component utilizing the iconic form of reference. Turner writes that communitas is a “generalized social bond,” blending lowliness and sacredness, homogeneity and comradeship. It is a precondition for the cultural development of human sociality. It is the unstructured and undifferentiated community or communion of equal individuals. Communitas has an aspect of “potentiality,” and “unprecedented potency.” His characterization of communitas and its role in sociality relies on the metaphor of the “emptiness at the center” of a wheel, which is indispensable for its functioning. It has an “existential quality” that involves the “whole man in relation to others.” This existential quality is different from the structures of sociality that build upon it, which have a cognitive quality. Turner is “inclined to think that communitas is not solely the product of biologically inherited drives released from cultural constraints. Rather it is the product of peculiarly human faculties.” It is the product of “men in their wholeness wholly attending.” The equality of communitas is most certainly not a fact of biological organisms of the homo lineage, whose skills and abilities vary wildly. It is a posited fact, an entailment of sharing a symbolic language, as interpreters must be posited as equals in the process of sharing interpretations with one another.

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The ‘I’ representing the interpreter that exists in every act of interpretation, lives in the virtual realm of shared language and cultural representations, and as such is one step removed from the biological individual and physical aggregation. As Fichte (1982/1797) noted two centuries ago, the ‘I’ is not a fact, but an act. Representing one’s capacities for interpretation by using the word ‘I’ establishes oneself in the community of interpretation, as an equal with everyone else who is able to ‘join the club’. The ‘I’ is used iconically as social memory to create an awareness of the fundamental equality of all language-users, of humans in their shared humanity. Memory Involving Indexical Reference Produces the Linguistic Construction of Society If the ‘I’ iconically represents one’s membership in the community of interpretation, creating our sense of ‘humanity’, another use of language references specific groups, specific kinds of groups, and specific visions for how sociality should be constructed. In these examples, social memory is indexed. Turner is also useful in explicating this kind of human sociality, as he notes there are “two models of human interrelatedness” that necessarily coexist with each other. One is what we just analyzed – communitas. While the ‘communion of equal individuals’ is memorialized in such political ideas as “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” the second type of sociality is described by Turner as a “structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system.” This model is the result of linguistically-constructed politico-legal-economic systems of cooperation and social hierarchy, according to principles that may well take individual differences into account. If the Declaration of Independence trumpets human equality, the Constitution of the United States focuses on the distinction between, and proper hierarchical organization of, the ‘natural’ orders of human beings, particularly the differences between the ‘one, few, and many’.7 How does the human cultural construction of sociality begin and develop? As noted in the previous section, it develops when ideas of “we” begin to be countenanced and explicitly designated linguistically. This is the linguistic companion to what philosopher John Searle (1995) calls “collective intentionality” or “we intentionality.” Consider what I noted in the previous section: when large numbers of unrelated individuals are joined by a common language, the result is an unplanned, yet robustly predictable, organizational structure. These new and unplanned patterns of human organization may find 7 See the debate of the representatives to the Federal Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on June 7, 1787 (Farrand 1911).

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linguistic representation; terms may be invented to bring the group to mind and enable the identification of its unique characteristics. These characterizations may then become starting points for the variation and selection of social ideas. For example, self-organizing city dynamics, when conceptualized, can become sources for theorizing about the division of labor and political organization. And key ideas applied to abstract entities like the ‘United States’, such as “all men are created equal,” can become motivations for considering the morality of slavery or of women’s suffrage. Thus, a feedback effect of sharing language – large groups of individuals living in unplanned, emergent forms of social organization – can enter into our cognitive maps as a form of memory, and can then become the source of variation and selection of conceptualized social forms. I have characterized the capacity of symbolic language to allow us to construct ‘society’ as indexical memory. Why would I characterize this emergent effect of cultural memory as indexical? I do this because explicit, shared terms directly link individual narratives to others. Through such conceptualizations, individuals are able to directly place themselves and others within a rulebased, constructed social system that they each, more-or-less, understand and respect. Consider a hungry man who arrives at a restaurant at 10pm, only to be told that the restaurant is closed. Because the patron exists to himself not just as a biological individual in need of food, but also as a part of a social narrative, as a ‘self’ in an explicit ‘society’, he recognizes the authority of the restaurateur to close her restaurant when she wishes. Though the closing of the restaurant may not be convenient to him, or even in his best interests, because of the shared symbolic order mediating between the patron and the restaurateur, no fight breaks out, no food is demanded, no threats made. The explicit system of rules that both patron and restaurateur abide by directly mediates between the hungry man as ‘self’, and the expectations put on relational interactions with others in ‘society’. The uncomfortable fact that some people got to eat while the hungry person did not is brought under rules that explicitly determine this as a fair outcome, one that takes precedence over the needs of the hungry person. The hungry person himself, though perhaps individually hurt by the decision at that moment, recognizes that his life in many other moments is better off because of such mediating rules that connect individuals to others. The system connecting self to society pragmatically makes sense to him as a social construct. Explicit social rules directly index social behaviors for individuals. Laws, rules, constitutions, explicitly-given ‘rights’, and other tokens that represent ‘we intentionality’ act as memory, implicating individual narratives as well.

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By abiding by the terms of this social memory, many individuals come into coordination with each other as a direct result of choosing to submit to the terms of the narrative. Social narratives may index basic biological needs such as those implicated in economic arrangements, but also may index things such as fairness, equality, happiness, and even aesthetic taste. Let me recapitulate what I have said so far about how linguistically-represented memory can differently function to produce different classes of human sociality. A social memory component utilizing iconic reference – the narrative ‘I’ that grounds self-narratives – references the equal participation of all language-users in the community of interpretation. It references the fundamental equality of all humans to each other. A social memory component utilizing indexical reference refers to particular groups in their characteristic organizational patterns. Importantly, these represented patterns can become starting points for the variation and selection of social ideas, exploring different ways and reasons for forming into groups. Explicit representations of ‘the United States’, ‘Led Zeppelin fans’, ‘representational democracy’, ‘economic justice’, ‘open marriage’, and the countless other ways we explicitly represent social forms, become ideas that govern social practices. These ideas can become bottlenecks of constraint linking individuals to each other mentally, re-­ producing particular social groups and their characteristic dynamics.8 Memory Involving Symbolic Reference Produces an Encoded ‘Spiritual Map’ of Social Relations Many who study religion have made the claim that divine beliefs function within religious communities as encoded sociality; I am contextualizing this claim within emergence theory, noting its role as symbolic memory. For example, Boddy (1994) writes that religious statements are one step removed from normal statements about societies; they are “coded moral and political acts . . .  derived from thinking about one’s relationships to others by thinking through the Other.” Geerts (1990) approves of Turner’s (1974) quote that divine concepts don’t directly refer to the community; they provide “a set of structures of 8 While I developed many of these ideas prior to Deacon’s publication of Incomplete Nature, in that work Deacon offers language that has clarified my thinking, and confirms the basic direction I have taken. He notes that with respect to the teleodynamics of sociality, the critical issue is “the capacity for semiotic processes to control behavior and shape the worldview of whole cultures.” He further suggests that teleodynamic processes may be expressed as common cultural narratives for explaining events, habits of communication developed between different groups or classes of individuals, conventionalized patterns of exchange, etc. (2012, 368).

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thought and feeling” about the relationship between the living and the supernatural realm, which then influences the community. Gardner (1983) notes that ritual participation is not intended to produce conventional states of affairs with respect to sociality directly, but rather, to influence supernatural beings. As noted in Ch. 2, two theorists have explicitly noted that the key characteristic setting apart religious sociality from other forms of sociality is the way divine beliefs guide religious experience, which in turn connects the individual to the community. Wikstrom (1990) suggests that in religious communities, four things are connected: individual psychological motives, religious myths that somehow touch these psychological needs, socio-cultural realities, and a kind of ‘play’ of religious imagination. He suggests the play of religious imagination involves the mediation of a special reality-map consisting of an existentially-relevant frame of interpretation pointing to a “cosmic Thou.” And Csordas (2001) proposes that something like a ‘transducer’ connects the ideal world of the sacred and numinous with the material world of existence. He suggests that this transducer is a particular kind of imaginative, indeterminate, spontaneous, and numinous bodily/sensory engagement with the world seen as a revealed manifestation of the divine when appropriate theological ideas give this engagement legitimacy. Examples include Catholic Charismatic ‘words of knowledge’ and Native American Church ‘physical signs’. What this suggests is that the divine as experienced systematically links individuals and group, the experience translating the link between ideas about the divine to social organization. Beliefs about the divine act as social memory, but not directly; they are not about sociality at all. What makes them relevant to sociality is the way experience of the divine becomes relevant to social organization. I will specifically examine religious teleodynamics in greater detail in the next section.

Teleodynamic Religion and the Role of Symbolic Reference

My other goal for this chapter, besides showing how human sociality is emergent, is to specifically show how religion is a teleodynamic emergent system involving symbolic reference. Over the next two sections, I will argue that religion utilizes what Rocha and Hordijk defined as symbols (see Ch. 3), and conforms to the central themes of semantic closure and strange loops. To begin, I want to acknowledge the formal similarity of Rappaport’s definition of ritual, “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers,” with one of Deacon’s definitions of teleodynamics, “via memory, constraints derived from

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specific, past, higher-order states . . . get repeatedly re-entered into the lowerorder dynamics leading to future states” (2003b). If participants in ritual do not encode their own actions, as Rappaport states, they necessarily must be the result of a kind of memory. Both Deacon and Rappaport conceive their object of study to involve an organizational structure repeatedly re-creating itself as a result of a kind of memory imposing itself on the present. They both emphasize the circular causal structure of teleodynamics and ritually-organized religious communities, respectively, and both consider their subjects as organizationally related to living things.9 These general comparisons of teleodynamics and ritual religion don’t distinguish between the type of memory involved, whether it uses indexical and symbolic reference. Rocha and Hordijk, working within Pattee’s account of semantic closure, proposed three rules for identifying when symbolic reference is being used as system memory. I want to look at these rules, comparing them to my description of religious communities. Rocha and Hordijk note that symbols are dynamically incoherent with respect to the rest of the system’s dynamics. They do not act directly based on their material/dynamic qualities, but indirectly, based on their relational and informational properties. They must be decoded to affect the system in which they are a part, so they represent a formal rather than an efficient cause. Symbols, since not efficacious directly, have to be separated from direct material and energetic transaction, ‘stored away’ and accessed by structures able to interpret them. The syntactic structure of information in symbols can be accessed and utilized without reference to its content. Besides being dynamically incoherent, symbols are identifiable because a ‘construction code’ is responsible for translating their informational content into dynamic realities. Rocha and Hordijk note that semantic information is decoded from syntactic structures to construct dynamic configurations in a dynamical system-environment coupling. The construction code is an example of an ‘interpretant-vehicle’ as outlined in Ch. 3, and functions in the same way as placing a linear scale of numbers next to a tube of mercury of changing height does, allowing one to be taken as the other. The construction code designates the rules used to translate dynamically incoherent memory into another domain, producing potent outcomes when translated. Together, what the first two criteria imply is that if there exists something that could be described as a symbolic teleodynamic social group, whatever represents the conceptual heart of such a community would not have direct effects on sociality; it would not be seen to be directly efficacious in the social 9 Rappaport (1999, 411–12, 408–9); Deacon (2003b, 284; 2006, 137–8).

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world by being about sociality. It would lack a direct message linking the individual to the social; it would be a ‘formal’ or structuring cause of sociality, rather than an ‘efficient’ cause of sociality.10 Since the concepts linking individual narratives together to create sociality would not be directly about sociality, for them to be efficacious in that domain, they would have to be set apart and accessed by many people for reasons other than their effect on sociality. In a sense, they would have to be ‘framed’ and set apart from normal social discourse. Further, the impact such set-apart ideas would have on the psychology of individuals and the organization of societies would have to be the result of a code. Something functioning as a consistent decoding device, an interpretant-vehicle, would translate the conceptual center of such a community as it is taken up by individuals into entailments for sociality. To understand how religion realizes these dynamics, let us consider first how the ideas governing a religious community can be seen to be dynamically incoherent. The claim I am making is that there is a distinction to be made between the effects of divine ideas as they produce decentering experiences in ritual participants, and the effects of divine ideas as they are articulated, studied, defended, and passed on according to their impact on normal, mundane consciousness (their ‘unencoded’ form). Myths can have ‘inert’ and ‘potent’ effects on consciousness. Stories of gods acting among human beings in characteristic and defining ways are just that – stories – to anyone who is contemplating the content of religion in a normal frame of mind. Myths are ‘inert’ with respect to social organization when viewed from the perspective of normal experience. However, when they are embraced as authoritative and ‘really real’, their effect on experience allows them to become potent and transformative. This distinction differentiates the intellectual activities of apologetics, theology, and ‘religious studies’ from devotional participation in religious community life. To explain this distinction, Rappaport’s idea of metaperformativity is critical. Recall metaperformativity is a description of the way ritual makes myth individually and socially authoritative. When myths are embraced as authoritative and ‘really real’ through the metaperformative authority of the ritual structure, they have potent and transformative social and psychological effects, as normal modes of interpreting them are suppressed. Next, let us consider how religious ‘symbols’ are set apart from the mundane. How does this occur with respect to myth? Most basically, this is accomplished through the theatrical and repetitive elements of ritual, which make clear that 10

If we can metaphorically consider language, used normally, articulating directly the connection of selves to society, as demonstrating ‘efficient’ causality.

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certain components informing religious life are distinguishable from others, and should be understood differently. That the Roman Mass offers a non-filling meal of bread and wine every week, and has done so for 2,000 years, sets apart that meal as distinct from other meals, and other mundane affairs of life. Religious symbols may also be set apart by rules allowing only certain people to engage the material culture of the sacred, or that make criticism of them a punishable offense, or by the use of ostentatious wealth, human effort, or suffering to display the value of mythological elements far beyond their mundane, practical, value. These facts suggest that mythological elements, by being set apart and protected, as well as by not directly impacting psychological or social relations in their inert forms, represent ‘dynamically incoherent memory’ – the symboltokens can be manipulated without reference to their function as information for the ritual community, and are implemented in non-reactive structures to normal conscious experience. What is the ‘construction code’ (the second of Rocha & Hordijk’s criteria) that decodes myth and constructs from it a dynamic religious community coupled with a larger cultural environment? What translates dynamically incoherent mythological themes into actual differences in the psychological and social worlds of communities of interpreters? Taylor (1990) has made a distinction that is helpful here. In analyzing the religious dimensions of Confucianism,11 he claims that the idea of transformation is what allows us to distinguish between a philosophical absolute and a religious absolute. A philosophical absolute changes how we think; religious absolutes change how we are. Taylor argues that for an absolute to function as a religious absolute, it must involve personal transformation. He writes, “Religion provides not only for a relationship with what is defined as the absolute, but provides as well a way for the individual to move toward that which is identified as the absolute” (1990, 3, italics mine). Ultimate transformation is the “quintessential characteristic in the identification of a religious tradition.” If Taylor is correct, and I think that he is, then in terms of the ideas we developed in Ch. 2, the construction code is the decentering process, the ‘play of religious imagination’ that is biased by ideas of the divine. Biased decentering acts as the ‘transducer’ connecting people to each other, as they find their place within the theological world defined by mythological content. Myths, when taken as authoritative, bias the decentering process and thus bias the experiences of many people, impacting group coordination as a result. Through decentering, the mythical becomes the mystical, and the mystical grounds a 11

See Appendix, below, for a full account of the religious dimensions of Confucianism.

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new kind of sociality. This is seen in the ‘hot’ voodoo sèvis of Lowenthal, Durkheim’s ‘collective effervescence’, and even in Rappaport’s account of the ongoing, low-key, relatively private experience of daily prayer in Orthodox Judaism.12 Decentering affects the way religious practitioners view and participate in the community that shares the practice. How is decentering accomplished? The important claim I am making here is that the very same techniques used to prepare individuals to take up their myths as authoritative and potent, which Rappaport called metaperformativity, is precisely what McNamara thinks causes religious decentering. As I explained in Ch. 2, for one participating in religious ritual, there are implicit facts about the dynamics of participation that are important to note. First, one is implicitly acknowledging that the divine exists, and exists in certain ways, with certain specific characteristics; second, one is implicitly acknowledging the authority of the divine; and third, one is embodying or ‘channeling’ the divine through ritual practice; one is submitting one’s ego to an extraordinary causal influence. Performance of religious ritual implies a ‘speaker’ that is greater than the individual, to whom the individual is submitting oneself. These dynamics are precisely what McNamara thinks establish religious decentering. A partial list of what McNamara considers ‘triggers’ for decentering includes: Intentional religious practices such as those that obtain in initiation rites, prayer, meditation, reading scripture, listening to sacred music, etc. These may prime the ‘religion circuit’ of the brain to make decentering more likely. This is possible because beliefs, emotions, cognitions and cognitive practices influence neurochemical activity, which is crucial to changing brain states. Religious narratives, which are taken as truly representing the unseen realm, often involve divinely-ordained setbacks and defeats, which can reduce agency and trigger decentering in those who take such narratives seriously. Religious language, which has peculiar characteristics; these shift the source and control of speech away from the individual and to the putative superior agent. In ritual acts involving religious language, the individual sets aside his/her own identity to participate in the identity of the 12

“Frequent performance of brief rituals, like the round of daily prayers of Orthodox Jews and their continued observance of mitzvoth (commandments) in the details of daily life may penetrate to the cognitive and affective bases of that behavior, and thus strengthen the ground upon which the order realized stands” (Rappaport 1999, 209).

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speaker whose voice is characterized through the language. Thus, religious language may facilitate the onset of decentering, even as it marks metaperformativity. Self-consciousness is reduced so the spirit can speak, and the fusion of the old identity with the new is facilitated. Masks and religious dramas appear to facilitate decentering. Masks and participation in religious dramas make it easier to access alternative identities. Adopting the mask of a god means suppressing one’s own identity and acquiring a supernatural identity. Strong forms of this decentering such as those that obtain in religious possession, is a broad cultural phenomena; 74% of all cultures evidence possession beliefs. Possession, as with all decentering, should be considered a by-product of the way the brain constructs identity. McNamara wonders whether sacrificial blood, the presence of which is accompanied by some discomfort, triggers decentering. I would suggest it does, as it involves the intentional killing of an animal, which is inherently uncomfortable and intense, as well as the sacrifice of wealth, for the sake of invisible Beings and Ways. Any religious act that, in Rappaport’s words, is ‘intense’, becomes an index of how ‘real’ the posited entity is believed to be that asks or demands individuals give up comfort or value on their behalf. Intense symbolic acts invite sobriety and seriousness, suggesting unseen usps are so important that they have earned the right to such behaviors from humans. This can trigger decentering. A similar result can be seen in the effects martyrdom has on others, which point to the importance of the unseen reality in the name of which the martyrdom was performed. I would add that attitudes and behaviors expressing worship trigger decentering, as the content focuses attention on the postulated nonimmanent Being or Way on whose behalf the community has gathered. Wildman (2011, 232) argues that religious musical worship is really a way to manipulate psycho-social triggers found in corporate rhythmic movement, but I would suggest that the opposite is more likely the case: religious communities may use all sorts of psycho-social tricks to get people into the situations (like musical worship of divine Beings and Ways) that cause decentering and the experience of the higher selves latent in religious community participation. As I stated in Ch. 2, the authoritative interpretation of individual religious decentering occurs according to how such experiences fit into the theological world designated by myth. Decentering, fueled by the metaperformativity of ritual and myth, link together an individual’s narrative of (a) themselves,

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(b) the community of interpretation who share myth and ritual, and (c) the community’s view of the cosmos. A ‘world order’ is enacted by metaperformative decentering (Rappaport 1999), and individual experience is translated into group dynamics by this world order. This is Rocha & Hordijk’s ‘construction code’, turning dynamically incoherent religions myths into experiences of individuals. The third of Rocha & Hordijk’s criterion is self-organization and selection, and describes how the material structures constructed by symbolic representation exist under the constraints of self-organization and self-reproduction, and are pragmatically selected in an evolutionary process. As Pattee notes, a dynamic system that is conservative and repetitious must also be flexible and interactive. This criterion identifies the critical role that self-reproduction plays, as well as how feedback from the environment culls memory variants and their corresponding dynamic outcomes. It is through reproduction with variation and selection that symbols representing initial conditions for organism development can, over time, track their environment intelligently, increasing the fitness of the organism over the long term. The ‘environment’ for a symbolic teleodynamic social system would not be the physical environment, but rather the larger cultural and symbolic domain composing the shared public space of symbolic language. Competition would come from alternative conceptualizations of sociality of various types. The proper functioning of its social dynamics would not be for the benefit of the individual primarily, but for the community as an organism. Rappaport provides us a way to view the self-reproductive capacities of religion that result from the synergistic relationships coordinating myth, individual experience, and religious sociality in a mutually reinforcing set. As ritual and myth are made individually meaningful through decentering, community ritual dynamics are reinforced and a metaphysical order is established; as community ritual dynamics are reinforced and a metaphysical order is established, individuals are re-invited to access transformative decentering experiences. Individual psychological experiences, narratives, and an adaptive, long-lived social order mutually reinforce each other, insuring the reproduction of the entire ‘teleodynamic’. Rappaport also makes several important contributions towards seeing religious communities as fitting this requirement. He explains how a religious community is organized so as to be adaptive, as ritual hierarchically authorizes more and less central content. His argument is that the hierarchy of sacredness is also a hierarchy of stability, Ultimate Sacred Postulates being the most stable, Dominant Symbols less so, rules even less so, etc. This allows a religious community to adapt to many different cultural environments. It also gives an order

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to how change will be manifested in a religious community: it will start at the periphery and gradually makes it way to the center, the depth of change determined by what is necessary for the survival of the community. Selection pressures, coming from changes in the larger cultural/political/social environment, will influence the experience of individuals participating in the religious community, and will determine whether or not they continue to participate. If myths still meaningfully invite alternative forms of experience by which sociality is organized, the community will continue to be adaptive in its cultural or sociological niche (cf. Rappaport 1999, 428, 429–30).13 An important entailment of Rocha & Hordijk’s third criterion is that religious communities should be self-organizing bounded systems. Cho and Squier, in a paper that analyzes just these characteristics of religious communities from a ‘systems’ perspective, write:  . . . a Christian or Buddhist is identified by her connectivity to other individuals of that class, through particular kinds of interactions, such as sharing doctrines, ritual practices, and communal structures. Individuals in themselves are not inherently Christians or Buddhists. Instead, a system is constituted in the connectivity of its components. We can demarcate Christians as a system based on a relatively high degree of connectivity between individuals . . .  We can identify Buddhism as a system by demarcating it from its surrounding Indian environment, such as the brahmanical tradition against which Buddhists distinguished themselves, as well as other nonbrahmanical movements with which Buddhism dialogued, borrowed, and competed. This system identification might entail adopting the simplifying focus of Buddhism’s self-organization into the three primary components of the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and their interactions. (2013, 368, 367). If, as they claim, theological and ritual components provide the connections that identify Buddhist and Christian religious communities, a ‘lineage’ of religious communities must have been reproducing identical or highly similar myths and rituals over time. Instrumental to this process would have been community discernment practices, invoked to maintain the identity of the community, and the proper interpretation of decentering experiences. Community 13

I have supplemented Rappaport’s account here with the idea that myth must continue to meaningfully invite decentering. He focuses on myth’s ‘meaninglessness’, its ‘mysteriousness’. This change is in line with my critique of Rappaport’s misunderstanding of the importance of divine ideas.

