MDDM related book: "most denizens of the world of the spirits are ghosts"

[Doug Millison]

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/boyer.html


 Human Nature Review  2002 Volume 2: 308-309 ( 22 July )

Book Review

Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and
Ancestors
by Pascal Boyer
London: William Heinemann, 2001.

Reviewed by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Professor, Department of Psychology,
University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, ISRAEL.


[...] Even today, most scholarly work on religion consists of apologetics
in one form or another, and we are deluged by offers of grants to study
"spirituality" or teach "religion and science". This all serves to make us
forget that religion is a collection of fantasies about spirits, and Boyer
indeed aims to teach us about the world of the spirits in the grand
tradition of the Enlightenment. Any general introduction to the world of
the spirits must be ambitious because it hasn't been done and also because
it has been done intuitively by all of us.

The framework is cognitive-evolutionary and assumes that the brain is a
machine operating according to rules developed through evolution. "Religion
is about the existence and causal powers of non-observable entities and
agencies" (p. 8), and is made up of "Ša limited catalogue of possible
supernatural beliefs" (p. 11). This is a good starting point. This world of
the imagination contains "serious" religious ideas, as well as ideas about
Santa Claus, witchcraft and various popular magical practices.
Psychologically, they are produced by the same processes.

The question is that of that of the seeming plausibility of religious ideas
to most humans and the uniform way spirits are perceived. In what ways are
they similar to other objects and how are they different? "Religious
representations are particular combinations of mental representations that
satisfy two conditions. First, the religious concepts violate certain
expectations from ontological categories. Second, they preserve other
expectations" (p. 71). This is the main argument, and this is where Boyer's
contribution has to be judged.

Boyer studiously avoids the use of such relevant concepts as projection,
animism, or anthropomorphism, but what he presents as the evidence for
"intuitive physics" (p. 113), the famous experiments by Michotte showing
"causal illusions" in the perception of movement, are indeed evidence for
animism. Later on he states that "the only feature of humans that is always
projected onto supernatural beings is the mind" (p. 163). The "violations"
of ontological categories that are found in the religious imagination are
those that fit our consciousness and early experience, and that is why we
don't find more extreme violations of these categories.

Boyer describes religious ideas as "counter-intuitive", but their
universality shows that these concepts are actually natural and intuitive,
and, as Boyer himself points out, much more intuitive than the ideas of
physics, chemistry, or cognitive anthropology.

Despite the interesting and lucid attempt to formalize animism and
anthropomorphism by detailing general cognitive processes, everything said
here is compatible with earlier versions of animism and projection. The
common belief is that "God knows that you are lying" (p. 181). The power to
read minds attributed to gods and ancestors may be just that attributed to
parents by the young child, and later projected. Human experiences must be
expressed through a human vocabulary, and so, naturally and intuitively, we
ascribe humanity (i.e. conscious agency) to everything around us, until we
learn better.

One clear fact is that most denizens of the world of the spirits are
ghosts, the souls of human beings now dead. How do souls become ghosts? An
interesting transformation takes place at death, as the deceased are
beginning to be perceived as malevolent and dangerous. This change demands
an explanation. Why do beloved dead become frightening ghosts? Boyer's
explanation is that the fear of ghosts stems from our fear of corpses, and
there is an evolutionary acquired fear of pathogens in the corpse. Thus,
horror of the dead is reduced to the fear of disease. This claim is made in
the absence of evidence for any awareness of pathogens till fairly recent
times (vide Ignaz Semmelweis). Humans seem unable to acquire useful ideas
about hygiene in many other cases, and these need to be explicitly taught.
Besides, in many cultures ways of handling corpses in mortuary rituals are
far from hygienic.

The truth is that we are horrified by the corpses we see, but we are just
as terrified of ghosts we do not ever see, which are not tied to any
experience of corpses. Boyer is correct in pointing out the dead violate
our expectations of several ontological categories, and so are ideal
candidates for the supernatural world. Still, Chapter 6, titled Why is
religion about death?, turns out to be the least persuasive of the whole
book, and the transformation of the dear departed into malevolent ghosts
remains a mystery. Freud's recognition of our inevitable ambivalence about
the departed has no place in Boyer's armamentarium.

Despite its limitations, this book is a first-rate attempt to move the
study of religion in the direction desperately needed now more than ever.

© Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi.

Dr. Beit-Hallahmi's research interests include the psychology of religion,
the history of psychology, social identity, and personality development.
Among his recent publications are The Psychology of Religious Behaviour.,
Belief, and Experience (1997, with Michael Argyle), The Illustrated
Encyclopedia of Active New Religions (1998), and Psychoanalysis, Identity,
and Ideology: Critical Essays on the Israel/Palestine Case (2002, with John
Bunzl).

Citation

Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2002). Review of Religion Explained: The Human Instincts
That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors by Pascal Boyer. Human Nature
Review. 2: 308-309.

 

The Human Nature Review