Chapter 4 (cont):
– Religion: Sources, Objects, Methods, Moral Function
Chapter 5: The Mental Elements of Civilization
– Letters
– Science
– Art
My closing thoughts on Will Durant’s introduction the The Story of Civilization
Primitive people did not always have religion; even modern-day primitives are sometimes puzzled by the questions posed by researchers. Some modern primitives have no concept of deities at all, others recognized only malevolent gods, and didn’t even bother to try to appease them, for what good could it do? Some Native Americans believed in the concept of gods, but didn’t worship them, an approach also taken by Epicurus. The Abipone took the practical approach – contemplating only the practical tasks of life. As varied and universal across time and place the atheist views are, Durant classifies them as exceptions. The rule is that cultures for various reasons, and to various purposes (reasons and purposes being useful to distinguish) have almost always developed religion.
According to Lucretius, fear is the mother of the gods. According to Durant, fear of death most of all gives birth to religion, as do “wonder at the cause of chance events,… hope for divine aid… , and gratitude for good fortune.” The belief in a soul distinct from the body is inextricably bound with the fear or death. The extension of the concept of soul to all things leads to the first common form of religion – animism – the artifacts, and sometimes the facts, of which survive in modernity around the world, from the fairies of Ireland to the halos of Christian art.
Of the multitude of objects with souls available to worship, the first two were likely the moon and the sun. For the moon governed the cycles of fertility, both of our mothers and of the land, and formed the basis for our reckoning of time (again, into the modern day). We don’t know when sun-worship began, but it may have been tied again to the calendar and to the rise of agriculture. Every major religion had a sun god, whether the Mongol Tegri, Chinese Ti, Vedic India Dyaus pitar, Greek Zeus, or Persian Ahura. Today, we still beseech “heaven help us” and sports stars raise a finger to the sky for good luck and thanks. Likewise, with sky as the father, earth is the mother, and the creation story is almost universally the mating of earth to sky. Most early deities, being gods of earthly things, were female. The emergence of more male gods may have paralleled the emergence of patriarchal society.
There is hardly any superstition so old but it can be found flourishing somewhere today. Civilization is the precarious labor and luxury of a minority; the basic masses of mankind hardly change from millennium to millennium.
SoC, p. 59.
Relatively early in written history, we see religion treating poorly those with scientific theories about the world around us, as Anaxagoras was exiled from Greece in the 5th century BC for hypothesizing the the sun wasn’t a god, but just a big ball of fire. And in the time when Durant was writing this volume (1927-1932), most of Japan (the Land of the Rising Sun) believed that the Emperor was the living incarnation of the Sun God. Perhaps it is the arrogance of the present (an End of History fallacy writ large) that causes us to believe ourselves the exception to the cycle of history.
From the sky to the earth to the animals, the souls of the gods themselves seem to have been seen as the departed souls of dead men. The relationship is preserved even today in our language. Spirit in English means both soul and ghost. Cultures worldwide have prayed to their ancestors in much the same way that modern Christians invoke the assistance of the saints. Ancestor worship continues in modern times. Gods who began as indifferent evolved to fearful, and eventually become loving fathers and ancestors. “The slow progress of civilization is reflected in the tardy amiability of the gods.” As written history begins, exceptional individuals were deified, and their stories preserved.
The first method of religion was magic. The casting of spells and the making of sacrifices encouraged the fertility of woman and the earth herself. Festivals of promiscuity compensated for the infertility of (male) individuals. The earth was fertilized with the blood of beasts and almost every culture at one time appeased their gods through human sacrifice. Frequently the sacrifice (man as god) was consumed in order to confer its power to rest of the group. Magic made the priest when the knowledge needed to confer the rites grew large enough as to demand specialization. The priest has alternated with the warrior in ruling society, except when priest and warrior merged, and in so doing, transitioned from the creation to the use of religion as a means to power.
Religion uses tabu and myth to support morality. Tabu, the Polynesian word, places acts and objects off limits. Chief among these is woman. Myth seeks to reinforce behaviors that help society. The vast knowledge, and sometimes nearly as comprehensive ignorance, including knowledge of food and hygiene, of the ancients was codified in the tabus and myths of its religions. “The moral function of religion is to conserve established values, rather than create new ones.” Although for the practitioner, religion frequently serves as the basis of moral conduct, religion itself evolves not as the foundation of morality, but as an aid to it, by sanctioning the conduct demanded by environment, economic, and social circumstance.
Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. … Institutions which were at first in the hands of clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and — after some hesitation — the moral code allied with it; literature and philosophy become anti-clerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos, and life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth.** In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after centuries of chaos builds another civilization.
SoC, p. 71
** We are here.
Durant has one section left in his ‘brief’ introduction. The tracing of the Mental elements of civilization: letters, science, and art that in turn support, enhance, and finally serve to help disassemble civilization, until after a period of darkness, a new one emerges.
Language likely emerged from gestures and sounds – probably concrete nouns and probably through imitation. The Tecuna tribe in ancient Brazil had the perfect verb for to sneeze – haitschu. In English we still retain roar, rush, murmur, hiss, hum, cackle, and many others. The killer app of early language was when we transitioned from the specific to the general, from that tree to all things that are like that tree. The ability to understand and communicate abstract concepts is critical to planning, and critical to writing itself. Without abstraction, how can we understand that marks on a clay pot indicate information about something other than the marks themselves?
The first writing is of course uncertain. Some believe that it was trade marks inscribed in clay vessels. Current thought (almost 100 years after Durant wrote) is that it was accounting ledgers in support of trade; records of transactions conducted and payment owed. It may be that writing was necessitated to prove debts incurred and paid. And immediately the intellectual class bemoaned its impact on the minds of youth. King Thamos, of Eqyptian legend, lamented: “Children and young people who had hitherto been forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.” The outsourcing of memory to writing may have lessened the mental dexterity of the individual, but at the level of civilization it enabled the accumulation of knowledge beyond what could be held in memory. At first, letters remained closely guarded by the priestly class. But eventually, and especially with the advent of movable type, it allowed knowledge to flow to any mind willing to grapple with it, challenge it, and improve it. Writing allowed us to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Durant traces the beginnings of science to counting, though one could certainly argue that the practical knowledge of edibles and poisons, tool-making and trade, hunting and coordination, migration and time-keeping came first. While counting was necessary for the beginning of measurement, our language (calculus – little stone) reveals the incredibly short distance between its beginnings and now. The root words for measure and month are almost certainly the same as for moon, that first God to regulate our understanding of time. Ancient man had no physics, but understood perfectly well (better than we moderns) how to construct a bow and aim an arrow. Ancient doctors knew little or no chemistry, but know which plants were beneficial and which poisonous. Ancient Peruvians had a 90% success rate trephining the skull to relieve pressure from injury; in Paris in 1786 the procedure was invariably fatal.
If modern primitive societies are representative of the ancient, Art seems to have originated in the decoration of the body through pigments, dyes, tattooing, and other forms of modification. Painting may then have moved to pottery, which seems to have rapidly progressed from practical to artistic itself, under the guidance of the first potters, who were likely women. Clothing may have been initially more ornamental than practical. Sculpture likely arose also from the potter’s art, music as an extension of dance, and drama and the opera as an extension of music. Art is the expression of beauty, and the only standard of beauty is the eye of the beholder. Those eyes are invariably influenced by their environment, economy, and social norms. And so it goes.
As we reach the end of Durant’ introduction to civilization, he concludes that pre-civilized man had already created every element of civilization but writing and the state (and it seems to me that Durant earlier included writing in the pre-history, though that may just be a quibble about semantics). Our civilization is built on the shoulders of “savages,” without whose “hundred thousand years of experiment and groping, civilization could not have been. We owe almost everything to them – as a fortunate, and possibly degenerate, youth inherits the means to culture, security, and ease through the long toil of an unlettered ancestry.”
In reading Durant’s beautiful prose and the patterns and connections he makes, I am struck most by one thought running through the entire narrative as an invisible thread holding it all together. Paradoxically, that invisible thread is this: there is no absolute good or bad, there is only that which is useful and practical for a culture in their time and environment. For a philosophy expert writing history to arrive in a position of moral relativism is only mildly interesting, since plenty of philosophers espouse relativism (though few want to live it, and fewer still are historians). Durant’s great gift was in answering relative to what: relative to what is needed. This seems to echo an answer Durant gave during an interview* near the end of his life: when discussing natural selection, he observed that Darwin was right, it is the survival of the fittest. The problem is that we can’t know ahead of time the definition of fittest. The fittest are those that survive. We may want to consider this before we judge those who went before us and upon whose shoulders we firmly, and often ungratefully, stand.
Note:
* The interview is published as part of the audiobook version of The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Both Will and Ariel recorded many interviews, most of them together. It is a rare treat to listen to their answers, and a rare delight to hear them interact.