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disciplinary acts such as excommunication preserve the boundaries of the system, even while they produce the impetus for new communities to ‘split off’ and pursue their own, unique trajectories.

Semantic Closure, Strange Loops, and the Creation of a Social ‘Self’

Semantic closure, as it has been articulated by Pattee and others, is the autonomous, circular causal closure of the dynamics of the material aspects of a system and the constraints provided by the symbolic aspects of a system. According to this theory, constraints on the dynamics of a reproducing system are introduced symbolically from within the system itself, and passed on to future iterations of the system, by the system itself. This, according to these theorists, is critical to defining what is meant by an ‘agent’ or a ‘self’. I think we can naturally interpret as an example of semantic closure how the social outcomes of religious communities are tied to the decentering psychological experiences of individuals participating in ritual and myth. These social outcomes create the conditions that insure the reproduction of the myths and rituals, which re-invites decentering psychological experiences. The metaperformativity of ritual and myth link together both social organization and the psychological experience of individuals in a mutually reinforcing set. This means we have gone a long way to specifying what Rappaport meant when he described religious communities as an adaptive system in the same class as living things. Further, we can even consider religious community dynamics as representing a kind of autonomous self, which seems to be the central claim Durkheim makes with respect to the religiously-charged sociality he describes (see Ch. 6). This is because the reproductive form of such a semantically-closed loop is importantly tied to Hofstadter’s idea of a strange loop, defined as “an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive ‘upwards’ shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle.” This definition is, of course, formally similar to the concept of semantic closure as just discussed. And Hofstadter equally emphasizes the shift from matter to symbol, and back again, as does Pattee. But Hofstadter develops the concept of a strange loop to apply both to biological organisms, and to the dynamics of human conscious persons. Because of this, he analyzes strange loops from the higher-level perspective of one’s conscious experience, not just from the perspective of the lower-level ‘parts’ involved in a dynamic process. That is, Hofstadter draws attention to the fact that a strange loop is what we mean by a self, an agent, and

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a conscious being. While he does not speculate (much) on the conscious experience of simple, single-celled organisms that are defined by a strange loop, he does in fact note that such experience is entailed by his argument (2007, Chap. 1). Given this fact, to argue that a religious community is a strange loop is to open a theoretical Pandora’s Box with respect to claiming such communities, viewed as a single agent, might have experiences, as one could easily read Durkheim as suggesting (as we will see). I quoted Deacon to this effect in the first chapter, as well. For now, the point I want to make is to explicitly equate Rappaport’s conception of metaperformativity, as discussed in the second chapter, with Hofstadter’s conception of a strange loop. Following Rappaport’s lead, from the perspective of ritual participants, the combined effect of ritual and myth is to imply an extraordinary speaker; this is what produces the powerful psychological and social effects we have examined. However, from the perspective of the religious community viewed as a single system, that very organizational form is that of a strange loop, where an agent (the implied extraordinary speaker) has a virtual existence, similar to that of the personal, subjective ‘I’, mediated by the interdependence of encoded memory (myth and ritual) and social dynamics. Teleodynamics, strange loops, semantic closure – each of these ideas is an attempt to capture the logic of a system that acts as a self, with interests for the future. I suggest this is a fair characterization of religious community dynamics. The engine that makes this religious dynamic ‘future oriented’ is that it leaves a placeholder at its organizational center, like the ‘subjectless sentence fragment’ Gödel created to stand at the center of his Incompleteness Theorem.14 The Ultimate Sacred Postulates at the organizational center of a religious community name an unseen, unknown divine Being or Way, which can leverage an experience that is created ‘on the fly’, through alternative forms of consciousness and decentering. Like a performative utterance, the social and psychological effects of the divine are realized as a result of positing the divine as existing. The potentially endless re-production of divine content is entailed, as is the community that lives by it. The dynamics of such a social organism support the continued existence of the cybernetic religious system; thus, religious communities exist first for themselves. This is confirmed by Rappaport, who along with Durkheim originally inspired the line of investigation of this book. He describes liturgical orders – one of his terms for the ‘dynamically incoherent memory’ used in a religious community to facilitate its self-reproducing dynamics – as follows: 14

Recall Quine’s English version of the sentence, “‘preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence’. preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence.”

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Although liturgical orders are important in the regulation of social, political, and ecological relations in many societies, they cannot be said to ‘reflect’ or ‘represent’ those relations in any simple way . . . Some liturgies make no reference to existing social arrangements or, if they do, they may at the same time signify entities transcending the existing social order and values from which the social order has, in fact, fallen away . . .  Liturgical orders in their wholeness do not simply or ultimately represent the social, economic, political, or psychic orders prevailing. They represent – which is to say they re-present – themselves. rappaport 1999, 262

I suggest a religious community can be seen as an emergent, symbolic, teleodynamic entity with respect to its cultural environment in the same way a biological organism can be seen as a symbolic teleodynamic entity with respect to its chemical environment, and a human person can be seen as a symbolic teleodynamic entity with respect to hominid psychology.

part 2 The Emergence of Meaning in Religion

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David Sloan Wilson and Daniel Dennett – Religion without Meaning In Part One of this book, I defined religion as an emergent social phenomenon, where mythic beliefs about the divine (a form of culturally-passed down memory) are taken up in ritual (a cultural practice) to link synergistically the psychological experiences of individuals and the dynamics of group organization. So far, I have addressed the question of religion’s organization fairly extensively, following Rappaport’s approach, which focuses on the ‘scientific question’ of emergent organization. In Part Two of this book, I will focus more on the question of religion’s meaningfulness, following Durkheim’s approach, which focuses on the ‘philosophical question’ of religion’s qualities and values. How might an emergent account of religion contribute to our understanding of the meaningfulness of religious participation? I will make the transition to this question by first focusing on recent scientific accounts of religion that have effectively described religion’s profound organizational dynamics, but in terms that specifically ignore any emergent experiences, values, or meaning. The accounts of David Sloan Wilson and Daniel Dennett should do nicely in this respect; they do an excellent job of exploring religion from the perspective of evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and should provide a foil for working through Durkheim’s account of the emergent qualities of religious community participation. This will give us the background we need to attempt a fuller account of these emergent qualities in the last chapter.

Wilson’s Thesis

In an important contribution to the scientific study of religion, David Sloan Wilson has utilized his years of experience as an evolutionary biologist to take a fresh look at religion. Wilson’s professional career has centered on developing multi-level selection theory, a biological theory about the evolution of groups that has been gaining adherents in recent years. Wilson’s proposal is an expansion and clarification of the idea of ‘group-level selection’. The basic idea of such selection is that genetic adaptations can accrue that turn individuals who would normally have a reproductive strategy focusing exclusively on the survival of the individual, into individuals whose reproductive strategy includes

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a focus on the survival of the relationships to which that individual is a part. For this kind of change to occur, the networks of relationships to which individuals belong must allow those individuals, on average, to out-reproduce those that do not have such relationships, on average. Further, there must be some mechanism to control the spread of cheating by free-riders, who would gain the benefits of group support without the cost of group-focus, and eventually sabotage the group’s average survival advantage. What is enlightening about the ‘multi-level’ approach, according to Wilson, is that it allows us to focus on the different levels in which differences in fitness can be played out. The question of how groups form out of basically self-centered individuals is precisely the theoretical issue that got Wilson interested in religion. His major treatment of the subject, 2002’s Darwin’s Cathedral, is his attempt to bring the rigor of evolutionary biology to the academic study of religion. It is an important, thought-provoking work, and was followed by a study (Wilson 2005) analyzing 35 randomly chosen religious groups from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987). The goal of this study was to see if the theoretical position he developed in his book could withstand empirical testing. Wilson writes that when evolutionists typically look at religion, they see it either as (a) a nonfunctional outcome of affordances given by our biology (like the ability to play sports); (b) a tool of exploitation by some of others; or (c) a kind of cultural parasite that ‘infects’ its hosts to the detriment of individuals and groups. He claims, however, that these perspectives miss something crucial. He notices that the superstitions, myths, and gods of many religious communities are intimately related to matters of supreme practical importance, such as food sharing. They unify a community, enabling it to increase its collective secular capabilities. Religion, he suggests, might best be thought of as a tool supporting adaptive social functioning. To test these intuitions, Wilson gathered evidence that would allow him to decide between the different evolutionary hypotheses about religion. His study looked at the descriptions of religion contained in a random sample of religious groups identified in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Do divine beliefs reliably cause the members of religious groups to help each other and otherwise function as adaptive units? By his assessment, the answer is primarily yes for the religious groups in the random sample, and thus for those in the entire encyclopedia. Whatever else religion is, the data suggests it functions to create adaptive social groups. Most of the religions in the sample set – and thus most religions in the encyclopedia – support the “practical welfare” of groups. Thus, Wilson concludes that the nature of religion cannot be understood without recognizing its “secular utility” (2005, 391). Portrayals of religion “as primarily nonfunctional and individually selfish…can be rejected on the basis of the

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survey” (2005, 404). Thus, for Wilson, belief in the divine can be explained as an ‘adaptation’1 for regulating human conduct. The benefits of religion tend to be public goods, which are costly to individuals to produce. From the perspective of evolution, the basic problem with respect to understanding any such behavior is to explain how selfish individual tendencies can be overcome, making possible behavior that is of benefit to others. How does religion facilitate this social-mindedness? Wilson draws on his experience in thinking about the origin of groups in biology, and proposes some ideas taken from that field. The first critical idea is that religion represents ‘social control features’. A ‘social control feature’ is a simple mechanism that links selfish individuals together. A chromosome is one example, since it links genes that otherwise would act selfishly2 so that they have to work together in order to replicate. Social control features allow a trade-off to occur between group benefit and individual cost. What does Wilson see as a social control feature among religious groups? What functions like a chromosome in religion? Wilson argues that cultural ideas and practices that enhance groupishness and restrict selfishness have been explored and selected in religions. He sees religious communities as groups of selfish individuals bound together by cultural ideas and practices to function as adaptive units. Wilson writes: In their specific behavioral prescriptions, theological beliefs, and social practices, most religions are impressively designed to provide a set of instructions for how to behave, to promote cooperation among group members, and to prevent passive freeloading and active exploitation within the group (2005, 385). Thus, he believes behavioral prescriptions, theological beliefs, and specific social practices are what act as social control features. Group selection produces a tendency towards cooperation, but has to contend with (and usually loses to) the tendency to behave selfishly. Only the pure forms of religion that participants idealize in their minds look like the product of pure group selection. In real, lived religious communities, the ideals of the group and the selfish individual are battling each other, giving us the ‘mixed bag’ that is real religion. Ultimately, Wilson sees religions behaving like a 1 Wilson may be primarily thinking of a cultural adaptation, if I am reading him correctly. In my opinion, his account of which kind of adaptation – biological or cultural – he is speaking of is not consistent across Darwin’s Cathedral. 2 For an account of what is meant by genes ‘acting selfishly’, see Dawkins (2006).

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societal organism such as an ant colony – an aggregate of different individual parts fitted together in an adaptively functioning whole. How did religion come to play this role? Wilson thinks that a religious community is primarily a moral community (and in this, he explicitly acknowledges his debt to Durkheim). Wilson argues that, prior to religion, both human morality and culture were already evolving as social control features, but these were powerfully extended by religious belief. Following moral theorists like Boehm (1999), Wilson considers that modern humanity sprung from huntergatherer societies that populated Africa over the past 150,000 years. Wilson argues that these early humans must have genetically evolved a specialized cognitive architecture making small groups of people psychologically prepared to bind themselves into functional units. The results of this adaptation are seen today; he argues, following Ellickson (1991), that humans naturally establish, enforce, and abide by social norms, even in the absence of a formal legal system. Early hunter-gatherer societies must have developed a strong and shared moral sense that directed them toward a common purpose; for them, ‘right’ coincided with group welfare, and wrong corresponded with self-serving acts at the expense of other group members. So, Wilson argues, if religion is fundamentally about binding groups together, it rides on top of geneticallygiven moral endowments; religious morality is not purely a result of culture. Wilson also notes that a defining characteristic of the last 150,000 years of human sociality has been an increasing reliance on culture – practices and ideas passed on from generation to generation through non-genetic means. These informal customs and ideas about social organization differ from society to society. Wilson suggests this capacity arose when genetic evolution provided the conditions for cultural evolutionary processes to develop, which also took advantage of the basic principles of variation, reproduction, and selection. A culture evolves as individuals express their capacity to explore variations of ideas, make selections from those variations (either consciously or not), and to reproduce those selections with some degree of fidelity from generation to generation. Cultural systems can evolve intelligently, even if no single individual or group is providing the foresighted guidance necessary for that intelligence. Further, they can adapt more quickly to recent environments that can biology, since they rely on fast-responding human brains, rather than slower genetic processes. Besides our evolved moral nature, then, cultural evolution is another factor that increases the potency of selection among groups, and decreases the potency of selection within groups, compared to what would be expected on the basis of genetic evolution alone. Culture links people together in a way that tips the balance of individual behavior towards working within the group as an adaptive unit.

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If both morality and culture already push humans towards group selection, what does religion add? Wilson argues that religious beliefs magnify the effectiveness of our ‘evolved’ morality and ‘evolving’ culture as social control features. To explain how, Wilson analyzes the catechisms used by Calvin in Geneva as a representative case. He concludes that in this form of Calvinism we see the ‘guarded egalitarianism’ characterizing hunter-gatherer morality extended by such ‘cultural add-ons’ as belief in the Calvinist God, to make hunter-gatherer morality work on a large-scale. We can characterize his general hypothesis in this way: religion is biological morality extended by cultural evolution in support of biologically adaptive coordinated action. This, Wilson argues is an example of group selection. He outlines the principles of this claim in six axioms (2002, 51), which I will paraphrase and compress here: 1.

2. 3.

4.

Some resources and commodities of value can only be gained through the coordinated action of individuals. When this type of coordinated action occurs, we can say such individuals are functioning together as an adaptive unit. Moral systems cause human groups to function as adaptive units. Moral systems are frequently expressed religiously. The nature of supernatural agents and their relationship with humans can be explained as adaptations that enable human groups to function adaptively; these adaptations are the result of the blind variation and selective retention of religious ideas.3 Group-level adaptations do not easily occur; well-functioning groups must outcompete other groups for such adaptations to be selected.

Going beyond this specific argument, which he carefully analyzes and supports, Wilson claims that a profitable line for investigating religion would be to see how it is distinct from other forms of culturally-created sociality. Wilson says one of his goals is to “understand what all unifying [social] systems have in common and why they vary in ways that impel us to categorize some as ‘religious’, others as ‘political’ and so on” (2002, 222). He notes, for example, that a chief conclusion of his empirical research on religious groups is that church and state are “in the same business” of organizing the lives of a group of people (2005, 391). He suggests, without further elaboration, that there are formal, organizational reasons to distinguish them. He concludes, “A good religion is awesome in the degree to which it organizes behavior and replicates itself through time. The mechanisms that enable all of this nongenetic information 3 Although it is possible that some religious adaptations are consciously taken up or imitated.

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to be encoded, expressed under the right conditions, and faithfully transmitted must be very sophisticated indeed. Theoretical models of cultural evolution have not yet grasped this degree of sophistication…” (2005, 399). As I have already argued, emergence theory gives us the tools we need to grasp and articulate the sophisticated way religion encodes and expresses nongenetic social information, differentiating it from politics and other social forms.

Is Religion Best Assessed by a Biological Theory?

Put in perspective with the other evolutionary views about religion that Wilson challenges, we must note that Wilson may be onto something. Against those who argue that religion is primarily a kind of failed science, or an insidious mental virus, Wilson suggests that religious groups utilize powerful strategies for insuring group welfare, and thus may contribute to the reproductive success of individuals in such groups. We should expect to see, if his theory is correct, that group-level selection pressures should limit the presence of theological beliefs that merely satisfy the urge to explain without insuring group welfare, or that motivate dysfunctional reproductive behaviors. What can we point to as a possible criticism of his theory? His basic argument is as follows: multi-level selection theory – still considered controversial by some – should be extended to include cultural evolution, not just genetic evolution. Culture can provide the ‘control features’ that bind individuals together in reproductively favorable arrangements, and thus ideas, and not just genes, can be selected and passed on, based on how they perform in supporting the average reproductive success of individuals in groups. Those groups whose members successfully out-reproduce the members of other groups will have their particular religious ideas passed on, as they transmit their religious beliefs to their children; over time, these religious ideas will replace alternative ideas held by less successful groups. The key idea of Wilson’s approach, then, is that the primary determinant of whether this religious idea will replace that religious idea is how the group that entertains the idea functions as an adaptive unit, as defined biologically. He assumes that religious beliefs will be passed on vertically, from parent to child, and says that the mechanism by which some religious beliefs will come to replace others is the successful biological reproduction of the group members that holds the belief. These assumptions permeate Wilson’s analysis, and are reasonable, from the perspective of a biologist. It is important to realize, however, that Wilson’s theory is ultimately insensitive to the difference between biological and cultural selection pressures. Both biology and culture, on Wilson’s analysis, function ‘correctly’ when they

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support biological reproduction. Thus, Wilson reduces religion to a tool of biological survival. There are many examples of this sort of reasoning in Darwin’s Cathedral. For example, he claims that religion exists to provide collective benefits to its members measured in terms of survival and reproduction; religion is “fundamentally a solution to basic needs” (2002, 183–4). He argues that members of religious groups should prosper in the basic biological sense more than isolated individuals or members of less adaptively organized groups. While he acknowledges that religions may change some aspects of what people want, religion is built upon the foundation of providing what all people want, through the coordinated action of groups. Secular utility is the ultimate selection pressure being exerted on religious ideas. Belief systems must motivate adaptive behaviors (as defined biologically) in this world. In this sense, both he and his intellectual sparring partners share an assumption – religious beliefs are in no way true or meaningful for individuals for any other reason than that they ultimately contribute to reproductive success. He notes that adaptive traits in biology always require two explanations – the mechanism that causes the adaptation (its proximate cause), and the environmental selection force that selects that mechanism for what it does (its ultimate cause). Just as having a ‘sweet tooth’ served as a reason (proximate cause) for an adaptive response in early humans (eating fruit), but the actual selection pressure had to do with the need for vitamin C (ultimate cause), so a given belief might exist – and even appear to be ‘meaningful’ – for any number of reasons, but ultimately it persists because it supports a group’s reproductive functioning relative to another group. This perspective allows one to reason about religion according to one simple standard; and I suggest it is too simple. Consider psychologist and skeptic Susan Blackmore’s (2010) admission of error about religion in a comment for The Guardian newspaper, which I will quote in part below. She argues that as a result of new data, she had to revise her earlier, negative views of religion. She writes, Are religions viruses of the mind? I would have replied with an unequivocal “yes” until a few days ago when some shocking data suggested I am wrong. This happened at a conference in Bristol on “Explaining religion.” About a dozen speakers presented research and philosophical arguments, mostly falling into two camps: one arguing that religions are biologically adaptive, the other that they are by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for other reasons. I spoke first, presenting the view from memetics that religions begin as by-products but then evolve and spread, like viruses, using humans to propagate themselves for their own benefit and to the detriment of the people they infect…

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This was all in my mind when Michael Blume got up to speak on “The reproductive advantage of religion.” With graph after convincing graph he showed that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people… Data from 82 countries showed almost a straight line plot of the number of children against the frequency of religious worship, with those who worship more than once a week averaging 2.5 children and those who never worship only 1.7 – again below replacement rate… All this suggests that religious memes are adaptive rather than viral from the point of view of human genes… If Wilson’s theory of religion is correct and religion answers to biological adaptation alone, the reasons given for Blackmore’s change of mind – higher reproductive rates – represents the whole story that needs to be told about religion. This is the ‘ultimate cause’ of religion, the only salient factor for assessing it, and the only thing of value that it contributes. While it may not be that Blackmore and Wilson actually think this narrowly about religion, the point is, the only standard of value given by Wilson’s theory for assessing religion boils down to this. Thus, Wilson argues that in an ‘ultimate’ sense (as defined above), philosopher of religion Huston Smith (1991a) is wrong when he says religion accomplishes community, but is about more than community. Wilson turns this idea on its head and suggests that though ideas of God are not about community, they exist because they cause feelings that undergird community. Like the pleasure of sex that exists (ultimately) to ground reproduction, “[t]hese exalted feelings may have evolved, both biologically and culturally, precisely because of their utilitarian consequences” (2002, 176). If religious beliefs motivate adaptive behaviors, they are relevant to the functional, adaptive explanation of religion; if they fail to, they are nonfunctional (2005, 393). That is all that can or needs to be said about religious belief. I suggest that an adequate account of religion must be able to register that human beings are able to define their place and value in the world in terms that go beyond mere biological survival. Both religious and nonreligious ideas can be meaningful to individuals, and valued at a cultural level, for reasons that go beyond reproduction. In fact, it is precisely the detachment of religion’s potent motivations from biological standards of human flourishing that frightens Daniel Dennett, who considers this possibility a threat to the long-term survival of the human race. Biological theory can only give us one assessment of this capability, and it is negative. By investigating religion from a different vantage point, however, we might find clues as to why religious belief, though

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largely supportive of biological reproduction, as Wilson’s data indicates, might not reduce to this function, and might not be valued only because it supports this function. When Wilson talks about the “nonadaptive nature of religion, such as the celibate Shakers or the suicidal Jonestown cult” (2005, 386), he is acknowledging that even if the data does suggest that most religions support human reproductive flourishing, they may not exist for that purpose; there is more to the story than biological reproduction. If ‘Shakerism’ had really caught on – and I see no reason why it couldn’t have – isn’t it possible that it could have run the human race to extinction, and that the last group of Shakers alive would still be convinced that what they were doing represented something meaningful, important, true, good, and beautiful? When the last surviving Jews at the Masada fortress committed group suicide, rather than surrendering to the Romans, presumably they considered what they were doing to be heroic and good. What is it about religion that allows it to contradict biological standards of value? What could make the religious think that what they believe trumps individual and group survival? And how should we assess this potential? Rappaport (1999) has argued that one of the most important aspects of human evolution is what he calls the ‘evolution of humanity’, which is not a fact about homo sapiens in their physiological or neuroanatomical development, but rather a fact about how culture ‘turns the tables’ on biological evolution. Culture, Rappaport argues, invites a “great inversion” where the importance of ideas trumps the biological survival of the species that has ideas. The ideas that are most central to human social systems are about things such as “Honor, Freedom, Fatherland, and the Good” (1999, 10), and the preservation of such ideas has often required great and even ultimate sacrifice of both individuals and groups to preserve them. Ideas such as ‘better dead than Red’ involve more than just pragmatic concern for higher reproductive rates, and ideas such as a hyper-individualism, nihilism, or hedonism may negate biological reproduction as a value at all. Meaningfulness, I argue, represents a different reason for forming groups than biological fecundity, though I would not dispute Wilson’s claims that many religions do in fact contribute to human group behavior that supports biological fecundity. All things being equal, a religious group that provides meaning and supports biological reproduction will outcompete a religious group that provides meaning without supporting biological reproduction. I will further explore the difference between biological and cultural selection pressures, and the question of religion’s tie to biological reproduction, by turning to the ideas of the other thinker I will recount in this chapter, Daniel Dennett.

