Archive for the ‘Christianity’ Category
are monogamy and the nuclear family natural or conventional? Conundrums…
The human species is monogamous – isn’t it? Isn’t the bonding of a male and a female to produce a large or small brood the typical mode of human being? And yet our closest living relatives aren’t monogamous, and as to our more recent ancestors and their relatives – who knows?
A couple of years ago I read Joseph Henrich’s fascinating book The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous – a serious ethnographic work in spite of the title. So, ‘WEIRD’ stands for the Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic regions of the world, so just think about whether your region fits the pattern. I have to admit, my region does, though the ‘particularly prosperous’ bit makes me feel like a bit of a failure.
But it’s the ‘psychologically peculiar’ stuff that most interests me. On page 156 of his book Henrich presents data from ‘the Ethnographic Atlas, an anthropological database of over 1200 societies (ethnolinguistic groups) that captures life prior to industrialisation.’ He doesn’t date ‘industrialisation’, but let’s say prior to the eighteenth century. He describes five kinship traits typical of WEIRD societies, and the degree to which these traits existed in earlier times.
- Bilateral descent – relatedness is traced (roughly) equally through both parents – 28%
- Little or no marriage to cousins or other relatives – 25%
- Monogamous marriage – people are permitted to have only one spouse at a time – 15%
- Nuclear families – domestic life is organised around married couples and their children – 8%
- Neolocal residence – newly married couples set up a separate household – 5%
It’s important to take these findings in, as we tend to consider current norms as more or less eternal. And it would be impossible for me to summarise Henrich’s analysis in his 500+ page book, but one factor that forcibly struck me was the impact of the Church (as the Catholic Church was known since its inception in the fourth century CE until the Reformation in the sixteenth century) in laying the foundations of Western European WEIRDness, and that of its colonies in the Americas and here in Australia. Here’s how Henrich puts it:
… between about 400 and 1200 CE, the intensive kin-based institutions of many European tribal populations were slowly degraded, dismantled, and eventually demolished by the branch of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church – hereinafter the Western Church or just the Church. Then, from the ruins of their traditional social structures, people began to form new voluntary associations based on shared interests or beliefs [aka friendships] rather than on kinship or tribal affiliations.
So, monogamous male-female relations and nuclear families were pushed by the Church quite relentlessly for centuries, and this has had a massive impact, which most people, including myself, have had little awareness of. Henrich and his team (I’m assuming he had a whole team working on this massive project) produced a summary of the changes that have occurred from the fourth century onwards, mostly at the behest of the Church. He calls it the Marriage and Family Program (MFP). I’m going to copy the whole thing out here, if only for my own sake, because it’s quite mind-bending, and some of the most fascinating historical material I’ve ever read: They are ‘prohibitions and declarations on marriage from the Church and secular rulers’, with the years given in bold:
305-6 – Synod of Elvira (Granada, Spain) decrees that any man who takes the sister of his dead wife as his new wife (sororate marriage) should abstain from Communion for five years. Those marrying their daughters-in-law should abstain from Communion until near death.
315 – Synod of Neocaesarea (Turkey) forbids marrying the wife of one’s brother (levirate marriage) and possible sororate marriage.
325 – Council of Nicaea (Turkey) prohibits marrying the sister of one’s dead wife as well as Jews, pagans and heretics.
339 – The Roman Emperor Constantius prohibits uncle-niece marriages, in accordance with Christian sentiments, and imposes the death penalty on violators.
384/7 – The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius reaffirms prohibitions against sororate and levirate marriages and bans first cousin marriage. In 409, the Western emperor Honorius softens the law by allowing dispensations. It is not clear how long this persisted in the West. The dissolving Western Empire makes continued enforcement unlikely.
396 – The Eastern Roman Emperor Arcadius (a Christian) again prohibits first cousin marriage, but without the harsh penalties. In 400 or 404, however, he changes his mind, making cousin marriage legal in the Eastern Empire.
506 – Synod of Agde (France, Visigoth Kingdom) prohibits first and second cousin marriage, and marriage to a brother’s widow, wife’s sister, stepmother, uncle’s widow, uncle’s daughter, or any kinswoman. These are defined as incest.
517 – Synod of Epaone (France or Switzerland, Burgundian Kingdom) decrees that unions with first and second cousins are incestuous and henceforth forbidden, although existing unions are not dissolved. The synod also forbids marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law, and aunts by marriage. Many subsequent synods in the area of what would become the Carolingian Empire refer to this synod for incest regulations.
527/31 – Second synod of Toledo (Spain) prescribes excommunication for all engaged in incestuous marriages. The number of years of excommunication should equal the number of years of the marriage. This is affirmed by synods in 535, 692 and 743.
538 – First documented letter between a Frankish king and the pope is about incest (marriage to the wife of a deceased brother). The pope disapproves, but he leaves decisions about Penance to the bishops.
589 – Reccared I, the Visigothic King (Spain), decrees the dissolution of incestuous marriages, punishing offenders with exile, and the transfer of their property to their children.
596 – The Frankish King Childebert II decrees the death penalty for marriage to one’s stepmother but leaves the punishment of other incest violations to the bishops. If the convicted resists the Church’s punishment, his property will be seized and redistributed to his relatives (creating incentives to report violators).
627 – Synod of Clichy implements the same punishment and enforcement procedures as those decreed by King Childebert II in 596. A systematic collection of incest legislation is compiled around this time and becomes part of the Collectio vetus Gallica, the collection of canons from Gaul.
643 – Lombard laws of Rothari forbid marriage to one’s stepmother, stepdaughter and sister-in-law.
*692 – At the synod of Trullo (Turkey), the Eastern Church finally forbids marriage to one’s first cousins and corresponding affinal kin. This prohibits a father and a son marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters, and two brothers marrying a mother and a daughter or two sisters.
721 – Roman Synod (Italy) prohibits marriage to one’s brother’s wife, niece, grandchild, stepmother, stepdaughter, cousin, godmother, and all kinfolk, including anyone ever married to any blood relative. In 726, Pope Gregory II specifies that for missionary purposes the prohibitions are up to first cousins, but for others the prohibitions extend to all known relatives. His successor, Gregory III, clarifies this prohibition such that marriages of third cousins are allowed but marriages to all affinal kin with the prohibited degree are not. These decisions are widely disseminated.
*741 – Under the Byzantine Emperor Leo III, the prohibitions in the Eastern Church are increased to include marriage of second cousins and, slightly later, second cousins once removed. The penalty for cousin marriage becomes whipping.
743 – Roman synod under Pope Zacharias orders Christians to refrain from marrying cousins, nieces, and other kinfolk. Such incest is punishable by excommunication and, if necessary, anathema [cursed by God].
755 – The Synod of Verneuil (France), convened under the Frankish King Pepin, commands that marriages be performed publicly.
756 – Synod of Verbier (France) prohibits the marriage of third cousins and closer and decrees existing marriages between second cousins are to be ended. Those married to third cousins need only do Penance.
757 – Synod of Compiegne (France) rules that existing marriages of second cousins or closer must be nullified. The Frankish King, Pepin, threatens secular punishments for any who disagree.
