Gods and Lies
The search for meaning leveraged to control.
[Letter #023]
Good morning, son.
Your mother and I just returned from a trip to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This excursion was to be our “babymoon,” which has been described to me as the final trip that a couple can take together before the first baby comes along. This makes sense to me, as any sojourning we do after you’re here will require quite a bit more logistical preparation to accommodate you. It’s a simple task to drive to the mountains, if all you have to do is pack a bag for a couple of days. When diapers, a stroller, onesies, and all manner of other baby paraphernalia become requisite, the conditions are altered considerably.
In case you’re somehow unaware, the town is a tourist destination, and it is designed as such. It’s crammed to bursting with boutiques and souvenir shops that all overflow with more or less the same sort of merchandise. Between these shops are a plethora of carnival-style food vendors and a dizzying array of “breweries” and “wineries” offering free samples. I use quotes there because I doubt any of them actually produce their wares on site, despite the old-timey fermentation aesthetics. The whole downtown area specifically aims to raise the “mountain life” kitsch level to maximum and extract as much money as possible. I found, oddly enough, that I don’t seem to mind touristy kitsch as long as it’s bear-themed. Imagine that.
I sat outside of a coffee shop at a little table among a collection of stores there called “The Village.” Your mother was taking a few moments to peruse the offerings of the toy store. I’m sure she had some Tiny Bear in mind. As I sat, however, I was listening to the background music playing through the hidden speakers. It’s not uncommon these days to hear music played in such places, nor was I surprised that the style was “country,” this being a Tennessee tourist hotspot after all. The country music genre wouldn’t have been my first choice, should anyone have asked my opinion, but I didn’t really remember it being quite this religious when I last heard any.
Having grown up in a small country town in north Florida (which, if you’re from the area, you know is actually just southern Alabama), I’m exceptionally well-acquainted with the country music tropes common among the last few decades. They generally concern love, break-ups, drinking, trucks, parenting, and with only the somewhat uncommon reference to Christianity. From what I recall, rural folks would prefer not to think about Sunday worship services while they’re line-dancing on Saturday night. Not that it’s not important, mind you, but it’s a bit of a buzzkill that they’d rather not have to label as such.
So, maybe it was just the case that this song I heard at the coffee shop table was intended more for the “amen, hallelujah” crowd, as opposed to the “boot-scootin’” crowd, but the singer was really going on about how she felt the love of her savior in Sunday school and how her entire life was given purpose and fulfillment by the “Good Lord.” (In fairness, I looked the song up just now to discover that it was performed by a “Christian country” artist, so it was indeed intended for the former of the above categories.) I guess it just got me thinking about having a purpose in life in general and how folks like this country music singer get noticeably bent out of shape at the thought of not having one. I started to feel bad for such people, as they’ve been taught their whole lives that this particular set of myths is what it’s all about, and that if they don’t agree or don’t feel it, then it’s their fault for not trying hard enough. I was raised on the same teachings. It made me wonder whether there was a shred of truth to the singer’s feelings, or if this was just what she was expected to do, either by the paycheck or by social pressures. If she did feel something, was it just a post facto rationalization to justify her peculiar ritual?
I’ve been steadily working through my thoughts regarding the many discussions of the Ishmael series, and this one is only a brief mention within the second book, The Story of B. I believe that was where it’s discussed, if the memory holds. Daniel Quinn throws a lot of little bits at the reader in separate chunks, all sort of loosely related to one another, and he intends for the end result to form a kind of mosaic concept that is difficult to otherwise encapsulate in a single narrative. As a result of this method, it’s often difficult to remember which volume holds which set of arguments. Regardless, one of these ideas got me thinking as I sat with the song.
Humans have always had gods. I’m not convinced that we’re genetically “designed” to create and worship deities, as such, but it certainly seems like all human cultures do it to some degree. Occam seems to tell me that we’re just really clever apes with a tendency to notice patterns in things. This helps tremendously with hunting for food, a trait that only we humans have among all of the Great Apes. We developed the ability to think about and discuss time, cause and effect, and justifications for ourselves and the universe. Despite all of that humanist ego-stroking, we’re still just apes, and so we’re still pretty limited in what we can understand without thousands of lifetimes of collective learning. I think that leads to developing gods to give us something to point to when we can’t explain certain phenomena, akin to the “Argument from Ignorance” fallacy (“We don’t know, thus the answer must be X”).
