At 1:46 PM -0400 28/6/03, Jon Johanning wrote:
>This is very half-assed speculation which I'm not at all sure of
(warning!), but it may be that pre-literate societies, dependent on memory
for transmitting ideas and information, tend to be very slow to change their
world-views, etc., because one can easily get confused between what one
remembered one's elders said and the new ideas one thought of oneself.
Stone age people invented religion, to overcome this difficulty. Its a brilliant idea.
We might even speculate that this invention, this ability to form a distinct society with a rich and slowly growing heritage of dogmatically transmitted knowledge and customs was what gave homo sapiens the critical edge over other forms of human. This ability to increment our understanding and technology from one generation to the next, relying entirely on oral transmission. ^^^^^^^ CB: I agree with you that this mechanism of transgenerational transmission of experiences is at the crux of the major difference of homo sapiens from other species. It expands the social life of humans enormously compared to other species. "Man" is the social animal, and this is the main way of social expansion. Language and symbolling are critical because they are the means to this expansion of human social life. The wheel does not have to be reinvented each generation. There is accumulation of knowledge. It might be that the term "culture" can be substituted for "religion". Every area of human life , not just what would be referred to as religion, is transmittable across generations. Much of it is is oral, but the material culture is symbolically organized , so that there are material emblems, such as sacred geographical spots, tools, kinship systems of actual people, that are carriers of messages too.( See Levi-Strauss' concept of the logic of the concrete)
^^^^^^
No-one's knocking our stone-age grand-parents. They were brilliant. ^^^^^ CB: Yes with no writing they had to keep more in their heads. They had lots of pnemonic devices, probably, including "religion" , and more; as I say the land was a probably a big , concrete, "library" for most hunters and gatherers through the millenia. ^^^^^^
> So they tend to be very "conformist." Whereas, once writing is pretty well
developed and folks start writing down religious/metaphysical materials,
they can put new ideas in separate documents from the ones containing the
traditional ones.
Of course new ideas that are not immediately incorporated into the established social order (as represented by the established religion of the society) would also have simply disappeared without trace. So stone age people would not have enjoyed any heritage of non-conformism. Non-conformists would have been at an enormous disadvantage, they would have had to start from scratch, even to the extent of each needing to re-invent the very concept of non-conformism!
^^^^^^^^ CB: Most "non-conformism" probably had a material basis. That is, why change things unless there was some crisis, unless the traditional ways stopped "working" ? Necessity is the mother of invention. Long term equilibriums were punctuated by catastrophes: floods, hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, meteor crashes, etc, that destroyed the traditional configuration of ancient sacred spots or the like. Many ( most) indigenous mythologies/religions have stories about the world being destroyed ( Noah's Arc, the Aztec Tizoc stone with four times the world destroyed, and the like). The "world" for a group was their anciently equilibrated , local environment, ecosystem ( not necessarily the whole earth). In these times, non-conformists had to invent new "religions" to adjust to the new material situation. There were probably no internal class contradictions leading to revolutions at the relatively rapid rate
accelerating rate) since class society was invented with agriculture.