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The ellipses in the long Armstrong excerpt (pp. 7-8) mark a discussion of Mencius; perhaps I should not have omitted it. After all, plenty attest to a higher cause, and, really, what is that empathy, that reflexive action and risk of self the Chinese philosopher of the fourth and third centuries BCE describes, in order to save another? Some who have behaved heroically suggest you just don't think, because it's the right and only thing to do. The underlying implication, that it's just that important, that you
don't not, as such, describes a rudimentary context of
religio.
Do we, then, seek the evolution of the sacred? The transition we're looking for marks an important difference between writhing and wailing in living empathy for a dying animal, the time and security and downright will of making art from blood and bone, the rise of cooperative organization among larger groups of hunter-gatherers to build early temples, on through to the monopoly on violence as the ambit of the sacred at Sialk.
By the time we get around to Sumer and "the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern world"
(Armstrong, 23), we are also looking at an innovation at the heart of many modern critiques against "religion", or, as such, modern critiques against an idiosyncratic and eccentric, albeit historically influential, assertion of religion.
We can spend any number of posts identifying the connections 'twixt the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of Armstrong's consideration of religion in the West, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries described by scholar Mark Noll:
Western Protestantism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was moving from establishment forms of religion, embedded in traditional, organic, premodern political economies, to individualized and affectional forms adapted to modernizing, rational, and market-oriented societies. Theological manifestations of these changes can be described in several ways. They first reoriented specific beliefs: God was perceived less often as transcendent and self-contained, more often as immanent and relational. Divine revelation was equated more simply with the Bible alone than Scripture embedded in a self-conscious ecclesiastical tradition. The physical world created by God was more likely to be regarded as understandable, progressing, and malleable, than as mysterious, inimical, and fixed. Theological method came to rely less on instinctive deference to inherited confessions and more on self-evident propositions organized by scientific method.
Theological changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also involved a shift in meaning for key concepts that operated in both religious and political life, for example, “freedom”, “justice”, “virtue”, and “vice”. For theology, the process at work was the same as Gordon Wood once described for intellectual developments more generally: “Although words and concepts may remain outwardly the same for centuries, their particular functions and meanings do not and could not remain static—not as long as individuals attempt to use them to explain new social circumstances and make meaningful new social behavior.” In America as much was happening in theology from new meanings given to old words as from the introduction of new vocabularies.
(4)
Understanding the transitions of the seventeenth that fomented the dynamism Noll describes of the eighteenth and nineteenth is important in comprehending both the modern critiques against an idiosyncratic and eccentric conception of religion, and the errors thereof. But if the Church of England, arising in the sixteenth century, is an epitome of a critique against religion having to do with social control, then for the Christian experience that became the early Church, the politics did not so much rise as they were the crucible in which the hierarchy formed. Later schisms and reformations do not seem to have learned the lesson, and if the naked interests of Henry VIII weren't bad enough, remember that the nineteenth century included a charismatic new iteration of Christianity quite literally pulled out of a hat, and the whole thing was always political.
Once upon a time—the archaeological and early historical records—tells us why
religio exists. The historical record tells us all about why, as the question has it, these religions exist. It ought not be especially difficult to observe why we need these religious inclinations. Whether we still need them, though, depends on what part of religion we mean.
A practical context of need might be perceived
vis à vis American capitalism. Do we really need large, institutional churches? While it is tempting to say no, part of what makes church organizations important is their attendance of particular duties that otherwise are not attended. Alphabet and Facebook and a bunch of vouchers for Frito-Lay products just aren't going to replace what American Christendom does. To the other, getting rid of American Christendom won't erase the injustice it participates in. After all, Facebook and Alphabet can just keep screwing with people like they do.
Oscar Wilde↱, for instance, circa 1891:
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
If, by
religion, we mean the churches and major religious organizations, we will still need them until we figure out how to not need certain functions they perform, in the abstract ambit of the sacred, that we as a society simply
don't not do. To wit, eliminate
imposed scarcity, and challenge poverty within the human endeavor, sure, but until then we do not necessarily have other plans to address the problem.
To the other, if we consider basic obligations, that
religio moving the Paleolithic hunter would not be so useless these days. The extraordinary, industrialized mass destruction of
excess hogs and chickens for the sake of capitalism describes poorly our empathy toward our fellow creatures, both the animals we pretend to require for food, and that portion of humanity we require beg for sustenance.
What does it take to "reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible"? That is an example of what it would take to so utterly transform, or even not need the churches of our industrial-era idiosyncracy. But neither
religio nor the, daresay,
fascination Armstrong describes as aspiring to participate in a "richer and more permanent existence", or, as Williams expressed, "human beings trying to enter fully into the flow of life, so that they become part of the whole process of animal life that's going on all around them", will go away.
And if Clive Barker tells us, "Nothing ever begins", explains, "each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making", we might also suggest it true that, "hidden among [the stories] is a filigree that will, with time, become a world"
(19). That is to say, should we ever so utterly transform the idiosyncratic and eccentric theologies of our time, people will reinvent the sacred. If
fascination seemed like the wrong word because it describes something that feels too capricious, it is also true the
why of seeking meaning remains its own puzzle.
But something about our abstract obligation to something transcending ourselves suggests our religious inclinations are an evolutionary result. To the other, it's hard to imagine what we would be like without them. Historically, we wouldn't have made it this far. The results of outgrowing or evolving past such sentimentalism and frailty will depend on the reason why that adaptation comes about. Outgrowing our empathy, though, or our need for meaning, is outgrowing our humanity.
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Notes:
Armstrong, Karen. Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Barker, Clive. Weaveworld. New York: Poseidon, 1987.
Cline, Austin. "What Is Religion?" Learn Religions. 25 June 2019. LearnReligions.com. 18 June 2020. http://bit.ly/2D76E1s
Curry, Andrew. "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?" Smithsonian Magazine. November, 2008. SmithsonianMag.com. 18 June 2020. https://bit.ly/30XdTWM
Noll, Mark. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Wilde, Oscar. "The Soul of Man under Socialism". 1891. Marxists.org. 19 June 2020. http://bit.ly/1JdDOaw
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