In the circular structure of survival in nature, there was no
room for metaphysical self-constitution, i.e., no practical need
to wonder about what was beyond the immediate and proximate,
never mind life and death. When the practical experience of
self-constitution made rudiments of language (the language of
gestures, objects, sounds) possible, a sense of time-as
sequences of durations-developed, and thus a new dimension, in
addition to the immediate, opened. This opening grew as awareness
of oneself in relation to others increased in a context of
diversified practical experiences. Acknowledging others, not
just as prey, or as object of sexual drive, but as associates
(in hunting, foraging, mating, securing shelter), and even the
very act of association, resulted in awareness of the power of
coordination. Thus the awareness, as diffuse as it still was, of
time got reinforced. Be-Hu Tung ventured a description of the
process: "In the beginning there was no moral or social order.
People knew only their mothers, not their fathers. Hungry, they
searched for their food. Once full, they threw the rest away.
They ate their food with skin and hair on it, drank blood and
covered themselves in fur and reeds." He described a world in
its animal phase, still dependent on the cycles of nature,
perceiving and celebrating repetition.
Myth and ritual responded to natural rhythms and incorporated
these in the life cycle. Once human self-constitution extended
beyond nature, creating its own realm, observance of natural
rhythms took new forms. This new forms were more able to support
levels of efficiency appropriate to the new condition achieved in
the experience of farming. It was no longer the case that
survival equaled finding and appropriating means of subsistence
in nature. Rather, natural cycles were introduced as a matrix of
work, modulating the entire existence. Once the experience of
religion was identified as such, religious praxis adopted the
same matrix. In almost all known religions, natural cycles, as
they pertain to reproduction, work, celebrations, education, are
detailed. Cooperation and coordination progressively increased.
A mechanism of synchronization beyond the one that only
accommodated natural cycles became necessary. In retrospect, we
understand how rules of interaction established in the
nature-dominated pragmatic framework turned into the
commandments of what would be asserted through written religion.
We also understand how animistic pre-religious practice-embodied
in the use of masks and charms, in worship of the untouched
natural object (tree, rock, spring, animal), and the employment
of objects meant to keep harm away (tooth, bone, plant) took new
forms in what can be defined as the semiotic strategy of
attaching the religious word (more broadly, the Book) to the
life of each member of the religious community. The need to
establish the community, and to identify it through action, was
so pressing that ceremonies were put in place to bring people
together for at least a few times during the year. In Egyptian
hieroglyphics, one can distinguish an affection for coordination
of effort, expressed in the depiction of rowers on boats,
builders of pyramids, warriors. The written word of the Hebrews
was inspired by the experience of hieroglyphics, taking the
notion of coordination to a more abstract level. This level
provided a framework for synchronizing activity that brought
ritual closer to religion. This added a new dimension to
ceremonies based on natural cycles, gradually severing the link
to the practical experience of interaction with nature.
Notation evolving into the written word was still the domain of
the very few. Accordingly, religious reminders were strongly
visual, as well as aural, a state of affairs that continued in
the religions that sprouted from Judaism and established
themselves after the fall of the Roman Empire. The populations
adhering to these religions were largely illiterate, but derived
important characteristics from religions based on the written
word-the Word that was equated with God. Nailed to the doorways
or inscribed over portals, converted into many types of charms,
the words of a religious creed became elements of the
synchronizing mechanism that religion embodied in the pragmatic
framework of its constitution. Prayer punctuated the daily
routine, as it continues to do in our day. The seasons and the
cycles of nature, embodied in the mytho-magical, were
reinterpreted in religious celebrations, which referenced the
natural cycle, and appropriated pre-religious rituals. Cycles of
activity aimed at maintaining and increasing the outcome of work
for survival were thus confirmed. A community's well-being was
expressed by its ability to satisfy the needs of its members and
achieve a pattern of growth. Still heavily dependent upon
natural elements (rain, floods, wind, insects, etc.), as well as
subjected to attacks from neighbors, communities developed
strategies for better use of resources (human included),
storage, and defense mechanisms. These strategies were carefully
encoded in the respective religious covenants.
The religions that have survived and developed seem to gravitate
around a core of very practical writings and associated visual
reminders of the power they invoke in connection to the
pragmatic identity of the community. The book was the standard;
those who constituted the organization of religion-the
priesthood-could usually read the book. Scribes, even some of
the priests, could write and add to the book. The majority
listened and memorized, resorting to better memory than we
exercise today, memory that their practical experience
required. They subscribed to religious patterns, or carried out
rituals on a personal or communal level.
