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Beginning a Thesis8/02/2007 13:36:58Well I've finally managed to produce some text for the master's thesis that supposedly I've been working on all summer. This is the working introduction. The working title is Biologizing Religion and Hostage Humanities. As usual, I welcome all manner of comments, complaints, and critiques. See the whole project as it unfolds in my experimental online workspace. I have been tempted, in the course of my research, to say that a new paradigm of homo religiosus is coming into place, one founded in a laboratory understanding of human biology and the brain. The reason I don’t is that there is enough resistance to it among my colleagues that I might sound overly confident. They insist on a fundamental poverty of laboratory explanations so far as they understand their task as interpreters of religion. What is more, I am not convinced anymore that the old paradigm is going away, for it is actually inscribed into the logic of the new at the back door. That back door is the second major part of this paper, while the new paradigm is the first. For some time it hasn’t been easy to use the term homo religiosus without a dash of irony, due to its association with the phenomenologists of religion, toward which scholars nowadays are so ambivalent. Nevertheless, the sense that there exists a shade of homo religiosus in the makeup of human beings remains as an assumption kept (unexplained) in the closet while scholars carry on loudly with the “linguistic turn” in the ante-room. Like Otto, Eliade, and van der Leeuw, we sense that a scholar of religion has something to study in every human culture and human circumstance. Unlike them, though, we have been able to recognize that “religion,” as a contingent concept with a particular ideological pedigree, might not be the best term to describe what that something is in every case. Meanwhile, having developed a methodology grounded in languages and criticism under the tutelage of the phenomenologists of religion, many scholars find no appeal in what the laboratory has to say about their subject of study. The new homo religiosus (not totally new but newly promising) proposes to take religion from human to homo sapiens and, as I will argue, back again. This process, consciously or not, falls into E.O. Wilson’s notorious call for humanistic inquiry “to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized” (1975: 562). Through a growing body of knowledge in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and genetics, a truly biological picture of activities and beliefs deemed religious is emerging. Some foundations of religiosity, it appears, can be traced to neurological mechanisms that arose during the course of human evolution. In turn, this work has taken root in a world that is able to declare the 1990’s “the decade of the brain”3 and in which psychiatric conditions are treated more and more though pharmacological drugs rather than through spiritual practice or therapy. (“Zoloft works better than God,” a priest once told me in a conversation about depression.) Popular magazines from Newsweek and Time to the New York Times Magazine have paraded the research around with labels like “the God spot” and “the God gene.” People from a variety of religious perspectives, from self-proclaimed neurotheologians to the infamous New Atheists, have practiced and discussed this body of research together, even while adding to it their mutually contradictory interpretations. By bringing homo religiosus “back again” to the human, I find myself calling Wilson to task on the temporariness of biologizing. For some time, philosophers attentive to the claims of cognitive science and artificial intelligence have pointed to the limits that scientific explanations reach at the core of human experience. How can we see the homo sapiens except through our own humanness? Religions assert similar limits with knowledge founded on the unknowable and imperceptible. Such limitations, furthermore, have become especially poignant in the crisis of politics that accompanies the present war on terror. With the religions of ourselves and others apparently at the heart of terrorism and the struggle against it, biological analysis presents itself as a possible means for managing a threat that is difficult to comprehend, or in any case, as terms in which to vindicate the superiority of one’s own beliefs. Done under the flag of enlightenment, biologizing people ends up revealing our constraints as organisms evolved to enact particular strategies for survival. Though such strategies are not exhaustive of human potential, we are bound to their hardware. It “tricks” us with certain biases and motivations, and religiosity itself may be another of the tricks. The flight to the homo sapiens in the laboratory returns us to ourselves as humans bound in our biases, not so much enlightened as emboldened in our politics.
re:Thesis start - 8/09/2007 14:54:09
re:Beginning a Thesis - 8/11/2007 11:38:52
Human is what it is like to be the creature Homo sapiens. Homo religiousus is the relation between either of those and what is deemed religious. The old homo religiosus referred to humans, while the new refers to Homo sapiens.
re:Beginning a Thesis - 8/11/2007 12:29:55
re:Beginning a Thesis - 8/11/2007 16:35:11
An explication of that back door is the second major part of this paper, while a summary of my observations on the new paradigm is the first.
re:thesis - 8/13/2007 23:33:22
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