Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009)

Edward O. Wilson's research on eusociality led him to identify the nest as a common attribute among the eusocial species.  Although not proven, Wilson surmises that a gene has been suppressed among the eusocial species that silences the brain's program for dispersal from the nest, leading to the sustained survival of the eusocial community.  (September 12, 2012 post)  Humans are included among the eusocial species, but humans disperse; they do not build and congregate in nests, but they do build and maintain social communities comprised of multiple generations and humans are organized into groups by altruistic division of labor, which are characteristics of eusocial species.  As a surrogate for the nest, Wilson suggests that the campfire served a nest-like function in the development of the genus homo, which strongly suggests that  mastery of fire was critical to humans eusociality. 

As I read Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth (see September 12, 2012 post), I was reminded of a book on the bookshelf that addressed this topic, Richard Wrangham's (see  July 1, 2010 post)  Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.  Wrangham believes that mastery of fire was critical to human evolution, but even more important, mastery of fire enabled early humans to cook their food on a regular basis. According to Wrangham, cooked food is even more significant than mastery of fire for human evolution.  Armed with data and concrete examples Wrangham demonstrates that eating cooked food is linked to two evolutionary changes in the human body:  (1) comparatively smaller, more efficient digestive systems (particularly the stomach and the small intestine) that require less energy to digest food and absorb nutrients than our predecessors, and (2) larger brains.  Large brains require significant amounts of energy, and that energy is available to the brain only if it is not needed for other activities essential for survival such as eating and digesting.  Compared to apes and chimpanzees (and presumably extinct australopithecines and habilines), humans spend a fraction of their daily life eating and digesting food.  Apes and chimps spend hours eating plant food or fruit every day.  The relative weight of the human gut is roughly only 60% of the relative weight of the gut of apes and chimpanzees.

The controversial question is when did the first species among the genus homo begin cooking food?  For certain the benefits of and development of a preference for cooked food was accidentally discovered.  Wrangham believes that human cooking begins with homo erectus.  There is anthropological evidence cited by Wrangham that cutting meat with primitive stone tools began as early as 2.6 million years ago.  Roughly 300,000 years later, a new species, referred to by some as homo habilis, which still had many australopithecine characteristics, emerged, and roughly another 500,000 years later the species referred to as homo erectus, emerged according the available fossil record and lived on the African continent for nearly 1.5 million years (until roughly 300,000 years ago).  While it is doubtful that homo erectus had language capacity or skills (see January 31, 2013 post discussing homo neanderthalensis), what we do know is that the cranial capacity of early specimens of homo erectus was 200cc greater than homo habilis and later specimens 400-500cc greater than homo habilis, representing an increase in brain size of approximately 33-75% over the habilines.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  That would be the largest incremental percentage increase from species to species within the genus homo. Homo erectus is recognized to be, in many respects, to be much closer to modern homo sapiens than homo habilis.  Combined with some evidence of the use of controlled fire at sites where homo erectus bones have been found, the control of fire and the significant increase in brain size (the energy for which is enabled by decreased energy used in eating and digesting food) lead Wrangham to identify homo erectus as the first human species to favor and consume cooked food on a regular basis.  Wrangham also speculates that homo erectus, unlike its predecessors, favored sleeping on the ground (instead of trees) and the control of fire would have been useful in providing light to see predators at night or keeping predators away.  The morphology of erectus is not as suitable for sleeping in trees as its predecessors.

Others (Aiello and Wheeler) have concluded that cooking food is the invention of homo heidelbergensis (the predecessor to homo neanderthalensis) a later species.  Aiello and Wheeler believed that brain size was steady among homo erectus until the emergence of heidelbergensis with its larger brain.  Wrangham finds the fossil record sufficient to support the view that brain size gradually grew among erectus and believes that the steady increase in size is attributable to improved cooking techniques, and that continued growth in brain size to heidelbergensis and ultimately to homo sapiens is likely similarly associated with improved cooking techniques, not cooking as a novel adaptation or spandrel. 

Wrangham's thesis is this:  "An important step in fire's becoming a central part of human lives was to maintain it at night.  Suppose some habilines carried a smoldering log by day to protect against predators, then left it at the base of a sleeping tree when they climbed to make a nest at night.  It would not have been such a big step to give it extra fuel so the log will still be burning the next day --perhaps after seeing this happen first by accident.  From there it would have been a smaller step to sitting near the fire to keep it burning, and thereby take advantage of its protection, light, and warmth.  Once they kept fire alive at night, a group of habilines in a particular place occasionally dropped food morsels by accident, at them after they had been heated, and learned that they tasted better.  Repeating their habit, this group would have swiftly evolved into the first Homo erectus.  The newly delicious cooked diet led to their evolving smaller guts, bigger brains, bigger bodies, and reduced body hair; more running; more hunting; longer lives; calmer temperatures; and a new emphasis on bonding between females and males.  The softness of their cooked plant foods selected for smaller teeth, the protection fire provided at night enabled them to sleep on the ground and lose their climbing ability, and females likely began cooking for males, whose time was increasingly free to search for more meat and honey."  So despite the relative dearth of evidence of fire dating back to the time of homo erectus, Wrangham believes that the dramatic shift in brain size and tooth size is significant evidence that Homo erectus started the first outdoor cooking kitchen. 

