Ancestor Worship and Atheism

I learned about the existence of atheism and anarchism at around the same time (I think I was twelve). It may have been simply their parallel structure as words that caused me to interpret them in similar ways. I imagined that atheism properly understood is not so much a doxastic state, a lack of belief in the existence of some external entity, but rather a normative state, an opposition to the existence of that entity, or, perhaps better, an opposition to that entity's supposed claim on my soul. On the standard interpretation, by contrast, atheism involves the denial of the existence of an entity, while anarchism involves opposition to an institution that everyone acknowledges to exist. Its existence is the problem that gives any self-identification as an anarchist its sense and purpose.

Yet there may be something revealing about this misunderstanding-- something that leaves anarchism intact, while forcing us to rethink what it is we are asking, or answering, in conversations about religious belief. Now I've long insisted that it's a huge waste of time to argue either for or against the existence of God. I'm sympathetic to Bertrand Russell's view that claims about God are 'bad grammar', even if, as I see it, he was motivated by cocky self-assuredness, while on this question I suffer from the opposite weakness: total incomprehension.

Things start to make a bit of sense to me however when I turn from philosophical speculation to the ethnographic record. We know that, for the most part, preoccupation with the existence or non-existence of an omnipotent omniscient supernatural creator is a feature of only a particular type of society. It is, to put it succinctly, an abstraction from the idea of the monarch, and debates about the existence of God that characterize the modern era run parallel to the emergence of alternatives to monarchism. In this respect, it is no less provincial to suppose that the question "Do you believe in God?" is universally meaningful, than to suppose that one might reasonably ask of a paleolithic hunter-gatherer whether he prefers republicanism or absolute monarchy.

Countless ethnographic reports tell us that in relatively simple societies (and I mean 'simple' not as a judgment but as a description of measurable features) it is not the supreme being or first cause or summum bonum that is of interest: it is rather ancestors, the way the dead continue to play a role in the world of the living, the way they are reincarnated back into that world through new births, and the way they influence that world for better or ill depending on how the living regulate their behavior. This is what matters, and even if there might be some myth about the origins of the world or even about a supreme entity that rules the 'other side', this is nonetheless not what their religion --if we can speak of such a thing-- is centrally about.

This is something many early missionaries understood. For them, it was a matter of bringing God to the people who had not yet heard of him, in the savage and barbarian lands such as America, and not a matter of insisting that they exchange one god for another. This was a categorically different project for them than the conversion of the Chinese, for example, who were held by many (particularly the more liberal Jesuits) to already have a perfectly viable distinction between God and Creation, which would now only need to be recast in Biblical terminology: a cosmetic change more than a change of heart.

Now it seems to me that it makes sense to call an Amazonian native circa 1600 an 'atheist' only to the same extent that it makes sense to call her an 'anarchist'. She has no familiarity with state structures or with the idea of a causa sui, summum bonum, etc., but in both cases there is no real opposition, just a different range of belief options afforded by the particular sort of society in which she happens to live.

Yet while anarchism is supposed to concern an individual's beliefs about what is best for human society, atheism by contrast is supposed to be about the way not just human society in fact is, but the way the entire world is, with all its galaxies and quarks and so on. It is supposed to be a viewpoint about the ultimate causes of these things, and about what is sustaining them in existence and giving them their natures. That's a pretty tall order for any -ism, especially when we know that there is such a rigid correlation (in the ethnographic record, which for some reason no one wants to look at) between beliefs about the transcendent order on the one hand and the civic order on the other.

Now I am, as I've confessed repeatedly in this space, both an anarchist and an atheist, but I see the latter more or less as a direct consequence of the former: not so much as a view about what's actually behind the quarks and galaxies and magnets and stuff, but rather as a direct corollary for the transcendent realm of my principled commitments in the immanent realm. I don't need God because I don't need kings. I'm with the 16th-century Amazonians. (At least deep in my heart I am; in actual practice I am a run-of-the-mill liberal democrat and a non-practicing unitarian universalist, just like pretty much everyone I know.)

The so-called atheism of someone like Dawkins, from this perspective, looks at least as foolish as the piety of any bishop. It is born of a deep assurance that ethnographic data can be of no interest in formulating claims about the ultimate nature of reality, and this because of an absolute certainty that the ethnographic lens could never be turned back upon oneself, whose declarations about the existence or non-existence of a supreme being are motivated by reason and reflection alone, and not by the range of options one has in a particular time and place. (Hitchens, by contrast and to his credit, admits that he is an 'Anglican atheist').

The tragedy is that a century ago it looked like we were well on our way to a sophisticated science of religion, grounded in ethnographic data. Marcel Mauss was an atheist too, but he was light years ahead of Dawkins in his understanding of what it is to be an atheist, and by the same token of what it is to experience the world religiously or through the filter of ideas about transcendent beings (whether ancestor spirits or a supreme creator).

