Sociology was one of my college majors. It is the butt of jokes, derided as one of the most impractical of college majors. Yet it taught me to see the world and even to think about it in a different way. Most important of all, though, it has instilled me with a keen fascination for society – what makes it work, why it is so prone to so much upheaval and even failure, and why it imposes so much suffering on so many.
We wonder why civilization is accompanied by so much strife and heartache. It should be as plain as day. We live in a fusion of technology, language, writing, mathematics, and Enlightenment-era science, along with a multitude of other things that serves not only as kind of protective layering – an incorporeal exoskeleton but also as an extra layer of cerebral cortex and even as something akin to a beehive.
This contrivance, which has been improvised by humans across eons as a means of securing a viable niche within existence and that supplies its own synergy has enabled us to become the dominant and certainly the most disruptive species on the planet. Yet, in some respects, this incorporeal networked exoskeleton, as I have come to call it, could be likened to a blanket, a rather threadbare one, that by its very nature, isn’t capable of encompassing all of human complexity.
As this recent Aeon article stresses, there are acute differences among us, notably in terms of how we process the stimuli we encounter in our daily encounters. Consequently, this exoskeleton, as essential and as marvelously adaptive as it is, simply can’t can account for all of the stupefying complexity that defines us as a species.
For some reason, I am reminded of the religious mystics among us, those who possess traits that have have equipped them with unique, often compelling views of the transcendent and ineffable. I count my late mother as one of them. This has led me to speculate on occasion about how different life would be if the first monotheistic religion, Judaism, had not evolved into a textual religion, and it is worth stressing that this development was far from preordained.
How much more valued would these mystics be – how much more would they contribute to religious discourse – if Judaism and other religions had not evolved into textual faiths, remaining instead cultic faiths focused largely on sacred places and events?
To be sure, the eventual evolution of Judaism into a textual faith had major implications for the direction that Western Civilization ultimately took. Could this civilization have become as culturally and technologically dense but for the emphasis on sacred texts that the religions of the book ultimately provided?
Perhaps not. Yet it serves to illustrate that the the improvised shell that humans and their hominid forebears began improvising many millennia ago essentially amounted to a bracketing of human endeavor – a reining of of certain facets of human insight and striving that, potentially, at least, could have carried our species in remarkably different directions and may have shaped us in ways that diverged significantly from how we define humanity today in the 21st century.
Dispatches from the Cusp 