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Daniel Dennett’s View of Religion

Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006) is a summary, defense, and critique of much of the current ‘science of religion’ literature, by a philosopher whose evaluation of religion’s place in human life might be described as ‘skeptical, but open’. The strength of his book is the way he compellingly weaves together current scientific theories of religion to tell a narrative of the origins of religion in humanity’s evolutionary history. In addition, Dennett offers a defense of a ‘memetic’ or ‘viral’ approach to religion that offers an alternative to the group selection approach of Wilson, and he goes beyond the exclusively negative caricatures of religion offered by others in the ‘new atheist’ camp. He offers his book as an ‘opening serve’ for a discussion with other, scientifically-minded religious theorists, and challenges them to return a ‘volley’ by refining his approach and offering compelling alternatives. I wish to be viewed as taking up this challenge, introducing to the discussion the powerful theoretical tools that current emergence theory offers. Dennett defines religion as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought” (2006, 9). Immediately, we see that he thinks religion fundamentally represents a social phenomenon, which puts him in the company of thinkers like Durkheim, Rappaport, and Wilson. Further, like them, he recognizes that what is of interest is the way beliefs about the divine cause and/or flow out of religious sociality; he writes that the “core phenomenon of religion…invokes gods who are effective agents in real time, and who play a central role in the way the participants think about what they ought to do” (2006, 11–12). From my perspective, he is correct in his claim that it is the causal role of divine agency that is central to religion, as well as his claim that seeking the “approval” of the divine characterizes the core attitude of religious practice. The question is, does Dennett offer a compelling explanation for either theme, from the perspective he develops in Breaking the Spell? Dennett, as might be guessed from the title of his book, does not think that divine entities exist. People mistakenly believe that the divine is a causal force in their lives, though this mistaken belief might be useful in ways that have nothing to do with its truth. Religious ideas do not invite feedback from anything in the world; thus, they do not produce results that demonstrate that religious people ‘know’ what they are talking about. Dennett, then, beyond claiming the divine does not exist, rejects (or does not consider) the possibility that there are consistent, if subtle, feedback effects in the dynamics of religious community participation that have wrongly been interpreted as pointing to the divine. As we will see, this distinguishes his position from

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Durkheim’s. The distinction is important; modern physics might explain why hardness as such does not exist in the world, but it also explains the real phenomenon that is responsible for why people think the term refers to something; physics uses a false belief as a clue to something else that does exist. For Dennett, religious ideas are errors, period. Any purported experiential feedback from religious belief is due to chance or the projection of psychological need. For this reason, Dennett specifically questions the idea that religion needs to be studied as an entity ‘on its own level’. That is, he questions whether there is any content justifying ‘religious studies’ as a distinct field; it adds nothing that couldn’t be gained by studying religion from the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and biology, history, anthropology, and cognitive science. He specifically rejects Eliade’s claim that studying religion from other perspectives leaves out ‘the sacred’, something otherwise unknown about religion that participation in religion might teach us. This is different from Dennett’s views concerning biology, for example; he believes there are unique aspects to life that justify biology as an independent science from chemistry and physics. Thus, his approach in Breaking the Spell is to introduce, distinguish, criticize, and defend the main lines of ‘science of religion’ literature that explains religion by reducing it to something else. This he undertakes in the bulk of his book, and it makes for a fairly compelling account, worth taking seriously. The fundamental datum that governs his explanation of religion is that religion looks designed. This means either (a) religion has evolved biologically, or (b) it is the product of rational reflection, like corporations, universities, and professional sports, or (c) its design comes from cultural selection processes invisible to religious believers. Dennett argues against the idea that religion has evolved biologically; there is nothing like a (genetically) heritable ‘spiritual sense’ that boosts genetic fitness, and religious convictions are not like “having epileptic seizures or blue eyes.” There won’t be a god gene or a spirituality gene, or a religious experience center, for example (2006, 315–16). Rather, the component parts of religion are due to a convergence of several different overactive dispositions, sensitivities, and other co-opted adaptations that have nothing to do with God or religion, which result in a tendency towards religious or mythological beliefs. If religion looks designed but is not a result of biological evolution, its component parts resulting from randomly-arising side-effects of other evolved characteristics, where does the design come from? While self-reflective and literate ‘world’ religions may include a significant degree of rational design, Dennett believes that invisible selection forces have done the bulk of the work

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sculpting the deep commonalities and patterns that govern religion worldwide. How do these invisible selection forces work to produce religion’s design? As a clue, he notes that religious beliefs are reproduced by ritual; he views ritual as an effective memory enhancer, improving the copying fidelity of religious ideas. This fact suggests how selection processes are acting in religion: ritual grounds the relatively faithful copying of ideas, which suggests that religion is a result of memetic evolution, not genetic evolution. Inspired by a ‘gene-centered’ view of biological evolution, memetics claims that packets of cultural, behavioral4 and linguistic information can be viewed as being in a moment-by-moment competition with each other for ‘brainspace’ in human beings. Most ideas are encoded linguistically, and can be transferred from brain to brain through the spread and sharing of words. If we let nature take its course, some of these packets of cultural, behavioral, and linguistic information will be passed on from brain to brain better than others. These packets of information, on analogy to genes, can be called memes, as cultural information packets or recipes for doing something. Consider that in America in the early 1970’s, two ‘memes’ – the phrase ‘cool’, and the phrase ‘far-out’ – competed for brain space as a linguistic expression of approval. For various different reasons, ‘cool’ outcompeted ‘far-out’, and in fact ‘cool’ has shown itself to possess a remarkable facility to cross generations and cultures, having originated in the African-American jazz culture of the 1940’s. ‘Cool’, on this account, is a remarkably effective replicator, a successful meme. Given the alternatives, selection has produced a term with wide appeal, an ideal term with the right combination of associations, phonemes, and word length to express approval. According to Dennett’s meme theory of religion, religious ideas as memes do not have to be true, but merely attractive; their proliferation “depends on their ability to attract hosts one way or another” (2006, 186). Human minds have been ‘hijacked’ by attractive religious ideas for reasons other than their truthfulness. What allows this is the adaptive biases of our evolved psychology, which when extended beyond their evolved role by the abstracting power of language, give rise to predictable components of religious beliefs. Religious ideas compel religious people to maintain social institutions that serve the transmission of those ideas, ‘professing’ beliefs at the expense of rationality and truth. Dennett argues that in fact, the success of religious 4 Easily specifiable behaviors that can be imitated can be passed on as memes. Consider Michael Jordan’s habit of sticking out his tongue while playing basketball, or wiping off the bottom of his shoes before shooting free-throws. Both were (and still are) widely copied behaviors of many would-be and actual basketball stars.

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memes depends on more than just their fit with our evolved psychological biases. For example, other, non-religious memes may act as cultural immunities and ‘receptivities’ for religion. Scientific memes of skepticism and rationality might ‘inoculate’ hosts from religion, and the ‘good tricks’ of religious memes might facilitate their spread. Such good tricks include bundling a religious meme with another one that urges parents to teach young children religion before their critical faculties develop, or a meme that urges some religious members to forego sexual reproduction to better serve the transmission of religious memes. The differential reproduction of complexes of memes has produced highly ingenious sets of religious ideas that very effectively reproduce in human brains. Once allegiance is captured, a host can be turned into a rational servant of those memes, using his or her intellectual resources to justify and perfect them. For the religious, their memes appear valuable for reasons transcending the genetic imperatives of biology. The survival of these memes, not the survival of the individual believer or their reproductive impulse, is most important. Dennett notes that religious people don’t “shrink from the idea that they have been commandeered by a meme that trumps their reproductive instinct; they embrace it” (2006, 187). We can see that one of the most important innovations of meme theory is the claim that memes have their own fitness as replicators, independent of any contribution they may or may not make to their hosts, including the genetic fitness of their hosts. Now as a matter of fact, successful memes might be effective reproducers because they somehow do benefit biological reproduction – consider memes that emphasize the value of health and medicine, and contribute to healthy childbirth. In that case, the meme would be a mutualist symbiont, benefitting itself by benefitting the biological reproduction of its host. But a meme can theoretically survive as a parasite by effectively jumping from brain to brain, spreading through the population faster than its neutral or negative effect on sexual reproduction can kill it off. From the perspective of biological evolution, a meme can oppress its hosts with an affliction. Memes may help, neither help nor hurt, or hurt the individuals involved in terms of their biological reproduction.5 It is possible, writes Dennett, that memes for religion have co-evolved with human biological needs in such a way that religious memes support biological survival; they may be a cultural invention like money, useful for the way they ‘grease the wheels’ of human social cooperation such that biological imperatives can proceed more effectively in a group context. In claiming this, Dennett 5 As is the case with ‘real’ viruses, biologically defined.

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is suggesting that cultural evolution, though free to sample all sorts of variations of memes, has stumbled upon those ideas that contribute to social solidarity, and thus, presumably, biological reproduction. In the case of religion, it is likely that religious participation creates bonds of trust that permit groups of individuals to act together more effectively. Because religious participation is an irrational source of sociality (because it was not instituted rationally for its social contribution, but rather, memes for religion stumbled upon such an arrangement), allegiance to religion and allegiance to the social good of humanity, though largely coincident, are not interchangeable. There is no guarantee that the religious will conclude that the good of humanity is the purpose of their religion. Typically, the good of religious memes is that which religious people are most invested in. Religious people “take on the goal of fostering, protecting, and spreading the Word” (2006, 177). Perhaps the right analogy for this dynamic is found in the ‘money’ example Dennett uses; though money was an invention stumbled upon in circumstances where it was functionally useful for facilitating exchange, its purpose in this respect can be easily forgotten or ignored. Some people may become so invested in money and making money that it becomes an end in itself, and can actually work against the social contribution it once represented. Systems of exchange, and people’s commitment to the meme of money, can diverge from the society-supporting constraints that were the original circumstances of its evolution. As Dennett notes many of the same features of religion Wilson’s does, Dennett considers Wilson’s arguments important, even if he doesn’t follow Wilson in his claim about group selection (point four on p. 83). Wilson thinks that rival religious groups compete with each other by out-reproducing each other, as a result of the adaptive benefits their religious ideas give them. This leads to the extinction of biologically maladaptive religious ideas and the survival of groups that benefit from biologically adaptive ideas. Dennett suggests this is too narrow a view of religion’s spread. We should consider culture as a horizontal vector for the spread of ideas. Ideas spread from person to person and group to group, outside the vertical channels of parental care and children’s education. He thinks this offers a better explanation for the spread of religion than competition between groups. What we in fact see with religion, according to Dennett, is the differential replication of ideas that have an impact on groups, not the differential (biological) reproduction of groups of individuals who hold religious ideas. Wilson’s error, therefore, is he doesn’t distinguish between a group defined by an idea, and that reproduces because the ideas of the group spread, and a group defined by biological reproduction, which reproduces because the ideas they hold

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cause the group to reproduce biologically better than other groups.6 Wilson himself rejects a meme theory of religion, and Dennett claims he does so in part because Wilson thinks it necessarily requires thinking that religious memes are a cultural parasite that evolves at the expense of human individuals and groups. Religion must therefore be dysfunctional on this account. But Dennett points out that memes can be neutral ‘commensals’ with respect to biological evolution, or even helpful ‘mutualists’. Dennett proposes a “mild memetic alternative” to Wilson’s approach, in order to highlight the cross-culture and cross-group spread of religious ideas, as distinct from the vertical transmission of religious ideas within lineages of isolated, competing groups: Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing outgroup curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated (2006, 184–5). Thus, a meme theory of religion, according to Dennett, can in principle account for the excellence of design encountered in religion (without postulating rational designers), and it can account for the fact that individual fitness is apparently subordinated to group fitness in religion. We need not postulate “group-replication tournaments” that are implied in a group-selection approach, but only a cultural environment in which ideas compete (2006, 185). Ideas that encourage people to act together in groups will spread more effectively as a result of this ‘groupishness’ than ideas that do a less effective job of uniting individuals together. I think Dennett’s criticisms and ‘friendly amendment’ to Wilson are helpful, complementing Wilson’s analysis of the powerful effect of religion on group dynamics. Recall that Wilson argues that religion provides ‘social control features’ that bind individuals together into groups. This is true, whether or not 6 Dennett claims that Wilson, though claiming to explain religion in terms of group selection, isn’t in fact doing so. Wilson says the excellent traits of one religion often get copied by other, unrelated religions; this means, according to Dennett, “[Wilson] is already committed to tracing the ease of host-hopping by innovations quite independently of any ‘vertical’ transmission of the features to descendant groups” (2006, n. 5, p. 403). According to Dennett, Wilson in fact is arguing that “the evolutionary design process that has given us religions involves the differential replication of memes, not groups” (2006, 184).

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those features are passed on vertically within competing groups, as groupselection theory would suggest, or horizontally across individuals and groups as ideas compete with each other, as a ‘mutualist’ meme theory would suggest. Wilson correctly points to religion’s effect, and offers important tools for understanding that effect, while grounding his perspective in a theory that unnecessarily ties him to an approach to culture that may be too limited. I’ll mention briefly one other idea Dennett takes seriously. He suggests that religions may provide intensified versions of something we evolved for, but in a new context that doesn’t necessarily justify the behavior any longer. He is thinking of our ability to be hypnotized, and the possible health benefits that such a capacity might have contributed in our evolutionary past. It is possible we have a ‘hypnotizability enabler’ center in the brain, which through cultural expansion, has been taken over by religion, which provides intense input to it. This would explain why healing rituals seem to be a nearly universal feature of religion, but would also explain a lot of the pomp and wasted energy in religion, as we hypnotize ourselves religiously far beyond what is necessary to support the placebo effect. As far as I can tell, this is the closest Dennett (or Wilson) goes to addressing ‘religious experience’ and altered states of consciousness. I will take up this theme in my comments, below. To summarize the case Dennett makes, he considers religion to be a set of cultural ideas that have been transmitted successfully and blindly, evolving to take on properties that make it fit with our evolved psychology. These ideas may have indirectly but strongly contributed to our social tendencies (and thus probably to our biological survival), and might have provided particular health benefits through the judicious manipulation of the placebo effect. However, thanks to the recent rise of philosophical self-reflection – thinking about thinking – we no longer need to rely on the blind variation and selection of cultural ideas, which represent humanity’s previous method of cultural progress. We can reflect on our cultural life in ways unprecedented to our (probably much older) religious heritage. The outcome of this self-reflection is that we can distinguish between ideas that help us survive in the natural world and help us create fair and just societies (science and philosophy), and those that give us no leverage on the natural world, and rely upon blind evolution to support sociality (religion). If there are positive attributes of religion, in the modern world they have been rendered largely irrelevant. And the negative attributes of religion – memes that invite commitment but are not necessarily in sync with social welfare; anti-scientific beliefs about the natural world; highly contagious ideas that siphon off a large portion of human energy and commitment – are significant enough to give us pause. Religion as currently practiced is the increasingly irrelevant tutor whose continued presence now

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competes with its rightful heir: enlightened thought, particularly enlightened scientific and social/political thought. This suggests religion is something that needs to be controlled, and if not eliminated, at least rendered innocuous, unable to prey on people unenlightened to its origins, strategies, and costs.

Response from an Emergent Approach to Religion

Wilson’s approach to religion, modified by Dennett’s friendly amendment, is a very powerful view of religion that has much overlap with the emergent approach I am advocating. The emergent approach I developed in Ch. 2 acknowledges the socially adaptive nature of religious communities at the heart of Wilson’s approach, as well as the reproduction of the memory component of myths at the heart of Dennett’s memetic approach. Dennett improves upon Wilson by giving us reasons for thinking that Wilson over-relies on a biological theory to explain religion, while affirming the attributes of religion Wilson champions. But the central issue neither thinker addresses is this: is it possible that religious memes replicate for reasons other than ease of transmission, and other than their ultimate support of biological reproduction? Dennett acknowledges the peculiar meaningfulness of religion to people, and the way it has the potential to bring out the best in people. While he does not think religion is uniquely competent in this respect (having a child and fighting alongside others in war are two other conditions that can bring out the best in people), he suggest that “probably nothing is as effective as religion over the long haul, and day-in day-out” for inspiring individuals to a life bigger and less selfish than it otherwise might be (2006, 4–5). Why might this be so? It does not seem that either Wilson’s or Dennett’s account offers us ways to make sense of this capacity of religion. To gain insight into this question, let us pursue some leads that Dennett offers us. Dennett acknowledges that genetic evolution and memetic evolution are actually governed by distinct ‘selection factors’ representing the different environments that genetic and cultural evolution depend upon. Benefitting human genetic fitness is not the same thing as benefitting human happiness or human welfare. He notes that humans often set aside personal interests, their health, and their chance to have children to devote their lives to ideas. This distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world. No one, he argues, would say the most important thing in life is to have more grandchildren than one’s rivals. In fact, because we are a “knowing species,” we must use knowledge to adapt our practices to “cope” with our biological imperatives (2006, 73). Presumably, for us to ‘cope’ with our biological imperatives, we must have access to some

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values that give us perspective on our biological imperatives, placing them in some hierarchy of greater and lesser values. He argues that though our biological constitution may value reproductive fitness above all else, this “does not mean that we ought to value replication above all!” (2006, 69–70). The ‘we’ in this sentence must be more than a conglomeration of biological fitness drives, as this ‘we’ has the capacity to value things differently than reproductive fitness might value things. He also suggests that it is possible that mutualist religious memes might provide undeniable benefits “of sorts that cannot be found elsewhere” (2006, 309). But he is largely silent on what those benefits are, and how religion might facilitate them. Nor does he think biological fitness is the guide to morality; fitness and moral values “are completely different questions” (2006, 177). Again, this suggests that things that have the potential to make us the most happy, that allows us to do right, and that represents our best interests, are not encoded – or encodable – in our genes. Dennett acknowledges that science, though it may amplify human powers, cannot answer all questions or serve all needs. It does not, for example, “provide or establish the values our ethical judgments and arguments are based on” (2006, 376). When assessing religion at the end of the book, Dennett states what he thinks the highest moral values are, which he does not think are dictated by our biological fitness imperatives. They have to do with the ability to make an informed choice, to be educated, to be free from indoctrination, and to be able to pursue meaning. He claims that western, liberal, individualistic democracy is better than any cultural world-views that would deny these moral values, particularly to children. He suggests two of the most important values that transcend our biological imperative are love of truth and justice; these values “are presupposed by human projects we all participate in…” (2006, 376). Dennett, therefore, to be consistent, must be some sort of emergentist. This ‘we’ that has the capacity to evaluate by standards other than reproductive fitness, that recognizes the value of western liberal democracy because it values the individual and the transcendent values of truth and justice, that values the ability to make an informed choice and to be free from indoctrination – this ‘we’ must be an emergent reality. Human values must represent new ‘goods’ that only exist at the level of human selves, and specifically do not exist at the level of our biological selves. When we combine these facts with Dennett’s observation about religion’s meaningfulness and capacity to allow us to transcend ourselves, we can surmise that religion somehow is able to address and make sense of the unexplained value and emergent presence of the human individual (which Dennett presupposes but does not explain), in order to be as meaningful and effective as it is.

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Like the ‘hanging chads’ that became part of the American conversation after the 2000 election – does this partially-separated chad on a voting ticket represent a vote or not? – we exist with respect to our biological and physical selves as both dependent upon them and unaccounted for by them. We are free to interfere with or accelerate our physical and biological tendencies according to values that we alone seem able to experience and know. The more we learn about ourselves through the lens of science, the more power we have to use that knowledge to change our individual and corporate destiny through our intervention in the ‘natural’ course of things, according to values that don’t exist in that course. We exist as selves, orthogonal but connected somehow to our physical and biological composition, and with that orthogonal connection seems to come new values and goods. If we are to seek explanation for this fact, or to find out what can make our lives meaningful, given our own limited transcendence of the realms we can control, we seem to need an account of something that is able to both register and overflow this capacity, something superior to us, something with the capacity to place us as existential beings. Our own subjectivity, to be meaningfully placed, needs to be anchored within a system of larger subjective relations that ensconces the mystery of our existence in a larger sense of existence. Religion seems capable of doing this; why it is able to do so is the supreme task facing those who would understand religion. I suggest that since the emergence of the self is what creates the conditions for perceiving the problem in the first place, further emergent dynamics might explain why religion can be experienced as a solution. What clearly is the case – from my perspective, anyway – is that neither Dennett’s nor Wilson’s explanation of religious ideas is able to account for religion’s meaningfulness. Dennett argues that religion is based on the gradual accretion of memetic ‘good tricks’ (ideas that take advantage of cracks in our evolved psychological dispositions) that surround the “irritant” provided by the false alarms generated by overextended biases of our psychological nature (such as our overactive disposition to look for agents). Even if, as he proposes, hypnotic induction became involved at some point, and is still an important aspect of religion (which might go part of the way to explain such meaningfulness), it seems that there is something else driving the religious enterprise in the first place. Religion asks – and answers – questions about the nature of the meaningful, the beautiful, the true, and the good; to reduce religion to good tricks of selfish memes and conglomerations of cognitive error would seem to vastly understate what needs explaining. Religion seems tied to what transcends mundane human existence. While I would agree with Dennett that religion is not always a force for good in the world, my point is that, whether for good or ill, religion

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seems to magnify aspects of ourselves that seem most characteristically human, most refined, most rich – and that includes our capacity for evil. In accounting for the motivations for religion, a good theory had better be able to address such questions better than alternatives, and I hope to show that an emergent approach to religion does so. There is no better starting point in this respect than investigating the approach of Émile Durkheim, who built The Elementary Forms of Religious Life on the assumption that humanity is more than our biology and evolved characteristics; we have become, through language, a dual-natured creature: we are biologically individual, and participants in an emergent social entity.

chapter 6

Émile Durkheim and the Emergence of Meaningful Social Agency The central argument in the seminal text in religious studies – Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995/1912) – is that human social groups are emergent causal agents, possessing characteristics independent of the individuals who make it up. The emergent characteristics of the social group include moral authority, intellectual refinement, emotional amplification, and a will distinct from that of the individuals that compose it. He argues that references to the divine in such social groups actually refer to this emergent social agency, which is why religious beliefs are in some manner true. Durkheim argues that in religious gatherings, individuals focus on some thing or idea (called a totem) that acts as a sign of the divine, and the group’s shared focus on this object or idea actually creates the emergent social agent, and reinforces its emergent characteristics. Durkheim ultimately fails to explain how it is that a group’s focus on a representative totem results in a new kind of group agency. It is precisely the idea of a metaperformative involving encoded memory that Durkheim needs to make his account clear. While he does an admirable job of pushing in this theoretical direction, he fails to fully conceptualize religion as a semantically-closed strange loop. His ‘brilliant failure’ is what makes this work so rich, influential, and worth theoretical attention.

Emergence and Cultural Sociality

Durkheim was one of the first theorists to demonstrate religion could be productively analyzed from a ‘systems’ or an ‘emergent’ approach to social organization.1 For Durkheim, society is a uniquely human social accomplishment that transcends the individual, and plays an active and even self-centered role in the lives of the individuals who compose it. He writes, Man is not simply an animal, plus certain qualities: He is something different. Human nature is the product of a recasting, so to speak, of animal 1 For an account of how Durkheim is explicitly working within an early ‘emergence’ paradigm, see Sawyer (2002).

