I don't know that Wright comes out and says it, but it's clear that he is a "functionalist" when it comes to religion. His notion that God is evolving toward an inclusive form assumes that the interests of society have been served, on balance, by religion. The rest of the chapter, after "The Dark Side of Polynesian Gods," is his attempt to show how practices that seem pointless, bizarre, cruel, or inefficient could nevertheless be functional in a society that lacked most social institutions that we take for granted, such as law and currency. He has already said that these later institutions are built upon the religions of the chiefdom societies. Now he adds science to the list.

Wright may seem to digress quite a lot, but I think he does it to link these ethnographic facts to his theme. Readers who are thinking he piles on these facts would be glad, presumably, that he tells us what their significance is.

O, he does indeed love to digress and, more annoyingly, repeat himself and become rather simplistic to make sure all of his readers actually did take the point. My nit-pick in this chapter was his statement that early anthropologists were highly judgmental.....and then continued on to state that he was proud that we have gotten past the need in our society to strangle a child. And he enjoyed making the comparison of Cook's statement on the "waste of the human race" to his contemporary England throwing the poor into debtors' prison. Point taken. But....this is indeed dangerous territory he's treading on: it is difficult to draw comparisons without being judgmental.
However, he did a nice job introducing a case study of cultural evolution and its symbiosis to religious evolution and the chapter was perfectly readable.

oblivion wrote:O, he does indeed love to digress and, more annoyingly, repeat himself and become rather simplistic to make sure all of his readers actually did take the point. My nit-pick in this chapter was his statement that early anthropologists were highly judgmental.....and then continued on to state that he was proud that we have gotten past the need in our society to strangle a child. And he enjoyed making the comparison of Cook's statement on the "waste of the human race" to his contemporary England throwing the poor into debtors' prison. Point taken. But....this is indeed dangerous territory he's treading on: it is difficult to draw comparisons without being judgmental.
However, he did a nice job introducing a case study of cultural evolution and its symbiosis to religious evolution and the chapter was perfectly readable.

Yes, true, he won't avoid judging, even if his judging isn't quite the same as what is implied in the modern word 'judgmental.' Deciding whether religion has in fact been responsible for moral progress is a process of judging for which there are no real parameters available. It's like trying to say that religion has been more good than bad, or more bad than good. We judge this according to our general sense, which is always going to incorporate emotional as well as empirical data.

oblivion wrote:. . . But....this is indeed dangerous territory he's treading on: it is difficult to draw comparisons without being judgmental.
However, he did a nice job introducing a case study of cultural evolution and its symbiosis to religious evolution and the chapter was perfectly readable.

This doesn't feel like dangerous territory to me and I don't get a sense that Wright is being condescending towards primitive beliefs. The fast march of cultural evolution will always mean that habits and customs and mores of an older time period will always look dated or quaint or, in other ways, anachronistic by modern standards. It's hard to imagine that in the U.S., women were granted the right to vote just ninety years ago. That seems so strange by today's standards at a time when equality has become the norm.

Wright says religion in the Polynesian culture began to assume a rudimentary moral dimension. There was no fear of eternal punishment in the afterlife, but there was fear of being punished in this life. A murderer might be haunted by the ghost of his victim, but he can make amends by building three houses, one for the victim's kin, one for his servants, and one for his bones (pg. 57). In this example, a superstitious fear of ghosts is supplied with a specific cure—build houses. You can see the beginnings of a religious tenet here. If you offend an unearthly spirit you can still make amends. During the hunter-gatherer phase and in the age of the chiefdoms, religion is still fairly nebulous and unstructured, but as religion evolves it becomes more structured. You would have to convince me how this is any kind of improvement. I suspect it is just a consequence of a more complex society.

(Michael from The Office: I'm not superstitious. I'm a little stitious.)

Since we are talking about the moral dimension of religion, it may be relevant to look at Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Kohlberg developed a theory that delineates moral reasoning into six distinct cognitive stages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's ... evelopment

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)

Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/good girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)

Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)

What's important to understand, I think, is that these are stages of development, meaning that you have to pass through Level I to get to Level II and so on. It's a progression. I would think that morality at the state level would also have to pass through stages of development and that different societies will progress at different times. That's why you would see Captain Cook being appalled at the idea of human sacrifice in Polynesia because 18th century England, despite its tax prisons, was much more advanced culturally and morally. And here in the West in 2010 it's appalling to think that in some Islamic cultures, stoning is still practiced. On the other hand, we still have capital punishment and I'm not sure the psychological torture of being a dead man walking is any better than being stoned to death. But that's another discussion.