796 – Synod of Friuli (Italy) directs attention to prenuptual investigations into potentially incestuous marriages and prohibits clandestine unions. The synod prescribes a waiting time before marriage during which neighbours and elders can examine whether a blood relationship exists that would prohibit marriage. The decree also stipulates that although infidelity by the wife is a legitimate reason for divorce, remarriage is impossible as long as both spouses live. Charlemagne puts his secular authority behind these rulings in 802.
802 – Charlemagne’s capitulary insists that nobody should attempt to marry until the bishops and priests, together with the elders, have investigated the blood relations of the prospective spouses.
874 – Synod of Douci (France) urges subjects to refrain from marrying third cousins. To strengthen the ruling, the synod makes the children of incestuous unions ineligible for succession to an estate.
909 – Synod of Trosle (France) clarifies and affirms the Synod of Douci, deeming that children born in an incestuous marriage are ineligible to inherit property or titles.
948 – Synod of Ingelheim (Germany) prohibits marriage with all kin as far back as memory goes.
1003 – At the Synod of Deidenhofen (Germany), Emperor Heinrich II (St Henry the Exuberant) substantially widens the incest ban to include sixth cousins. He may have done this to weaken his political rivals.
1023 – Synod of Seligenstadt (Germany) likewise forbids cousin marriage to sixth cousins. Bishop Burchard of Worms’s Decretum also extends the definition of incestuous marriages to include sixth cousins.
1059 – At the Synod of Rome, Pope Nicholas II forbids marriage to sixth cousins or as far back as relatives can be traced. His successor, Pope Alexander II, likewise decrees that marriages to sixth cousins or closer relatives are forbidden. The Kingdom of Dalmatia gets a temporary dispensation, forbidding marriages only out to fourth cousins.
1063 – Synod of Rome forbids marriages up to sixth cousins.
1072 – Synod of Rouen (France) forbids non-Christian marriages and decrees a priestly inquiry into all those about to wed.
1075 – Synod of London (England) forbids marriages up to sixth cousins, including affinal kin.
1101 – In Ireland, the Synod of Cashel introduces the incest prohibitions of the Catholic Church.
1102 – Synod of London nullifies existing marriages between sixth cousins (and closer) and decrees that third parties who knew of marriages between relatives are implicated in the crime of incest.
1123 – The First Lateran Council (Italy) condemns unions between blood relatives (without specifying the relatedness) and declares that those who contracted an incestuous marriage will be deprived of hereditary rights.
1140 – Decretum of Gratian: marriages of up to sixth cousins are forbidden.
*1166 – Synod of Constantinople (Turkey) reinforces the earlier Eastern Church’s prohibitions on cousin marriages (second cousins once removed and closer), and tightens enforcement.
1176 – The Bishop of Paris, Odo, helps introduce ‘the bans of marriage’ – that is, the public notice of impending marriages in front of the congregation.
1200 – Synod of London requires publication of the ‘bans of marriage’, and decrees that marriages be conducted publicly. Kin marriages are forbidden, though the degree of kinship is not specified.
1215 – Fourth Lateran Council (Italy) reduces marriage prohibitions to third-degree cousins and all closer blood relatives and affines. All prior rulings are also formalised and integrated into a constitution of canons. This brings prenuptual investigations and marriage bans into a formal legislative and legal framework.
1917 – Pope Benedict XV loosens restrictions further, prohibiting only marriage to second cousins and all closer blood and affinal relatives.
1983 – Pope John Paul II further loosens incest restrictions, allowing second cousins and more distant relatives to marry.
All this is presented in just under four pages of Henrich’s book, and in the book’s Appendix a more expansive 6.5 page version is given. Of course it can never be known how strictly these provisions and restrictions were adhered to, but their very existence, and the many Synods devoted to them, testify to the ambition and power of the Church in Europe for over a thousand years. Its influence impacts upon our attitude to love, marriage and sexual relationships even today. Thankfully, bonobos were spared, obviously due to their complete non-existence in the Christian mind throughout this era. But for European humans these restrictions became more stringent, and more enforceable, as the power of the Church grew. It’s worth noting that the term ‘in-law’ comes from Church canon law. Your brother-in-law is like your brother – treat him nicely, but definitely no hanky-panky.
So, were the restrictions effectively policed? Actually, the Church had something of a business going in granting dispensations – for a price. It goes along with their granting of ‘indulgences’ of course. In the early days – the days of tribalism – enforcement must have been difficult, but over time the uniformity of religious belief strengthened the Church’s power. Henrich presents this fascinating case:
… though popes and bishops strategically picked their battles, these policies were sometimes imposed on kings, nobles and other aristocrats. In the 11th century, for example, when the Duke of Normandy married a distant cousin from Flanders, the pope promptly excommunicated them both. To get their excommunications lifted, or risk anathema, each constructed a beautiful abbey for the Church. The pope’s power is impressive here, since this duke was no delicate flower; he would later become William the Conqueror.
So, this was the Church’s Marriage and Family Programme (MFP) and it impacted heavily on kin terminology throughout Europe, an impact that slowly radiated outward from the Church’s main power bases (northern Scotland – where I was born – being one of the last cards to fall).
It’s worth reflecting on how accidental all this was. Had the Emperor Constantine not been converted to Christianity by his Greek mother, Helena (or so the story goes), or had the Emperor Julian, who was quite the intellectual, not been murdered while in the process of ditching the new religion and re-establishing the old gods only a generation or so after Constantine, the whole of European society, the whole of the current WEIRD world, might have turned out differently. Imagine no Catholic Church, no Dark Ages, and an intellectual flowering almost a thousand years before our 15th century ‘renaissance’. The Romans were no slouches in the field of scientific enquiry after all, though there had certainly been a decline since the days of Epicurus and Lucretius.
So the big unanswerable question here is just how European society would have been structured, on the family and kinship level, and in countless other ways, had Christianity not supervened in such a super-dramatic way. Only the Shadow knows…
And, frankly, I haven’t even begun to unravel the history of monogamy itself – why one person would couple with another to raise children. Our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, don’t raise children that way – yet they do raise children, quite successfully. Something to explore in future posts.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: How the West became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, 2020
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Random House 2003 [first published 1776-1789]
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
the ultra ultra ultra male god we’re still dealing with
Can’t kill me, nya nya
A few years back I was trying to be more sociable by attending meet-ups, using the meet-up app, but it didn’t seem to work for me, given me. One perhaps promising meet-up was organised by an elderly intellectual, on philosophical topics. He would choose the topic, then send us a screed of viewpoints and questions related to it, which I found more or less apropos. So I went to a couple of these meet-ups, which were interesting enough, except that, as often in these situations, a minority hogged the limelight, and I’ve never been much of a limelight-hogger – though actually I found that one of my great pleasures of becoming a teacher, somewhat late in my working life, was that it was more or less set up for the teacher as limelight-hogger, which I have to say I found most satisfying. I’d had very little experience before then of actually being listened to, and I found it quite a treat.
