The Transformation of Blame
“Religious Thought” and the Genealogy of Scientific Explanation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rsth.v28i2.207Keywords:
religious thought, scientific explanation, mimesis, social order, blame, collective violenceAbstract
This essay discusses Donald Wiebe’s account of the relationship between “religious thought” and the mode of thought that he thinks typical of objective science and rational theology. First I present what I take to be Wiebe’s position. Then, drawing on René Girard’s fundamental anthropology and Michael Tomasello’s cultural-psychological work on joint attention, I offer a critique and articulate an alternative approach. I argue that the dichotomy between ostensibly objective modern scientific thought, on the one hand, and religious thought, on the other, is not an internal structural one, but concerns the radically differing value for social order accruing to otherwise commensurate modes of intersubjective attention to objects in a shared environment. I argue that the class of procedures aiming at relatively disinterested, nonagentic explanation is genetically related to the class of relatively parochial, affect-laden acts of blaming, a class that includes ex post facto (mythological) rationalizations of those proto-human reactions that engendered archaic ritual practices and systems of interdiction in the first place. The transition from religious thought to science, I conclude, is not a dichotomy in “kinds” of thought, as Wiebe argues, but arises with the historical emergence of a novel human potential for empathy and the concomitant erosion of the individual’s susceptibility, in the context of collective crises, to persuasion framed in terms of blame.
References
Aristotle. 1943 Politics. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Modern Library.
Barrett, Justin. 2004 Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
“Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1): 29–34. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(99)01419-9
Boyer, Pascal. 2001 Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burkert, Walter. 1996 Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dennett, Daniel. 2006 Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking.
Gans, Eric Lawrence. 2008 The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Girard, René. 1977 Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
“From Ritual to Science.” Configurations 8: 171–185. doi:10.1353/con.2000.0014
Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987 Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research Undertaken in Colaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lincoln, Bruce. 2003 Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, Jean François. 1993 “The Grip (Mainmise).” In Political Writings, edited by Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman, 148–158. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
Martin, Luther H. 2006 “Cognitive Science, Ritual, and the Hellenistic Mystery Religions.” Religion & Theology 13(3): 383–395. doi:10.1163/157430106779024644
McCauley, Robert N., and E. Thomas Lawson. 2002 Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBo9780511606410
Price, H.H. 1969 Thinking and Experience. 2nd ed. London: Hutchinson University Press.
Slone, D. Jason. 2004 Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. New York: Oxford University Press.
Spiro, M. 1966 “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” In Anthropological Approaches to Religion, edited by M. Banton. London: Tavistock.
Tomasello, Michael. 1999 The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Wiebe, Donald. 1991 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Mcgill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2002 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. 2nd ed. New York: Verso.