geo wrote: This doesn't feel like dangerous territory to me and I don't get a sense that Wright is being condescending towards primitive beliefs. The fast march of cultural evolution will always mean that habits and customs and mores of an older time period will always look dated or quaint or, in other ways, anachronistic by modern standards. It's hard to imagine that in the U.S., women were granted the right to vote just ninety years ago. That seems so strange by today's standards at a time when equality has become the norm.

geo, I appreciate your strong point of view here, and it is my sense, too, that in countries that have been able to modernize there are prevailing cultural attitudes that represent moral progress (I would add regard for the disabled to your rights of women). But I wonder if you would agree that this matter of us against the past, morally, is at least a tricky thing to assess. We tend to think of signature abuses occurring in the past, such as persecutions (of and by Christians, for example), but these may be committed by powerful elites and not so much by the mass of people. At any given time in the past, only isolated instances of severe abuses occurred, so we can't easily say that "everybody did it." In our own time (relative to the scope of history) we had the six million dead in The Holocaust, arguably a more heinous crime than any that preceded it. We insulate ourselves from this by saying it was isolated to one country or that it was "long ago," but when we do that we're not using the same metric that we use for an amorphous past.

Wright says religion in the Polynesian culture began to assume a rudimentary moral dimension. There was no fear of eternal punishment in the afterlife, but there was fear of being punished in this life. A murderer might be haunted by the ghost of his victim, but he can make amends by building three houses, one for the victim's kin, one for his servants, and one for his bones (pg. 57). In this example, a superstitious fear of ghosts is supplied with a specific cure—build houses. You can see the beginnings of a religious tenet here. If you offend an unearthly spirit you can still make amends. During the hunter-gatherer phase and in the age of the chiefdoms, religion is still fairly nebulous and unstructured, but as religion evolves it becomes more structured. You would have to convince me how this is any kind of improvement. I suspect it is just a consequence of a more complex society.

I think Wright also thinks that the complexity of the societies (nothing more than population growth?) created the hierarchies of gods, illustrating his main point that religions change according to the facts on the ground. It wasn't an improvement in itself, but Wright puts it as a way-station to a god that did encompass morality (even if, as with the early Jewish God, the morality is restricted to the in-group). Wright's belief is that the complexity of society made necessary the removal of the punishing or threatening function from the humans themselves to the deities.

In the background of our discussion is a matter that has caused some controversy in the past here on BT, and that is whether the good things that may be said to have come out of religion are owing to religion, or are just due to humanism winning out. The view of the side that holds religion to be regrettable usually is that its influence had to wane before any progress could come about. Wright has said several times that it's not like that, that religion is the base for everything else. He believes that cultural evolution mimics species evolution, so it's no surprise that he would think this way. And perhaps it can't be both ways, that culture evolves along the lines of natural selection, yet moral progress can be of its own, independent creation.

Since we are talking about the moral dimension of religion, it may be relevant to look at Kohlberg's stages of moral development. Kohlberg developed a theory that delineates moral reasoning into six distinct cognitive stages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's ... evelopment

Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)

Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/good girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)

Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)

What's important to understand, I think, is that these are stages of development, meaning that you have to pass through Level I to get to Level II and so on. It's a progression. I would think that morality at the state level would also have to pass through stages of development and that different societies will progress at different times. That's why you would see Captain Cook being appalled at the idea of human sacrifice in Polynesia because 18th century England, despite its tax prisons, was much more advanced culturally and morally. And here in the West in 2010 it's appalling to think that in some Islamic cultures, stoning is still practiced. On the other hand, we still have capital punishment and I'm not sure the psychological torture of being a dead man walking is any better than being stoned to death. But that's another discussion.

Thanks for bringing this in. It's interesting to see if Kohlberg's stages can be applied to societies. At least the first 3, maybe also the 4th, depend on brain maturation to develop, so they would be present in all societies regardless of time. Stage 5 surely existed from earliest times as well. As for stage 6, that's the one that Wright would say humanity needed to get to--and still needs to get to--through cultural evolution. Religions are often a barrier to that, but Wright says they may end up being a vehicle for it.

I had posted under the wrong chapter thread. Please go to "Gods of the Ancient States."

Hey DWill,

I think this last post is related to chapter four, isn't it? I'm planning on posting some of my thoughts too.

InviQtus wrote:Hello all!

