GOD and Culture

May 16, 2008

I often note just how convenient certain beliefs are for various cultures. I know that cultural systems build over time and are not the product of an individual sitting down and deciding: "Let's make this our official story since it will be believable and provide us with a strong sense of identity." These stories and beliefs only look as if they were created by a single guiding mind.

Today it struck me that natural scientists are in a similar situation when they try to talk about natural selection, another process that works automatically as time passes and various traits are selected. The end product looks amazingly as if there were a guiding consciousness. Science writers have to decide how to portray this process.. and they often land on a literary device that allows them to talk as if there were a guiding consciousness.

Here is Matt Ridley explaining himself on this question:

Since I have an aversion to the passive voice, I intend to avoid that problem throughout this book by pretending that there is indeed a teleological engineer thinking ahead and planning purposefully. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls such an artifact a "skyhook," since it is the rough equivalent of a civil engineer hanging his scaffolding from the sky, but for the sake of simplicity I shall call my skyhook the Genome Organizing Device, or GOD. [The Agile Gene, pg. 40-1]

This also allows him to sidestep religious questions by almost prodding religious-minded readers to understand "God" in this construction.. and I find that a cop-out.

Useful, however, is the notion that an unconscious natural process can arrive at a rational looking result. I think this concept is underutilized when thinking about culture and religion. For example, this week my class was reading a section of the Kebra Negast, the Ethiopian expansion of the story of Solomon and Sheba. It is exactly the kind of story that a person would make up. It draws from an ambiguous or at least incomplete story in Hebrew Scripture and uses those loose ends to attach the nation of Ethiopia to the story of Israel. It creates an ancient identity for Ethiopia almost out of whole cloth and establishes political legitimacy for a line of kings.

There may well be someone who fabricated a portion of this story.. but fabrication is almost always too crude a word for the social process that leads to a filled-out historical identity. These identities begin with a seed idea and then individual members of the community, without even thinking about what they are doing, add to that seed. This is the kind of unconscious creativity that animates culture. Take Islam. The tradition begins with a series of at times vague revelations to Muhammad, and then individuals proceed to connect the dots and fill in the stories.. and pretty soon there is an amazingly durable group of stories about God's people in pre-Islamic Arabia. Take Coptic Egypt. There is a brief mention in Matthew about the Holy Family going down to Egypt to escape Herod.. but then through visions and local detective work the entire itinerary of the Holy Family is mapped out.

These large scale creations of identity and history are obviously not the creation of an individual.. they are the brave efflorescence of cultures that hunger for identity and meaning. In order to avoid the passive voice it might be useful to refer to this social process as the Concept Organizing Device (COD). It works slowly but surely in every culture to create a complex system of meaning out of the rough stuff of life and history. The COD is so good at what it does that it will be tempting to refer to this process as having a consciousness.