It was with this in mind that I began to think about our cultural ancestors’ transition to what Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture” ten millennia ago. Those folks surely had their own gods, and I’m sure that those gods shifted in form and function to reflect the generational changes that came with this post-hunter/gatherer way of life. I recall from my college days that the Big Three religions today (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) didn’t exist back at the start of the Agricultural “Revolution.” All three of them came from the same Abrahamic traditions, and those traditions originate from the same part of the world that saw this initial full-agricultural lifestyle, so it stands to reason that they were created by the same people who also adopted that lifestyle. All three would have been influenced by cultural norms of the region, each other, and the ideas that came specifically from the totalitarian agriculture way of life.
I took a few minutes to look up the origins of the Big Three and other world religions, and I found that, at least relative to the totalitarian agriculture shift, they’re all pretty young, actually. The start date of Christianity is arguably around 0 CE, the exact point depending a lot of which event you would consider to be its inaugural. Judaism, at its very oldest, appears to be a Bronze Age amalgamation of regional beliefs, superstitions, and adaptations from prior mythologies, dating to roughly 1800 BC. Hinduism is often boasted to be the oldest major faith that is still in common practice, and even it is only estimated to have been collected together around 2300 BC. Islam was the late-comer to the party, popping up around 610 CE. The others I looked up were Confucianism (500 BC), Buddhism (400 CE), and Shinto (600 CE).
None of these faiths amount to anything even remotely 10,000 years old. Hell, all of their ages combined barely amount to that. Even if we were to be very generous with the advent of each of them, providing that they were passed down to each generation with only minor embellishments and other concerns, the farthest back that we could reasonably consider any of their origins would be maybe five thousand years ago. Before that, I feel like it’s much more likely that the gods worshiped by our cultural ancestors would have almost nothing in common with today’s major religions, aside from the commonalities shared ubiquitously among religious ideas in general.
This led me to consider the implications of such a timeline. Humans would have lived for 300k years, roughly, in our present form. That means that over a quarter-million years ago, there lived people who were just as wise and clever as you or me. They liked to hang out, have fun, copulate, sleep, eat, and watch campfires just as much as we do. They would have believed in their gods just as much as people do today, and they would have had different sorts of gods depending on where they were in the world. Over a couple hundred millennia, the religious practices would have morphed considerably, with the only lasting characteristic being constant change.
Even with the shift to totalitarian agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, somewhere around 8000 BC, beliefs about those gods would have continued following the same patterns. They would morph and reflect whatever the people were encountering at that time. Gods who favored hunting and tribal nomadism would be slowly replaced by the worship of gods boosting crop fertility and increasing land dominance. Recall that this form of lifestyle requires constant territorial expansion to account for population growth and soil depletion. We know that this sort of lifestyle took over the nomadic herding and hunter/gatherer styles, not just because of archeological evidence, but also because there are almost none of those people left today.
Archeology does tell us that the farming life took a long time to catch on among the various people groups of Africa, Europe, and Asia. It isn’t really a mystery to me why that is. Farming sucks. It’s backbreaking, all-day labor, and it forces people to become reliant on the whims of the harvest. People forget what is edible in the wild, and when the harvest fails, they starve and die. So, how long does it take to continue the march across the globe, expanding fields and eradicating or assimilating the “primitive” tribes? I don’t know. A couple thousand years? Probably something like that. So, a couple thousand years of war, famine, disease from people living in close proximity and with livestock, and just the general misery of living a pointless existence toiling away for an overlord to make a rich man richer.
Well, that would put us somewhere around the year 5000 to 4000 BC, I guess. The cultures around the eastern part of the Mediterranean and in Persia would probably be starting to feel a lot of the woes and disorders that come with civilization. That’s where the earliest cities started to accumulate after all. People living in fixed locations, all tightly together, often bumping around each other — yeah. That’s going to cause some grumbling. Combine that with the general malaise associated with a civilized life of toil for a wage and it’s pretty easy to understand why these humans wouldn’t be terribly happy with existence. But, if this is all they’ve ever known, and it’s all that their grandparents’ grandparents ever knew, then who could possibly know that there was ever more to life than that?
Surely, humanity must be a wretched and miserable condition. Humans, it could be reasoned, are inherently flawed.