Anyway, getting back to the elderly intellectual, he was generally good at sharing that wonderful limelight thing, and encouraging diversity of opinion, so it struck me as interesting that at one point he became firm, and, apropos of nothing, said that he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of religion. It had become clear to me that he wasn’t a religious person, and I later learned that he had a PhD in physics, which wasn’t at all surprising given the tendency of his conversation. So why this remark? The new atheism movement, with its ‘four horsemen’, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, had run its course by this time, not without having an influence on myself. I had never been religious, but the movement reawakened me to the baleful influence of one religion, Christianity, upon Europe and its global empires – the ‘civilised world’ that Darwin had in mind when he wrote his Voyage of the Beagle.
But more recently, the Abrahamic religions, as they’re called, have bugged me mostly because of their patriarchy, because of its clear conviction that the One God, never seen, never manifest, but ever-present, must be male. Which of course emerged from an ultra-patriarchal society, and helps to maintain that patriarchy to this day. I’ve gone on about the Catholic Church, known simply as The Church, which more or less controlled the whole of Europe for 1300 years, with its six-tiered hierarchy of maleness:
- the Father-Son godly duo
- the Papas, or Popes
- The Cardinals
- the Archbishops
- the Bishops
- the Priests
And even beyond them, the various all-male Catholic orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits and no doubt others I happily know nothing about. Of course there were Nuns, and some feisty ones, for better or worse, but they were generally imbued with the pride of their own celibacy and would often be more furiously puritanical than their cock-bothered brethren, as history has shown.
It seems to me that this patriarchal nature of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, all of a piece, is a weak spot that the four horsemen of new atheism didn’t exploit sufficiently. Where were the horsewomen? Where are they now?
I’d argue that the maleness of the so-called Abrahamic god should be the real target. To me, it’s painfully obvious why this ever-invisible, omniscient, omnipotent god was as male as male can be. It’s because he was constructed some 2600 years ago from two male gods then popular in the region of ancient Canaan (Yahweh and El/Elohim) – I’ve written about this in a two-part blog piece referenced below – by a society as ultra-patriarchal as it’s possible to be, IMHO. A society which sold females into marriage, in exchange for a dowry – from the age of ten, and even younger, without their having any say-so whatsoever. And once that deal was sealed, and the youngster handed over to her often much older husband, she was titled a ‘woman’, which adds extra horror to the story in John 7:53 – 8:11 (apparently a later interpellation, but that’s irrelevant) of the ‘woman taken in adultery’. Jesus supposedly saved her from being stoned to death, but how many others suffered that fate? And how many innocent girls, more or less raped by their unchosen husbands, suffered or died in childbirth?
The number of insults to women presented par inadvertence in the Bible is impossible to enumerate. It starts, of course, with the creation of the first woman as the male’s help-mate out of a supernumerary rib, a woman who promptly becomes the reason for the poor innocent man’s fall from the Macho God’s grace. But I won’t go on with the many proofs of the god’s maleness – because what is more interesting, and disturbing about the belief in ‘our Father, who art in heaven’, is how oblivious many believers seem to be about this fact.
Example – in glancing back at my two blog pieces on the origin of the god called God, I reread a very long comment to Part 1, by ‘Anonymous’, the only comment I received. It was a generally reasonable comment about not taking the Bible literally, that it was full of stories that one might reflect on and learn from and so forth. Fine. As ‘Anonymous’ says, you can take what you want from it and leave the rest. Fine. And ‘Anonymous’ inserts one brief line, which perhaps I overlooked at the time:
If you see G-d as very male that’s what you see.
I respectfully disagree. I see this god as very male because the Bible uses the male pronoun to refer to him almost 7000 times, and never once refers to him using the female pronoun. And of course because I know that the stories about him were written by people who lived within an ultra-patriarchal framework. And these things matter, and they have consequences to this day, as we know from anti-feminist remarks still being made by Bible Belt Old Testament literalists and Young-Earth Creationists and the like.
‘Anonymous’ doesn’t refer to his or her own gender, but I think I can guess.
I’ve added to my references a hilarious-horrific essay on Godly masculinity, just for fun.
References
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity
origins of human patriarchy, and where we may go from here
The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world … The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx
In a sense we [Beauvoir & Sartre] both lacked a real family, and we had elevated this contingency into a principle.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
I’m not a historian, or an anthropologist, or a palaeontologist, or a primatologist, though I’ve taken in many shreds of those subjects, all of which might help to illuminate the mystery of patriarchy, the default state of the vast majority of human cultures throughout the period of H sapiens existence – as far as we’re able to tell. Of course, we’ve been around for some 300,000 years, according to the most recent findings, but we don’t really know much about our socio-sexual relations beyond the last 10,000 years – or 20,000 at the outside. And there are so many mysteries – the beginning of human language, for example, which I imagine as originating in a complexifying amalgam of gesture and sound. And the beginnings of the notion of possession and property, which, in terms of male possession of females, can be seen in gorillas, lions (though the females do the hunting, and are no shrinking violets), chimps, baboons and, arguably, orangutans (which are largely solitary). Female dominant species include elephants and orcas (and of course bonobos), some of the smartest and most communally successful species on the planet.
How did H sapiens, and H neanderthalensis, organise themselves socio-sexually, say 50,000 years ago? I mention Neanderthals because I’m nearing the end of Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinarily rich and detailed book on the subject, which makes little or no mention, even speculatively, on gender roles. What I did find was a great deal of focus on lithics and tool-making, which we tend to associate with males, though I see no reason why females would not be engaged in this activity in earlier times.
A blog piece I’ve discovered (linked below) argues that the size difference between male and female humans has been diminishing over the millennia. This has certainly been the case in the WEIRD world over the past few decades, when every human and her dog has become overweight (he wrote while downing another chardonnay with his pizza). This piece also argues for different roles (but not necessarily in a hierarchical sense) for the sexes based on consistently different teeth wear at numerous Neanderthal sites over thousands of years across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
Travel forward to the historical period – the period starting with the development and dissemination of writing – and we encounter a god-besotted world. Some of the first inscriptions we find are the names of gods, and it’s also notable that these early gods – Anu (Sumerian), Ra (Egyptian), Marduk (Babylonian), Brahma (Hindustani) and Zeus (Greek), were male. There were of course female gods, and ‘households’ of gods, but the principal deity was male, an indication that patriarchy was well established throughout the literate world a few millennia ago. It was also a world full of warfare, violence and mind-boggling cruelty, both within and between ‘states’. If you require evidence, read the first hundred pages or so of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s massive work The World: a family history. It should silence the critics of Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis, but it probably won’t. And with the odd notable exception, the warfare and slaughter was carried out by males. It’s interesting to remind myself that while all the horrors of Shalmaneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Ying Zheng, Sulla, Caesar and countless other warlords were being perpetrated, bonobos were doing their merry thing south of the Congo River, far from that madding crowd. And just north of that river, chimps were doing their small share of squabbling and killing.