Division of labor by sex.  E.O. Wilson also includes altruistic division of labor among the attributes of eusociality (September 12, 2012 post).  Wrangham has a discussion that dovetails with Wilson on this point.  First, cooked food liberated males to spend more time hunting for meat in a way that chimps and apes cannot because they spend so much time chewing their food.  Fire enabled men to confine their eating time to the hours around dusk and even after dark.  Hunting enabled the male to contribute food to his family (including an extended family group), but this effort was ultimately dependent upon a reliable, predictable economic exchange between women and men.  Women became foragers and this provided a reliable source of food energy in the event that the men of the group returned with no meat.  Women also became primarily responsible for cooking.

Wrangham argues that while relying on cooked food created opportunities for cooperation, more importantly it exposed female cooks to exploitation because cooking takes time and lone cooks could not easily guard their wares from thieves.  This problem was solved, Wrangham believes, by pair-bonds among males and females:  a "husband" ensured that the woman's gathered foods were not taken by others and from this evolved "a simple marriage system." The male provided the female (and their children) with meat.  Consistent with Boehm's observations (see November 21, 2012 post), Wrangham observes (based on anthropological evaluation of modern hunter-gatherers) that meat is actually shared among a larger group that includes not only the male's "wife" and children, but also an extended family (and possibly a stranger).  The female's distribution of gathered food is largely shared just with her "husband" and their children.  In the gathering of food, there may very well be cooperation among women, but the sharing of the gathered food is limited to the immediate family.  Presumably sharing meat among a larger group evolved because direct reciprocity is essential to the hunting and killing of the large animal, bringing the meat back to the campfire and slaughtering it. 

Edward Humes, Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion and the Battle for America's Soul (2008)

Deception and religion have been joined at the hip for a very long time, perhaps as long as religion has existed in human culture given that religion has its origins in believing what we can never see or know.  Monkey Girl is Edward Humes' account of the Dover Township, Pennsylvania school board's effort to introduce the subject of intelligent design into the high school science curriculum and the litigation that ensued when parents stepped forward and asked a court to enjoin the school board's effort on the ground that it offended the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  What the 6-week trial in a United States District Court exposed was concerted deceit on the part of groups opposed to the teaching of natural selection  and what Charles Darwin called "descent with modification" in public school curriculum because it offended the biblical stories that lead them to the belief that god (an intelligent designer) created each of the species separately and the view of some that these acts of creation began no more than 10,000 years ago.  Comparable acts of deceit in the commercial world would be called mislabeling or misbranding or fraud.  In court, it is called perjury.

The drive to engage in the acts of deceit documented by Humes begins with the United States Supreme Court's decision in 1987 that the teaching of creationism offended the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and could not be taught in public schools.  If creationism could not be mandated as a subject of instruction in United States public schools these groups began to think about branding creationism as something else, something that sounded like it belonged in the science classroom --- intelligent design.  Their legal strategy, for example, compelled them to abandon the words "god" and "creator" and relabel god an "intelligent designer."  Their legal strategy also compelled them to create a controversy when, at least in the scientific community, no substantial controversy existed:  the existence of an intelligent designer would be deemed a serious scientific question and one that demanded that schools "teach the controversy."  The lingo of creationism and its relationship to the book of Genesis had to be purged if science students had any chance of being taught an alternate explanation of the creation of species alongside natural selection and descent with modification in the classroom.  This was no easy task.  To biblical literalists, it was confusing and did not sit well with the hard core biblical believers who wanted to drive natural selection and "Darwinism" from science class because, in their view, it was atheistic.  But for the advocates of intelligence design, their difficulties extended beyond the religious motivations of the Dover school board.  Not only were the intelligent design advocates ultimately unable to succeed in concealing the religious motivations of the school board, it turns out there was a long and unambiguous record demonstrating that intelligent design had its intellectual seed in creationism.  The very book that the intelligent design advocates wanted the high school students of Dover to have in their classroom, Of Pandas and People, had been drafted prior to the Supreme Court's 1987 decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, and the drafts had used the word creationism.  By the time of publication, after the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Edwards, the word creationism had been deleted everywhere and replaced with the term intelligent design. 