It is helpful to keep in mind that religious involvement was
facilitated by the fact that religion is not only pragmatically
founded, but also pragmatically ascertained and tested. Rules
for farming, hunting, preparing food; rules for hygiene and
family relations; rules for conducting war and dealing with
prisoners and slaves were expressed against the background of an
accepted supreme reference, before evolving into future ethical
rules and legal systems. Those rules which were not confirmed,
progressively lost authority, were "erased" from the people's
memory, and ceased to affect the rhythm of their lives. The
written word survived the oral, as well as the living who
uttered it or wrote it down. This word, abstracted from voice,
gesture, and movement, and abstracted from the individual, was
progressively assigned a more privileged place in the hierarchy.
The writings seemed to have a life of their own, independent of
the scribes, who were believed to be only copiers of everlasting
messages entrusted to them.
Written words express the longing for a unified framework of
existence, thought and action. Within such a framework,
observance of a limited number of rules and procedures could
guarantee a level of efficiency appropriate to the scale at which
human activity took place. This is a world of human practical
experiences transcending natural danger and fear. It is a
universe of existence in which a species is committed to its
further self-definition in defiance of nature while still
dependent upon it. Religion as a human experience appears in
this world as a powerful tool for the optimization of the effort
involved, because it effectively constitutes a synchronizing
mechanism. In the practical experience of religious writing and
the associated experience of reading or listening to a text, the
word becomes an instrument of abstraction. Accordingly, it is
assigned a privileged position in the hierarchy of the many sign
systems in use. Memetic replication appropriately describes the
evolution of religious ideas, but not necessarily how these
ideas are shaped by the pragmatic framework.
Tablets, scrolls, and books are blueprints for effective
self-constitution within a community of people sharing an
understanding of rules for efficient experiences. The outcome is
guaranteed by the implicit contract of those self-constituted as
believers in the supernatural from which the rules supposedly
emanate. In search of authority, this world settled for unifying
motivations. The rules of animal, and sometimes even human,
sacrifice, and those of religious offerings were based on the
pragmatics of maintaining optimal productivity (of herds, trees,
soil), of entering agreements, maintaining property,
redistributing wealth, and endowing offspring. The immediate
meaning of some of the commitments made became obscured over
time as scale changed and the association to nature weakened.
The rules were subsequently associated with metaphysical
requirements, or simply appropriated by culture in the form of
tradition. To ensure that each individual partook in the
well-being of the community, punishments were established for
those violating a religious rule. Immediate punishment and,
later, eternal punishment, although not in all religions, went
hand in hand as deterrents.
The involvement of language, in particular of writing and
reading, is significant. As already stated, the individual who
could decipher the signs of religious texts was set apart. Thus
reading took on a mystical dimension. The division between the
very few who wrote and read and the vast majority involved in
the religious experience diminished over a very long time. More
than other practical experiences, religion introduced the
unifying power of the written word in a world of diversity and
arbitrariness. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Word
was endowed with godlike qualities, implicitly becoming a god.
Seen from a given religious perspective, the rest of the world
fails because it does not accept the word, i.e., the religion.
The irreligious part of the world could be improved by imposing
the implicit pragmatics that the religion carried; it could
submit to the new order and cease to be a threat. At this time,
religion entered the realm of the abstract, divorced from the
experience with nature characteristic of religions originating
in the oral phase of human self-constitution. It is at this time
that religion became dogma.
All over the globe, in the worlds of Hinduism, Taoism,
Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, the
conflict between communities embracing a certain creed and
others, in pre-religious phases or dedicated to a different
religion, is one of opposing pragmatics in the context of
increased differentiation. In other words, a different religious
belief is a threat to the successful practical self-constitution
of one group. To get rid of the threat is a pragmatic
requirement, for which many wars were fought. Some are still
going on. With each religion that failed, a pragmatic requirement
failed, and was replaced by others more appropriate to the
context of human self- constitution. That these conflicts
appeared under the aegis of conflicting deities, represented by
leaders regarded as representatives of divinity, only goes to
show how close the relation is between the underlying structure
of human activity and its various embodiments.
In a world of unavoidable and even necessary diversity, religion
maintained islands of unity. When interaction increased among
the various groups, for reasons essentially connected to levels
of efficiency required for current and future practical
experiences, patterns of common activity resulted in patterns of
behavior, increased commonalty of language, accepted (or
rejected) values, and territorial and social organization. The
commonalty of language, as well as the commonalty of what would
become, during the Middle Ages, national identity (language and
religion being two of the identifiers), increased steadily.
