Putting Durkheim’s religion/magic distinction into the evolutionary context
Reading Wilson’s review of Dawkins made me think again about a possible way to distinguish religious as opposed to superstitious beliefs. Wilson writes:
This recalls Durkheim’s distinction between religion and superstition on the basis that religion has a primarily social role, whereas superstition tends to be personal. What Vyse (in Believing in Magic, pp. 9-10) writes about this is interesting enough to quote at length:
Durkheim proposed a method for distinguishing between religion and magic based on the social function of each. He began by rejecting the common notion that religion and magic can be distinguished from other domains by their supernatural character [...] As Durkheim pointed out, not all cultures distinguish between these two domains. [...]
As an alternative to the natural/supernatural distinction, Durkheim suggested that within each culture, objects and activities can be separated into two categories: the “sacred” and the “profane”. Religion is made up of “beliefs”, statements about the nature of sacred things, and “rites”, rules of conduct with respect to sacred things. [...]
According to this scheme, magical things are also sacred. They are placed in a higher category and give rise to beliefs and rites similar to those surrounding religious objects. But Durkheim believed that magic and religion fulfill different social functions: whereas religion serves the group, magic serves the individual. [...]
Vyse states that Durkheim’s view was rejected by others because of the phenomenon of “profoundly religious experiences [which] often occur in solitude”. As he explains:
In many religions, believers periodically turn away from the group and engage in individual prayer or contemplation, and because these experiences can have a powerful effect on an individual’s religious faith, Durkheim’s critics asserted that these solitary experiences contradict the view that religion exists to serve society. Moreover, Durkheim’s theory does not move us toward an understanding of the psychology of superstition.
That last point is true enough but only until evolution is used to cast light on the issue, I think. Wilson gives the example of Jain ascetics who live by highly impractical rules but whose behaviour starts to make sense once we consider it in the context of group selection – “the food begging system of the asceticts functions as an important moral policing mechanism for the community”. Thus, it is possible to put forward the theory that religion is linked to group selection pressures while superstition is linked to individual selection pressures. In effect, Durkheim’s claim that religion and superstition have different social functions comes to be understood at the evolutionary level. This is important as it strengthens the position – the question of individual religious experience can be answered by showing how such experience has an evolutionary social function, just like that of the Jain begging system. What is important is that the religious phenomena are likely to have developed later than the superstitious phenomena and to have co-opted some of those phenomena, i.e. religious experience may be a cognitive by-product that became an exaptation utilised by religion which is group-selected for.
I hope this quote also might help your insight..
Is religious belief a mere leap into irrationality as many skeptics assume? Psychology suggests that there may be more to belief than the suspension of reason. Religious beliefs and practices are found in all human groups and go back to the very beginnings of human culture. What makes religion so ‘natural’? Here I want to discuss one particular view of religion, popular among skeptics, that I call the “sleep of reason” interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn’t one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.
- Boyer, Pascal (2004). Why Is Religion Natural?
I whole-heartedly disagree with the over-simplistic view that religion or superstition is due to the ’sleep of reason’ as you will quickly find if you have a look around my blog – see “In a mirror, darkly” in the downloads section if you want to find out about my basic outlook. I am quite familiar with Boyer and, although I do not agree with everything he says, do think his research is playing a valuable role in the area of the evolutionary, cognitive study of religion.
I think it is the charismatic individual who after having a religious experience is able to convince a superstitious crowd to follow his purported supernatural messages and dictates, that creates a religion where the followers do not have their own divine individual inspiration. Where the individuals do not have their own personal direct spiritual experience, they are superstitious to believe the teachings of a leader who presents no evidence other than his own testimony of a purported contact with a higher source of knowledge. Religion is a political tyranny imposed by manipulative leaders bluffing their authority by demagoguery — the leaders are deluded, the followers are superstitious.
“Durkheim’s distinction between religion and superstition”…!!!Have you read Durkheim? How can you blithely equate his idea of “magic” with yours of “superstition”, unless you have not read it? They are not the same at all, and you do neither yourself nor Durkheim any favours conflating the two as you do. It is dangerous to (mis)quote a big name to try to give credence to your argument – talk about falling off the shoulders of giants!
Tom, not being an anthropologist and having read little in anthropology it is more than possible that I have missed an important point in Durkheim that clearly shows his definition of magic does not fit superstition. Unfortunately, what you write does not cast any light on the issue as you do not actually say how the two are different. My assessment that the equation between the two is serviceable is based upon looking (quickly) at the few parts of Elementary Forms of Religious Life that do talk about magic as well as on reading Wilson, who similarly focusses on religion, and Stuart Vyse, who also effectively equates magic in Durkheim and superstition. If I have ‘fallen off’ as you suggest, wouldn’t it be a good idea to explain exactly what was the essence of my error? Doing that would be helpful to me and others reading this, as well as actually backing up the claim you have made.
[...] superstition and Durkheim A while ago I received a comment to one of my posts that was dismissive enough to be down right rude. The poster was protesting my [...]
Magic, superstition and Durkheim « Just Another Deisidaimon said this on December 14, 2007 at 12:28 pm |