At the heart of the lawsuit, known as Kitzmiller v. Town of Dover, was this question:  was intelligent design science or religion?  For the plaintiffs, intelligent design was on trial; for the defendants and their supporters, traditional science was on trial.  After a six week trial in which the court heard from scientists on both side of the question, the court found that intelligent design was not science; it was religion. 

The scheme to inject intelligent design --- as opposed to creationism --- into the science curriculum begins with a paper developed by a University of California law professor, Phillip Johnson, that came to be known as the "wedge strategy," because it envisioned hammering a "wedge" into the tree of science by criticizing evolutionary theory --- putting science on the defensive and exploiting religious sentiment that was not only skeptical of evolutionary theory, but was essentially ignorant about natural selection and the body of scientific literature that had substantiated Darwin's natural selection model.  The wedge document was developed by Johnson in collaboration with the Discovery Institute, and essentially outlines not a scientific research program, but a public relations strategy to persuade people that a scientific controversy existed and that the public needed to be made aware of the controversy.  The wedge document was never intended to be made public, and it was forthright and honest in expressing the goals behind the wedge strategy, leaving no doubt about its theistic underpinning: 

• "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
• "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings were created by God."
• to initially see, within five years, "intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory" and within 20 years to see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science" and to see "design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life." 
• "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

During the Kitzmiller trial, however, the lawyers for the defendants, like Peter denying Jesus, wanted nothing to do with the wedge document.  They argued that it was a "mere fundraising proposal" of little significance.  The lawyers for the defendants desperately tried to prevent the plaintiffs' witness, Barbara Forrest, who testified not only about the revisions to the Pandas and People book but also about the wedge document, from testifying at all. 

A central part of the Discovery Institute's strategy was to change the ground rules of science so that it not only included the natural, material world, but also the supernatural ethereal world.  The problem with this project is that it is nothing less than the merger of science and religion.  According to the testimony of the plaintiff's expert at the Kitzmiller trial, "Science is the systematic attempt to provide natural explanations for natural phenomena."  The exclusion of the supernatural from science was unavoidable.  A scientific theory is testable, and is capable of being proven false.  The supernatural is not testable.  Judge Jones concluded, "Intelligent design is predicated on supernatural causation. . . . Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.  These claims subordinate observed data to statements based on authority, revelation, or religious belief."

Numerous posts in this blog raise issues that are relevant to the Kitzmiller case:

Teleology v teleonomy.  (June 12, 2011, May 24, 2010  and March 24, 2010 post).

The human propensity for self-deception and deception.  (February 4, 2012, August 28, 2011, and May 22, 2011 and May 12, 2010 post)

Anthropomorphism, anthropotheism,  and anthropodenial.  (March 20, 2012, June 12, 2011 and June 17, 2010 post).

Dualism and materialism.  ( December 17, 2012, February 27, 2011 and September 27, 2009 post)

At its core, the intelligent design movement, as exposed in the wedge document, is about as un-American as any group can be.  The long-run goal is for design theory to permeate not only religious, cultural, and moral life, but also "political life."  This is so contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, one would think the design movement's adherents were really living in modern Iran or some other theocracy.  Yet what Monkey Girl reveals is that the intelligent design movement has so little respect for the First Amendment, because they believe the government has abandoned religion by recognizing the freedom of atheists, skeptics (agnostics), and pantheists who imagine a universe governed by natural laws (see January 31, 2013 post) and they believe the government has abandoned its moorings as a "Christian nation."  In contrast, Humes closes out Monkey Girl with a quotation from the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, signed by founding father President John Adams:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility, against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the Parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."  (Emphasis added).

Nor should one forget the Jefferson Bible, in which founding father Thomas Jefferson, excised the text pertaining to miracles and other supernatural events. 

I have a proposal that will surely bring the intelligent design movement and creationists running back for the protection of the First Amendment.  Congress should pass a law that requires every religious school class to teach the following every Saturday or Sunday:  "The Book of Genesis is a story.  It was written and later edited by men who could not explain their origins or the origins of the physical universe including other life on earth and life and other material beyond the earth.  It's a wonderful story and it even has meaning, but it is just a story.  Our origins really did not happen they way, Adam and Eve were not real people, and the other stories that purport to be written history of the Hebrews are merely stories as well.  There may be some little historical basis in some of these stories, but they have been gilded, edited, redacted, and revised to fit a collective memory long after the events described in Genesis purportedly took place.  And by the way, children, did you not see that Genesis mentions nothing about the dinosaurs and other animals that lived on earth millions of years ago, whose bones we find in the ground today.  Children, do you not wonder why Genesis does not mention dinosaurs and other animals who no longer exist?  The answer is simple.  The men who wrote the stories in Genesis did not know about these animals.  They were not as knowledgeable as you are today."  Once the law is passed, I am sure there will be a lawsuit.  Maybe the ACLU will be the plaintiff.