That’s the starting point for a great many philosophers. The Greek and Roman ones certainly thought that way. The much more recent ones definitely thought that way. Our modern “conventional wisdom” uses that as a de facto starting point. “Nobody’s perfect,” after all, right? As though some sort of idealized “perfection” was a desirable aspiration anyway. Thinkers throughout the ages of civilization, going all the way back to the earliest times of our modern religions, have ceaselessly speculated nonsense about what humans could be and what behaviors they should maintain. We know that humans rarely hold up to such scrutiny, to such an extent that the Catholics made it a point to call some of the folks who allegedly did so “saints.” It’s not clear to me that these saints were actually all that great anyway, or if some of them even ever existed, but the Catholics like to use them as role models.
Well then, if we {A} have decided that humans are miserable wretches of flaw and imperfection, and we’ve {B} decided that there is a standard of actual perfection that we should strive toward every day, even though we know we will fail, and we’ve {C} decided that most of us will never achieve even a semblance of that unattainable goal, then — we must conclude that humanity is in need of salvation. Some god or set of gods, or maybe even a god named God, is necessary to guide us toward this perfection and save us from nastiness that is our own imperfection.
So, just to be clear, the view of philosophers, theologians, academics, and society in general is that humans are not miserable, starving, diseased, suffering, at war, and homeless because they’ve taken up a totalitarian agricultural lifestyle wherein powerful people, whose laws are enforced by threat of violence, will lock away the food that people need to live in order to force their compliance. No, that’s not it. It’s not that humans, who had only lived this lifestyle of dominance and warfare for a few thousand years, were somehow not living in the way that their ancestors evolved to live happily over millions of years before them. That’s not it — no. Humans are flawed creatures, sentenced to a life defined as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short because some fairly new deity came along and set out some inhumanly difficult behavioral expectations, knowing we’d be unable to meet them and/or make ourselves miserable and unhealthy attempting to do so. Now, because we have all fallen short of that glorious perfection, we require “nirvana,” or “enlightenment,” or “salvation,” or whatever you like.
Isn’t that something? We stopped living how we had evolved to live, we made up reasons why it was a good idea to do that, we made ourselves believe that our emotional emptiness was because we weren’t living up to unreasonable standards, and we gave ourselves an “out” by just agreeing to do whatever rituals the holy folks made up. If that’s not inventing a disease in order to sell a cure, I don’t know what is.
In order to better sell “the cure,” the holy folks usually threw in some version of heaven to boot. We needed some sort of special after-existence. Something beyond our wretched lives that’ll make it all worthwhile. Most humans don’t actually like to work that hard each day. Most don’t really want much more from life than to simply live peacefully and raise their kids with ample enough food to get by without enduring too many lean times. This sort of behavior, however, doesn’t allow kings and nobles to live like — well, kings and nobles. If they’re going to maintain their control over the masses and force compliance, it would be really helpful to tell them that after they die, things will be perfect and happy.
It’ll all be better after we shuffle off this mortal coil, right? When we fly with the angels among the stars to sit among the choir eternal. Hard to say otherwise, isn’t it? Can’t bring someone back from the other side to tell us one way or the other. If you did, you’d probably just be hearing the deluded ramblings of a person suffering from a blood-deprived brain. They make up all sorts of things. Of course, you have to be careful with this offer, lest your people decide that they would rather just cut to the chase, off themselves, and enjoy the paradise right away. You have to make sure that they’ve done enough drudgery here on Earth to justify their journey to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
That’s certainly one reason why the various supernatural forces all insist on us trying to be perfect specimens of virtue and purity. It’s also why those gods want us to work hard for our “betters” and show them deference, just as we show deference to the gods. If it’s all you’ve ever known, then the divine right of kings does seem pretty insurmountable. Know your place, peasant, work your entire life for the masters, and remain well-behaved so that those masters don’t need to concern themselves with your existence. When you inevitably die without making much of a difference to anyone, you’ll get some something something perfection paradise something. Promise. Streets of gold. All the virgins. Feasts of roast beast.
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
It isn’t really like it’s changed that much today. We’ve renamed a lot of those old conventions, and we pride ourselves on our remarkable social progress, but they still work practically the same way. Kings and emperors are just prime ministers and presidents, who aren’t really “elected” so much as they choose among themselves and wait their turn to sit on their thrones. Slavery and serfdom have just been simplified as “debt,” although we in the US really enjoy calling it “credit,” and we slap that stuff on pretty much everything possible. Hell, we’ll finance oxygen itself, just as soon as we can figure out how to reliably deprive people of it.
