Religion-Making and Art-Making: Identifying Convergences Between

Cognitive Evolutionary and Social Constructionist Models

of Human Evolution

EASR 2014 Carole M. Cusack, University of

Sydney

Religion-Making and Art-Making

Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Harvard University

Press (2011)

Stephen Davies, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution,

Oxford University Press (2013)

EASR 2014 Carole M. Cusack, University of Sydney

Main points:

• Both art and religion arise from play.

• Different types of social and political organizations will foster different types of art and religion.

• Certain religious practices bear a strong resemblance to art practices.

• Invented religions are evidence for the connection between creativity and spirituality.

Aesthetics

“Against rationalism about beauty, the eighteenth-century theory of taste

held the judgment of beauty to be immediate; against

egoism about virtue it held the pleasure of beauty to

be disinterested.”

— James Shelley, ‘The Concept of the Aesthetic’, Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013).

Aesthetics

Four domains of aesthetics:

• Objects

• Judgments

• Attitude

• Experience

“The point of departure of the sociology of art is the question: How is it possible that works of art,

which always originate as products of human activity within a particular

time and society and for a particular time, society, or function - even though they are not necessarily

produced as ‘works of art’ - can live beyond their time and seem expressive

and meaningful in completely different epochs and societies? On the other hand, how can the age and

society that produced them be recognized in the works?”

— Hanna Deinhard, Meaning and Expression: Towards a Sociology of Art (1970).

Davies’ The Artful Species and Evolutionary Explanations of Art

and Aesthetics

“I identify [the aesthetic] with the kind of experience to which it gives rise and with the kind of properties on which that experience focuses, these being in the most general classification those of beauty, the sublime, or their opposites. And I’ve rejected as too liberal the

position that regards all pleasurable or unpleasurable perceptual experience as

aesthetic.” — Stephen Davies, The Artful Species (2013).

A thing is art if:

• (a) it falls under an established, publicly recognised category of art or within an established art tradition or

• (b) it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realising that intention, or

• (c) it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realising significant aesthetic or artistic goals.

A thing is religion if:

• (a) the body or organisation claims to be religious and whose beliefs or practices are a revival of, or resemble, earlier cults;

• (b) it involves belief in a supernatural being or beings, whether physical and visible (e.g. the sun and stars), invisible, or abstract;

• (c) the body claims to be religious and offers a way to find meaning and purpose in life. — Justice Lionel Murphy, Church of the New Faith vs Commissioner of Payroll Tax (1983)

Can art/religion be explained as…

• Adaptation?

• Spandrel?

• Vestige?

• Cultural Phenomena?

“Any transmissible human form or behaviour that was recognised as signifying well-formedness and

developmental normalcy would not only become statistically average as it successfully spread through the

population; it would become normative in the evaluative sense, whether it first emerged as an adaptation or as

a spandrel.”

— Davies, The Artful Species.

Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution and the Parallels Between Art

and Religion •Play, narrative, etc. are central to the emergence and maintenance of religion.

•Different types of social organization and political organizations will foster different types of religion.

•Four modes of human developmental psychology: unitive, enactive, symbolic and conceptual.

•Uses Johan Huizinga’s work on play and Abraham Maslow’s cognitive psychology.

“Most of the time in daily life we are operating with a narrowly pragmatic

consciousness, with what Maslow calls D-cognition, and we don’t see symbols, or at least we don’t consciously see them. At

times, however, even in the midst of daily life, we may experience a B-cognition when something ordinary becomes extraordinary,

becomes symbolic.”

— Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution (2011).

Parallels between art and religion:

• Ritual

• Enactive representation

• Narrative

• Examples: dance, music, performance, story-telling

Invented Religions

• Invented religions are a particular cultural form of the human impulse to religion, appropriate to the twenty-first century West.

• They explicitly advertise their origins in play and narrative.

• Often derided as ‘joke’ or ‘parody’ religions, and excluded from the category of ‘real religion’.

• Visible from the 1950s onwards, e.g. Discordianism (1957), the Church of All-Worlds (1962), Jediism (c. 2001).

“Invented religions also view fictions, the ludic and play as legitimate sources of ultimate meaning; in no sense inferior

materials upon which to base a religion than factual accounts, attested experiences or historical events. The model of ‘invented religion’ that I have advanced emphasises

the self-conscious attention to the invented – i.e. not revealed or otherwise validated –

status avowed within these religions.”

— Carole Cusack, ‘Play, Narrative and the Creation of Religion: Extending the Theoretical Base of “Invented Religions”,’ Culture and Religion (2013).

“Living myth knows no distinction between play and seriousness. Only when myth has become mythology, that is, literature, borne along as traditional lore by a culture which has in the meantime more or less outgrown the primitive

imagination, only then will the contrast between play and seriousness apply to myth –

and to its detriment.”— Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949)

Conclusions

• Are art and religion adaptations? They are likely to be the results of social evolution that is adaptive.

• Art and religion are special and creative.

• Art activities and religion activities are often identical (e.g. dance, ritual, music, hymns, making images, the status of artists/religious functionaries etc.)

• Cognitive science is reinforcing what we already knew from social science: the aesthetic and the religious are intimately connected.

EASR 2014 Carole M. Cusack, University of

Sydney