Getting back to religion, the European success of the Roman Empire, and its eventual ‘capture’ by Christian monotheism, marked the beginning of the WEIRD world, according to Joseph Henrich. As he points out, the Catholic Church, which over time created a five-tiered male hierarchy of popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, was essentially the Christian Church, or simply the Church, from the fourth century CE to the reformation of the 16th century. During that time, Henrich persuasively argues, the Church transformed the world over which it held sway in subtle but significant ways, often to enrich and further empower itself. The key to that transformation was the Church’s marriage and family program (MFP). To be clear, this wasn’t a program drawn up by a Church Committee some time in the fourth century. There was nothing pre-meditated about it, and the result was in no way predicted, but it arguably set the foundations for the WEIRD values espoused today.
One key to all this was to break down the generally inward-facing kinship relationships of pre-Christian Eurasia. Before the Church’s interventions, linguistic and ethnic groups generally behaved in decidedly unWEIRD ways, but ways that are still found in regions dotted around the globe. Henrich provides an open-ended list:
- People lived enmeshed in kin-based organisations within tribal groups or networks. Extended family households were part of larger kin-groups (clans, houses, lineages, etc), some of which were called sippen (Germanic) or septs (Celtic).
- Inheritance and postmarital residence had patrilineal biases; people often lived in extended patrilineal households, and wives often moved to live with their husbands’ kinfolk.
- Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory. Even when individual ownership existed, kinfolk often retained inheritance rights such that lands couldn’t be sold or otherwise transferred without the consent of relatives.
- Large kin-based organisations provided individuals with both their legal and their social identities. Disputes within kin-groups were adjudicated internally, according to custom. Corporate responsibility meant that intentionality sometimes played little role in assigning punishments or levying fines for disputes between kin-groups.
- Kin-based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security. These organisations cared for sick, injured, and poor members, as well as the elderly.
- Arranged marriages with relatives were customary, as were marriage payments like dowry or bride price (where the groom or his family pays for the bride).
- Polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. In many communities, men could pair with only one ‘primary’ wife, typically someone of roughly equal status, but could then add secondary wives, usually of lower social status
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, pp 162-3
Henrich then presents a table of Church decrees, beginning in the fourth century and becoming more extreme as it increased its power, outlawing as incest marriage even up to sixth cousins, as well as with in-laws (sororate and levirate marriage). Marriage with non-Christians was also proscribed, and the Church enforced its own role as mandatory for officiating at marriages, ‘Christenings’ and the like. In fact the term ‘in-law’ derives from Canon Law as it was used to ‘officially’ order human relationships. These increasingly strict laws could sometimes be bent or broken through the payment of ‘Indulgences’, but it’s clear that many Church leaders came to believe their own propaganda, which they would back up with whatever scriptural passages they could find.
The power of Church laws, which determined the very legitimacy of human lives, was brought home to me as an adolescent reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles, in which Tess Durbeyfield, a simple country girl of Wessex, is impregnated by Alex d’Urberville, an upper-class rake, and is refused permission to christen the dying child, born ‘out of wedlock’, so that she has to bury the boy herself, beyond church grounds – just the start of Tess’s ordeals. I remember feeling both shattered by Tess’s sufferings and contemptuous of the behaviour of Christians and the absurd concept of ‘illegitimacy’. By Hardy’s time, England had become decidedly anti-Catholic, but the Church had done its work in determining the very bona fides of human existence, work which has only been undone in recent times, thanks to pioneering humanists like Thomas Hardy.
It’s probably reasonable to assume that the Church’s aim in all this was to extend its power, and that the development of ‘love’ based marriage, or a union based on common interests, was an unintended consequence. Certainly the Church’s proscriptions released individuals from earlier kin-based responsibilities, and left them free to choose partners based on mutual attraction. It also widened individuals’ sense of allegiance from kinship groups to like-minded political, social, work-based and even sporting associations.
Another unintended consequence was the lessening of patriarchal control, via patrilineal kinship relations – somewhat ironic given the highly patriarchal nature of the Church. The choosing of partners on the basis of mutual interests smacked – shock, horror – of gender equality. This has led, ultimately, but really inevitably, to the choosing of partners of the same gender. And the reduced power of the Catholic Church – even amongst avowed Catholics, strangely enough, at least in moral issues – has led to a world of ‘cultural Catholics’ or ‘cafeteria Catholics’, who seem to be only in it for the pomp and circumstance, or a certain degree of camaraderie.
It seems weird that the WEIRD world, which is becoming weirder with its acceptance of or creation of a broadening range of sexual sub-types – agender, cisgender, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, gender nonconforming, and transgender – might owe its origins to the Church, but somehow it seems fitting to me. Meanwhile, priestly paedophilia seems to have been largely a consequence of that Church’s own bizarre and inhuman anti-sex restrictions on its trained messengers of the Holy Spirit. It has been weakened by the ensuing scandals – another small blow to patriarchy. Patriarchy didn’t of course originate with the Church, nor can its defeat, if that ever comes, be sheeted home to its capitalising edicts. The WEIRD world’s intelligentsia, and increasingly its leadership, has been freed from the narrow confines of religion and patriarchy into a more accurate understanding of humanity, its origins in the biosphere, and its capacities. But I admit to being impatient with the pace of change. If we don’t see a larger and more dominant role for the female of the species, and soon, the future looks grim.
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2020
The WEIRDest people in the world, Joseph Henrich, 2020
on religion, secularism, tolerance and women
Over the years, I’ve read, listened to and encountered non-religious people defending religions and the religious in the name of tolerance, decency, human rights and more. A non-religious philosophy tutor once told the discussion group that I was a member of that western morality was based on Christianity. This claim appeared to be made as a criticism of the ‘new atheist’ movement that was prevalent at the time (some 15 or so years ago). I found it to be highly dubious on its face, so I engaged in a ‘deep dive’ into the key texts of Christianity – the so-called gospels, the purported reportage of the life, actions and teachings of Jesus, the son of the Judeao-Christian or Abrahamic god. Did these most basic Christian texts provide a coherent moral system for the western world, or even the barest framework of such a system?
Needless to say, I found no such thing, nor did I find any evidence that the gospel authors had ever even met the central figure in Christianity, Jesus. Whether such a person ever existed is a question with no clear answer. Jesus was a relatively common name at the time, a period which provides no written records of the existence of individuals outside of monarchs, governors and the like. Much research has explored the production and dating of the gospels, which were not contemporaneous with the life of their subject, who was said to have been crucified sometime between 30 and 40 AD (it doesn’t help that our current dating system is based on his conjectured birth). My writings on the subject (about a dozen blog posts, referenced below) were, as with most of my writings, a kind of self-education project. Amongst my gleanings were that the different gospels were inconsistent, both internally and compared to each other, and included interpolations from as late as the third or fourth century AD.
Let me focus briefly on one gospel example, the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ in John 8 (3-11), since it’s all about a topic of interest, the treatment of women. It’s now generally accepted as a later interpolation, but it’s still useful in terms of its lack of context – a problem with most gospel anecdotes. In modern jurisprudence, and modern (WEIRD) morality, context is absolutely essential. This is explored in much detail in Joseph Henrich’s book The weirdest people in the world, in which motive, intention, effect and a host of other factors are included in our judgment and appraisal of others.
