2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html

2011

Aristotle left a mark

Our Real Souls

If, on one hand, someone tries to tell you that your soul is a ghostly entity that lives on after your body dies, don’t buy it. And if, on the other hand, someone tries to tell you that you have no soul at all, don’t believe them, either. If, on the other other hand, someone tells you that our souls are the realest things about us, then read their blog post.

The old idea of the immaterial, eternal soul has lost ground with the advance of science and of modern culture. Scientists have mapped the universe from the quark to the galaxy, and mapped the human being from the allele to the brain wave, and the ghostly soul is nowhere to be found. Besides, the whole idea of the soul seems suspiciously useful as a tool for controlling the rabble. Promises of heavenly rewards and threats of hellish punishment keep the little people in line. Stories about the afterlife distract the poor, the oppressed, and would-be reformers from real-world injustices. Christian priests threatened peasants with hell, Hindu brahmins threatened the lower varnas with horrible reincarnations, and Mormons justified discrimination against Africans by referring to sins that they had committed as spirits before birth. An eternal, immaterial soul? Smells like a con job.

But who says the soul has to be eternal and immaterial to be real? Aristotle said that an ax’s soul would be chopping. Chopping is the ax’s purpose, definition, and use. Similarly, the Stoics said your soul was your “leading edge.” Defining the soul that way lets us atheists use the term honestly. I can say that a particular bar has “soul,” or warn a friend not to lose his “soul” at a job, or put my “soul” into my work. It’s a good word and a useful concept, and it fits everyday terms such as “soul mate.” Admittedly, it feels strange to define the soul as something other an eternal spirit, but that’s just because the medieval Church wants a monopoly on our minds. Aristotle predated the popes by a thousand years, and he said your soul was natural, not supernatural.

Before the fall of Rome, Christianity was tolerant. Theologians surmised that the Logos (Word) had gone to all the world, and that people in Asia, for example, could find salvation without ever hearing about Jesus. Then the barbarians sacked Rome, and Christianity developed a narrower outlook. Aristotle’s real-world view of the soul managed to hold on until after the Reformation. In response to Martin Luther, the Roman Pope and his loyal bishops responded half by reforming and half by retrenching. On the matter of the soul, they finally came down officially with Plato. For me, it's hard to believe that a thousand years ago in Europe there were intellectuals who held to Aristotle’s view of the soul, but it’s true. The Church wants you to believe that it’s the ghostly soul or nothing, and that's what I learned when I grew up.

Today, with the advance of science and philosophy, Plato’s version of the soul is in disrepute. You can’t literally believe in eternal spirits animating temporary bodies. Even so, you still have a soul. What could be more real to you than your own self? It’s your you-ness. You might call it your personal edge. But even if a person’s them-ness seems real, is it really real? Mystics and like-minded seekers might ask. If you’ve ever gotten to know a person, you have encountered the sort of soul I'm talking about. Hell, if you are acquainted with a dog or a cat, you have met a soul. A goldfish? Maybe not. We humans are the most soulful of all. We have evolved to discern other people’s what-nesses. Our senses and instincts are finely tuned to read each others’ souls, making human individuals compellingly real to each other. It is this act awareness of others that enables our unparalleled awareness of self.

Nietzsche said, “Be hard.” If your soul is your edge, as with Aristotle’s ax, I’d rather say “Be sharp.” Better yet, “Be keen.”

2021: In From Darwin to Derrida, David Haig frames concepts of meaning, purpose, and the soul in material terms. His treatment is a lot more thorough than mine. 

2011

Monkey Chant at Burning Man

Burning Man is a yearly festival of radical self-expression, interactive art, and intentional community. That’s fertile ground for an atheist Sunday school teacher. Last year at Burning Man, for instance, I attended my first monkey chant. When I say that religion is largely about community, my experience with the monkey chant is not far from my mind. As science writer Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, rituals of shared song and dance are society’s traditional community builders, all the way back to our hunter-gathered days, and all the way up to the boot camp drills and chants in the modern military. We seem to have evolved to form heartfelt communities through shared song and dance.

The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.

The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.

Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.

So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Fall of Adam and Eve

Labor is a curse, says Genesis.

What does evolutionary psychology have to do with the Bible’s story of the Fall?

Yesterday my neighbor told me that her husband was feeling his age. After a lifetime of physical labor, his knees, back, and shoulders were causing him pain. In evolutionary terms, walking upright is a recent innovation, so knees, backs, and shoulders are still weak spots in our anatomy. In addition, sustained physical labor is an even more recent innovation. Evolutionary psychologists look for mismatches between the tribal life we evolved to live and our current conditions. We evolved our bodies and minds to prosper in the nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle of 100 thousand years ago. Sustained physical labor looks like a mismatch to me. A hundred thousand years ago, there were no miners, lumberjacks, farmers, baggage handlers, or construction workers. Today, if you spend your life using your body differently from how it’s designed to be used, you suffer. As the book of Genesis says, a consequence of knowledge is labor, the sweat of one’s brow. This confluence between evolutionary analysis and a three thousand year old creation story is a fine example of how the world’s religious traditions are often at least half right, if you take them figuratively.