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nature.…man is in relationship not only with a physical milieu, but also with a social milieu… In order to live, then, he must adapt to it. Now, to maintain itself, society often needs us to see things from a certain standpoint and feel them in a certain way. It therefore modifies the ideas we would be inclined to have about them, and the feelings to which we would be inclined if we obeyed only our animal nature – even to the extent of replacing them with quite opposite feelings. Does society not go so far as to make us see our own life as a thing of little value, while for animals life is property par excellence? (1995, 62, italics mine). By describing the effects of society as a relational, holistic entity transcending individual minds, emotions, and values, he is exemplifying an emergent approach to human sociality. For Durkheim, a ‘religious community’ is not something different from ‘society’; rather, what is achieved in religious gatherings is society. Religious gatherings are a means by which people become aware of and intensify the emergent qualities they possess as a result of sharing a language and culture. Religion is the primary way the very abstract nature of collective thought and collective emotions becomes salient and intensified in individual’s lives. He writes, Religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. Such is its paramount role (1995, 227). Through religious rites and gatherings, people concentrate their collective forces. He writes, If society is to be able to become conscious of itself and keep the sense it has of itself at the required intensity, it must assemble and concentrate. This concentration brings about an uplifting of moral life that is expressed by a set of ideal conceptions in which the new life thus awakened is depicted (1995, 424). In traditional human societies, the “ideal conceptions” that awaken the moral life of society are the sacred concepts and symbols of religious life. However, he also suggests that gathering around political ideals serve just as well as religious ideas to facilitate and intensify the emergent nature of sociality. One is merely the other “transfigured.” Thus, there is no real difference “between Christians’ celebrating the principle dates of Christ’s life…and a citizens’ meeting commemorating the advent of a new moral charter or some other great event

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of national life” (1995, 429). Non-religious festivals and religious ceremonies have exactly the same end – to “bring individuals together, to put the masses into motion, and thus induce a state of effervescence” (1995, 386–7). And there is no difference in the type of deference people show to political and religious leaders, or in the actual moral authority they possess. Durkheim, though boldly and creatively investigating religion from an emergence perspective he almost single-handedly forges, inappropriately conflates religious sociality and political sociality. From the perspective of his theory, communities defined by statements such as ‘all men are created equal’, and ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ are not distinguishable from communities defined by statements such as ‘The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao’ and ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One’. This theoretical failure in Durkheim’s account of religion leads directly to a legacy in the sociological analysis of religion that cannot distinguish the Tao from Democracy, the Bhagavad Gita from the Constitution.2 To appreciate both Durkheim’s revolutionary insight and its failures, we need to look at his proposal in a little more detail. Durkheim simultaneously affirms that religion is about something greater than the individual, and denies that the ‘something greater’ is a supernatural entity. The ‘something greater’ is composed of the sui generis features of human social groups.3 Collective features arise when we share a language with others; these are responsible for the ‘higher’ half of humanity’s dual nature, the other half coming from our biology. These collective features he calls society. He argues that society, as a “community of interpretation,”4 is where ‘thought’ occurs independent of the individual. The thoughts that individuals from every generation contribute to cultural life are sifted and selected from; the most persistent become the ground for the next generation’s enculturation. The ‘atom’ of public thought, the concept,5 is not the work of individuals in isolation, but “is fashioned by a single intellect in which all others meet” (1995, 434–5). Thus, concepts are representations that “correspond to the way in which the special being that is society thinks about the things of its own experience” (1995, 436). Society’s collective representations “add to what our personal experience can teach us all the wisdom and 2 See Cassell (2012, Chap. 1), for an account of this. 3 Sawyer (2002) has pointed out that Durkheim’s use of this term is technical; it marks his approach as specifically influenced by early emergence theorists. 4 This is Josiah Royce’s term (1968/1912), not Durkheim’s, but it effectively captures Durkheim’s idea. I will continue to use this term interchangeably with society, since it captures what I think Durkheim is after effectively. 5 More specifically, Durkheim means the symbolically-represented concept.

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science that the collectivity has amassed over centuries” (1995, 437). Durkheim pictures human culture as demonstrating a ‘top-down’ influence on individual thought; an aggregate social dynamic transcends the mental life of any individual participant, and that dynamic is governed by reproduction (memory), variation, and selection. However, it is not just collective mental life that emerges in sociality through gathering together. Collective moral life is established when we gather. He writes, [Religious forces are] moral powers, since they are made entirely from the impressions that moral collectivity as a moral being makes on other moral beings, the individuals. Such moral powers do not express the manner in which natural things affect our senses but the manner in which the collective consciousness affects individual consciousnesses (1995, 224). In defense of this claim, he points to the curious moral authority that shared opinions have; even if we privately disagree with them, they have a moral force that compels us to agree with them publicly. He additionally argues that social gatherings produce collective and efficacious emotions, which exhibit themselves in outlandish forms of behavior, such as intense and rhythmic dancing, and psychological disassociation. These collective emotions – what he calls “collective effervescence” – become associated with a group’s sacred objects, which become a sign of those feelings. These objects get treated as if it was the reality causing those feelings. So ‘society’, besides producing social thought and moral sensitivity, produces “the feeling that the collectivity inspires in its members,” objectified and magnified (1995, 230). Finally, gathering together in religious and/or political assemblies produces a collective will. Durkheim speaks of the unexpected and shocking group decisions made during the French Revolution as society’s behavioral surplus. Durkheim is clear that relations between individuals is where and how socially emergent features reveal themselves. He argues that individuals and society are mutually cofacilitative – their relationship “moves in a circle.” The individual gets the best part of himself from society, and “society exists and lives only in and through individuals.” Note that ‘society’ is not a mere physical aggregation of members of a biological species; rather, it is what exists as a result of the shared public space of symbolic culture; it has a reality only in its “place in human consciousnesses” (1995, 351). If the idea of society is extinguished in minds, Durkheim argues, society dies. It is this culturally supported kind of sociality that is the emergent agency; biological influences on sociality, real as they may be, do not recognize, celebrate, engage and transform the self.

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These arguments press Durkheim to use fairly exalted language concerning the ontological status of societies, analogous to a human person. Societies have an inner life and a “collective soul.” They are “a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousnesses,” and are not the result of “communication” between individuals, but rather result when a “plurality of individual consciousnesses enter into communion and are fused into a common consciousness.” Society represents a “subject” that “encompasses every individual subject,” a “consciousness of consciousnesses,” that is “the highest form of psychic life.” It is a “supraindividual” reality that surpasses the individual, though it exists in and through the individual. He argues that a new avenue for explaining human mental life opens “as soon as we recognize that above the individual there is society, and that society is a system of active forces – not a nominal being, and not a creation of the mind.”6 This vision of a superconsciousness composed of aggregates of individuals sharing a symbolic world is, for Durkheim, what religious people mean by ‘God’. For Durkheim, it is a worthy replacement for Platonized, supernatural versions of divine beings.

Why Religion?

Durkheim argues that everyday, normal human thought is so replete with society’s collective representations that they usually go unnoticed. And because society’s profound effects are emergent (i.e. relational) effects, they have no obvious source. This means that when the effects of society are noticed, they can easily be mistaken for something supernatural. He writes, Because social pressure makes itself felt through mental channels, it was bound to give man the idea that outside him there are one or several powers, moral yet mighty, to which he is subject…The mythological interpretations would doubtless not have been born if man could easily see that those influences upon him come from society. But the ordinary observer cannot see where the influence of society comes from…So long as scientific analyses has not yet taught him, man is well aware that he is acted upon but not by whom. Thus he had to build out of nothing the idea of those powers with which he feels connected (1995, 211). The idea of gods and other divine causes is a natural result of individuals being causally influenced by emergent social effects, but not being aware of their 6 Durkheim (1995, 267, 426, 160, 443, 445, 447–8).

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source. Becoming aware of these emergent effects is critical to explaining and understanding religion. Durkheim thinks that religious gatherings have a multiplicative effect on the potency of society’s relational effects; when we gather, the thoughts and feelings society possesses strongly present themselves to individual consciousness. This effect accordingly dissipates when individuals disperse, and we become gradually dominated by the lower half of our dual nature, animality. Gathering together is the ground of the emergent social mind, and the effects of this gathering can be almost magical. Durkheim further argues that religious gathering actually constitutes the emergence of society. When we examine how he thinks this occurs, we can see a problem Durkheim doesn’t quite resolve. Durkheim explains his theory by analyzing the accounts of anthropologists who studied the social organization and religious life of Australian Aborigines. He identifies the totem as that aspect of Aboriginal culture that is most important, and analyzes its meaning for these groups. A large part of Aboriginal society is not determined by family lineage, but by the fact that clans of individuals bear the same name, and are identified with a plant or animal, which is their totem. Totemism, according to Durkheim, is not a religion of certain animals or plants, but rather the religion “of a kind of anonymous and impersonal force that is identifiable in each of these beings but identical to none of them.” Totems are the tangible form in which an intangible substance linking many things is represented in the imagination; that substance or energy is the real object of the cult. Besides representing this anonymous, impersonal force, the totem also represents the clan. Durkheim, combining these two ideas, says the totem is that which brings the clan’s collective mind to simultaneous collective attention. Because of its simplicity, the totem serves as the visible body of that from which the benevolent and powerful actions of sociality seem to emanate, and the ‘essence’ of totemism is the collective and emergent force of the clan’s sociality, imagined through the totem. What functional role does Durkheim say the totem plays? Wouldn’t gathering together without the totem produce the same emergent effects that define society? Or, is the totem somehow critical for the emergence of society as an active agent? What exactly is Durkheim’s argument? He describes at least 4 different ways a totem might function to either produce or represent the emergent social effects he describes. Unfortunately, he only clearly differentiates the most mundane possible function of a totem from other possible functions. He notes the mundane use of an emblem to represent a group’s identity, in order to compare it with a sacred totem. Tattoos, mascots, and emblems can “be useful as a rallying point” by “expressing the social unit tangibly, [making] the unit itself more tangible to all” (1995, 231). That is, individuals sharing a

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mascot are reminded that they are a group by that mascot. But this, for Durkheim, “requires no argument”; it is common knowledge. Durkheim’s comment that this mundane function of a totem requires no argument is important; it signals that what he tries to articulate over the next forty pages about a group’s sacred object is different; identification with a sacred object goes beyond merely signifying a sociality already present. When Australians gather ‘in the name of’ their totem; the emergent agent that is society is not merely referred to by their totem, but constituted somehow by it. Durkheim discusses other possible ways a totem could be connected to human sociality. A totem could come to closely represent – and even become interchangeable with – the fond memories of the emotional effervescence of social gatherings, by its association with those gatherings. Durkheim describes a soldier who dies trying to save the flag of the country he loves as an example of this function of a totem. The function of the totem becomes one of several explanations he invokes to explain a totem’s efficacy in producing ‘society’. Another function of a totem might be to preside over harmonized group movements directed towards it; in this way, it could be seen as being constitutive of social unity by being the passive center of attentional focus and corporate activity. He writes, The emblem is not only a convenient method of clarifying the awareness the society has of itself; it serves to create – and is a constitutive element of – that awareness… For the communication that is opening up between [individual consciousnesses] to end in a communion – that is, in a fusion of all the individual feelings into a common one – the signs that express those feelings must come together in one single resultant. The appearance of this resultant notifies individuals that they are in unison and brings home to them the moral unity. It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, and performing the same action in regard to the same object that they arrive at and experience agreement (1995, 231–2). My reading of Durkheim is that this position is the one he most consistently defaults to in terms of his theoretical explanation for the totem’s efficacy. Importantly, this explanation differs from his description of a totem’s function in real religious communities, and it is this gap between his theoretical explanation and the function of a totem he actually describes that is the source of Durkheim’s failure to distinguish theoretically political and religious group dynamics. What he actually describes concerning a totem’s function in religious groups is embedded in his characterization of the ‘sacred’, and in the many examples

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he gives as to how the sacred functions in a religious group. Durkheim characterizes the sacred in terms of its radical heterogeneity from profane things; there are different ‘energies’ at play in the sacred and the profane. Sacred things are isolated from profane things by prohibitions, and religious rites describe how humans must conduct themselves towards sacred things. Durkheim views majesty as the most characteristic disposition evoked by sacred things. Believers exemplify a kind of worship with respect to the sacred. As Wilson (2002, 227) describes Durkheim’s idea of the sacred, “to regard something as sacred is to subordinate oneself to it, to obey its demands. In contrast, to regard something as profane is to subordinate it to oneself to use it for one’s own purposes.” Durkheim gives an example of the most sacred totem of Australian aborigines, the ‘churinga’. He describes how it receives “devotion,” and says that “one can say that they worship and glorify it” (1995, 121,350). The sacred power of the totem is clearly conceived as a miraculous power, evoking love, care, and devotion for the sign of that power: The churinga has all sorts of miraculous qualities. By its touch, wounds are healed, especially those resulting from circumcision; it is similarly effective against illness; it makes the beard grow; it conveys important powers over the totemic species, whose normal reproduction it ensures; it gives men strength, courage, and perseverance, while depressing and weakening their enemies… The devotion they [churingas] receive further illustrates the great value that is attached to them. They are handled with a respect that is displayed by the solemnity of the movements. They are cared for, oiled, rubbed, and polished; when they are carried from one place to another, it is in the midst of ceremonies, proof that this travel is considered an act of the very highest importance (1995, 120, 121). Durkheim notes the attitude of worship towards totems, and he acknowledges that it constitutes a special kind of sociality that has potent collective manifestations. However, he fails to articulate why worship should be given a totem, if, according to his theoretical account, all it does to produce social unity is to act as the passive center of attentional focus and corporate activity, as a swastika might have done in a Nazi rally. He also fails to note how the worship of the totem might give it a different function in the community, when compared to the effect a profane attitude would have towards emblems, tattoos, and even abstract political principles. This means he conflates the role of an emblem and a totem in a community. For example, Durkheim correctly argues that religious totems ‘transfigure’ the collective intelligence, feelings, and morality of a group by proposing that the source of these things is a divine

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entity. However, he also argues that once we become clear about the nature of society as an emergent agent, we needn’t obfuscate society’s emergent effects with ideas about the divine, and the worship that goes along with those ideas. Political gatherings produce the same emergent societal effects as do religious gatherings. He notes: In the general enthusiasm of [the French Revolution], things that were by nature purely secular were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: Fatherland, Liberty, Reason…we saw society and its fundamental ideas becoming the object of a genuine cult directly, and without transfiguration of any kind. All these facts enable us to grasp how it is possible for the clan to awaken in its members the idea of forces existing outside them, both dominating and supporting them – in sum, religious forces (1995, 215–6). This is a critical gaffe in his argument; Durkheim has not clearly theorized the role of the worship of sacred objects in his conception of religion. The degree to which ‘religion’ is characterized by worship of the sacred distinguishes a religious totem from a mere emblem or mascot that allows coordinated group action, or a political principle that coordinates group mental life, and it is this dynamic that constitutes religious sociality in a unique way.

The Problem with Durkheim’s Conception of Religion

Durkheim’s theoretical achievements are many: he offers a naturalistic explanation for religion that attempts to account for the idea of the supernatural, and in that attempt forges an unprecedented emergent theory of human sociality. He argues that shared human culture gives us public and objective thought, emotions, and morals as distinct from private and subjective thought, emotions, and morals. He describes society as a real, emergent ontological ‘being’ or ‘agent’, possessing these capacities. And further, he begins to articulate the basic idea of a metaperformative (see my Ch. 2), as he tries to explain how social performances with respect to a totem allow the totem to be viewed as the source of that sociality. However, Durkheim’s attempt at theorizing a metaperformative does not distinguish a Nazi swastika at Nuremberg from a Torah in a Jewish synagogue in terms of their function. Both represent a group in some manner; both act as social memory in some way; both act as focal points for group performances organized with respect to them. However, they can be distinguished from each other based on whether their effects are perceived to be caused by something

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other than the group’s own action. The Torah does not directly represent sociality, but rather represents a divine agent with whom individuals are expected to relate, even as they relate to each other. Worship is critically tied to this idea of divine causal agency. If you can’t imagine that the totem points to an active cause bigger than the individual or the sum of all individuals, then what it points to can’t be seen as actively changing a person’s psychic life, or actively coordinating sociality. For that reason, the Swastika at a Nazi gathering presides over, but is not seen as the source of, the coordination performed with respect to it. All the ‘work’ done to coordinate performance with respect to a Swastika is presumed to be done by those doing the performing, for reasons that are manifestly social. This is not the case with the Torah in a synagogue; it points to God, who has a covenant with Israel, and who can be seen as existentially relevant to individuals, as well as to the cause of the social group. Worship creates the conditions that allow both psychic and social effects to be seen as coming from Yahweh. In a similar manner, the social function of ideas of the divine can be distinguished from the social function of secular political ideas according to how they facilitate worship with respect to them. Political ideas gain their social causal efficacy from what everyone does, once they buy into the vision of sociality represented by the ideas. Metaperformatives involving the divine, however, differ from this because they get their social causal efficacy not merely from the vision of sociality they present, but from the powerful psychic experiences they invite. The Christian community is constituted by individual acts of being baptized ‘in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’, for reasons of individual meaningfulness as much as (and perhaps more than) social reasons; the social impact of Christian belief rides in tandem with its psychic impact. Political gatherings certainly may produce an excited confidence that a particular political ideal is shared, correct, and good. But as Daniel Dennett argues in Breaking the Spell, the social effectiveness of belief in democracy is only as great as each person’s confidence in the commitment held by every other person. When that confidence fails (as it does in situations similar to a ‘run on the bank’), ‘society’ as constituted by some secular ideal disintegrates. A sacred divine Being or Way, on the other hand, is seen as a causal force distinct from each individual and their relations with others. The divine invites worship even when society has fallen apart, and does not depend upon what others do to be considered worthy of worship. This makes the divine a magnet for individuals to connect themselves to, and indirectly, a fountain of social capital waiting to be tapped through corporate worship. Durkheim argues this himself, as he explains his idea of ‘collective effervescence’. But he also claims that political gatherings produce this same effect.

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It is not possible, however, to worship secular principles like democracy and liberty because they are so obviously not transfigured. The principles themselves do not point to something greater than each individual, but rather point to a way of facilitating group sociality, which is the end that is valued. They, as a means to an end, are lesser than the end, and are adopted because they serve the end. As Krauthammer (1990) insightfully argued after the fall of the Soviet Bloc, The…deeply disillusioning truth about democracy is that it is designed at its core to be spiritually empty…the defining proposition of liberal democracy is that it mandates means (elections, parliaments, markets) but not ends. Democracy leaves the goals of life entirely up to the individual. Where the totalitarian state decrees life’s purposes – Deng’s Four Modernizations, Castro’s Rectification Campaigns, and the generic exhortation about “building socialism” – democracy leaves a naked public square. Tumarkin (1983) presents a compelling case demonstrating what happens when ‘worship’ is wrongly extended to secular purposes, such as the totalitarian ones listed by Krauthammer. She argues that the people of the Soviet Union were forced to submit to what can only be described as a ‘forbidden experiment’ by those behind the ‘Cult of Lenin’. She thoroughly characterizes how Lenin’s political ideals and person were presented to the Soviet people as something to worship, not as something to assess. His political ideals and person were intentionally presented as sacred in the same way religious communities present divine beings as sacred, with disastrous and sometimes even hilarious results. ‘Secular principles’ produce social unity differently than do sacred objects. The role of worship is so important, and so central to Durkheim’s theoretical error, that at the risk of repeating myself, I want to state it again. Secular principles are ideas about sociality that serve the end of social unity; they are not greater than the end result of creating effective groups. Nor are they something that can be perceived as acting by their own power, by their own causal effectiveness. People realize their efficacy comes from shared faith in them. In contrast, the divine invites worship for reasons other than social outcomes; for example, worship brings about experiences such as decentering, which is usually viewed as resulting from the causal efficacy of the divine. Worship of the divine then indirectly brings about the outcome of social unity. It is precisely the fact that sacred objects and ideas are ‘transfigured’ because they represent a divine cause that allows this; transfigurement and worship go hand-in-hand. In effect, swastikas and political principles act as indexes of sociality, taken up

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straightforwardly for their usefulness in creating society; sacred objects and ideas do not function in this way. They are encoded sources of sociality, functioning indirectly to that end. They indirectly produce something that is not what their fundamental nature is posited to be. As Rappaport says it, there is always ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ to the content of religious sources of sociality as compared to secular sources (1971a; 1971b). Recall that in a ‘strange loop’, the symbolic terms of a system store in encoded form the dynamics of that very system. Hofstadter describes the ‘dual role’ played by the same mathematical string in his beloved Gödel Incompleteness Theorem: the string can be data to be manipulated, and, when translated into a new form, can be a set of constraints on mathematical reasoning, which is then used to manipulate and reproduce that very string viewed as data. He argues this logic explains the relationship of biological processes to their own dna, and human persons to their own linguistic conceptions of themselves. In a similar way, religious ideas and sacred objects, in their inert form as ‘data’, are reproduced socially as a result of being translated into their ‘potent’ form via worship, producing psychic experiences tied to a particularly intense form of spiritualized sociality, such as we saw in the Haitian voodoo sévis in Ch. 2. They are reproduced as a result of this potency. I argue this is what Durkheim is aiming towards in the Elementary Forms, but fails to fully theorize. Durkheim is not able to distinguish religious worship from political gatherings because he doesn’t thematize the social effects of worship, despite the fact that he explicitly wants to distinguish an emblem or mascot from a sacred object. His theoretical characterization of the role sacred objects play for the community ends up being the same as his characterization of the role political ideals play. He is able to conflate a religious symbol with a political symbol, thinking they perform the same task. It is transfigurement – the lack of direct reference to sociality – that leverages encoded representation and the selfreproduction of the religious community. We can see this clearly in an example. Citizens of the United States can talk about ‘Uncle Sam’ as if he existed, but they know that ‘he’ is an emblem for citizens of the United States; the meaning of the phrase ‘Uncle Sam’ is merely a replacement for the community. There is no potent form for interpreting Uncle Sam, only an inert form. Uncle Sam is not a transfigured, encoded placeholder which is translated into meaningful sociality through mutual submission to ‘him’ as something greater than each individual who shares in ‘his’ worship. In the language of Rocha & Hordijk’s criteria for semantic closure,Uncle Sam is not information about sociality encoded symbolically that can be accessed and utilized without reference to its (social) content. The meaning of Uncle Sam is exhausted by direct, social content. In a nutshell, Durkheim confuses the indexical use of an

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emblem of sociality, with the symbolic use of an emblem for sociality. As we have seen, representation in the form of memory can have iconic, indexical, and symbolic varieties. To note that political and religious content are both exemplifications of memory – a general category – is not to say that they function for the group in the same way. These considerations suggest secular society’s emergent effects may not deserve the exalted ontological and phenomenological language Durkheim offers on their behalf. Secular principles have a very different effect on both individual psychic experiences and social organization than do sacred objects. Haitian experience of the lwa seems a much better fit to Durkheim’s characterizations than does the experience of democracy, or a shared commitment to a particular constitution. To the degree that the religious community is organized in the manner of a semantically-closed strange loop, it reflects Durkheim’s intuitions about the emergent nature of ‘society’ much better than secular society does. Some of his characterizations – such as the collective intelligence that results from the cultural selection of ideas – seem on the mark for understanding any form of human society, not just religious sociality. However, if the distinctions I’ve made distinguish a religious community from political society, the first but not the second may represent a ‘consciousness of consciousnesses’, a ‘supraindividual subject of active forces’ compelling us to ‘thinks its thoughts and feels its feelings’.

Durkheim and Emergent Meaning

To summarize Durkheim’s theory of religion, he proposes three important ideas relevant to emergent sociality. (1) When an emblem of a group is also an object of its worship, it (somehow) produces an emergent social reality, what Durkheim calls ‘society’. Society is strengthened every time the group gathers together with its ‘totem’. (2) Society impacts everyone participating in it by producing elevated emotional, moral, mental, and behavioral content. The ‘collective effervescence’ of this community is associated with the totem, which acts as a reminder of the experience outside of collective gatherings. The emergent effects of society are what suggest the idea of the divine – causal powers superior to the individual. This is the truth of religion. (3) The fact that societies traditionally maintain themselves by using ‘transfigured’ sacred objects like totems and other religious ideas and objects in their gatherings (e.g. the Christian Eucharist) is incidental to the emergent realities taking place in such gatherings. Any gathering with a focus on collective social ideals or symbols, such as those that occurred during the French Revolution or Nazi Germany, will do.