So, if you’ve just tuned into our broadcast, here’s the summary so far. A human tribe in the Middle East about 10k years ago, just one group of people among the thousands around the world at the time, took up totalitarian agriculture. In order to keep the masses laboring, the people with the power eventually locked up the food to force compliance and “good” behavior. In order to account for population growth (a side-effect of forcing the soil to yield massive harvests) and soil depletion, this tribe expanded and conquered land. This process repeated for a few thousand years while cities were built and power was consolidated into a few empires. People, whose ancestors had lived happy, well-fed, and full lives, grew miserable from this lifestyle of hierarchy, warfare, and domination. The gods were then used to tell people that they needed salvation from their flawed, worthless existence. By doing the appropriate holy hokey-pokey, one could attain this salvation and thereby punch an imaginary ticket to an imaginary land of abundance and perfection for eternity. Oh, but only after a lifetime of piety. These beliefs were used to further consolidate the power of the elites, who were themselves often excused from the pious obligations. Bada-bing and/or boom, and voila — the human condition.
That about cover it?
Despite all of our philosophy, technology, and medicine today, we’re still sitting in that same position. We’re still fundamentally unhappy with our lives. We don’t feel fulfilled or like we have a real purpose in existence. We know that what we’re doing today is destroying the planet. We know that humans, in general, are more miserable than ever. We know that we work longer and harder than our ancestors ever did, excepting possibly the poor Victorian era bastards during the pre-Union days or, you know, actual slaves like those who built the United States.
Humans are depressed and poor, with the exception of the elite (as usual). We work harder and harder because we have to in order to “make it,” only to find out that a lifetime of hard work doesn’t really satisfy the need for meaning or fulfillment. We’re told by every major religion out there that their brand of salvation is the correct one, because the gods demand perfection and we’re not good enough, and all that we have to do is pray hard enough to get the glorious absolution. If we aren’t feeling that promised level of satisfaction, then we just need to believe even harder, dammit!
What if, — and I mean, I’m just spitballing here — what if this has all just been a big whoopsie? What if we were just supposed to live like our ancestors did 20,000 years ago? They lived like their ancestors did 20k years before them. In turn, they lived like their ancestors, and that went on and on for the last — well, forever. Millions of years. What if we just took a wrong turn about ten thousand years ago, and we’ve been trying to justify that wrong turn ever since? What if this is all just bollocks, and we’re making it up to try to feel better?
What if humans don’t need salvation because there’s nothing inherently flawed about us? Would we say that marmosets and moose and geese and gazelles are “imperfect”? Having been raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, I can confidently assure you that no one believes such animals are imperfect. On the contrary, it seems that only humans are considered to have fallen short of God’s “glory.” It’s not to say that humans don’t do some really terrible things. Of course they do. But, honestly, that’s beside the point at this stage.
Thus I sat, listening to this country music singer going on about how the sermons she listens to in church make her feel alive and full of meaning and purpose. I genuinely felt bad for her, and I felt bad for the people who listen to that song and identify with it. They’ve been lied to their whole lives. They’ve been manipulated and controlled, and they’ve never heard a single whisper of a clue that it’s all nonsense. The people who manipulate and control them are likewise manipulated by others, and those by others still. Even so, they’ll feel the emptiness each day. They’ll know that life was never meant to feel like this. They’ll know at some deep level that fulfillment doesn’t come from practicing whatever particular brand of salvation-promises that they were born into. But, they’ll keep singing songs to persuade themselves into believing it anyway. What else could they possibly think to do?
Your mother eventually came back out of the toy store. Well, “came out,” doesn’t exactly describe the almost waddling effect she endures as she tries to lug around an enormous human within. I don’t think she managed to find anything in there that suited her well enough, but rest assured that we’ve got plenty of fun little doodads to draw your attention once you’re here with us. I got up to meet her and began considering writing this as a letter.
Son, I want you to try to be considerate of people as you go through life. Most everyone you will ever meet will have encountered some degree of bullshit that they’ve taken to heart. If it’s truly what they want to believe, and they won’t consider anything else, then just nod and move on. Respect that they can believe whatever they wish. For some people, they deeply fear that it’s the only comfort they’ll ever find in this life, and by discussing some of the things you’ll know about, they’ll risk losing their grip on that security blanket. So, when you come into a contradicting point of view, just state your case and let it ride. If they want to talk about it, let them do so, but never push anyone to adopt different beliefs.
Good luck with dealing with the different religions in the world, son. Try to find the similarities that you see among them, but also note the differences. They can be quite fascinating sometimes. I love you very much, and I hope that you’re safe.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