These days I'm trying to figure out when and how that vital research program trailed off, and left us only with yokels like Dawkins and Ratzinger to represent each his own position in the crudest and most un-self-aware terms possible. I suspect it has something to do with the rise of US Cold War hegemony (which made it seem that the American liberal democratic way of thinking was just thinking simpliciter) and of postmodernism (which made the study of human cultural diversity by European-trained scholars into an act of 'violence'). But now that these two trends are fizzling as well, perhaps now is a good moment to reclaim that early 20th-century scientific seriousness for the future study of religious belief. 

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Comments

[michael reidy]

It's always nice to know what an intelligent atheist makes of the sentiment of religion. You start from what you know, tentatively offering the notion of patination, the genuflexion before ancient texts (Philosophia Mystica) and the gnomic utterances within. Now the banal bricolage continues with Pitt Rivers patristics. (stand to the West when you say that pardner) The drawn purse of that shrunken head is not to be preferred to the enthusiasm of Prof. Dawkins.

[Justin]

Michael, I literally cannot make heads or tails out of what you've written.

[mtraven]

There is informed anthropological and cognitive studies of religion, eg the work of Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer. Bruno Latour has written some interesting things on religion that you might find congenial, most recently the essay "Thou Shalt Not Freeze Frame" . I don't think anyone serious takes Dawkins seriously on this topic.

The relation between anarchism and atheism is suggestive, but actually kind of obvious when you think about how the authority of the state has been so often linked to the authority of god. They both suffer from being reactions and come up short on positive programs

[Stephen]

Justin,

I can see how you cannot literally make tails of Michael's writing, however his reference to shrunken heads may be worth something as far as the manufacture of said heads is concerned.

[Neillie]

I rather think that trying to explain atheism to a hunter of the upper paleolithic would be as difficult as…well, trying to explain religion.

It’s pretty clear I think looking at the ethnography relating to extinct Southern African hunting and gathering people and Australian indigenes (if you're confident making conclusions based on comparison across tens of thousands of years) that ritual and myth were, among other things, practical tools essential to survival in inhospitable environments where survival margins were unthinkably narrow and extraordinarily close observation and interpretation of those environments was a survival imperative.

“Religion”, and the notion of “god”, even, are terms that are only thinkable when you’re comfortable enough to deserve gods with reasonably good manners. The San of Southern Africa were hilariously resistant to the missionaries. The ethnology is clear that they weren’t big on opposites and that they didn’t even distinguish between themselves and the plants and animals in their environment in terms that are easy to explain. Giving up their myth would have made survival in their place impossible.

We’ve been hunters and gatherers for 99% of our history as a species. The inheritance is difficult to lose, which, I suppose, could be the main reason it’s pointless arguing about the existence or non-existence of any god today: a believer will defend their belief as if their life depended on it because once upon a time, when myth and its attendant rituals were genuinely essential to survival, it did.

That might not make sense but it was fun to write.

[ramblingperfectionist]

Wow, I have no idea what your chain of reasoning is supposed to be. If atheism is just the "lack of belief in gods", which is really the simplest possible definition, then why on earth should you insist on differentiating between the Amazons' or Dawkins's atheism? Why should it have anything whatsoever to do with "the range of options one has in a particular time and place"? The fact that certain times encourage certain philosophies says nothing about the truth values of those philosophies. Of course I am showing the same blindness you accuse Dawkins of, but perhaps it's because I'm an outsider to the field that I have no idea why this position is not self-evident.

[ramblingperfectionist]

Incidentally, is it really news to you that the atheism of the New Atheists is in fact just naturalism/materialsm and not "just" atheism? The claim they make, therefore, is that there is no such thing as the supernatural, nothing outside the realm of physics as it is, if not physics as we understand it today. So we see the New Atheists equally concerned about the anti-vaxers, homeopathic medicine, chiropractors and so on.

[michael reidy]

Like the bricolage that Levi-Strauss speaks of in The Savage Mind the scholar bricoleur must cobble together his theories from what is to hand, he must make do with his mental equivalent of duct tape and casing wire and that jar of assorted nuts and bolts. Is a whimsical idea about monarchy adequate to the data? Is it to be preferred to the vivid outrage of Dawkins? I think not.

[Julia]

Please do continue on this theme. I wish to know what you consider the "range of options" we have in this time and place.

I come from the Mennonite tradition, a vaguely anarchic Christian denomination, though certainly more collectivist than individualist. "God as monarch" does not really apply. I think the same could be said of Jewish discourse. "Do you believe in God?" is not an ultimately meaningful question for either of these groups. 20th century Jewish thought (and I see a lot of my own tradition in this) finds God as the stuff of relationships, or more particularly, as a moment of radical receptivity to the other.

Maybe this is simply belief as a "private obscene secret" (so suggests Zizek in the first pages of The Puppet and the Dwarf), but maybe it reflects a different ethnographic option.