In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat a magic fruit that makes them self-aware. As a result, they are denied the other magic fruit that would have made them immortal, and Yahweh curses them. Women are cursed with a painful childbirth and domineering husbands. Men are cursed with labor. This all makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. When humans evolved self-awareness and speech, we became aware of our mortality. “On the day you eat of it, you will die,” said Yahweh, and figuratively speaking, that’s true. When we learned to understand our own biographies, we saw ourselves die in our own mind’s eyes. As Mary Oliver conveys in her poem “The Black Snake,” animals that lack foreknowledge live as if they’re immortal. We’re not so lucky. As for the curse of painful childbirth, it’s the result of the oversize brain we recently evolved. In other words, when we evolved sentience, doing so cursed women with the pains of labor. Women also got the short end of the stick in the power struggle between the sexes. Men used their verbal ability to promise, threaten, and punish, allowing them to wield power over women, especially in settled societies. Men’s attitudes toward women have traditionally been proprietary. Finally, men are cursed with physical labor. The capacity to think ahead leads to hard work. For one thing, you see how your own labor can build up wealth for yourself in the future. You work harder than you otherwise would because you can foresee the benefits. For another thing, people with power over you can see how your labor could benefit them, and down through history powerful people have contrived countless ways to force the less powerful to do the heavy lifting. Today, our system is economic, and the wealthy can pay someone like my neighbor to spend his career doing physical labor. Without self-knowledge, our ancestors never worked themselves like we work ourselves or work each other.

In China, the Taoist Zhuangzi said much the same thing in his story of the horses’ hooves. In his story, wild horses are healthy and happy, while domesticated horses are neurotic and sickly. He makes the point that the same is true of people. Before the coming of the sages, we lived simply and happily, but now the sages have brought stress and confusion. Who are these sages? Not coincidentally, “Homo sapiens” means “sage,” literally “wise man.” The wise ones who changed everyone’s lives with their cleverness were humans, specifically those who evolved language. We’ve spread across the globe and invented an endless array of unnatural lifestyles for ourselves.

The cosmological beliefs found in ancient religious texts may be untenable today, but their poetic insights sometimes still ring true.

2011

young woman and powerful man

High Status Sex Scandals

From the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the Anthony Weiner sexting incident, high-status men keep getting caught with their pants down. You might wonder why a congressman would send a photo of his crotch to a young woman, or why the leader of the free world would get tangled up with an intern. While evolutionary psychology doesn’t explain why any particular human engages in any particular behavior, it does explain our general tendencies. In this case, the indiscretions of high-status men make more sense when you understand that our ancestors evolved status in order to give stronger males more than their share of access to females. Evolutionarily, high status is largely about having sex with more women.

Millions of years ago, after we chimps* split with the gorillas and before we Hominina split with the other chimps, we evolved a system of male status.** Gibbons, orangutans, and gorillas do not have high- and low-status males living together, but we chimps do. This social system allowed stronger and weaker males to cooperate in a group, something you don’t see among other great apes. High status allowed the stronger males to get more than their share of the resources without having to drive the weaker males away or kill them. The most important scarce resource in the lives of our male chimp ancestors was females. That’s true of mammals in general, and we chimps are no exception.

A drive for status, especially among men, is a human universal, as noted by the world’s first evolutionary psychologist, Charles Darwin. We don’t consciously know that our quest for status is the latest chapter in the mammalian male’s quest for more mates. Once men get power, however, it’s easy to see what comes next.

For their part, women have their own evolutionary baggage. Our female ancestors have long preferred high-status males. The ones who didn’t prefer powerful males wound up bearing sons who were more likely to have low status like their fathers. Since high-status males reproduce at favorable rates, evolution leads females to favor them as mates because that strategy leads to their sons reproducing at favorable rates. If the leader of the free world gets messed up with a flirty aide, it’s partly because there's something about being the leader of the free world that gets a woman’s attention.

None of this is to say that any particular human is hard-wired to have unwise liaisons with any other particular human. Evolutionary psychology is about ultimate causes and population-wide patterns, not individual decisions. The pattern is easy to see, and it’s only a matter of time before another high-status male makes the day’s headlines by acting out yesterday's evolutionary imperative.

* Technically Hominini. (2020)

** Or maybe living in multi-male, multi-female bands goes back tens of millions of years to the early “monkeys” (technically simians). (2020)

PS: It turns out that extroverts in our culture are more promiscuous than average, and lots of powerful men are extroverts. (2019) 

Other Evolution-Themed Posts

Crow Scientist is Live, 2020

[Review] Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett, 2019

Not “Race” but Ancestry, 2019

Testosterone for Amateurs, 2019

Evolution Unites Us All, 2018

March for Science, Seattle, my speech, 2017

Evolution Activities for Darwin Day, 2017

Mother Love and Human Nature, 2017

Kids and Grandmother Fish, 2017

Reading about Religion, 2014

Creatures of Love, 2011

Grief and the Human Animal, 2011

Related old-website post: Thomas Jefferson the slave-raping hero, 2006