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I suggest, in response, that he doesn’t correctly conceptualize the tangled causal dynamics connecting worship, transfigured totems, individual psychological experiences, and sociality. His description of religion in (1) includes worship as a critical part, but worship is not addressed in his theory in (3). The emergent effects he points to in (2) are real; however, they do not reach the exalted phenomenological and ontological status he gives them in secular forms of social organization. If that is to happen (if it is to happen at all), it requires that the organization of the community be a strange loop, where sociality is encoded in symbolic tokens that facilitate their own reproduction by creating a type of sociality that values those tokens for reasons other than their social import. Worship of the divine is critical for this to happen. The question that is left to be explored in the next chapter is specifically the claim in (2): does participation in a religious community involve participation in something greater than one’s self, as Durkheim claims, which is responsible for the idea of majesty? Is this ‘something greater’ the source of the elevated meaningfulness, and subjective experience of enlivening, which religious people describe?

chapter 7

Varieties of Religious Meaning As we begin to explore the implications of an emergent theory of religion, it becomes important to highlight the key moves in the account I have given. Perhaps the critical piece for understanding religion is understanding the role Ultimate Sacred Postulates play to support metaperformativity, inviting unique forms of experience that indirectly contribute to a robust and reproductive type of sociality. usps function specifically to reference something not there, to point to something not present in Dominant Symbols. In the language of theology, the divine is characterized by both apophatic negative theology (usps are not like this, and not like that…) and kataphatic positive theology (Dominant Symbols are like this, and are like that…). And just as ‘infinity’ in the denominator of any fraction effectively reduces the fraction to zero, the ‘absence’ created by Ultimate Sacred Postulates casts a profoundly relativizing shadow over the Dominant Symbols that most helpfully describe the divine. The divine in itself is postulated to exist in ways impossible for us to know through normal experience, and grounds a form of sociality that can adapt to an almost infinite range of cultural and social conditions. Thus, the most important entailments of the way the divine is conceptualized result not from what the divine is about, but from what it is not about, its implied surplus. The ‘specified absence’ of divine concepts invites decentering religious experience, and creates the mutually self-supporting connection between individual and group narratives. If the divine cannot be directly experienced by the senses, by definition, what does the individual gain by making it central to their lives? What value does religious participation offer individuals, which makes it attractive? In this chapter, I will discuss different ways religion is meaningful, exploring the value that it creates. What they have in common is that the value of religion comes from positing the divine as true, which leverages something valuable to individuals, justifying the idea that divine beliefs are true. The more metaphysically daring possibilities will be suggested as the chapter progresses, along with a discussion of the assumptions that such possibilities imply. Religion Offers ‘Therapeutic Truth’ Perhaps the most common suggestion as to why religious participation is meaningful is that it mediates a kind of truth that is in some way healing. This

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can mean physically healing, which might have measurable genetic reproductive benefits, or it might mean psychically and socially healing, with perhaps no (direct) reproductive benefit, but which causes religion to be existentially valued and its ‘memes’ reproduced. Hypnosis, the Placebo Effect, and Participation in ‘Belief States’ McClenon (1997; 2001) has postulated that hypnotic suggestions embedded within certain forms of religious rituals may have important therapeutic healing effects, such as reducing pain, enhancing the normal course of physical healing, controlling blood loss, facilitating childbirth, and alleviating psychological disorders. He suggests that religious ritual mediating hypnotic suggestions relevant to physical healing may have co-evolved with the biological genotype connected to hypnotizability, a trait correlated with frequency of anomalous, religious experiences. The co-evolution of hypnotizability and religious ritual occurred as individuals physically benefitting from religious practices gained a reproductive advantage over those that did not. He suggests that all religions have some deep relationship with physical healing, and this is due to this robust hypnotic trait. Dennett (2006), in his account of the origins of religion, gives tentative support to such a claim, suggesting that if anything could be considered an evolved ‘god center’ in the brain, it would be something like a ‘hypnotizability-enabler’. This could have acted as a kind of ‘health insurance’ for those who were susceptible to shamanic healing techniques. Dennett ties this feature with the well-known ‘placebo effect’, where belief that one is getting an effective cure for certain physical ailments causes cures at a higher rate than those who get no false encouragement. The claim that belief in the divine can be physically healing through its tie to hypnosis is seemingly implied by what Rappaport has already pointed out with respect to metaperformativity. Just as decentering is invited by metaperformativity, so is hypnotic induction. In religious ritual, a profound, powerful causal agent of some kind – either personal or impersonal – is postulated to exist, and at least publicly accepted by those participating in the ritual. Further, through ritual participation, individuals have already entered into a passive acknowledgement of the authority of such an agent – one of the key implied effects of metaperformativity. Certainly this is related to the common hypnotic induction technique of an authoritative person getting a subject to enter into conscious or unconscious agreement and submission to the hypnotizer. I suggest that the broader term ‘belief states’ (rather than ‘hypnotic states’) be used to identify the impact of psychic outcome of metaperformativity on the anomalous experiences individuals have through decentering and hypnosis.

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Since healing rituals are an important part of many if not most religious traditions, this suggests that one of the meaningful aspects of religious participation is the physical therapy that it provides. By being linked to a divine Being or Way that is powerful, creative, and the source of the order of society, individuals may believe their physical health is tied to their relationship to such a Being or Way, and actually experience healing in certain circumstances as a direct result of that belief. Beyond physical healing, others have noted that psychological health is connected with ritual participation.1 Strong religious faith is tied to self-reports of higher levels of life satisfaction, personal happiness, and an increased ability to deal psychologically with traumatic life events. Religious service attendance is strongly linked with reduced mortality risks in the incidence of cardiovascular diseases, and even increased life expectancy. Dennett, when surveying the findings on religion and psychological health, believes that growing evidence suggests religions succeed remarkably well at improving participant’s health and morale, though he believes further research is necessary before making a definitive conclusion. Religion ‘Resolves Unresolvables’ If religiosity is tied to the reduction of distress and anxiety, it might be due to the way it creates and sustains coherence between one’s beliefs and values, on the one hand, and the way life – including social life – is actually experienced, on the other, leaving one with a sense the world is ordered, controlled, and understandable, even when it is not (Inzlicht, Tullett, and Good 2011). Religion provides a cosmic blueprint that inspires hope, and thus buffers people from uncertainty and ineliminable conflict. Besides physical and psychological healing, then, ritual and myth offer therapeutic existential truth to be appropriated by participants. Anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and Maurice Bloch have each suggested that one of the most important ways religion accomplishes this is it offers a location where ineliminable conflicts in human experience can be placed and ‘mystically’ resolved, the solution then appropriated to ease existential pain and social strife. Geertz, for example, tells a story from Bali exemplifying how sacred symbols unite the incoherent. In Bali, religious plays involve puppets as characters embodying different Balinese virtues that cannot coexist simultaneously, such as compassion, the single-minded will to action, and justice. The dilemmas the plays set up are resolved with mystical insight, coming from a realm in which ineliminable conflicts are posited as 1 For a recent summary, see Inzlicht, Tullett, and Good (2011).

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being in harmony. The divine offers “a genuine comprehension of the realities of the human situation, a true perception of the ultimate [harmonious unification of it],” and with the divine “comes the ability to combine…compassion, … will to action, and…justice” (1973, 139). Turner (1969) and Bloch (1992) give other examples of this, and make similar arguments. I suggest this is another outcome of the ‘specified absence’ created by ritual and myth. Myth and ritual posit non-physical sources of effective agency, characterized by Dominant Symbols, postulated to ground both society and nature (Boudewijnse 1990). According to Rappaport, Dominant Symbols represent the union of psychic, social, natural, and cosmic processes, which life tends to pull apart. Human dilemmas can be safely given to an implied causal agent characterized by the unifying ideas found in Dominant Symbols, and posited as resolved. Religious communities become a place from which therapeutic truth – both individually and corporately – can be potentially mediated. A recent example of this can be seen in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was commissioned after the abolishment of apartheid in South Africa. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, this committee allowed victims and perpetrators of apartheid alike to give their testimonies about abuses that were committed under apartheid. Widely hailed as a success, it was an important aspect of the transition from a racist regime to a stable democracy, where ‘restorative justice’ was the model instead of ‘retributive justice’. A focus on forgiveness was central to the committee’s approach. The ‘theological’ aspects of this committee’s work was best seen in Chairman Desmond Tutu’s interpretation and implementation of it: Where a jurist would have been logical, [Tutu] has not hesitated to be theological. He has sensed when to lead audience members in a hymn to help a victim recover composure and when to call them all to prayer. While some…have criticized the God-language he has used, Tutu knows that the nation is seeking a deeper healing than mere law can provide. The Christian author of this article does not hesitate to invoke Christian Dominant Symbols to explain the power of Tutu’s approach: “Perhaps this unique exercise points beyond conventional retribution into a realm where justice and mercy coalesce. It is an area more consistent with Calvary than the courtroom” (Storey 1997).2 This is an example of the therapeutic use of the specific religious ‘conceptual blend’ Mark Turner wrote about, which I recounted in Ch. 4, involving an innocent man paying for society’s crimes. 2 An in-depth interview with Tutu on the theological implications of the committee’s approach can be seen at http://youtu.be/hOaSbGD7Was.

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I suggest that this kind of societal healing, which explicitly calls on theological concepts and divine Beings and Ways, is similar to the healing that McNamara proposes occurs in decentering. Decentering in McNamara’s sense resolves tensions existing in individuals as they negotiate their individual problems and failings; I am drawing attention here to societal and cosmic problems, such as the problem of death and the incompatibility of the demands of justice and mercy. It is possible that the decentering experiences found in group ritual attend to ineliminable societal tensions and problems, even as private decentering experiences attend to individual tensions and problems. In both cases, discursive thought cannot resolve the dilemmas, since they are largely crises produced by the logical incompatibilities of discursive thought. This makes non-discursive, mystical resolution an important aspect of human religious symbolism; as Murphy (1979) notes, discursive ambiguity is an essential part of the union of oppositional dyads. That belief in the divine offers hope, contributing resources to individual and social well-being, would certainly represent one way that individuals would find religious community participation meaningful. This therapeutic function of myth and ritual may represent a cultural adaptation, discovered by the variation and selection of religious community beliefs over time. Creating Better Selves When Daniel Dennett began writing his book meant to challenge the unquestioned status religion has in modern life, he did what all of us should do when taking on a topic we want to challenge: he listened. He interviewed people for whom religion played an important role in their life. He writes, These occasions were often moving, to say the least, and I learned a lot. Some people had endured hardships that I could not readily imagine myself surviving, and some had found in their religion the strength to make, and hold fast to, decisions that were nothing short of heroic. Less dramatic, but even more impressive in retrospect, were the people of modest talent and accomplishment who were, in one way or another, simply much better people than one might expect them to be; it wasn’t just that their lives had meaning to them – though this was certainly true – but that they were actually making the world better by their efforts, inspired by their conviction that their lives were not their own to dispose of as they chose. [F]or day-in, day-out lifelong bracing, there is probably nothing so effective as religion: it makes powerful and talented people more humble and patient, it makes average people rise above themselves, it provides sturdy support for many people who desperately need help staying away

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from drink or drugs or crime. People who would otherwise be selfabsorbed or shallow or crude or simply quitters are often ennobled by their religion, given a perspective on life that helps make them the hard decisions that we all would be proud to make (2006, 54–5). Of course, Dennett is aware of how religion can be the source of much suffering in the world, this fact being one of the reasons we must ‘break the spell’ – the spell of unquestioning defense and protection of religion. But he points to something that is often pointed to by religious folks themselves: that their religion has made them more selfless people, more spiritual people. Dennett analyzes what the term ‘spiritual’ means, suggesting it points to “one of the best secrets of life: let your self go” (2006, 303). When this is done, he continues, mundane preoccupations shrink to proper size, becoming less important. A person who has forgotten him or herself can stay centered and engaged; the hard choices will be easier, the right words will come as needed, and they will be a better person. Dennett claims that being spiritual has nothing to do with believing in doctrines or with the supernatural. However, I want to suggest that while it is possible for a non-religious person to be spiritual in his sense, and likewise possible for a religious person to fail to be, there is something that religious participation does to invite such ways of being in the world. By implying acceptance of the authority of a posited nonmaterial, hidden agency, the individual’s life is necessarily relativized and reoriented towards something that is posited to be greater than him or her. In order to find and experience the divine, one must in some way ‘flee’ the mundane and suppress normal behaviors and ego-narratives; mundane need-fulfillment cannot be the source of such spirituality. Durkheim discusses this through his idea of negative cult. He characterizes negative cult as a series of abstinences regarding normal experience; certain religious practices move normal biological and cultural activity away from the norm in some way.3 Disinterestedness in the normal way of everyday life unexpectedly exerts a positive influence on the religious life; by sacrificing some of our profane interests we “create for [the gods] the place in life…which they are entitled” (1995, 320). For Durkheim, suppression of the ‘profane’ is a precondition to accessing the positive sacred. This movement away from normal egoneeds, I suggest, is characteristic of the emergent dynamics that link self-narratives and group narratives through the mediation of a spiritual map, 3 While Durkheim had in mind ascetic practices, the basic idea here can be extended to mean a practiced overindulgence as much as asceticism. What is important is that normal forms of the activity are suppressed, not that some activity as such is suppressed.

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and is a constant spur towards ‘spirituality’ as Dennett describes it. Relativizing one’s own wants and needs through submission to something posited as ‘greater’ is the source of most of the qualities Dennett lauds, and correctly associates with religion. This, too, is an important source of the meaningfulness of religion. Emergent Emotions Deacon and Cashman (2009), in a paper that Shanafelt (2011) says “effectively synergizes different aspects of anthropology – evolutionary, biological, linguistic, humanistic, and even that of transcendent personal experience,” describe how religious mythological language goes beyond merely identifying routine emotions and experiences to be experienced in ritual. It helps create the conditions for truly novel ‘blends’ of emotions, which are profoundly meaningful to human beings, and central to such inspiring religious experiences as awe, reverence, and feelings of self-transcendence. These, they suggest, represent types of experiences that are simply not possible in normal or mundane situations. A stunning example of what Deacon and Cashman mean by ‘emergent emotions’ can be seen in a demonstration performed by ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown, for the television show Derren Brown: Fear and Faith, pt. 2, which aired on the Channel 4 Television Corporation in Great Britain on November 16, 2012.4 In that show, Mr. Brown, whose goal is to demonstrate that God is not required to explain the kinds of profound religious experiences that Christians have attributed to divine intervention, utilized his skills in psychological manipulation to give an atheist a religious experience, without ever invoking the word ‘God’.5 The basic setup for the experience could have been taken directly from Deacon and Cashman’s paper, as Christian Dominant Symbols, such as being cherished by a father figure, being open to new experiences, and the feeling of being connected to a master plan, were skillfully blended together in his conversation with her. Through a technique of psychological ‘anchoring’, they were brought to sudden consciousness for her in a powerful experience that was unlike any other experience the subject ever 4 uk viewers can see this episode on the Channel 4 website at http://www.channel4.com/ programmes/derren-brown-the-specials/4od#3451478. Non-uk viewers can see the episode on YouTube, at http://youtu.be/ust-pJC-9j8. 5 Although it must be noted that he relied heavily on the implicit Christian categories his subject, an educated woman in England, carried with her as background knowledge. The experience she was to have took place in a church, surrounded by Christian symbols, with promptings that certainly suggested that many people in history have believed in the Christian God.

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had – deeply meaningful, and potentially life-changing. Her immediate comment about the experience, in the midst of obvious overpowering emotion, was “Why couldn’t I have had this all my life,” and her description to Mr. Brown a few seconds later was “The love I get from my family and my friends…I just felt that times a thousand.” Her follow-up comments a few days later were, “It just felt as though all the love in the world had been thrown at me, and it was completely overwhelming…It felt as though that love had always been available to me, but I had kind of pushed it away or mistreated it somehow by not letting it into my life. It’s as if my spectrum has just been broadened…and that high end has just been extended.” Mr. Brown at that point reminded her of something she had told him after filming: “This has to be something supernatural.”6 Interestingly, once it was explained to the subject how the experience had been manipulated, her response was, “It has added a kind of artificial element to it for me now.” Apparently, what had made it meaningful was not merely the experience itself – which, after all, could theoretically be reproduced through the taking of certain drugs – but the idea that the experience was a window or opening into the way life was meant to be experienced. It was the belief that the emergent emotions had a divine cause that was really the valuable aspect of the experience. I will revisit this later in this chapter; for now, however, it is sufficient to note that the idea of emergent emotions is certainly a potential outcome of myth, as Deacon and Cashman suggest. Further, belief states – whether manipulated by a skilled mentalist or through the psychic implications of metaperformativity – are certainly relevant to the kinds of emergent emotions and religious experiences that people have.

Social Orientation

Meaningfulness does not just come from therapeutic healing experiences and new emotional blends; it also comes from the way religious ritual profoundly connects the cosmos and the social order to the individual. Albert Einstein, in a defense of the kind of religion he felt was a necessary and important part of human life, described it as providing the highest moral and ethical values, which act as ends for human technical knowledge:

6 Mr. Brown has assured me that the young woman in the show was not an actor; that her emotional experience was not an act or scripted in any way, and that he is reasonably certain that among some suggestible people, the manipulation and creation of emergent emotions in this way is repeatable (personal communication, 2014).

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Objective [scientific] knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source… To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man…they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. Quoted in wilber 2001, 108

Einstein seems to be suggesting three things in this provocative passage. First, he suggests that individuals without society would simply not have clear ends, goals, and values at which to aim. As Durkheim would say, these ends, goals and values are collective ends, goals and values; apart from the emergent effects of sharing a language, societal values and ends such as “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” simply wouldn’t exist. They are not features of biological hominids, but rather of language-sharers who have entered into the project of constructing a symbolic model for the natural, psychic, and social worlds. Second, Einstein suggests that rational, scientific knowledge would not have ends and values without religion. Religious communities are living traditions that distill, preserve, and rank values, arranging them in a hierarchy that gives individuals and all the specific subsystems of society (such as the scientific enterprise) the priorities that give them meaning and that guide their operation. Finally, Einstein suggests that religion serves to connect such ends and values with the emotional life of people. Anthropologist Brian Hayden (2003) has argued compellingly that religious ritual (and what McNamara calls decentering) provided the emotional and ecstatic bonds in our deep past necessary to connect unrelated individuals to each other, and commit them to shared ideals. The emotions and intensity of religion can be far stronger than logic, reason, or science, which might not have even developed without religion providing the glue to create ‘society’. Religious studies scholar Wesley Wildman (2011) has argued that one of the important meaningful experiences that religious communities mediate is social orientation, which people feel is of vital importance to their lives. Orienting experiences are critical for the stability of social life, representing the way our highest ethical and evaluative commitments are embedded in our social dynamics, which themselves are embedded in the character of the

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cosmos. As Rappaport writes, the social orientation provided by ritual and myth establishes “a unity or integrity of understanding that may seem highly meaningful to those grasping it and that may be tenuous or lacking in society poor in ritual” (1999, 276).

Emergent Selves needing Orientation

I have mentioned in previous chapters (Ch.’s 1 and 5) that the fact that a human person is already an emergent phenomenon might be an important clue to understanding the meaningfulness of religion. I want to expand upon this here. Several authors (Hofstadter 2007; Deacon 1997; Kerby 1991) have argued that the human person, as a narratively-organized center of subjectivity, represents an emergent dynamic. If this is so, it has important – but under-considered – implications for the meaningfulness of religion. Human subjectivity, in its relationship to the body associated with it, is difficult to characterize. Our capacity to recognize our subjective experience as orthogonal to, but somehow profoundly connected with, our objective bodies has been the source of profound questions concerning our place in the universe. What could possibly be invoked to explain this? Are we the ‘more’ whose identity derives from the ‘less’, as scientific accounts would suggest? If so, why does a subjective conscious unity suddenly ‘pop into existence’ from a material, objective base? How could our growing knowledge of the base ever give us a satisfying sense of our place in the universe? Or are we the ‘less’ that is derived from the ‘more’, ‘sparks of divinity’ somehow associated with the lower aspects of creation, which religious narratives tend to affirm? I suggest the real issue of human nature relevant to driving religious interests is not our evolved ‘overactive agency detection’ algorithm, nor our ‘sweet tooth’ for narratives involving minimally counter-intuitive objects, as some evolutionary psychologists suggest,7 but rather our awareness of our own subjectivity, distinct from the objects that surround us and compose us. If we weren’t aware of our subjective nature, we just might be able to conceive ourselves as being ‘robots all the way down’, as Daniel Dennett has been characterized as arguing (and which he does not deny).8 We are aware of it, however; our internal experience of ourselves as conscious subjects drives the obvious question of why we should exist as such, and the surprising fact is that religious communities have been meaningfully addressing this important 7 See Guthrie (1993) for the first, Boyer (2001) for the second. 8 See Dennett (2005).

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existential question – perhaps wrongly, but effectively nonetheless – for countless generations. I will state my conviction clearly that an objective, scientific account of bodies cannot meaningfully address the problem of subjectivity. Subjectivity, thus, must be a basic category. Yet knowledge of human subjectivity is a logical achievement only; philosophical analysis of subjectivity recognizes that the objective ‘parts’ of our brains as understood by science do not add up to experience; something excess is present, though nothing that can be named (objectified) is that excess. This leads us to identify ourselves with what we are not, leaving an empty placeholder in place of positive knowledge of our subjective selves. This, I suggest, is what invites a conviction that if we are to be known at all, it is only through experience of a higher-level subjectivity. Without this we cannot be named, cannot be identified. This kind of naming has been claimed to occur in the realm of myth and the depths of mystical encounter. As theologian Paul Tillich writes, “man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself although it transcends him…” (1959, 10). This kind of profoundly grounding subjective experience seems to be reliably produced in ritual involving the divine, and has wide support from theologians of various religious traditions, suggesting a kind of ‘generic religious apologetic’ justifying religious community participation. At the risk of multiplying references, I want to demonstrate in the paragraphs that follow that this experience is considered central to many religious traditions, both Eastern and Western, and clearly points to the meaningfulness of religion as a result of participation in something experienced as greater than one’s self. Consider the work of Nasr, writing recently within the Islamic tradition. In summarizing the way the soul arrives at faith, he writes, “Perhaps the most immediate experience of man is his subjectivity, the mystery of inwardness and a consciousness which can reflect upon itself, opening inwardly unto the Infinite which is also bliss” (1989, 147). But merely realizing our subjectivity as distinct from our experience of objects isn’t enough for faith. “Supreme knowledge which can deliver us requires realizing the relativity of the soul; but going beyond the realm of the soul requires the transformation of the soul itself. This is why the soul must become disciplined by spiritual virtues,” which for Nasr, are given through the traditions of the Islamic religious community (1989, 312–13, 316). When this happens, the soul participates in the ‘really real’ truth which is suprahuman. Or consider the work of Augustine (4th century), writing within the Chri­ stian tradition. For Augustine, God cannot be found in the realm of external material nature. As Cary describes Augustine’s argument, one must “awaken to a different kind of vision, one that has been going on all along in the soul

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without being noticed…if the soul could only see itself, it would begin to see what non-bodily things are like” (2003, 64–5). For Augustine, the proper progression for an individual to understand spiritual matters is to start outward, proceed inward, and eventually find rest upward. The “key moment in all these efforts to execute the project of inward turn comes when the mind or reason turns from looking inward to looking upward and discovers that immutable Truth is implicit in all its judgments” (2003, 66). But mere mental acknowledgement of an inner world that invites a movement towards an upward world is not enough; one must experience the transformation of the presence of the upward world for oneself. Internal philosophy must yield to eternal religious revelation.9 Or consider the Yogic tradition in Hinduism. Brahmanical Hinduism proposes that beneath the changing mental and physical processes that are usually associated with the human self, there is an essential self in all persons, all selves, called ātman, which is a spiritual essence that transmigrates from life to life. Ātman is permanent, unchanging (King 1999, 80). Release, within the yogic tradition, consists of rediscovering within oneself that unity, that Soul preexisting the human soul. “This…is accomplished in contemporary human consciousness by the practice of yogic meditation” (Reat 1990, 153). As McNamara (2009) notes, yogic meditation is centered in cessation of thought or the cultivation of non-attachment to mental states and bodily desires, and attachment to the immortal soul, the higher consciousness. In yoga, there is a conscious effort to quiet the mind, dampen desire and craving, and dethrone the self; when an old self is shed, one attaches to and becomes a higher Self. Or consider the work of Sekida (1975), writing within the Zen Buddhist tradition. He discusses the work of zazen – sitting concentration – in brokering the religious truth of ‘no-self’, which corrects the problematic sense of permanence people cling to. The work of zazen is to deconstruct, step by step, the natural but incorrect conclusions drawn from our experience of the objective world, and the experience of our selves. The goal is to recognize the Buddhist Truth of Impermanence, which reveals that both outward objects and the internal subjective self are conventional realities that have no ontological substance, and thus can be deconstructed and manipulated for the sake of wellbeing. Patil (2007) notes that as the Buddhist position was formulated by thinkers such as Dharmakirti (7th century), an important methodological truth was realized. Though the impermanence of outward experience can be demonstrated by philosophy, it is at the cost of reifying the ‘inner philosopher’ who does the deconstructing. Philosophy is not enough to deconstruct this ‘inner philosopher’; what is needed is the practice of Buddhist meditation to lead one to the truth of impermanence. Buddhism is not about assenting to a 9 This can be seen in Books VIII and IX of the Confessions (1997/397).