So here is the story, from the ‘New Revised Standard Version’ of the Bible:
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them,4 they said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery.5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”11 She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
So this is where we need to add, if we can, the context lacking in the story. For example, what does ‘caught in the act of adultery’ mean here? And indeed, what does ‘woman’ mean? It’s well established that, in this region, at this time, females were sold into marriage on a regular basis. Furthermore, these females were often – in fact customarily – children as young as ten, or younger, and once married, they were referred to as ‘women’.
But we hardly need to go into detail to recognise that adultery is here quite undefined, that stoning to death for this or any other crime is disproportionate to say the least, and that it’s highly unlikely that a man would be threatened with the same punishment as the ‘woman’ is in this case.
This of course isn’t an isolated anecdote – all of the parables, speeches and actions of Jesus, as described, lack the contextual elements we would need to arrive at the kinds of judgments expected of us in the WEIRD world.
Then again, it might be argued that the proscriptions enumerated in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 2-17) are a better starting point for western or WEIRD morality. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that lying, stealing and killing fellow humans would be offensive to an omnipotent god who wants to see his prize creations behaving nicely, it does seem odd that he should be so concerned about his own position in their lives that he must have their love more or less constantly (second commandment). It suggests a degree of insecurity not quite in keeping with omnipotence. The tenth commandment, too, strikes a flat note to a WEIRD individual keen to promote a bonobo humanity, as it speaks against coveting one’s neighbour’s wife along with other property items. It’s a bald reminder, as if one needed it after reading Genesis, etc, that this god is definitively male.
The whole point here is that, if western or WEIRD morality emerged from Christianity or the Bible, which to some extent is true, it needs to also be pointed out that the Bible and its ‘gospels’ are human documents. The Pentateuch was written five or six hundred years before the putative birth of Jesus, and was arguably the first successful creation of an omnipotent, controlling god, designed to unite a tribe or people as ‘special’ and chosen, while seeking to explain the origin of the world in which they lived (though of course its creation myths were derived from earlier versions). The god’s concern, through the commandments – or rather the concern of the Jewish leaders and authors who wrote them, was to unite and separate the Jewish people in the context of a multi-ethnic region with a bewildering array of gods, with ambiguous powers and rankings. Given the context, these commandments are bog-standard – don’t lie to, steal from or kill each other, don’t covet each others’ property (including women), treat your one and only god (creator of all things) with respect, treat marriage as sacred, honour your parents and kin, and follow the proper rituals. Basically, a recipe for the survival and thriving of the group, in what was, then and for a long time before and afterwards, a god-obsessed human world.
The interesting innovation of Christianity, of course, was that it dispensed with the chosen people concept, making it more universalisable, if that’s a word. The concept of Christ dying for our sins, or so that the rest of humanity might be ‘saved’, does seem rather obscure, but it has doubtless provided grounds for thousands of theological theses over the centuries.
I began this piece reflecting on those non-believers who look askance at other non-believers criticising religion and the religious. I understand full well that, had I been born many centuries ago, I too would have believed in the gods of my region. Galileo, the foremost mathematician and astronomer of his day, was a lifelong Catholic. Newton, born in the year of Galileo’s death, and the foremost scientist of his generation, was also a thorough if idiosyncratic Christian. Whatever one thinks of free will, we can’t escape the zeitgeist we’re born into. The thing is, today’s zeitgeist is more complex than anything that’s gone before, and will probably become more so, and the tensions between religious beliefs and secular, scientific explorations of every imaginable research field, including religion, its origins, modalities and effects, and why it is losing its grip on WEIRD humanity, will continue long into the foreseeable. I have no idea how it will all end, but I suspect that the feminine side of humanity will be an essential element in bringing about a best-case resolution, if such a resolution ever comes.
References
http://stewartsstruggles.blogspot.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020.
Bible: Child Marriage in Ancient Israelite times – Paedophilia?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020%3A2-17&version=NIV
Dava Sobel, Galileo’s daughter: a drama of science, faith and love, 1999
23 – bonobo morality superior to Christianity
the Cyrus Cylinder, dated to 539 BCE
In his strange but interesting book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari reveals an obsessive interest in religion. While recognising that the traditional religions such as Christianity, which dominated Europe and its colonies and offshoots for a millennium and a half, no longer provide a template for our political and social organisation, he’s happy to label the isms that he claims are traditional religion’s successors, namely humanism, liberalism, progressivism and scientism, as religions too. And the final section of his book bears the title ‘the data religion’, and is all about our new-found worship of algorithms.
Personally I much prefer a tighter definition of religion, being a belief in gods and god-like entities, or spiritual, or spirit-ish, beings such as sprites, fairies or mischief-making bunyips and such – thingummies that have an effect on our world but are too superior to ever be caught by hand or on camera. Or they belong to another world or dimension or something. Harari dismisses the non-believers’ dismissal of these beings as supernatural, but he offers no better alternative. He seems to have caught the Nietschean affliction of trying to stand outside of everything so he can be disdainful of it.
Traditional religions, however, suffer from the hearsay problem. I first heard about the Judeo-Christian god from a Sunday School teacher who no doubt heard about him from either his parents or rellies, or some other churchy elder, and so on down the generations, with mostly increasing conviction as we go back in time. Another way to describe him, or gods and religions in general, is as memes, thought-bubbles, differing in detail and import as they pass between people, but always presented with a sort of prestigious vagueness. God, for example, is divine, but what does this word mean? How do we collect evidence for divinity? Much easier to collect evidence for the processes involved in the Earth’s origin. Humans are lazy that way.
I don’t want to enter into a philosophical or theological discussion here – god forbid – but I’m concerned about the baleful effect that certain religions, those that still influence large numbers of human apes today, have on morality. Religion, as we know, tends to congeal morality in the time-frame of that religion’s founding, or its high-water mark. And even then it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Take the story of ‘the woman taken in adultery’, in the soi-disant gospel of John, about which there’s much argy-bargy as to authenticity (it may have been a later interpolation), as if any of these writings are particularly authentic. The issue here, for me at least, is about whether the ‘sin’ is really a sin, or more generally what is a sin, though in the religious context of the time, the point of the story is that, since everyone sins, this woman’s sin deserves forgiveness, like everyone else’s sins, as long as she sins ‘no more’. Of course, it’s a pretty piss-poor argument, even if you equate sinning with wrong-doing according to the legalities of the day. Context is everything, and no context is given in the story. Adultery isn’t even clearly defined. It’s well-known, and other biblical texts bear witness to the fact, that women were treated as chattels in this era and region, and very often married off as children to men twice or thrice their age, with no fellow-feeling about it. Bonobos wouldn’t have stood for it. So my advice to this youngster would’ve been ‘go for it lassie, and pay no attention to those arseholes’. Depending on the context, that is.
And yet this sort of context-free drivel is still taken seriously by those who aren’t religious and should know better. I’ve heard a professional philosopher, much younger than myself and by no means religious, argue, or simply claim, that our legal system is based on Christian teaching. That’s total bullshit. Some years ago I did a deep dive on Christian morality as expressed in the five ‘gospels’, including Thomas, and found no clear moral message – again because context is everything, so that general remarks like ‘blessed are the peace-makers’, or indeed the cheese-makers, are essentially meaningless. Bonobos are pretty peaceful, but they’ll fight when they have to, to keep the greater peace. It’s a pretty good general rule, but the particular action and its extent depends on context.