From among the major changes that religion underwent, the most
significant are probably its reification in the institution of
the church and the constitution of vast bodies of discourse
regarding its intrinsic logic, known as theology. Once asserted
as an institution, religion became the locus of specific human
interaction that resulted in patterns based on the language
(Latin, for some in the Western Christian world, and Arabic in
the Islamic East) in which religion was expressed. Religious
practical experience progressively distanced itself from the
complexities of work and socio- political organization, and
constituted a form of praxis independent of others, although
never entirely disconnected from them. The organization of
religion concerns the pattern of religious services at certain
locations: temple, church, mosque. It concerns the institution,
one among many: the military, the nobility, guilds, banks,
sometimes competing with them. It also concerns education,
within its own structure or in coordination, sometimes in
conflict, with other interests at work.
A multitude of structural environments, adapted to the practical
aspects of religious experience appear, while religion
progressively extricated itself, or was eliminated, from the
pragmatics of survival and existence. The institution it became
dedicated itself to pursuing its own repetitive assignments. At
the same time, it established and promoted its implicit set of
motivations and criteria for evaluation. In many instances, the
church constituted viable social entities in which work, and
agriculture in particular, was performed according to
prescriptions combining it with the practice of faith. Rules of
feudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed,
education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the Middle
Ages to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia,
and North and South America, the church impacted community life
through actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense.
The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social and
political realities, or at least to resist those in place.
Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religious
experience was one of repeated self-constitution of its own
entity in new contexts, and of pursuing experiences of faith,
even if the activity as such was not religious. In this process,
the church gained the awareness of the role of scale, and
maintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such as
monasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proved
decreasingly possible as the church tried to extend its
involvement. The growing pragmatic context had to be
acknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocal
dependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion of
the world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting from
long-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has come
from communication-in particular the new visual media-requiring
strategies of national, cultural, social, and even political
integration.
From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of the
Rig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran,
to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to the
Bible and treatises printed on the presses of Fust and Schöffer
(Gutenberg's usurpers) in Mainz, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Zurich,
Seville, and Naples-over 4,000 years can be seen as part of the
broader history of the beginning of literacy. This history is a
witness to the process, one of many variations, but also one of
dedication to the permanency of faith and the word through which
it is reified.
Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and so
religion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kind
of information, generated in the human mind as it started
labeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our direct
understanding. What did not change, although it was rendered
relative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supreme
authority, known as God, or described through other names such
as Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practical
experience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indian
religious leaders were alive today, they would probably realize
that if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded on
the written text of the Book or books, but in the practical
experiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident,
the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religion
is entitled Finding God in Cyberspace.
The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?
The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experience
essential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of the
main functions of language. It should come as no surprise that
education was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to a
high degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise that
religion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once the
scale of human activity that made literacy necessary was
reached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion as
one of their identifiers, the entire history of the relation
between society and religion can be seen in a different light.
As we know from history, the quest for power frequently brought
state and religion into conflict, although one needed and relied
on the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrial
society, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. These
were simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for the
maintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long as
these did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of market
transactions.
Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life,
change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed as
the result of self-observation and observation of the outside
world. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religious
explanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, is
one example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplying
alternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usually
carefully construed so as not to collide with the religious
viewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of the
consequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies based
on an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions.
During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derived
from studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideas
not rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of the
church. These ideas were expressed by men and women who founded
orders. They were put into practice by religious activists or
made into new theologies.
There is no religion that does not go through its internal
revisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today's
list of religious denominations, one can find everything, from
paganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for this
multiplication into infinity is not different from the
explanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices,
as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiences
as it does to any other form of pragmatic human
self-constitution. The practical experience of science,
diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma,
also followed many paths of diversification. So did the
unfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. The
unifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted by
the monolithic church, was progressively subjected to
distinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. When
people were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a book
that the Catholic church did not allow them to read even after
the Reformation-protest started, but it started after the
Renaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defy
the papacy with some degree of success.
The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimes
illiterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and military
insurgent of today belong to very different pragmatic
frameworks. The former did not have to be able to read or write
in order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) related
to the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institution
guarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of these
events, individual performance was of extreme importance to the
community, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joan
of Arc, Jan Hus-or, to change the reference, from the story of
Guru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted by
the Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbus
was on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther,
George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. The
educated faithful of the past probably obtained access to the
established values of culture and to the main paradigms of
science as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church.
An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn between
accepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, while
experiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepare
its followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-one
meant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towards
their contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not only
that of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment of
the population that has no need for either.