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proposition, but having an experience, mediated in Buddhist practice, that defines you by showing you are not what you thought you were. The importance of this example from Buddhism is that the same schema governing theistic Christian, Muslim, and Hindu accounts holds in a non-theistic religious setting; the ascent to the highest truth proceeds from the outward, to the inward, and ultimately to the upward. For Dharmakirti, philosophy can be used to correct stubborn errors about the external world, but later, participatory experience is necessary to correct an even higher level of stubborn error about the internal world, which results from the use of philosophy. The highest truth needs to be experienced existentially, in religious performance. It is not just theologians who have been struck by the ‘problem’ of subjectivity and the need to access resources in religious practice to explain it. In a fascinating irony in the history of science, the problematic relationship of human subjectivity with respect to the objective natural world became obvious to those physicists working on the ‘new physics’ at the beginning of the 20th century. Ken Wilber, in his volume Quantum Questions (2001/1984), brings together the mystical writings of physicists such as Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Planck, de Broglie, Einstein, and Pauli. Wilber argues that their interest in religion was not the result of any positive finding of the new physics, but resulted from their growing awareness that human subjective experience always has and always will be an ineradicable part of the human quest for understanding nature. Prior to 20th century discoveries in physics, the ineradicable presence of mind was seemingly hidden by the power of Newtonian physics, as it was possible to simply assume that our common-sense understandings of matter, force, and other such concepts were unmediated by our own minds, existing ‘out there’ objectively. The new physics put that false idea to rest, reinforcing the fact that human minds are inevitably involved in even the most objective accounts of nature. As the subjective nature of mind can’t be explained by any science that deals with objective reality, these physicists were driven to pursue religious themes and explanations. Here I’ll quote Arthur Eddington as representative of the position of many of the physicists. He writes, We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of [mathematical] symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. If to-day you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the aether or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing

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beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world, it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolized. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness – the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols. Quoted in wilber 2001, 196

And tying this insight to religion, he further writes, [T]hose who in the search for truth start from consciousness as a seat of self-knowledge with interests and responsibilities not confined to the material plane are just as much facing the hard facts of experience as those who start from consciousness as a device for reading the indications of spectroscopes and micrometers… The starting point of belief in mystical religion is a conviction of significance or, as I have called it earlier, the sanction of a striving in the consciousness. This must be emphasized because appeal to intuitive conviction of this kind has been the foundation of religion through all ages and I do not wish to give the impress that we have now found something new and more scientific to substitute. Quoted in wilber 2001, 192, 212

We see, then, there is widespread support that something like the subject/ object distinction figures large in making sense of the meaningfulness of religion. I suggest it is the emergent nature of the human ‘subjective self’ that drives our need to find our existential home in religion, to seek for a ‘supersubjective’ reality that is experienced through ritual practice of some kind. What about religious practices would explain its remarkable ability to facilitate such powerful experiences of ‘supersubjectivity’? What could possibly explain this common feature of all religions? Different Ways of Considering the ‘Spiritual Map’, and Their Implications Theology must depend upon a metaphysical interpretation of the community. – josiah royce, The Problem of Christianity

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One way to account for religion’s ability to create ‘super-subjectivity’ would be to claim that religious community dynamics represent a strange loop, grounding a community that has subjective experiences as a single agent. Stating the same thing from the perspective of individual participants, the claim would be that ritual and myth facilitate the exploration of the potential for shared subjective experience, which has an ontological status greater than that of the subjective experience of individual participants. This, I have argued, is exactly what Durkheim suggests; I am supporting his proposal in the terms of emergence theory. The model for this collective subjectivity would be the ‘community’ of neurons in our heads, whose dynamics constitute a strange loop, grounding emergent agents – you and I – who have experiences as single people, and have an ontological status greater than that of our mere neurophysiology, objectively considered. How would such a claim be supported, and what alternative interpretation of religion would challenge it? Central to the discussion would be to get clear on the different ways we might interpret the claim that religious experience represents a ‘spiritual map’ encoding sociality. There are different ways to interpret what occurs in decentering, and how it facilitates shared group experiences. Different metaphysical assumptions and purported facts about shared group experiences will lead to different kinds of theories as to what capacities lie latent in the process, and different ways to interpret the phrase, ‘spiritual map’. For example, some might argue that experience of the divine is a powerful but illusory and purely local experience. When the experiences of many psilocybiningesters, for example, are guided by a shared view of the divine world, it might strongly bias the experience of each individual in a way that unconsciously coordinates group experience. Since unconscious, the social coordination would wrongly be viewed as coming from the active intervention of the divine. An enlightening example of this kind of shared unconscious map was demonstrated, again, by illusionist Derren Brown, this time for the television show Trick of the Mind, Series Three, Episode 3, which aired on Channel 4 Television Corporation in Great Britain on Sunday April 9, 2006.10 According to his website, in this episode, [Derren] meets a group of individuals to see if he can communicate an image to them subconsciously. After a moment of relaxation they are told 10

uk viewers can see this episode on the Channel 4 website at http://www.channel4.com/ programmes/derren-brown-trick-of-the-mind/4od#3181155. Non-uk viewers can see the episode on YouTube, at http://youtu.be/Edcv4zyO5u0?t=17m37s.

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to draw the image they saw in the back of their mind. Their pictures are displayed and all but two people have drawn a very similar drooping flower, which is shown to match an image Derren has sealed in his pocket. In a debrief afterwards Derren suggests that the people who got the flower are the sort of people who would use subliminal tapes and cds, and it transpires that the group of people had previously all used the same subliminal cd to aid sleeping. Derren explains to the viewers that the cd, Dreamscapes, had been prepared by him a year previously and sent out to people who had responded to an advert; they had also been sent a questionnaire to help Derren identify the more suggestible participants. The most promising were invited to a venue called ‘Dreamspace’ for this experiment along with one person who had returned the cd and one who had not felt any benefit from the cd: these were the two people who had not drawn the flowers. None of the participants had been aware that there was any connection between the cd and the invitation to come to the venue.11 What this social experiment demonstrates is that associations developed unconsciously and subliminally can ‘play out’ in unexpected ways that appear supernatural, but in fact demonstrate unconscious biasing. Using this explanation of the ‘spiritual map’ and its causal efficacy, we could argue that the Native American boy who experiences his spirit guide on a vision quest, and then returns to the group, will relate to others and be related to by others in ways that are consciously as well as subtly and unconsciously biased by the theological ideas guiding the community. Their shared theology acts to identify particular spirit guides and their relations to other ‘spiritual beings’, and social coordination would result, biased by such shared understandings. This could lead to the kinds of interesting unconscious psychic manifestations Derren Brown intentionally cultivated, creating the sense of divine causality. The illusion of super-subjectivity is produced, as persons are located in a metaphysical and social order that appears to be directed by some sort of outside, causally effective agency. Coincidences and synchronicities might reliably be produced in such a situation, grounding what the ritual participant means by the causal action of the divine. It is important to note that this vision of the spiritual map is completely consistent with the emergent account of religion I have offered in previous chapters. It is one possible way to account for the intertwined relationship between self-narrative and group narratives, mediated by 11

The description is taken from http://www.derrenbrown.org.uk/tv_series_trick_of_the _mind_3.php.

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religious experience guided by a spiritual map. Further, this account is consistent with metaphysical assumptions that ground current psychological and sociological scientific investigation. But is there possibly more to the story than this? Specifically, is something like subjectivity and conscious experience necessarily limited to the workings of human (and perhaps animal) brains? The extraordinary qualities of functionally-related groups of neurons – such as the unity of conscious experience, its partial freedom with respect to deterministic laws, and the experience of values such as beauty, truth, and goodness – compellingly evade explanation on the assumption of materialist conceptions of the brain. Many leading theories of the mind/brain interaction posit that subjective experience is emergent upon functional organization; might not functionally related groups of people be the ground upon which further emergent qualities exist? This is where metaphysical considerations do in fact matter when assessing religious communities, in the same way they do when considering the human mind/brain. I previously pointed to the fact that Haitians don’t just dance together in the name of the lwa; they dance with the lwa as the lwa dance through at least some of them. This could be interpreted completely ‘naturally’; that is, according to a metaphysical prescription that says individual experience is locked in the brains of individuals, without the possibility to affect others except through past and present bodily and/or linguistic interaction. However, if the dynamics of a religious community are plausibly tied to the ‘strange loop’ dynamics that characterize human persons and biological lineages, it is possible to suggest that religious communities have capacities and qualities that are sui generis, connected to their identity as emergent agents.12 As put by Josiah Royce, a later contemporary of Durkheim who also described the religious community as emergent, theology might “depend upon a metaphysical interpretation of the community” (1968, 233). What makes this suggestion plausible from the side of data are the many (anecdotal) examples of paranormal experience of various types that make up the warp and woof of religious community testimony.13 This testimony needs to be approached carefully, due to difficulties resulting from known characteristics of human psychology such as wishful thinking, difficulties in thinking statistically, hypnotic effects, projection, confirmation effects, and confabulation, 12 13

The illusion to Durkheim here (‘sui generis’) is intentional, as Durkheim explicitly stated that religiously-empowered social groups are a ‘consciousness of consciousnesses’. An excellent introduction to the positive claims and issues of paranormal experience is Griffin (1997).

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which Derren Brown and others exploit.14 Controlled scientific testing of parapsychological phenomena has not returned results that have managed to convince most scientists that something real is being investigated (Cordón 2005). However, philosopher Huston Smith (1991b; 2003) has argued that what is being claimed in religious testimony is precisely the existence of something that would not in principle be controllable by human agency, detectable by scientific experiments. The agency that religious communities point to would be, under the metaphysical interpretation being explored here, a result of organization of wider scope than that of the individual mind, and at a level ontologically superior to human agency. If there is something like a collective subjective conscious experience, we should not expect to be able to control it as we expect to control atoms and rocks. Even other human persons, because emergent, cannot be brought under a scheme of control, Smith points out; to achieve anything like objectivity in psychological experimentation, it is necessary to hide from the subject the purpose of the study. Neither can the behavior of emergent biological entities be understood solely by physical laws (Davies 1999; Favareau 2007). If emergent corporate agents exist as shared mental phenomena across many religious participants, “it is they who dance circles around us, not we they” (H. Smith 1991b, 212). Psychologist Elizabeth Mayer has effectively explored some of the layers of group subjectivity in her book Extraordinary Knowing (2007). Her scientific worldview was turned on its head by the highly improbable discovery of her daughter’s lost harp by a dowser, using a map of San Francisco, from thousands of miles away. Freeman Dyson’s introduction to the book lays out a position towards such anecdotal accounts that acknowledges the problem of anecdotes – they are not controlled experiments – and suggests a response that echoes Huston Smith’s argument: there is something about the nature of the phenomena that exceeds the proper scope of science. He says it is his position that esp is real, as the anecdotal evidence suggests, but cannot be tested since esp and other such phenomena belong to a mental universe that is “too fluid and evanescent to fit within the rigid protocols of controlled scientific testing” (Mayer 2007, ix). To some, this may appear as a dodge, an excuse, and special pleading. We might want to join with such skeptics, if it wasn’t for the fact that the everyday experience of subjective unity, qualia, and value accompanied by the functioning of a group of neurons – none of which (presumably) have conscious experiences of their own – also escapes the grasp of science.

14

Michael Shermer (2002) and Carl Sagan (1996) do a good job exploring the psychological problems that contribute to the misidentification of the natural as supernatural.

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There is an interesting subset of the psychotherapy literature that focuses on shared subjective experience, as clients and therapists have sometimes found themselves linked together in ways that seem to defy the ‘standard metaphysical view’ of the mind/brain. Carpenter (2002) lists many therapists, including Freud and Jung, who have had such experiences, and felt them compelling enough to discuss publicly in papers or books.15 What these experiences suggest, in terms of the possibility of decentering experiences acting as a spiritual map, is there may be constraints on individual decentering that arise from the interaction of shared subjective experience. While I only raise the question here, I acknowledge that much of the ‘value added’ claimed by religious community participation comes from the meaningful and inexplicable wisdom and knowledge that some people experience in such settings. It is these types of experiences that ground belief in the causal agency of the divine in the first place. Van de Port’s (2005) very insightful musings on this topic in his study of Brazilian Bahian religion, as well as Somé’s (1997) insights into the African Dagara, could certainly be enlisted in support of such a position. There are different implications for the value of religion entailed by the two positions I have sketched here. If the spiritual map is merely a bias shared by a group of people, which produces conscious and unconscious coordination of individuals according to shared values and expectations, it deceives individuals into thinking that they are engaging a divine causal agent that in fact does not exist. The ‘specified absence’ created by ritual and myth does not act as a placeholder for external causes, as religious people believe, but rather for unconscious causes. On the other hand, if we conceive of the spiritual map with the assumption that ‘extraordinary knowing’ and shared subjective experience is a possibility, then the map’s effectiveness might be due to the fact that it represents the boundaries of a genuine and sui generis form of consciousness. The specified absences of ritual and myth make room for that shared, subjective experience. In both cases, the map acts as a constraint on individual self-narratives as they interact with group narratives. The first case suggests that religious belief is purely error; whatever good religion might produce individually or socially, existentially or reproductively, there is no truth to religion. Nor is there any unique value from the perspective of the individual to the particular functions that religion performs, if these 15

A partial list of the more important works would include (Fodor 1942; Fodor 1949; Jung 1957; Jung 1963; Servadio 1935; Servadio 1955; Ullman 1949; Ullman 1959; Ullman 1975; Eisenbud 1946; Eisenbud 1969; Eisenbud 1970; Schwartz 1965; Schwartz 1967; Mintz 1983; Orloff 1997; Freud 1933; Ehrenwald 1942; Ehrenwald 1948; Ehrenwald 1955; Ehrenwald 1970).

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functions can be replaced by secular versions. While the group dynamics of religion may be unique, unprecedented, and demonstrate a telos, these dynamics deceive individuals to in order to have their effect on them as individuals. Even so, this is non-trivially important; considering the important healing effects we have examined above, it’s ‘therapeutic truth’ remains in force. But this is not unlike the therapeutic ‘truth’ of a placebo. This is ultimately Dennett’s position, as I read him. This view suggests that the error of religion should be corrected, the various ‘technologies’ of religion rescued and put under human science, and the ‘spell broken’. The second case suggests that religious communities involve the facilitation of unique kinds of knowing, new kinds of experiencing, new kinds of subjectivity, and new kinds of value. In an interesting way, these two options represent a subtle distinction between the teleodynamics of life, as compared to the teleodynamics of mind. The teleodynamics of life are due to the encoded memory of dna constraining cell dynamics without requiring belief in a ‘mystical’ or ‘mind-like’ awareness arising from these dynamics. Life, then, even when conceived ‘teleodynamically’, does not challenge ‘monistic materialism’ as the default metaphysical assumption of science. It is only when we consider the teleodynamics of mind that such a challenge appears. So the question when considering religion is, do we consider it more like life (which would correspond to a ‘Derren Brown’ interpretation of Rappaport), or more like a subjective mind (which would correspond to an ‘Elizabeth Mayer’ interpretation of Durkheim)? These choices would guide different research proposals for investigating religion in the future. Both versions would suggest that investigating the sociology, neuroscience, semiotics, and emergent ‘interaction effects’ of religion should continue apace; investigation into these can proceed without concern for the metaphysical implications discussed. What the second version of the spiritual map suggests is that there might be a further research program possible. It would investigate commonalities in the way religious communities experience, and are constrained by, the effects of shared corporate subjectivity. Phenomenological accounts of religious experience could be investigated that focus not on the content of belief – on the view of religion developed here, this can vary widely – but rather on common ways individuals in diverse communities experience the constraints of this subjective corporate experience, discern the ‘true’ divine dynamics from the ‘false’, and experience the outcomes of faithful adherence and willful resistance to those constraints. Why are there virtuosi in different religious traditions, and what do they have in common in terms of practice? How do they prepare to be a ‘vessel’ for the divine, develop their sensitivities to whatever feedback indicates success in those states, and see the effect of transmitting those states to others? Certainly

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there is a huge literature that could be combed through with an eye on such an investigation. Summary Emergence theory, developed to make sense of life and mind without appealing to anything outside of nature, re-envisions nature to make room for these phenomena. Emergence theory focuses on system organization, and the new capacities and qualities of certain systems. It avoids the twin errors of a reductionism that pays no attention to organization, and a materialism that has no capacity to deal with human subjective experience. At first glance, religion represents something that might be productively engaged by emergence theory, since it, like life and mind, has traditionally invited explanation in terms of causes posited to exist outside of nature – divine Beings and Ways. I have argued in this book that careful attention to the scientific question of emergent organization, and the philosophical question of emergent subjective capacities and qualities, represents a fruitful way to understand religious community dynamics and experiences. Here I am following the lead of such seminal figures in religious studies as Roy Rappaport and Émile Durkheim. I drew attention to the way the decentering psychological experiences of individuals, and the robust and adaptive social organization of religious groups, have become intertwined through the mediating influence of ritual and myth; each reinforces the continued existence of the other. This, I posit, is a better way to understand religion than perspectives that only focus on human biology and neurology, on the one hand, and perspectives that insist on the pre-existing reality of divine Beings and Ways that exist outside of nature, on the other. The emergence of a unique form of human sociality is what bridges the gap between these two incomplete perspectives. Emergence theory allows one to think that religion is a phenomenon that ultimately does need to be studied ‘on its own level’, as some of the most important thinkers in religious studies have thought. At the same time, with an emergence approach the focus shifts from the content of religious belief, to the structure of religious dynamics. It is there that the ‘magic’ of an emergent shift in ontological levels happens. It happens when social dynamics take on the structure of a ‘strange loop’: when a symbol system encodes constraints on the interaction of individuals in such a way that both the symbols and the interactions are reproduced, each ‘reciprocally co-facilitating’16 the other. 16

This is Deacon’s term.

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I have argued that Rappaport’s conception of metaperformativity is critical to understanding religion as exemplifying these dynamics. This idea, which is the most important contribution of Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity to religious studies, examines the strange capacity of ritual and myth to create psychic and social dynamics that suggest the reality of the very thing ritual and myth posit exists. To participate in ritual and myth is to posit that the divine exists, that it is authoritative, and that participants have submitted to its influence. This has potent effects on the psychology of individuals, and the structural organization of a religious community. It invites decentering religious experiences of great power, and a robust, adaptive social organization that has at its center divine content that has no direct material or physical referents. This kind of community is able to adapt to a great variety of social and cultural situations. This interpretation of religious community dynamics, I argue, should be taken very seriously, regardless of what one thinks about the status of shared subjective experiences and ‘extraordinary knowing’. Even if one is not willing to countenance such metaphysical possibilities, we still can note that the ‘spiritual map’ that ritual and myth create connects psychic experiences and religious sociality such that they each reinforce the other. For the more metaphysically daring, emergence theory gives tools for thinking about emergent ‘religious’ experiences, as well. The profoundly meaningful way religious community participation can be experienced – which even its critics can acknowledge – suggests that some kind of important coordination is occurring between the subjective experiences of many individuals. We might be able to consider religious communities as a locus of unique experience, for the same reasons we consider human brains as such a locus. If both human brains and religious communities exhibit the same organizational dynamics, there is no principled reason to think that unique capacities and qualities could not arise in religious community dynamics, on analogy to what occurs when human brains are placed in relationship to the natural and social worlds, through the mediating capacities of language. Both religious communities and human brains posit, via symbolic representation, the existence of something (the ‘I’; the divine) that therefore makes a difference in ongoing experiences of persons and religious groups, respectively. The problem of the causal role played by consciousness – and thus the causal role of the divine, conceived on analogy to it – has not been resolved in this book, but the analogy suggests that whatever options we come up with to describe the causal role of consciousness, we could use this as a guide for considering the causal role of the divine. Indeed, we may find that any headway made on the problem of divine activity may shed light on the problem of consciousness, as noted in Ch. 1.

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Taking an emergent approach to religion suggests a holistic approach to religious community dynamics that the field of religious studies desperately needs, if it wants to maintain itself as a field. My hope is that this book contributes to a view of religion that understands it in its stunning wholeness, but does so in a way that views it as completely natural.

Appendix

Confucianism as a Test Case In Appendix, I will use the categories articulated in Ch.’s 2–4 to take on a ‘test case’ designed to showcase how emergent categories can contribute to our understanding of religion. I will use these categories to make sense of Confucianism, a worldview/ religion that, at least to some interpreters, is absent of anything that could be confused with decentering, and doesn’t conform to Western understanding of ‘religion’. This will help assess a potential criticism of my approach: that decentering religious experiences are overemphasized, or, conversely, that the term ‘religion’ should be properly extended to group dynamics that are broader than those indicated here.