Another example of context-free ethics that I’ve heard being extolled is the Ten Commandments, or at least those that still make sense in the modern world – don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t covet (note the negativity), don’t commit adultery (makes no sense to bonobos, and why and when did human apes start marrying?), and honour your parents (hmmm, shouldn’t parents, and any others, be given the respect they deserve? Not based on titles or positions, but on observed behaviour and effects? Automatic honouring, or respect, strikes me as a bad, even dangerous idea. Political leaders often benefit from this automatic, fawning respect, especially in non-democratic countries, where those leaders are allowed to hang around for a long time, like an ever more fetid odour).
None of these commandments should be considered as absolutes, which is why the nuance of laws based on the complexity of civil society is far superior, and that nuance is displayed in rather more earthly laws of the time, such as those of Solon in Athens. And another near contemporary, Cyrus of Persia, renowned for having emancipated the Jews of Babylon, had rather more humane laws (or really just policies, and possibly short-term) written on a cylinder uncovered more than 2000 years later, and celebrated by some (mostly Persian nationals) as the first versions of human rights.
Laws change, as they should, as we learn more about human flourishing, and that such flourishing depends on a broader, more vital flourishing of that narrow band of life that covers the surface, and a tiny sub-surface, of our planet. From whence we emerged. Only recently, rather shockingly, has the so-called developed world caught up with bonobos in their understanding and acceptance of homosexual behaviour – and that acceptance is very far from universal. Perhaps such intolerance has sprung from the old idea that ‘the world must be peopled’, but these days we’re well aware that it has been peopled enough. Nowadays we don’t want so much to have children to carry on for us, but to carry on ourselves, hale and hearty for 200 years or so. But that’s another story.
References
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Solons-laws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Cylinder
the strange concept of faith and the basic concept of morality
when did Jesus become so Western European?
The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention – distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and the paucity of its evidence – is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory.
Sam Harris, The end of faith
Canto: Writing about religion and atheism, belief and unbelief, appears to have become unfashionable recently, after a spate of atheist tomes in the early-mid 2000s, which certainly had an impact. Christianity continues to decline, and we try to ignore the other religions as best we can. But with the current kerfuffle about Amy Coney Barrett, a woman described as being ‘of deep faith’ possibly being raised to the US Supreme Court, it seems to me that religion still has the power to shape the law in some countries that we would hope should know better.
Jacinta: Yes, we’ve long expressed the view that this term ‘faith’ has a strange cachet about it that doesn’t really stand up well to scrutiny – to put it mildly. Just considering the judeo-christian version, the claims, as Sam Harris wrote, are extravagant indeed. That the world – rarely very clearly defined – was made by a single god, of whose essence and world-creating abilities we can have no understanding. We can only speculate, haplessly and hopelessly, as to why he created this world (he isn’t really male but we have to use some pronoun after all), and what his purpose is for us, though there are supposedly clues in a collection of writings over many centuries, which are said to have been inspired by him. Apparently, though, we are his special creation, ordered to go forth, multiply and subdue the earth and all that crawls upon it, presumably for our needs and purposes (Genesis 1:28). This set of beliefs, and of course there are many more, though they may vary between individuals, doesn’t fit well with what we know about the formation of this planet, its relation to the universe, and the story of human evolution, so thoroughly verified by genetics, which we learned about as a result of Darwin and Wallace’s theory of natural selection from random variation.
Canto: Yes, the story of this creator-god and the creation story supposedly written by the god’s human agents some 2,600 years ago or so, is in no way compatible with what we’ve learned about the 3 billion-plus years of life on this planet and the few hundred thousand years of existence of our Homo sapiens ancestors. And yet belief in the existence of this creator-god still persists in the minds of otherwise highly intelligent people, including many of our primary makers and interpreters of law.
Jacinta: Especially in the USA – exceptional, as we’ve often complained, only in its religiosity and its jingoism. Which brings us back to Amy Coney Barrett, who is a ‘devout Catholic’. I think the word ‘devout’, like ‘faith’ and ‘sacred’, deserves scrutiny. An article in The Nation about her carries this sub-heading: ‘Her Catholicism is irrelevant. The worldview of the fringe right-wing sect she has grown up in definitely isn’t.’ This raises my ire. I know nothing of this fringe right-wing sect but I know plenty about Catholicism. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church is, in its hierarchy, the most profoundly patriarchal, misogynistic and homophobic organisation in the ‘western world’ – the world outside Islam and Hinduism.
Canto: Well this fringe sect might be even worse, but granted the Catholic church has far greater reach. And Barrett will be the fifth Catholic on the court if promoted. Catholics represent about 22% of the US population. Interestingly, according to recent Pew Research, some 65% of Americans describe themselves as Christian, down from 77% only ten years ago, so we’re seeing big changes in our lifetime, though the political and judicial powers are at least a generation behind the trend.
Jacinta: So let’s talk about faith and its untouchable nature. In some respects it’s like loyalty, as in keeping faith with the church, or our ancestors. The first type of religion was undoubtedly a form of animism – the wind, the sun, the rain, the ocean, these were moving, changeable elements which moved in mysterious ways, sometimes destructively, sometimes beneficially for humans. In our need to control our world we decided we needed to be on the side of these forces, to be loyal to them, bestowing gifts, sacrifices, bowing down. And when the sun shone mildly upon us, when the rain nourished our crops, it was because we were keeping faith with these godlike forces. But perhaps other less visible forces were operating, spreading sicknesses, killing our newborns – and so we created more abstract deities or forces, perhaps associated with places of danger or disease – the forest, the mountains, perhaps a particular lake or swamp.
Canto: Yes, you’re talking about a pre-scientific era. Gods or supernatural entities – sprites or goblins – a thousand different terms used in a thousand different languages – these were explanations for unforeseen and unexpected events. And so you had to keep in with them, keep faith with them, through obeisance, sacrifices and the like.
Jacinta: Gods and spirits as explanations – bad explanations. I believe that was what David Deutsch was on about in The beginning of infinity. I also like the idea of gods as memes. For example, I was sent to Sunday School at about 7 or 8 where I learned about the judeo-christian god from a guy in a Salvation Army uniform. He stood out the front and passed this story, this version of a god – a meme, essentially – to me and others. I was hearing it for the first time, and of course it passed, like any other meme, though my ‘interpretive apparatus’, my 7-year-old brain, and that’s how religion spreads, it seems to me. A universal message of sorts, individually interpreted, like many memes. But when this meme of a single god who made the world specially for us, etc etc, starts to fall apart as an explanation of anything – and this has been happening since the spread of far better explanations from at least the 17th century’s scientific enlightenment – the importance of faith has been emphasised to keep it all together. I think you’ll find that ‘faith’ was a very rare term in the millenium or so of medieval Christendom. It wasn’t faith, then, it was just the truth. Faith is like an enfeebled offspring of that truth.
