I've heard about Robert Bellah, and I've occasionally read about bits and pieces of his work. Now, at the age of 84, he's produced his magnum opus, Religion in Human Evoloutions: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard University Press), reviewed in The New York Times by Alan Wolfe. He characterizes the book as "magisterial" (his quotes, not mine)—"The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly"—but finds the evolutionary approach unconvincing. Not having read the book, I'm in no position to judge, but I note that Bellah draws heavily on the work of Merlin Donald (Origins of the Modern Mind), an evolutionary cognitivist, whom I regard as a very substantial thinker. Wolfe also notes that Bellah "emphatically rejects the hostility toward religion expressed by Richard Dawkins."
While the books starts with the origins of the universe and works its way through human biological evolution (after all, it's 746 pages long), it
is primarily concerned with what, following the philosopher Karl Jaspers, can be called religion’s “axial age.” During the 500 years that preceded the birth of Jesus Christ, four great religious civilizations flourished: ancient Israel, classical Greece, Confucian China and Buddhist India. The fact of their simultaneity is remarkable enough. All four societies also witnessed greater tension between religious and political authority than those that preceded them. Perhaps for this reason, the religions of the axial age promoted philosophical speculation as well as offering spiritual comfort. As a result, they appear to us as surprisingly contemporary. “Our cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us,” as Bellah points out, “all originate in the axial age.”
Wolf's central critique is that, while Bellah argues that each of these four traditions achieved major "breakthroughs", he deploys evolutionary thinking in such as way as to negate the breakthrough nature of their accomplishments:
Things change, of course; that is why we have evolution. But in the view of most evolutionary theorists, the process is too slow to allow anything like a breakthrough to occur. Influenced by such ways of thinking, Bellah trumpets the genius of all four civilizations and then denies that their resident geniuses broke any new ground.
Now, rounding the bend and coming on home Wolfe says
His aim in his four synthetic chapters on the axial age is to demonstrate the emergence of a human capacity to think in theoretical terms, that is, to move beyond mere observation to ponder why and how things happen in the world. Even if the explanations offered during this era were not rational as we understand that term today, relying as they did on myth and superstition, they were nonetheless a significant human accomplishment. This seems to me correct, even if it may contradict the notion that no great breakthrough took place.
That sounds like Bellah is arguing that these four civilizations achieved what David Hays and I have called rank 2 thought (see the papers here). If so, then, yes, I can see why Bellah would have difficulty. It's not merely that thinking about thought is extraordinarily difficult, but that at least some breakthroughs are rather like a Gestalt switch: first you see the duck, and then the rabbit; first you see the old crone, then then young beauty. If THAT's the kind of breakthrough you're investigating, and you're describing it at the level of the lines and shadings, then, yes, the breakthrough itself will keep disappearing. You may know, really and deeply believe, that a breakthrough happened. But you can't see the forest for the trees.
I wonder of Bellah knows what hornet's nests he's disturbed by arguing that abstract theorizing originates with religion, not philosophy or science? Yet I suspet that he's right.
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