Wright wrote:Modern science, like modern economics and modern law and modern government, evolved from primordial forms that were symbiotically intertwined with religious thought. In fact, it isn't obvious that we would have any of these modern institutions had it not been for early religion, which did so much to carry human social organization and culture beyond the hunter-gatherer stage.

Thus far Robert Wright has not provided us with a definition of just exactly what he means by "religion". That seems to me to be a significant omission on his part. But the way in which he is using the term suggests that religion is primarily a way of explaining how the world is that allows for and makes use of supernatural concepts and entities (to be sure, hunter- gatherer societies probably made no explicit distinction between natural and supernatural).

So if we conceive of religion this way, then it seems obvious that Wright is crediting religion for laying the groundwork for modern science too much. The point has been made by many people before that science is continuous with everyday forms of inquiry. That being the case there is no more reason to say that those early attempts to explain phenomena via supernatural explanations were any more necessary than those early attempts that lacked supernatural components.

So, just as surely as we would have morality (thus modern law and modern government) without religion, as a natural consequence of the fact that we are sentient beings living in large, complex social groups, we would have still have modern science without religion as a natural consequence of the fact that we live in a complex world that we need to figure out in order to improve our conditions and odds of survival. In fact, in my opinion, we would not have had religion to begin with without those facts of the human condition.

First, let me say that I hate this book, even though I think Wright is onto something important in the idea that the concept of god is evolving in response to specific changes in society. For starters, I think Wright has made a grievous error in his approach to looking at early religious practices and beliefs. He acts as if it is possible to separate out "religion" from the rest of a hunter/gatherer or tribal or even chiefdom society as if it were a separate entity distinct from economics, politics, healing arts, art, etc. It makes as much sense to talk about shaman, spirits, and belief in the supernatural as being the starting point from which modern medicine, science, law and politics began as it does religion. What we know as the institutions of society do not really begin to pull themselves apart until a society becomes a chiefdom and even then they are still very interwoven. I think I can show why I think this is a problem using the example of his discussion of the shaman. Wright views the shaman primarily as part of religion, serving a religious function. This is too narrow. In many societies a shaman was as much a healer and an enforcer of morality (not part of religion in h/g societies) as he/she was a religious leader (not really a good word, but I can't think of a more correct term). There are many functions that a shaman serves in a society; he/she is not just a religious figure. So which functions are religious and which are not?

Saffron wrote: First, let me say that I hate this book, even though I think Wright is onto something important in the idea that the concept of god is evolving in response to specific changes in society. For starters, I think Wright has made a grievous error in his approach to looking at early religious practices and beliefs. He acts as if it is possible to separate out "religion" from the rest of a hunter/gatherer or tribal or even chiefdom society as if it were a separate entity distinct from economics, politics, healing arts, art, etc.

I'm not sure I'll succeed in addressing the point you're making, but from Wright's statement that in these early societies there is apparently no word for religion, as well as other things he says about how religion (though they don't have the word!) infuses everything, I perceive that he's not trying to separate religion from these other entities. That couldn't be done, he says, because there is what we would call a religious dimension to every aspect of life, from the civil to the economic to the domestic.

It makes as much sense to talk about shaman, spirits, and belief in the supernatural as being the starting point from which modern medicine, science, law and politics began as it does religion.

I'm reading "shaman, spirits, and belief" as being about the same as "religion," and so I don't seem to be understanding the point. Wright does generally go along with the idea that belief in the supernatural provided a breeding ground for science, medicine, and law.

What we know as the institutions of society do not really begin to pull themselves apart until a society becomes a chiefdom and even then they are still very interwoven. I think I can show why I think this is a problem using the example of his discussion of the shaman. Wright views the shaman primarily as part of religion, serving a religious function. This is too narrow. In many societies a shaman was as much a healer and an enforcer of morality (not part of religion in h/g societies) as he/she was a religious leader (not really a good word, but I can't think of a more correct term). There are many functions that a shaman serves in a society; he/she is not just a religious figure. So which functions are religious and which are not?

I see Wright painting the shaman as a man (sadly, always?) of broad power who has a sort of contract with the people to intercede with the spirit world on their behalf. This includes healing individuals, promoting the well-being of the group, and settling disputes. The latter two functions point to the important political role of the shaman. As Wright says, "in some societies the shaman and the political leader have been one and the same " (p. 42). This seems to indicate interwovenness of institutions, so again I'm getting the feeling that Wright is mostly agreeing with what you're objecting to.

DW:
Thanks for trying to repond to my post. I will just apologize for it rather than try to clarify. It was an incomplete and muddled. It is too hard to think after a 12 hour shift.