Canto: And what about ‘deep faith’, is that just more enfeebled?
Jacinta: Stubbornly enfeebled perhaps. Actually, it’s probably more recent than the 17th or 18th centuries – it’s more of a 20th century concept, and it has gathered around it a kind of sacred aura, almost as a bulwark against the scientific age – which of course is ‘spiritually empty’.
Canto: Thank god. But I think that even believers are cognisant that ‘faith’ has a dodginess about it. I recall years ago John Polkinghorne, the British physicist and theologian, expressing uneasiness with the word, and suggesting maybe ‘hope’ should be substituted. I suspect he regretted saying that – it surely weakens the religious position quite a bit. Then again, it seems more honest.
Jacinta: Yes, and somehow more human. Many of us have hoped that this earthly existence isn’t all there is – this brief candle. And some, like the late George Harrison, have been entirely matter-of-fact about death being part of the eternal journey, though whether this was bravado or not we’ll never know.
Canto: We can also put our faith in the multiverse – an infinite series of universes in which we live longer, have better sex, make far more money…
Jacinta: Or die of an excruciatingly painful wasting disease… I’m not convinced by that one, whatever the maths says. Though it certainly is fascinating where current problems in physical theory can lead us. But to return to faith – it is what religion is about. The faith, or hope, that human life is special, that we are being looked after, watched over, judged. Gods are, I believe, integral to religion. It could be one, or many. They could be omnipotent, or fallible. They could be benevolent, or vindictive. But they must be interested, even obsessed, by us. That’s why I don’t think ancient philosophies like Buddhism, Taoism or Confucianism are religions, however ‘spiritual’ their teachings seem to be. Religions are unthinkable without gods.
Canto: Yes, and religion doesn’t deal with the moral sphere, as Stephen Jay Gould used to think. Or rather, it might be moral, but it’s really about the morality of the god, or gods, and trying to second-guess it. Why have we been punished by bad weather? Because the god disapproves of something we’ve done. We need to change our behaviour as well as heaping praise upon the god for telling us about our wrong-doing and trying to correct us. So we obsess over the gods’ obsession with us, and round and round it goes, never getting to an answer about these inscrutable beings. Meanwhile real morality is about how we can thrive as the most socially complex, socially constructed mammalian species on the planet, and we’ve been engaging in that quest and that process since our beginnings. Trying to shed these imaginary gods and our notion of our specialness in their eyes is an important part of the process, I think. Science has discovered, really quite recently, our relatedness to every other species on the planet – and even more recently, how our behaviour is threatening so many of those species, as well as the less lucky members of our own species. That’s where we should be focussing our moral lens.
Trumpdagistan: the new fundamentalism
The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others, but it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
A recent Point of Inquiry podcast has again turned my attention to what I should now call Trumpdagistan, a more or less dictatorial state that borders Canada and Mexico, which for various reasons I shouldn’t really be concerning myself with, as I live very far from the country and have never had any intention of visiting it, even if I had the means. It just seems to be a kind of ghoulishness on my part, my version of addiction to rotten.com, if that website still exists.
As a completely non-religious person, I’m obviously opposed to any interference of the state by religion, that terribly bad explanation of any and all phenomena. Trumpdagistan, even before it was renamed, was the most religious of all the democratic countries. Their national god is Guard, who guards Trumpdagistan against all evils, including secularism, the world’s primary evil, according to Billy Barr, the dictatorship’s chief toady, who believes that all morality derives from the book of Guard.
Whilst the wanker in the white palace (WWP) is very unlikely to believe in Guard (for his self-obsession is all-consuming but exhausting, as it basically consists of constantly puffing hot air into a balloon full of holes), he recognises the usefulness of a national god in much the same way as every previous dictator has. So he’s happy, indeed delighted, to unleash his toady on secularism and more particularly, secularists. Free-thinkers, in the words of Stephen Dedalus.
The WWP and his toadies have made every effort in their few years of control to create a compliant, Guard-worshipping judiciary, especially at the very top, the Supreme Court. As the Point of Inquiry podcast has pointed out, that court is now stacked with Guard-botherers, more or less bent on overturning the separation between politics and religion, through particular interpretations of the country’s much-worshipped Constitution which somehow bestow a kind of second-class citizenship on secularists. It’s unclear, however, how the Constitution can be so interpreted.
In any case, the WWP’s ‘administration’ has managed to promote two more religious right-wingers to the Supreme Court, for a total of five – just another couple of bricks in the wall, so to speak. The much-worshipped constitution of the former USA actually has very little to say on religion. The first amendment to that constitution, as it pertains to religion, says only this:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
That’s it. It’s since been known as the ‘establishment clause’. The rest of that amendment, also quite brief, deals with freedom of speech, without particular reference to religion. The only possible ambiguity in the above clause is ‘respecting’, which could mean ‘having respect for’ or ‘with respect or reference to’. Neither interpretation suggests that the constitution, or the bill of rights, supports any religion; rather it clearly supports keeping out of religion, or maintaining a separation between religion and law-making. And yet, mischief-making religionists, some of them rather powerful, have tried hard to distort the simple meaning. Take the late unlamented Justice Scalia, who in one forgettable judicial opinion came up with this gem:
The establishment clause permits the disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
Of course the clause has nothing whatever to do with permitting disregard, it simply avoids permission and prohibition equally. Nothing could be clearer. What Scalia seems to be wanting the clause to say is that the law should disregard and so not protect polytheists, atheists and the like. This defies any serious interpretation.
And so we come to the toady. He’s apparently a catholic, and believes that secularism is the principle cause of the ills that Trumpdagistan is suffering from. Those ills don’t, of course, include white collar corruption, which he avidly supports. To their credit, many other catholics are condemning Barr’s evidence-free claims, but in Barr’s Trumpdagistan, a collection of writings penned many centuries ago by scores of individuals of widely varying views and experience, and known today, at least by some, as the bible, is the only source of morality for all humanity, and will no doubt be installed as the basis of all Trumpdagistani law. All of this is making the WWP very popular, if polls are to be believed, so expect much more of it in the future. What would Thomas Jefferson think?
Face it, same-sex marriage law will affect the religious freedom to discriminate
The former Prime Minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, has said recently that if you’re for religious freedom and against political correctness, you should vote no to – same-sex marriage, gay marriage, marriage equality, or whatever way you want to frame the issue.
As far as I’m aware, this isn’t Abbott’s argument, because an argument has to be argued for, with something like premisses and a conclusion. It’s simply a statement, or a pronouncement, much like the pronouncement made on the same topic by another former PM, Julia Gillard, that she was opposed to same-sex marriage. She would subsequently say that ‘her position was clear’ on the matter, and such remarks appeared to substitute for an argument.
Now we shouldn’t necessarily expect our political leaders to talk like philosophers, but I do think we should expect something more from them than bald pronouncements. Gillard, when subjected to some minuscule pressure on the issue, did say, as I recall, that marriage had always been recognised as being between a man and a woman, and she saw no reason to change it. Of course, as arguments go, this is rather weak, amounting, as it seems, to an objection to change of any kind. You could say, for example, that houses have always been made of wood, so there’s no need to change to any other building material.
