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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
What's the connection between tribalism and the belief in an external God or a spiritual-religious impulse?
The way to make something sacred, or the way to give yourself the self-confidence and ability to risk individual lives on behalf of the group, is to assume the presence of a superior being that most likely created that particular group and certainly gives it superior knowledge and validity in the world. Those are the characteristics of tribes. That seems to be a principle that both anthropologists and biologists would agree on as one source of religious or spiritual impulse.
But that's only the beginning. This aspect that I've dealt with to some extent -- and I feel that this is not studied nearly enough generally -- is what I call biophilia. That is the innate tendency to affiliate with, and draw deep satisfaction from, other organisms -- specific ones, certain species that we fixate on, certain habitats that we recognize as home based and also certain environments and settings that we recognize as ideal habitation.
There's no doubt anymore, from psychological tests, that people do prefer a natural environment in which to live. They want to have also a substantially modified environment for their habitation -- and to provide food and protection. But then, beyond that and given a choice, the vast majority of people -- allowed to develop freely in their psychological preferences and where they go and what they experience -- do prefer access to a natural environment. Clearly this is something very deep and very mysterious in the human psyche, and very important for human welfare.
In your book "Consilience" you say that consciousness is evolved from the material. But you also use the word "sacred" a lot. When most people use the word "sacred," they're usually talking about an external, nonmaterial God. How do you use the word "sacred"?
It's true that the word "sacred," strictly used, is assumed to be connected with the supernatural in some sense. That may take the form of divine intervention from a single creator God, or something as diffuse as the spirits of trees and rocks, a kind of sacred quality of nature.
The naturalistic view, though, requires that we consider the broader meaning of the sacred: the deep sense of spirituality about each other and about our natural environment. And to sacralize, to make sacred, is in my view the end product of evolution in our moral and aesthetic reasoning. It proceeds from mere preference and liking, to custom, to ritualization, to law, all the way to ascribing that behavior or perception to a profoundly important source.
How would you define the word "spirituality"?
You're about to turn me into a philosopher [laughs]. Spirituality in my mind is a sense of awe and wonder. A combined sense of awe and wonder and mystery that comes from the perception of, or belief in, something that exists in the world that is very important to us to the point of being given special status in our everyday lives. And it's protected by custom and ritual and law.
You've called for "devising a new spirituality based on what we actually know about our own origins across millions of years of evolution, and thence on into our historical origins," or what might be called a human-based spirituality or religion. One of the basic purposes of traditional religion has been to provide us with a sense of meaning and purpose. Under a human-based religion, how would individuals feel a sense of meaning and purpose if it isn't to go to heaven and sit at the foot of God?
You're asking me a very particular personal question. You've just given a reason why I'm active in the humanist movement -- which is a relatively small population of people in the United States. I'm always impressed by the fact that there are something like 5,000 members -- and there are 15 million Southern Baptists alone. This tells us something about how the mind works. It doesn't necessarily serve as a means of figuring out which belief cuts the deepest.
And humanists -- I'll identify myself as a secular humanist -- recognize that they do not have 2,500 years of the evolution of ritual and mythology into which they can invest their spiritual energies. That's the easy way. Humanists recognize that there's another way. It's harder and it's not undergirded by a long history of sacralization. And it may never have sacred prayers and sacred hymns.
But it will instead provide a substitute, based upon an understanding of how the world works, that in time could grow stronger than the support and psychological strengths provided by traditional religions. One thing that is apparent now is that most religious mythologies are poor descriptions of how the world works. So in effect they are fallacious. And this shakes one to the extent that one wishes to hold onto a traditional religious view.
What has become clear is that as far as we can work out -- with all the science and technology and reconstruction of history that we are capable of -- the world is very different from the vision of traditional religion. And far more complex, far larger, far vaster, far more interesting in many ways.
The human species -- in achieving its independence from that universe, its ability to survive in good part by understanding how the universe works -- has achieved something truly magnificent. And what we need to offer in the way of reverence should be not to some imagined higher power, but to each other. And we need to dedicate ourselves to preserving the one home -- seemingly the only home -- that we're ever likely to have as a species. And that brings us full circle back to just what this world consists of in terms of a very particular disequilibrium that has taken billions of years to evolve.
