Now, what were those characteristics, and how 'would we know what they are? Well, one way we can know is by examining the groups of hunter-gatherers that are still tenuously alive on the planet today. These are small groups of people whose way of life predates the invention of agriculture. The fact that we know them means they must have made some contact with our present global civilization-and that immediately implies that their way of life is in its last days. They are the essence of humans. They have been studied by dedicated anthropologists who have lived with them, learned their languages, been adopted into the group in those cases that permit outsiders to have such an experience, and we can learn something about them. They are by no means all the same. This is a large topic, called cultural anthropology. I do not pretend to be expert in it, but I have had the benefit of spending a fair amount of time with some of the anthropologists who have been at the forefront of studying some of these groups. And I think it's relevant to the task before us.
There are, as I say, different kinds of groups, including some that we might consider absolutely horrendous and some that we might consider astonishingly benign, and I'll try to give a sense of each.
For the latter let me say just a few words about the!Kung people in the Kalahari Desert in the Republic of Botswana. These are a people who now have been drafted into the army of apartheid South Africa, and their culture has been irrevocably abused. But up until some twenty years ago, they had been well studied. We know something about them.
They are hunter-gatherers, which mainly means that the men hunt and the women gather. There is a kind of sexual division of labor, but there is very little in the way of social hierarchy. There is not a significant male dominance of women. In fact, there's very little in the way of social hierarchy at all.There is specialization of labor. That's different from social hierarchy. Children are treated with tenderness and understanding. And there is very little in the way of warfare, although occasionally they run into difficulties because of misunderstandings.
For example, there was a famous case, sometime ago, in which a hunting party came back and said that there was the most astonishing good fortune-a completely new creature had been discovered, and you could actually creep up to it with your bow and arrow and get within a meter of it, and it would not run away. And then you could shoot it dead. And here it is. And it was a cow. The neighboring Herero people protested, and this conflict between two groups, one that had not yet left the hunter-gatherer stage and the other that had domesticated animals, then had to be settled.
Another interesting question has to do with the hunt. Who owns the prey that is killed? It turns out it is not the hunter who killed the animal, it is the artisan who made the arrow. It is his kill. But this is merely a matter of bookkeeping, because everyone gets part of the kill, except that the arrowsmith has a right to a favored part. In fact, there is very little in the way of property. They are a nomadic people and can own only what they can carry with them-except for pots and some pieces of clothing and hunting apparatus and things of that sort. And even some of that (there is no personal property) is community property. There is no head man or head woman per se. And there is a cosmology, there is a kind of religion, there is the active encouragement of the religious experience which is obtained, as in many cultures-in fact, all cultures as far as I know-partly by the use of chemical hallucinogens and partly through the use of particular kinds of behavior: dance, trances, and so on. They recognize other levels of consciousness, of conscious experience. They consider these religious experiences or hallucinations as highly valuable, as not something to be laughed at or put into a category of beliefs of the weak-minded. This is a culture in which there has traditionally always been enough to eat. Mainly mongongo nuts, the staple provided by the women, with the men providing the occasional appetizers of meat.
Now, it's interesting to compare such cultures with other cultures that, in a certain sense, because of the biases of our own culture, we know much better. And these are cultures like the Ji-varo of the Amazon Valley, in which there are in this world and the next, very striking dominance hierarchies in which there is always someone above someone else, except of course for the Supreme Creator God, above whom there is no one else. These are people who torture their enemies, who do not hug their children-in fact, brutalize their children-who are dedicated to warfare, whose sacrament is not some exotic hallucinogen but instead is ethanol, ordinary ethyl alcohol (I mean, ordinary in our society). And in virtually all the aspects that I just mentioned, there is a completely different way of looking at the world.
Now, these two views-we might call one with a powerful social hierarchy and the other with an almost nonexistent social hierarchy-cut through the anthropological literature. And there's an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. In some cases, for example, from Herodotus, you can get the key characteristics of some society now long dead. And Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariant analysis, statistical correlation- what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described. It is Prescott's view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody's happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.
Now, you cannot prove a causal sequence from a statistical correlation. And you could just as well argue that what the religious forms are determines everything or what the sacrament is has a powerful connection, between societies with alcohol and the societies that torture their enemies and abuse women and so on. But these correlations at least show that there are two and probably a multiplicity of ways of being human. That these cultures, which as far as we can tell have not been powerfully influenced by Western technical civilization, are yet strikingly different, and the reason for that difference-whatever other reasons there are-must be within us.
And, in fact, if you look at nonhuman primates, you find that some of them have this pecking-order dominance hierarchy and others don't. And it is very likely that built in to humans are both ways of behaving; that is, a hardwired circuit in our brains that permits us to fit effortlessly-or with little effort-into some dominance hierarchy. After all, the military establishments of all nations work, and part of the reason they work is that we must have some predisposition to fit into a dominance hierarchy. And at the same time, we must also have some predisposition for the antithesis, which for short I will call democracy. They lead a kind of uneasy coexistence you can find in any democracy that has a military or a caste system or a class system. Now, if you grant me that much, let us then go on to the issue of the early function and origins of religion. Clearly there are no observers in our time who were present hundreds of thousands of years ago, and there can be no confident assertions on this subject. All we can have is differing degrees of plausibility. But I think this is, whether you agree with each point I'm making or not, a very useful way to look at the origins of religion. And I'm certainly not the first person to do so. Democritus is quoted as having said in the fifth century B.C.,
The ancients seeing what happens in the sky, for example, thunder and lightning and thunderbolts and conjunctions of the stars and eclipses of the Sun and Moon were afraid, believing gods to be the cause of these.
This is what is sometimes called 'animism,' the idea that there are intelligent forces of nature that exist in everything. The Greeks put a minor god in every tree and stream. All of this has been brilliantly discussed by a former Gifford lecturer, Sir James Frazer, in his book
The story of God's commandment to Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, is an example of the transition from human to animal sacrifice. After a while people decided it really wasn't worthwhile killing their own children in this way; they would symbolically kill their own children by just getting a goat and killing it. In fact, the general decline in the practice of human and animal sacrifice in the evolution of religion is worth some attention. The Judaic and therefore also the Christian-Islamic religions began when human and animal sacrifice was all the rage.
What does that kind of propitiation mean? It is a wish for the course of nature to be different from what it