What was more troubling about Gillard’s justification, though, was what was left unsaid. It is true that in Australia, marriage has always been recognised as between a man and a woman, though that situation has changed recently in a number of other countries. It’s also true, though it wasn’t referred to by Gillard, that through almost the entire history of male-female marriage in Australia and elsewhere, homosexuals have been tortured, murdered, executed, imprisoned, vilified, loathed and scorned, and treated as beyond the pale, with a few notable exceptions of place and time. So during this long history, the question of same-sex marriage has hardly been prominent in the minds of homosexuals or their detractors.
So I return to Tony Abbott’s pronouncement. I want to see if I can turn it into something like an argument. A no vote supports religious freedom and strikes against political correctness. I’ll take the last part first. What is political correctness? Other pundits are also, I note, asking that question. All that can be said with certainty is that Abbott considers it a bad thing. It’s, not, therefore (at least in his mind) ‘correctness’, which carries much the same meaning as ‘rightness’, as in a correct answer. Political correctness somehow negates or inverts correctness, but it’s not at all clear how this is so. I can only surmise that he thinks that something that’s correct ‘politically’ is actually incorrect or not correct. So the word ‘political’ must mean ‘not’. So then I’d have to wonder why Abbott ever became a politician. In any case, I’m left wondering how this odd term can apply to the matter at hand, which is whether to allow gay couples the freedom to marry as other couples do. The ‘political correctness’ question is an obscure and rather tedious semantic quibble, while same-sex marriage is a serious issuing affecting many peoples’ lives, so I won’t pursue the ‘political correctness’ gambit any further.
Abbott’s main point, presumably, is that same-sex marriage adversely affects religious freedom. So how, exactly, would the marriage of people who happen to be of the same gender affect religious freedom? The essential argument is that, since the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, for example, is opposed to same sex marriage, and homosexuality in general, individuals Catholics who happen to be homosexual, and who wish to marry their loved one and don’t wish to abandon their faith, may seek to use the law to force, or try to force, the Catholic Church to marry them. And of course this isn’t just a problem for Catholicism. The Anglican hierarchy tends to be more liberal, but we know that it isn’t uniformly so, and some segments of it are as arch as the most conservative Catholics. And then there’s Islam (and other religions). Of course it would be rare indeed to find practicing Moslems, here or elsewhere, who are openly gay and wanting to marry, but it’s likely that such people do exist, given humanity’s weird and wonderful diversity.
This is in fact an interesting conundrum. The website for marriage equality in Australia has this to say:
No religious institution can be forced to marry a lesbian or gay couple against their beliefs (in much the same way as certain religious bodies cannot be forced to marry people who are divorced).
This seems an overly confident assumption, since the issue has yet to be tested, and it surely will, as it is apparently being tested in the USA by gay couples.
A weaker point being made by the religious is that they will be persecuted for upholding the traditional view of marriage against the new law. But this might be said for anyone who holds a minority view. Clearly, when same-sex marriage law comes into being, it will be supported by the majority of Australians. Indeed it will become law largely because it’s supported by the majority, and the majority is likely to increase, though this is never guaranteed. People who hold the minority view will have to argue for it, and should expect others to argue against it. This isn’t persecution. I personally don’t think they have any strong arguments for their views, which clearly discriminate against homosexuals. Being called out for that discriminatory view, isn’t persecution IMHO.
Having said this, I agree with the conservative journalist Paul Kelly that same-sex marriage law inevitably pits church against state, and that the various religious groups’ freedom to discriminate against homosexuals is at stake. This is, in the west, a part of our growing secularisation against religions that are largely mired in outmoded social conventions. This clash has been going on for some time and is set to continue. The outcome, I think, is inevitable, but it will be a slow, painstaking process.
nones, rinos and new australians – we’re becoming more secular, but also more religiously complex
So the census data on religion, and everything else, has just come out, and it wasn’t as I’d predicted (in my mind). I expected a rise in the nones but I opted for a more conservative result, partly because of so many wrong predictions (in my mind) in the recent past, but mainly because I didn’t really expect the accelerating rise in recent censuses to continue for too much longer, I expected a few wobbles on the path to heathenism. Not so much two steps forward and one step back, more like a mixture of giant strides and baby steps.
So the result is encouraging and more people are taking note and it has clear implications for areas of social and political policies in which religion plays a part, such as funding for religion in schools, marriage equality, abortion rights, euthanasia, tax exemptions for religious organisations, school chaplains and the like.
So let’s take a closer look at the findings. The graph I present at the top of this post is identical to the one I posted about 5 years ago, except that the last bar, representing the 2016 figures, is added. And it’s quite a spectacular finding, showing that the acceleration is continuing. The drop in the assertively Christian sector is way bigger than expected (in my mind), from a little under 60% to just over 50%. That’s really something, and there’s no doubt that figure will be well under 50% by next census. So much for the twilight of atheism – at least in this benighted backwater. The figure for the assertively non-religious has taken a bigger jump than in any previous census – we only started measuring the category in 1971. That was a surprise, as was the size of the drop in Catholics (and the Anglican population continues to diminish). The figure of 30.1% for the nones, up from 22.3% in 2011, should be supplemented by a goodly percentage of the ‘not-stated/inadequately described’ category, which makes up about 10%, barely changed from last census. This would make for a figure of more than a third of our population professing no religion.
The figure for ‘other religions’ continues to rise but it’s still under 10%. It’s hardly cause for concern exactly, but we should always be vigilant about maintaining a thoroughly secular polity and judiciary. It has served us, and other secular countries, very well indeed. Meanwhile the mix of other religions makes for greater complexity and diversity, and hopefully will prevent the dominance of any particular religious perspective. We should encourage dialogue between these groups to prevent religious balkanisation.
These results really do give hope that the overall ‘no religion’ figure, now at around 30%, will overtake the overall Christian figure, at about 51%, in my lifetime. If the trend continues to accelerate, that may well happen by 2026. Meanwhile it’ll be fascinating to see how these results play out in the political and social arena in the near future, and what Christian apologists have to say about them.
Of course, the census hardly provides a fine-grained view of the nation’s religious affiliations. I’ve not said much about the ‘rino’ population before – that’s those who are ‘religious in name only’. In fact I only heard that acronym for the first time two days ago, but I’ve long been aware of the type, and I’ve met a few ‘Catholics’ who fit the bill. It really does gripe me that more of these people don’t come out as non-believers, but of course I can’t get inside their heads. Certainly church attendance has dropped markedly in recent years, but it’s impossible to know whether these nominal believers would follow religious lines on hot-button topics like euthanasia or abortion.
The census results, as always, have been published with accompanying ‘expert’ commentaries, and on the religious question they’ve said that the figures don’t really give comfort to Christians or atheists. It’s cloud cuckoo talk, but it doesn’t surprise me. The results speak volumes and give plenty of comfort to those who want religion to be kept well out of politics, and who never want to see a return to powerful Christian lobbies and their incessant and often ridiculous propaganda. Politicians, please take note.