Introduction to the Problem

In introducing a text exploring whether Confucianism is a religion, Neville (1990) argues that there are three defining aspects to a religion, summarized as: 1. A cosmology, defining the “fundamental structures and limits of the world and forming the basic ways in which cultures and individuals imagine how things are and what they mean.” 2. Ritual, which is finite sets of repeatable and symbolizable actions that epitomize things a tradition takes to be crucial to defining the normative place of humans in the cosmos. 3. Procedures for “fundamental transformation aimed to relate persons harmoniously to the normative cosmological elements, the path of spiritual perfection.” As my argument has developed in this book, I am in wide agreement with Neville’s summary, as I have argued that each of these could be considered an entailment of social dynamics exemplifying Rocha & Hordijk’s three criteria. Specifically, I have suggested that a religious community, if it holds to the form I have described, will have concepts of the divine, composed of non-indexing Ultimate Sacred Postulates and metaphorical Dominant Symbols, which together characterize the way the invisible world is relevant to the visible world. Second, it will have a means by which myth is decoded into a potent, society-constructing form, which I have argued is the result of metaperformativity. Metaperformativity is facilitated by ritual. Third, a religious community will invite and provide room for decentering and the transformation of the person to a ‘higher self’ that is implied in the Dominant Symbols. This invitation for

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi 10.1163/9789004293762_009

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transformation comes as a formal entailment of ritual and myth, and it is experienced as the divine making itself manifest. Together, these features of a religious community create a special kind of community, ‘a community of saints’, linked together by the fact that they share the same ‘spiritual map’. This community will manifest reproduction/ variation/selection, leading to intelligent adaptation to its cultural environment. So the question I will explore in this section is: Is Confucianism a religion? According to Neville, there are those who say no, who see Confucianism as a way to perfect certain important social relations. For this group, there is nothing else to sagehood than to conform to normative ways of life. Those who say yes argue “some version or other of the classical Neo-Confucian thesis that true humanity is fully achieved only when the usual run of life is transformed so as to manifest Principle in a full and perspicuous way” (1990, x). We will examine examples of both claims, getting a sense of the argument. Then, from the perspective of an emergent conception of religion, we will examine the evidence concerning Confucianism, concluding with a particular look at the life of a ‘modern Confucian sage’, Okada Takehiko.



The View of Seligman et al.

First, let us examine a view of Confucianism that would be hard to characterize as ‘religious’ by any definition of the term. It is contained in Seligman et al.’s Ritual and its Consequences (2008). This book, which is a rich source for understanding the deep appeal of a ritual way of life, is notable, to this reader at least, for its lack of reference to theological or religious elements in its exposition of ritual. Specifically, there is almost no mention of a hidden realm inaccessible to normal rational and pragmatic experience. When the authors offer an example of ritual that fits the view they wish to promote, they turn to an early Chinese text on ritual called “Nature Emerges from the Decree” (Xing Zi Ming Chu), which they note is a recently excavated text from the 4th century bce. In what follows, I will utilize mostly direct quotes of their explication and expansion of this text, though changing the order somewhat and occasionally adding close paraphrases and transitional phrases for clarity:1 According to “Nature Emerges from the Decree,” it is up to humans to build patterns of relationships out of this fractured world. There are only actions, and it is up to humans to ritualize some of those actions and thereby set up an ordered ethical way of life. The reason why this is necessary is humans are containers of emotional energies. These energies are constantly being dragged out by our 1 Taken from Seligman et al. (2008, 32–5).

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encounters with things, including others. The Way, here defined as movement itself, starts with our dispositions and the ways that our energies cause us to interact with other things. The goal of human growth is to move from our dispositions to “propriety” – responding to things properly, instead of by immediate disposition. And the repeated study that makes this possible is based upon ritual and related forms of practice – a canon of proper behavior that has been built up through past responses. Ritual is a repertoire of these patterns of relationship, a repertoire that is endlessly growing, constantly changing, and always in danger of becoming inadequate. The criterion for which actions from the past should become part of that ritual canon is whether their continued performance helps to refine one’s ability to respond to others. This canon consists of the set of songs collected as the Book of Songs, the speeches collected in the Book of Documents, the rituals collected in the Book of Rituals, and the music collected as the Music.2 Originally, these appropriate songs, speeches, and rituals were merely a small subset of the many responses humans gave to their lived situations. But the later‐ born sages deemed some of these actions exemplary, and as such defined them as part of a ritual canon that people in general should enact. Sages put them into an order and built an educational curriculum out of them. The goal of such an enactment would be to refine one’s own dispositions: by reenacting exemplary actions from the past, one trains one’s responses so that one can achieve propriety. In the Analects of Confucius, the distinction is made between ritual and humaneness. Humaneness is perhaps best understood as simply the way that one acts ritually when there is no ritual to tell one what to do. The practice of ritual should help direct proper conduct in a situation outside of the proper context of a known ritual. For example, one trains a child to say “thank you.” For the first few years of this training, it is by rote, but the hope is that the child, as she grows, will be able to express equivalent forms of expressing gratitude in situations where a simple “thank you” would be inappropriate. If one spends one’s life doing rituals properly, then one gains a sense of how the subjunctive world constructed out of those rituals could be constructed in situations without a ritual precedent, or in situations where ritual obligations conflict. For early Confucian thinkers, there is an even higher level than humaneness: the highest example of ritual action was to become a sage. But one can define a sage as simply someone who acts properly in any given situation, whether or not there is a ritual precedent to guide his action.

2 These are older, classical texts Confucius appealed to.

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I do not suggest Seligman et al. mean this account of one particular Chinese text to be a picture of ‘Confucianism’; they use it as an example of a ritual approach to life they feel is valuable. But the important fact is this text, and the authors’ explication of it, makes use of many of the same terms and themes that those who think Confucianism is a religion make use of – terms such as Ritual, Humaneness, the Way, and Sage3 – but here, these terms are used in such a way that nothing ‘mystical’ or religious is invoked. This demonstrates that it is possible to interpret Confucianism, as Neville noted, as merely a way to perfect certain important social relations, and that there is nothing  else to sagehood than conforming to normative ways of life. Key moves in this approach are (a) To use purely pragmatic criterion for deciding which actions from the past should become part of the ritual canon – i.e. “whether continued performance of them helps to refine one’s ability to respond to others.” (b) To define the Way as something known to normal experience – i.e. “movement itself.” (c) To describe the process of development and growth of an individual as something one does to and for oneself – e.g. “refining one’s own dispositions”; “reenacting exemplary actions from the past”; and “training ones responses.” (d) To consider the sage as simply someone who acts properly in any given situation. If this text contains a representative picture of Confucianism, then it is not difficult to see that it fits none of Rocha & Hordijk’s criteria in its social dynamics. But what do others say?



The View of Ames

Let us turn to Ames (2003), who notes certain key terms in Confucianism do have cosmological significance, and uses the term religious to describe Confucianism, although his account downplays the importance of a hidden realm inaccessible to normal rational and pragmatic experience. Ames writes that his primary goal is to defend Confucianism from those who misrepresent it from opposite sides: from those who offer a ‘Christianized’, Heavencentered interpretation of classical Confucianism; and from the ‘default claim’ that Confucianism is merely a secular humanism. Ames suggests there is a personal transformation in Confucianism: a transformation of the quality of one’s life in the ordinary 3 Capitalized, italicized terms throughout this section represent technical terms in Confucianism.

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business of the day. In his analysis of the classical Confucian text Doctrine of the Mean, we get an idea of how that transformation occurs, and to what end: by “sustained attention to achieving equilibrium by staying centered in the familiar affairs of one’s life…[which] leads ultimately to religious experience and pays off in religious dividends” (2003, 170). But what does Ames mean by ‘religious’ when he talks about religious experience and religious dividends? He argues that in the Confucian corpus, it boils down to a “focused appreciation of the complex meaning and value of the total field of existing things through a reflexive awakening to…one’s own participatory role as co-creator” (2003, 177). This is an important sentence in his overall argument; let us unpack it a bit. First, note that none of the terms need be interpreted as theological terms. Neither ‘focused attention’ nor ‘meaning and value’ nor ‘total field of existing things’ nor ‘reflexive awakening’ nor ‘co-creator’ require analysis in terms of Ultimate Sacred Postulates or Dominant Symbols. For example, Ames defines ‘co-creativity’ from the Confucian perspective as “getting the most out of one’s experience” (2003, 166). And ‘reflexive awakening’ seems to be covered by the realization that human growth is both “shaped by and contributes to the meaning of” the total field of existing things (2003, 165). Further, Ames notes that the Doctrine of the Mean suggests humans have everything they need to achieve realization without reference to something transcendent, and the world is sufficiently served by such human creativity that it need not appeal to divine intervention. But buried in these descriptions is at least one key idea that, when Ames describes it, does seem to point in the direction of a hidden, divine Way. What is meant by the idea that human co-creativity contributes to the meaning of the total field of existing things? Ames elaborates on this idea in terms that appear to be theological statements. He suggests that in classical Confucianism, becoming centered in the familiar relations of life (exemplified best by family life) produces a “harmony that is achieved through patterns of deference.” As one learns to extend deference into the world, “one ultimately becomes a co-creator of cosmic proportions in nurturing the processes of heaven and earth” (2003, 170). Certainly, becoming a co-creator of cosmic proportions, nurturing the processes of heaven and earth, goes beyond what normal experience might suggest is to be achieved by practicing certain deferential behaviors towards family members. So why would one believe that deferential behaviors towards family members has this effect? This idea seems important to understanding Confucianism somehow. Ames, however, does not expound on what the source of this belief is, or how it fits in to the other aspects of Confucian life he develops. For example, his account of sagehood – the end goal of the process of personal transformation in Confucianism – is described in terms that require no elaboration or appeal to any hidden causes. And Ames writes that Ritual practice, which is how one

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learns deference, and supposedly becomes a co-creator of heaven and earth, is simply learned patterns performed individually and elegantly. Ritual releases the uniqueness of a participant as one engages the aesthetic project of becoming a person, achieving a disposition, an attitude, a posture, and an identity. Ritual is personal performance, revealing one’s worth to oneself and one’s community. If these characterizations are correct, how could a Confucian think he or she is becoming a co-creator of cosmic proportions through Ritual? Thus, though Ames attempts to use terms like ‘religious’ to explain and capture the essence of Confucianism – e.g. Rites “are value-revealing life forms that attract emulation and inspire religious devotion” (2003, 174) – he hasn’t developed any aspects of Confucian practice that seems to fit the description of a religious community as a strange loop. If Ames is right, Confucianism could not be considered a religion on his terms. But what if we take the cosmological idea noted by Ames (becoming “a co-creator of cosmic proportions…nurturing the processes of heaven and earth”) as having causal relevance in a Confucian worldview?



The View of Ching

Ching (1986) has argued that Confucianism has deeply mystical elements, and that these elements have been significant throughout the course of the Confucian heritage. Her account is notable for its emphasis on a higher consciousness and something greater than the individual, actively sought as the source of sagehood and propriety by many leaders of Confucianism. She begins by describing the religious context of Confucius himself, noting that his language and arguments are grounded in an inherited religious view of the Lord on High – Heaven. At the time, this was a supreme and personal deity. Ching notes that though Confucius was largely quiet about god and the afterlife, he says it was Heaven that both gave him his message and protected him. And though he was skeptical about ghosts and spirits, he believed human beings are accountable to a supreme being. Though he only discreetly mentions Heaven, his own self-description suggests a man who cultivated an interior life with the goal of grasping the will of Heaven so deeply that his instincts were transformed, and he learned to appreciate the things of the spirit. Two early Confucians, Mencius and Hsun-tzu, though very different in certain respects, each developed a mystical approach to the individual in proper social relations. Mencius, when writing about the correct inner disposition for Ritual, alludes “to the presence in the heart of an actuality greater than itself” (1986, 77). And while belief in a supreme god seems to have diminished in China after the time of Mencius, a mystical bent to Confucianism continued. Hsun-tzu didn’t belief in heaven as a

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supernatural being or power, but instead, thought in terms of a “heavenly principle” which should regulate our natural likes and dislikes. This heavenly principle was our original, deep self. It is characterized by a particular aesthetic – harmony – which can be seen most clearly in Ritual and in music. Ritual and music help us to bring to expression our inner equilibrium and tranquility, which ought to reflect the harmony between heaven and earth. Hsun-tzu wrote “in the wisdom and completeness of their ceremonies and music, we see the directing power of Heaven and Earth” (1986, 68). Ching notes a deep mysticism to the classic texts of Confucianism, as Sage-Kings are presented in dialogue with Heaven, as sons of Heaven receiving instructions and gaining blessings and protection. Even texts that seem to eschew this view of Heaven, such as the Doctrine of the Mean, describe how internal, emotional harmony puts one in touch with the processes of life and creativity. Because harmony links Heaven, the cosmos, and the individual in his/her social relations, this suggests to Ching the traditional microcosm-macrocosm correlation between the inner workings of human mind/hearts and the creative processes of the universe. The Doctrine of the Mean clearly expresses the belief “that emotional harmony opens man to something greater than himself” (1986, 69). According to Ching, this text supplied the impetus to a Confucian form of meditation. Ching moves on to examine Neo-Confucianism as it developed in the late first millennium/beginning of the second millennium. She is particularly interested in how Neo-Confucian meditation – though perhaps inspired by Buddhist and Taoist versions – was consistent with a classical Confucian worldview, and even opened up classic Confucian themes for further development. Neo-Confucians recognized the “need of ‘preserving the Heavenly principle and eliminating human passions’” (1986, 70). She notes two sides to Neo-Confucian spirituality, understood under the overarching terms ‘diminution’ and ‘growth’. The idea was that “spiritual growth is possible only when accompanied functionally by a certain degree of self-denial” (1986, 69). Through meditation, unity and harmony and knowledge of the moral self is sought, with the goal of self-improvement, allowing a fuller manifestation of the Heavenly principle within. Through Confucian meditation, one returns to one’s original nature. “Confucian meditation…entails not just an examination of conscience, but is definitely oriented toward a higher consciousness through the emptying of the self and of desires” (1986, 74–5). For Ching, Confucian history demonstrates a thoroughly mystical perspective on human existence. Perhaps the single best exemplification of Ching’s account of the Confucian perspective is found in her comment, “To become humane – that is, a perfect human being – one must ‘preserve’ and ‘nurture’ the Heavenly principle within one’s mind and heart” (1986, 71). It seems, then, for Ching mystical belief is at the center of Confucian thought. And this would seem to put her – at least superficially – at odds with the approaches of Seligman et al. and Ames, who focus on socially beneficent and

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aesthetic behavior, respectively. Lurking behind all of these accounts, however, has been the idea of personal change. Confucianism seems to involve a program for personal change; the question is, what kind of change does Confucianism promote?



The View of Taylor

Taylor (1990) claims that the idea of transformation is what allows us to distinguish between a philosophical absolute and a religious absolute. In effect, philosophical absolutes changes how we think; religious absolutes change how we are. His argument is that in Confucianism, we have a clear example of a religious absolute that effects transformation. Taylor focuses on several different historical periods and aspects of Confucianism to make his point; I will draw on some of his analysis in a later section when I argue my own position. For now, I want to focus on his account of classical  Confucianism, the role of the sage, and how Neo-Confucians sought to attain sagehood. Taylor begins his discussion, as does Ching, by examining the elements of classical Confucianism that suggest a cosmological aspect. He focuses on the concept of Heaven, which was the name of the high God of the Chou people. He suggests that for Confucius, “the relationship of humankind to Heaven” functions as an absolute. But does this cosmological principle functions as a philosophical absolute or a religious absolute? Taylor argues that for an absolute to function as a religious absolute, it must involve personal transformation. He writes, “Religion provides not only for a relationship with what is defined as the absolute, but provides as well a way for the individual to move toward that which is identified as the absolute” (1990, 3, italics mine). Ultimate transformation is the “quintessential characteristic in the identification of a religious tradition.” If this is the case, the “question for the Confucian tradition is the degree to which Heaven, or the Principle of Heaven, establishes a relationship with humankind that provides a means of ultimate transformation, such that humankind might realize a transformed relationship and thus enter into a transformed state of being.” Taylor suggests that we find the answer to that question in the Sage, who features large in both classical and Neo-Confucianism. Taylor argues that “in the relationship between Heaven as a religious absolute and the sage as a transformed person, we have the identification of a soteriological process and, as a result, the identification of the religious core of the tradition” (1990, 3). Importantly, the Sage, in his/her relationship to Heaven, serves as a model for the relationship of the Confucian tradition as a whole to Heaven. Taylor imagines the soul of the Confucian tradition to be the production of a lineage of Sage-Kings. Taylor’s account of classical Confucianism focuses on the way in which a peculiar kind of power was supposed to be released through sagehood. That power was viewed

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as flowing from the cosmological structure of the universe. In classical Confucianism, to develop one’s moral nature was not an exercise in developing one’s potential only; it was, in addition, to establish correlation with the Way of Heaven. This was viewed as a establishing a relationship with an immanent, absolute principle. The Way of Heaven was viewed as being the “ultimate moral order of the universe itself of which humankind is but a microcosm” (1990, 21). From this unseen but real source of causal efficacy, both human nature and the cosmos itself gained their moral nature. The great SageKings of the past understood the Way of Heaven, and thus became conduits for the release of the power of Heaven into their rule. Confucians, according to Taylor, asked the rulers of their day to take a risk that wasn’t really a risk, if one knew the efficacy of Heaven. They were asked to focus not on political power and strength, but rather on a return to the ways of moral virtue, particularly exemplified in the Sage-Kings of the past. Because the moral nature of the individual was also the moral nature of the cosmos, getting into right relationship with Heaven would bring security, as the Way of Heaven itself would act to bring all things into order. No action beyond proper relationship to Heaven was needed. This Effortless Action would release moral virtue, resulting in political security and well-being. The Sage way of life manifests the Way of Heaven to the world, and since Confucianism had as its goal to transmit the Way, the deeds of the Sages became the model for how the Way was to be taken up in the present. Eventually, the ‘Five Classics’ of Confucianism, which record the deeds of the Sages, would be engraved in stone and become state orthodoxy. Finally, let us look at Taylor’s account of the process of attaining sagehood in NeoConfucianism. For neo-Confucians like Chu Hsi, the classics are useful because they have a “philosophical capacity to reveal…the underlying metaphysical structure revealed in all things,” called Principle (1990, 33). When one approaches the classics, it is to be done for their value in self-cultivation, not as an exercise in philology. Since the classics are the quintessential expression of Principle, they can “penetrate to the deepest layers of one’s own nature” and are useful for “unraveling…the depth of a person’s moral and spiritual core, his true nature and mind” (1990, 35). This view of the classics and their role in transformation – though implemented differently in Neo-Confucianism than in classical Confucianism4 – was rooted in the same cosmological view that played a role in classical Confucianism: the relation of Heaven to the cosmos and to humanity. For Neo-Confucians, Heaven is the unifying structure of the world; everything shares in it and is unified by it. Moral virtue unifies everything; Heaven and earth are one body, and there can be no limit to Humanity when properly cultivated in oneself.

4 Specifically, through an emphasis on meditational techniques in Neo-Confucianism that distinguishes it from classical Confucianism’s emphasis on ritual deference.

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Discussion Now that we have these four perspectives in view, what sense can we make of Confucianism in light of the categories suggested by the emergence perspective developed in this book? First, we must note that there are many aspects of Confucianism that seem to confound the discussion, and each confounding aspect acts as a mirror suggesting what each of our author’s implicit theory of ‘religion’ is. One confounding element is the fact that there seems to be an internal discussion within Confucianism itself concerning whether transformation occurs from ‘outside-in’, as seems suggested by a ‘sociological’ strain of Confucianism, or from ‘inside-out’, as seems to be suggested by an ‘idealist’ strain of Confucianism.5 A second confounding element is that the emphasis of classical Confucianism on the King and the State can be contrasted with another strand in Confucianism emphasizing the importance of self-cultivation in every individual.6 A third confounding element is the fact that the divine in Confucianism developed in an impersonal direction, in an age where personal gods were the norm.7 A final confounding element – perhaps the most important – is the fact that in Confucianism the ‘ontology of the Absolute’ – the way the divine is characterized – seems to develop away from a pole of a pre-existing, stable, transcendent ‘other’, and in the direction of a immanent, dynamic, patterning of the here-andnow. I believe much of the difference in the accounts of Confucianism in the works examined above can be seen to be based in commitments to one or another of these poles as the basis for defining religion. And I suggest none of these in themselves are relevant to the discussion of the status of Confucianism as a religious community. To make this point, I want to take up this last confounding element in a little more depth, as a proper understanding of decentering and its role in the teleodynamics of a religious community can helpfully clear things up. To do this, the positions of Ames and Ching must be contrasted, as I believe their differences lie in how they articulate the ‘ontology of the Absolute’. Ames, as we have seen, tries to distinguish Confucianism 5 Fung (1966) argues that this debate – first seen in the differences between Mencius and Hsun Tzu, is at the heart of the Confucian discussion throughout the ages. Also, see Fingarette’s (1972, 46–57) discussion of the difference between Ritual and Humanity in Confucius’ thought for an ‘outside-in’ perspective, and Taylor’s (1990, Chap. 4) discussion of ‘spiritual autobiography’ in Neo-Confucianism for an inside-out perspective. 6 Compare Taylor’s (1990, 7) and Fung’s (1966, 215) discussion of the ‘traditional place’ and ‘proper sphere’ of Confucianism in statecraft, to Tu’s (1986, 10) discussion of Neo-Confucian concerns, where he states that the institutionalization of Confucianism was the ‘loss’ of true Confucianism. 7 Note that in Fung’s history of Confucianism (1966, Chap. 1), ‘natural’ is largely equated with ‘impersonal’, and ‘superstition’ (and religion) with ‘personal’, and thus he argues that Confucianism is philosophy, not religion.

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from secular humanism, on the one hand, and a Western, Christianized ‘religion’ on the other. He argues that the Western model of religion, which relies on the worship of the divine as something prior, independent, and external, is countered in Confucianism by a model of religion where ordinary human experience, when properly lived, can be the source of intense ‘religious’ experience. But when it comes to discussing what ‘religion’ and ‘religious’ actually boil down to in terms of individual transformation, Ames suggests the practice of Ritual is simply learned patterns of deference performed individually and elegantly. Ritual unleashes the uniqueness of a participant as one engages the aesthetic project of becoming a person, achieving a disposition, an attitude, a posture, and an identity. Ritual is personal performance, revealing one’s worth to oneself and one’s community. Though Ames argues that the Confucian goal is towards an immanent, here-and-now patterning of life that is religious, his account of how one achieves this seems thoroughly mundane, a matter of self-perfection and the external expression of aesthetic grace. Ching’s account, on the other hand, so strongly emphasizes the interior and mystical nature of transformation in Confucianism – the experienced reality of “the will of Heaven”; “the things of the spirit”; the desire for “something greater than [man]”; a “higher consciousness”; and the “quest for sagehood, which can only be understood with reference to the interior life…and sometimes to mystical experience”8 – that one wonders how any of the other authors we’ve examined could have had a different opinion. The problem here, I think, is that her argument uses metaphors taken from the original context of Confucianism, as well as from the Western audience she is largely addressing. These metaphors suggest an ‘ontological absolute’, removed from the here-and-now: a person (God) in a place (Heaven) and at a time (antedating human experience). The absolute is distant from mundane human experience of the here-and-now. However, contra Ching, as Confucianism developed against these characterizations, its Dominant Symbols were transformed into metaphors involving a ‘dynamic patterned absolute’, the Way. The Way is characterized as always present in every moment of the here-and-now, though requiring a type of ‘spiritual excavation’ to be known.9 While Ching certainly notes the dynamic aspect of Confucian Dominant Symbols,10 she seems to overstate the way interiority, and the distance it suggests from the here-and-now, is necessary for Confucian spiritual practice; Confucian dominant Symbols more naturally lead to an emphasis on embodied practice. In fact, Taylor notes 8 9 10

Ching (1986, 66, 69, 75, 79). Fingarette’s account (1972, 16–24) of the chief metaphor of classical Confucianism – the Way – is very helpful in understanding this. “Confucian mysticism enables the person to perceive the profoundly dynamic character of the Heavenly principle within, the principle by which birds fly, fishes swim and human beings love virtue” (1986, 79).

