Loss of Intimacy

I've started into the next book in my large stack: The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. I have seen this particular book mentioned on several blogs, including NW Ohio Skeptics and, if the first chapter or so is any indication, I think I'm going to enjoy this book a lot (which means you'll be seeing quite a numbers of quotes from it)!

As an individual with two college degrees in the social sciences (BA in Sociology and MS in Social Science), I've spent more time than the average person studying various aspects of cultural anthropology. So, I was very interested to see Wright draw upon hunter-gatherer societies as the initial building block for the formation of belief systems that later became known as religions.

As Wright aptly points out, the concept of religion itself is foreign to hunter-gatherers. Their beliefs in spirits and supernatural phenomena are so woven into the fabric of daily life that they don't view it as something separate. It simply is one facet of the overall society.

One part that I found quite fascinating is Wright's contention that these societies don't have moral standards that interface with their spiritual beliefs.

The general absence of moral sanctions in hunter-gatherer religion isn't too puzzling. Hunter-gatherers live -- as everyone else lived 12,000 years ago -- in intimate, essentially transparent groups. A village may consist of thirty, forty, fifty people, so many kinds of wrongdoing are hard to conceal. If you stole a man's digging stick, where would you hide it? And what would be the point of having it if you couldn't use it? And, anyway, is it worth the risk of getting caught -- incurring the wrath of its owner, his family, and closest friends, and incurring the ongoing suspicion of everyone else? The fact that you have to live with these people for the rest of your life is by itself a pretty strong incentive to treat them decently. (emphasis added)

That last sentence really jumped out at me. In many ways, I think it goes to the heart of the general discord of American life.

In our modern society, we no longer know our neighbors. As people easily pull up roots by moving to and fro, we accentuate the feeling of separation between ourselves and everyone else. It is because we feel no intimate ties to any one community that life becomes nothing more than looking out for Number One. And it's why we are suspicious of anyone whose beliefs are not carbon copies of our own!

Just like a marriage can be torn apart when the sense of intimacy is lost, our lack of intimacy with our fellow beings has led to perpetual estrangement within the shared community of the cosmos we call home!