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that Neo-Confucian debates concerning the value of meditation circled around the tension between the distance from the here-and-now presupposed by interiority, and the presentness that is the chief characteristic of the Way.11 So what does emergence theory add to this discussion? An implication of viewing religious communities from the perspective of Rocha & Hordijk’s three criteria is that the ‘center’ of a religious community is the way ritual and myth produce decentered consciousness. In other words, to use Taylor’s terminology, the way religious transformation occurs. And one crucial aspect of this process is the expectation of, and submission to, a hidden cause, which is the necessary precursor to decentering. The critical point is if the Confucian Way is considered to exist in a way that is hidden from normal consciousness, normal consciousness must be suppressed. The discipline of self-cultivation required to attain sagehood must necessarily involve quieting and suppressing aspects of human nature to allow the true, hidden nature of Humanity to be expressed.12 So when Ames rightly explains how Heaven should not be thought of as a ‘place out there’, but rather as an aesthetic manifestation ‘here’, but at the same time doesn’t acknowledge the hidden aspect of Heaven to normal experience, he misses the role decentering plays in Confucian transformation. And when Ching rightly notices the hidden nature of the Way to normal consciousness, but doesn’t put enough emphasis on the immanent nature of that absolute principle, she can overstate the place of mystical interiority in Confucianism. This is why I think that Taylor, by placing emphasis on the nature of Confucian transformation, places the emphasis in exactly the right place. It is not how myth exists in its inert form that is most central to a religious community; what is central is the way that it is taken up as a source of decentering, in its potent form. Seligman et al. and Ames – at least in the works we examined – do not consider how Confucian myths point to a divine Way hidden from normal experience, and this allows them to picture Confucianism as a way to perfect certain social relations, relying on what one does to and for oneself. The way anomalous experience has been sympathetically treated in Confucianism confirms that decentering is of profound importance to understanding it (and this in turn demonstrates the usefulness of an emergence perspective to the problem). I have 11 12

See Taylor (1990, 94). That quieting can occur in a multitude of ways in the Confucian tradition, both through disciplined embodied action, as well as through meditation techniques. A full account of this in Confucianism would be a project in its own right, but Fung, Taylor, Ching, and Fingarette each suggest different ways that this self-quieting occurs. Note particularly Ching’s discussion of ‘dimunition’, which strongly suggests Durkheim’s negative cult. Even Ames’ account of how Confucius is portrayed in the middle chapters of the Analects offers a perspective on this.

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argued that anomalous experience is always at least invited through participation in a religious community, through the way ritual and myth establishes non-material, hidden truths as real and authoritative. And while decentering does not require it, anomalous experience can serve as the most spectacular demonstration of the efficacy of the hidden world in bringing about religious transformation. Does Confucianism have a place for anomalous experience? Scholars have rightly pointed to the ‘ordinariness’ that is claimed to be central to Confucian transformation; this, I think, provides the impetus to the approaches of Seligman et al. and Ames, where ‘ordinary’ meanings are given to key Confucian terms. But the ordinariness referenced in Confucian transformation is best thought of as the fact that the Way is to be found in ordinary experience – familiar experience such as family life – and not that the Way itself is ordinary. There has always been a component to Confucianism suggesting anomalous experience of the Way. Confucius assumed a “magic power”13 that provided the basis for taking a ‘risk that is not a risk’ in his arguments for moral reform to the political leaders of his day, and he stated that Heaven had given him his task. Mencius, one of the leading initial interpreters of Confucius, speaks of the “great flood of Spirit” that suggests a powerful experience during his meditative practice.14 And the expectation of “sudden enlightenment” in Chu Hsi,15 exemplified in the spiritual autobiographies of Neo-Confucian sages,16 demonstrates a friendliness to anomalous experience in Neo-Confucian life. Taylor, trying to summarize the historical data on anomalous experience in Neo-Confucianism, suggests that the basic view during this period was that Confucian practice should not strive towards experiencing anomalous sudden enlightenment, since ordinary self-cultivation is sufficient to produce Confucian transformation. However, sudden enlightenment was considered a sign of the emergence of Humanity, and a prelude to the correct application of one’s moral efforts.17 I suggest the reason Confucians throughout their history have been friendly to anomalous experience is that decentering – allowing the ‘hidden’ truths to be made manifest in individual consciousness – is part and parcel of the way Confucian myths are made effective in Confucian life.

13 14

15 16 17

Fingarette, Ch. 1. On this topic, Richey (2005) writes, “It is [on the topic of the great flood of Spirit] that Mencius is at his most mystical, and recent scholarship has suggested that he and his disciples may have practiced a form of meditative discipline akin to yoga…While faint glimpses of what may be ascetic and meditative disciplines sometimes appear in the Analects, nowhere in the text are there detailed discussions of nurturing one’s qi such as can be found in Mencius 2A2.” Fung, 305–6. Taylor, Ch. 4. Taylor (1990, 111–13).

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Okada as Example of a Confucian Sage

As a final example of the way Confucianism demonstrates Rocha & Hordijk’s three criteria, let us consider Taylor’s account of Okada Takehiko, a Confucian whom he knew and interviewed over a number of years.18 I will present Okada as a modern Confucian seeking sagehood, defending Confucian myths for the sake of individual transformation and social redemption. Taylor says that when he first met Okada, he was struck by the difference between meeting a mere scholar of the tradition, and meeting someone in whom the tradition ‘lives’. He says the distinction between these two kinds of people is both obvious and hard to capture. He writes that Okada’s concern, instead of being primarily of academic interest, is for the “plight of his generation,” since he feels the world is in “tremendous moral and spiritual decline” (1990, 140). This phrase suggests that Okada seems to be holding the world as he sees it to a universal standard, an absolute ideal, which he himself has embraced, and which the world has fallen from. Okada tells Taylor that the solution to the moral and spiritual decline he sees is the practice of Confucian meditation, a practice that he has long embraced. Okada says “that it is these kinds of practices that will provide a means to solve the problems of the world in positive ways” (1990, 141). The reason Okada believes Confucian meditation to be a universally powerful method of rectification can be gleaned from his comments on modern science. While he supports the progress of science, he is disturbed by the lack of connection between scientific and Confucian worldviews. But why would he think there should be a connection between them? Okada refers to Chu Hsi’s view that human nature and the laws of nature operate on the same principle, that there is a natural relationship between them. The ethical nature of humanity as exemplified in Confucianism can and should be extended to the nature of all things. And conversely, if a scientific worldview fails to incorporate the ethical nature of humanity as part of nature itself, it will misunderstand nature. This is a clear example that demonstrates Okada takes Confucian myths to be true; a hidden reality is the ground for both cosmic and human truths. But why would Okada be convinced that these particular myths are true, as opposed to others? Isn’t he aware that there are other cosmological viewpoints on the world? And why would he think the ethical goodness of humanity is the true state of things? Aren’t there other viewpoints on the ‘true’ nature of humanity? Okada answers both of these questions in the same way. He acknowledges there are other positions on the true nature of the cosmos and humanity, but he appeals to the deep inner transformation that Confucian meditation has given him, confirming the truth of Confucian views. The goodness of human nature is not, for Okada, a product of rational inquiry, but a product of insight produced by deep inner experience. 18

I am taking this from Taylor (1990, Chap. 9).

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Through the introspective and meditational techniques of Confucianism, the true nature of humanity and the cosmos can be found by anyone who responds to the Confucian invitation to experience for themselves the goodness at the core of reality. I believe these comments are an example of the way ritual and myth produce decentering, reveal hidden powers that solve existential problems, and provide the motives to reproduce those myths. And though Okada does not specifically discuss it, Confucian tradition asserts that as individuals en masse (or, depending on your account of Confucianism, their enlightened leaders) pursue this non-mundane way of approaching experience, the sociality that results will manifest the full flowering of the Way. Okada, in response to a further question by Taylor, takes an argumentative tack that confirms he is practicing Confucianism in a way conforming to the dynamics of a metaperformative strange loop. When specifically pushed by Taylor on whether he is advocating a universal Confucian way of salvation for all people everywhere, or merely a return to ‘religion’ in whatever manifestation it may appear, he responds by saying that since he is concerned with respect for human life, his concern transcends particular religious traditions, even the particularity of Confucianism. So it seems he is saying ‘any religious tradition will do’. But he goes on to say he thinks Confucianism is better suited to provide the respect for human life he advocates, since its focus has always been on humankind. In Humanity, the Way of Heaven is reflected most perfectly. Thus, his overall argument, whether he recognizes it or not, is that the central concern of Confucianism is in fact the central problem of humanity – Confucianism is a solution to the central ineliminable opposition of real human experience. In human behavior, we see a tendency to disrespect true human nature, but that problem is mystically resolved by discovering the Way of Heaven that is the real core of human nature. And that makes Confucianism the best choice for solving the problem. I suggest he believes this because he participates in ritual demonstrating his submission to Confucian myths. This dynamic takes the particular interests of Confucianism and translates them through his meditative experiences into the universal and proper view of things, and proposes solutions to the problems it indicates taken from a repertoire of Confucian Dominant Symbols. From Okada’s perspective as a ritual participant, a Confucian response to this problem just ‘happens’ to be the solution. So he can think that his response is not coming from a Confucian-centered particularity, but rather from a pragmatic concern for solving a problem. What he doesn’t note is that Confucianism selects one perspective from a large number of potential perspectives on human experience, makes it authoritative, and then offers the best solution to the problem highlighted by that particular perspective. This interpretation is further confirmed by a line of discussion between Okada and Taylor that superficially seems to contradict this characterization. Taylor says Okada believes we don’t need to have Confucianism in the future, just a focus on the issue of human dignity. This is because particular, historically-contingent Confucian doctrines

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may not withstand criticism; ancient teaching should not be a static embodiment of authority.19 However, my take on this discussion is that Okada is merely renouncing a fundamentalist approach to the textual tradition; what he clearly does not abandon is the belief that the hidden world exists as the Confucian tradition says it does. In fact, he seems so convinced the ‘real’ world exists in the way the Confucian tradition says it does, he doesn’t feel the need to fight for the particularities of the actual, historical Confucian tradition itself. Okada tells Taylor “the essential Confucian teaching does not need its own reification” (1990, 147 italics mine).

Conclusion Taylor says Confucian scholars such as Tu point to Okada an example of the living Confucian tradition. And his account of Okada seems to confirm the expectations that an emergent view of Confucianism would predict. To the degree that Okada represents a lineage of Confucians who sought sagehood and built Confucian communities, going back through the Neo-Confucians, Mencius, and ultimately to Confucius himself, we can profitably talk about Confucianism as a religious community. I could point to other aspects of the Confucian tradition that lead one to conclude it adheres to the formal description of a teleodynamic social entity utilizing symbolic reference as a way to encode social memory. Particularly noteworthy is the way the tradition evolved in its cultural environment during the period of strong Taoist and Buddhist influences in China. There, the evidence suggests the tradition, while maintaining its boundaries, demonstrated intelligent variation, taking on ideas from other traditions in a particularly Confucian way, supporting a flowering of ‘New Confucianism’.20 But I will finish Appendix with the observation that Ames’ account of Con­ fucianism is strongly reminiscent of Lowenthal’s account of Haitian Voodoo, if we, pace Ames, take account of Confucian decentering in the way I think the evidence suggests. Ames, like Lowenthal, describes a particular aesthetic which binds together individual self-expression and the community in which the ‘full flowering’ of religious life occurs. If we note the element of decentering Ames ignores, we see that a rituallyauthorized theological component – the Way and its manner of manifestation in 19

20

This leads Taylor to equate Okada’s position with the comment by Tu, “concern for the survival of the Confucian tradition…must be subsumed under a broader concern for the future of humankind” (Quoted in Taylor 1990, 147). Particularly helpful in this respect is Fung’s characterization of that history, Lior’s (2014) account of Confucianism as a complex adaptive system, and Taylor’s account (1990, Chap. 5), which seems permeated by a concern for both boundaries and creative responses to challenges from without.

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human nature – Humanity – links together the psychic and the social under particular Dominant Symbols. This ‘flowering’ of a religious way of life is reproduced as the ineliminable oppositions of human life are mystically resolved through individual transformation in the space created by a community organized around ritual and myth. I suggest the overall arc of this section allows us to answer Neville’s question about Confucianism in the affirmative – the large-scale trajectory of its organizational dynamics exhibits the characteristics of a symbolic social teleodynamic system.

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Index adaptive systems 22, 44 Alcorta, Candace 82 Ames, Roger 168–171, 174, 176, 177, 180 ant colonies comparison with human sociality 85 Ape Language Research 57 Archer, Margaret 38, 88 Austin, J.L. 27, 44, 72 Barbieri, Marcello 55 Bateson, Gregory 21, 55 Bechtel, William 9 Beckermann, A., H. 17 belief states 142 Berkeley, Bishop 17 Bickerton, Derek 85 Bickhard, Mark 47 Blackmore, Susan 113, 114 Bloch, Maurice 143 Boddy, Janice 92 Boehm, Chris 110 Boyer, Pascal 37 Boyle, Robert 15 Brown, Derren 147, 148, 155, 156, 158, 160 Calvinism 111 Campbell, Donald 47, 80 Carpenter, James 159 Cary, Phillip 151 Cashman, Tyrone 78, 147, 148 Chalmers, David 17, 49 Chase, Philip 88 Ching, Julia 170–172, 174–176 Cho, Francisca 100 circular causal structure 21, 50, 53, 65, 94, 101 and social dynamics 130 Clayton, Philip 44 communitas characterized by iconic reference 8, 88 community of interpretation 8, 88–90, 99, 129 Comparative Religious Ideas Project 4 conceptual blends 75, 77–79 Confucianism 10, 36, 43, 96, 165, 166, 168–176, 178–180

consciousness of consciousnesses 10, 131, 139, 157 construction code 67, 94, 99 Csordas, Thomas 39, 93 Davies, Paul 7, 18 Deacon, Terrence 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 38, 44–49, 51–55, 57, 59, 66, 77–79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 92, 93, 102, 147, 148, 161 speculates on emergent sociality 19 decentering 33–42, 95–102, 137, 141, 142, 145, 149, 155, 159, 161, 162, 165, 174, 176, 179, 180 definition of 34 supported by metaperformativity 35 Dennett, Daniel 4, 9, 44, 107, 114–125, 136, 142, 143, 145–147, 150, 160 divine Beings and Ways definition of 4 divine pre-existence critique of 13–14 DNA 5, 52, 65, 78, 80, 138, 160 the referential capacity of 52 domain-general reasoning 75, 77 Dominant Symbols 24–27, 29, 36, 38, 41, 99, 141, 144, 147, 165, 169, 175, 179, 181 Durkheim, Émile 6, 8–10, 12, 74, 84, 87, 97, 101, 102, 107, 110, 116, 117, 126–140, 146, 149, 155, 157, 160, 161, 176 dynamically incoherent memory 67, 94, 96, 102 Dynamic Systems Theory 64 Dyson, Freeman 158 Eddington, Arthur 153 Einstein, Albert views on religion 148, 149 Elder-Vass, Dave 88 Eliade, Mircea 9, 117 Ellickson, Robert 110 emergence challenges the ‘machine metaphor’ 46 compared to reduction 45–46 critiques of 18 defined by organization 4, 7, 9, 45

193

Index Durkheim’s view of religion as 127 memory and 4, 7 the philosophical question 17, 160 religion, example of 6, 93, 157 religion, life, and mind examples of 3, 73 the scientific question 17, 160 a type of naturalism 3 types of 7, 48 emergent emotions 147, 148 encoded memory 4, 32, 74, 102, 127, 160 encoded social memory 24, 32, 38, 92, 95, 138 Fauconnier, Gilles 75, 79 Favareau, Donald 5, 78 Fichte, Johann 90 Fingarette, Herbert 174–177 Fitch, W. Tecumseh 84 Frankl, Viktor 37 Freud, Sigmund 159 Fung, Yu-lan 174, 176, 180 Gardner, D.S. 93 Geerts, Henri 92 Geertz, Clifford 31, 35, 143 genetic code 5, 63, 65 Gödel Incompleteness Theorem 68, 70, 138 Gödel, Kurt 68–73, 102 Goodenough, Ursula 44, 81, 83 Grady, Joseph 76 Griffin, David 5 group selection 107 Hayden, Brian 149 Hofstadter, Douglas 4, 7, 44, 58, 63, 67–69, 72, 73, 101, 138 homeodynamics 48, 53 effects of language on human sociality 83 explanation of 48 hypnotic suggestibility and healing 142 ‘I’

as iconic memory representing the ‘community of interpretation’ 67, 89, 90, 92, 162 icons 54–56, 58, 59 indexes 54, 56, 58, 71, 78 as examples of associative learning 56

interpretants 60–62, 73 interpretant-vehicle 60–63, 94–96 Rosetta Stone example of 61 interpretation 8, 25, 34, 36, 54, 58–63, 66, 68, 69, 72, 88–90, 92, 93, 98, 100, 154, 179 explanation of 59 James, William 33 Juarrero, Alice 44 Jung, Carl 159 Keane, Webb 32 Kerby, Anthony 85 Kirkpatrick, Lee 79 Knitter, Paul 13, 14 Krauthammer, Charles 137 Lambek, Michael 32 least discordant remainder 53 Lemba people 11 linguistic construction of sociality characterized by indexical reference 8, 38, 90, 91, 137 Lior, Yair 88, 180 Lowenthal, Ira 40, 41, 97, 180 Manchester, William 87 matter early modern metaphysics 5 critique of 15–17 going beyond 17 Mayer, Elizabeth 158 McClenon, James 142 McLaughlin, Brian 18, 44 McNamara, Patrick 33–35, 37, 97, 98, 145, 149, 152 meme theory Dennett’s memetic theory of religion 121 religion and 118 metaperformativity 27–32, 35, 37, 40, 41, 95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 136, 142, 148, 162, 165 Mill, J.S. 44 Mithen, Steven 75, 79 monistic materialism 15, 17, 160 morphodynamics 48, 50, 53, 84 effects of language on human sociality 84 explanation of 50 feedback effect on self-narratives 85

194 multi-level selection theory 107 Wilson’s claim that it explains religion 111 Murphy, Ronald 145 myth adaptive because it has no concrete content 21 in Rappaport 24 relation to Ultimate Sacred Postulates and Dominant Symbols 27 myth and ritual are they evolved features? 74, 112 Nagel, Thomas 5, 16 Neville, Robert 165, 166, 168, 181 niche construction human culture the result of 83 Nuremberg rally demonstrates numinousness 32 Okada, Takehiko example of a Confucian sage 166, 178–180 Patil, Parimal 152 Pattee, Howard 4, 5, 7, 44, 63–67, 94, 99, 101 Paul, Robert 28 Peirce, C.S. 44, 54–57, 59–62, 70, 71 performative utterance 27, 31, 35, 72, 73, 102 Peters, Richard 6 Plantinga, Alvin 6 Principia Mathematica 68, 69, 73 problem of consciousness 18, 162 correlated with the problem of divine activity 19 Proudfoot, Wayne 33, 35, 36 Quine, W.V.O. 69, 102 Rabin, John 33 Rappaport, Roy 6, 8–10, 12, 20–27, 29–32, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 73, 74, 81, 82, 93, 95, 97–102, 107, 115, 116, 138, 142, 144, 150, 160–162 the ‘great inversion’ 115 Reid, Paul 87 religion adaptive dynamics of 29 an adaptive system like life 22, 101

Index an emergent self having conscious experience 101 characterized by symbolic reference 8 cybernetics and 6 as emergent cultural phenomenon 12 long-lived 11 naturalistic stance towards 13–15 Rappaport’s definition of 23 and the self, as nested emergent ­systems 125, 150 sui generis properties of 6 religious experience invited by metaperformativity 35, 97 and McNamara’s view of ‘decentering’ 34 Rappaport’s view of 30–31 Wildman’s understanding of 33 Richardson, Robert 9 Richey, Jeffrey 177 ritual in Rappaport 22, 27 Rappaport’s definition of 27 Rocha, Luis Mateus 65 Rocha, Luis Mateus and Hordijk, Wim  66, 94, 99, 100 three criteria for identifying symbol use  67, 74, 93, 94, 96, 99, 138, 165, 168, 176, 178 Royce, Josiah 87, 88, 129, 154, 157 Sagan, Carl 158 San people 11, 158 Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue 57 Saver, Jeffrey 33 Sawyer, Keith 6, 127, 129 Searle, John 72, 87, 90 Sekida, Katsuki 152 self reference how it creates truth 70 self-simplifying 7, 46, 47, 50 Seligman, Adam 166, 168, 171, 176, 177 semantic closure 44, 64, 65, 74, 93, 94, 101, 138 central to defining a ‘self’ 101 semiosis 54, 61, 63, 68, 78 semiotic 5, 44, 52, 53, 57, 60, 61, 69, 92 Shanafelt, Robert 147 Sherman, Jeremy 51 Shermer, Michael 158 signs and signification 54–55 Smith, Huston 114, 158 Smuts, Barbara B. 81

195

Index social control feature 22, 109, 110 ritual as 23 society as emergent, according to Durkheim 129 Somé, Malidoma 159 Sosis, Richard 82 specified absence 38, 39, 41, 141, 144, 159 ‘spiritual’ Dennett’s definition of 146 spiritual map 24, 32, 38, 92, 146, 154–156, 159, 160, 162, 166 Squier, Richard King 100 Stausberg, Michael 10–12 strange loop 44, 67, 68, 101, 161, 179 subjective experience 4, 5, 20, 150, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161 super-subjectivity 151, 155, 156, 158, 159 Augustine on the divine as 151 Brahmanical Hinduism on the divine as 152 Dharmakirti on the divine as 152 modern physicists, on the divine as 153 Nasr, S.H. on the divine as 151 Paul Tillich on the divine as 151 supervenience 49 symbolic reference 5, 8, 57–59, 64, 74, 75, 77–79, 81, 92–94, 180 connection to the prefrontal cortex 78 constitutes habits of symbol-users 59 human language and 5 religion and 5, 38 symbols 24, 25, 31, 54, 57, 59, 64–69, 71–74, 79, 93–96, 99, 128, 154 definition of 57 Taylor, Rodney 96, 172–180 teleodynamics 48, 51, 53, 86, 92–94, 160, 174 effects of language on human sociality 86

telos teleodynamics defined by 53 therapeutic truth 141, 144, 160 Thompson, Evan 17, 19 totemism in Durkheim 6, 127, 132–136, 139 Towards a Science of Consciousness conference 18 transducer religious experience as 39, 93, 96 transformation 10, 11, 34, 96, 151, 152, 165, 168, 169, 172–178, 181 Tumarkin, Nina 22, 137 Turner, Mark 75, 76, 79, 144 Turner, Victor 90, 92, 143 his conception of communitas 89 Tutu, Desmond 144 Tu, Weiming 174, 180 Ultimate Sacred Postulates 24, 25, 27–29, 35, 99, 102, 141, 165, 169 Van de Port, Mattijs 159 Van Gulick, Robert 48 von Neumann, John 4, 7, 63 Voodoo 10, 40, 180 Watanabe, John M. 81 ‘we intentionality’ 90, 91 ‘we narratives’ 87, 88 Winston Churchill, example of 87 Wikstrom, Owe 39, 93 Wilber, Ken 153 Wildman, Wesley 33, 34, 98, 149 Wiles, Janet 81 Wilson, David Sloan 11, 22, 44, 80, 107–112, 114–116, 120, 121, 123, 125, 134