In Edwards v. Aguillard, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia dissented from the majority's decision that struck down Louisiana's statute that called for the "balanced treatment" of "creation science" and "evolution science" in Louisiana schools.  The 7 member majority of the Court authored by Justice Brennan and the concurring opinions of Justice Powell and Justice White found plenty of evidence that creation science lacked a secular purpose and was religiously inspired.  "This is not a hard case," wrote Justice White.  The case came before the Supreme Court based on the trial court's grant of a motion for summary judgment, which meant the trial court found enough undisputed evidence presented by the plaintiff's challenging the Louisiana statute to warrant granting a judgment without a full evidentiary trial.  Justice Scalia professed to take no position on the merits of "creation science," but he felt that Louisiana deserved a full evidentiary trial before an appellate court such as the US Supreme Court decided whether or not there was a valid secular purpose.  One would think, and hope, that Justice Scalia, informed by the full evidentiary record in Kitzmiller, would have recognized as Justice White did in Edwards that "this is not a hard case" had the Kitzmiller case made its way to the Supreme Court for judicial review, and that he would recognize that intelligent design deserved the same fate that creation science received in Edwards. 

Jose Saramago, Small Memories (2009)

Memory is fragile.  (See September 20, 2011 post).  Jose Saramago's honest account of his memories of some events in his life when he was small in Small Memories concedes as much.  "Sometimes I wonder," he writes, "if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else."  He refers to memory's "reconstructive powers," and the capacity for memory to be refreshed:  "Thanks to some documents I had assumed lost, bet which providentially turned up when I was searching for something else entirely, my disoriented memory has finally been able to fit together various disparate pieces of the puzzle and replace what was uncertain and doubtful with what was right and true."

"We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightst stimulus, and there's no explanation for that' we don't summon them up, they are simply there.  And it is for those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of these facts. . ." 

This is not the first time that a post in this blog has connected Saramago's work with the subject of memory.  In The Notebook (September 28, 2010 post), the Nobelist created a memory bank in blog form.  In the posting on his final novel, Cain (December 20, 2011 post) I remarked, "I also believe storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memories of things past. (See August 15, 2011 post). And storytelling, whether historical or fictional or both, enables the construction of both personal and social/group identity."  And Saramago is a master at clutching collective memory --- history we call it --- and creating stories --- fiction we call it --- as in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (June 28, 2011 post) and Baltasar and Blimunda (January 1, 2013 post).

A series of postings in September 2010 revolved around the subject of memory (September 9, 2010 post) but more recently a posting observed: "Personal identity is a matter of autobiographical memory. This is our autobiographical self (see April 8, 2011 post). But our autobiographical memories are shared, and this facilitates social bonding and the building of relationships. It also influences our story-telling and the stories we tell each other, whether represented as fact or fiction. Cultures are built on the sharing of autobiographical memory, yet at the same time personal identity is strongly influenced by the culture that one personally experiences. While at the outset I said that personal identity owes its existence to cultural or group identity, the reverse is true as well.  Cultural identity ultimately owes its existence to the sharing of many personal identities. Autobiographical memories are merged and revised into a collective memory. But as we have seen in prior posts, memory is fluid, constantly changing and redeveloping in incremental ways. (See November 6, 2011 post)."

It is collective or shared memory that I believe is one subject that is missing from John Searle's accounting of the creation of a social world (see February 24, 2013 post).  Memory, observes Searle, is important for intentionality, and therefore collective memory should be just as important for collective intentionality.  That evokes the importance of culture in the creation of the human social world.  That is not lost on Saramago.

John Searle, Making The Social World (2010)

The substance of John Searle's most recent book, Making the Social World, is largely covered by the last chapter of his 2008 selection of essays, Philosophy in a New Century entitled "Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles" (see January 21, 2011 post).  I refer the reader back to this earlier post for Searle's discussion of status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for action.  This is a discussion of the language-enabled creation of obligations, permissions, rights, responsibilities, duties, obligations and the like (what Searle calls deontic powers) that Searle tells us are the glue of the human social world and collective action.  I wish to cover two topics in this posting:  first, the importance of language in making a social world, and second, the significance of human imagination in Searle's model of the social world. 

Language is the foundation of all social institutions, says Searle. "We will not understand an essential feature of language if we do not see that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation, the conventional character of the devices, used, and the intentionality of speaker meaning.  It is this feature that enables language to form the foundation of human society in general."  Language, adds Searle, introduces deontology into social relations and how it creates an institutional reality with a deontic power.  The foundation of Searle's thesis is this:  "If a speaker intentionally conveys information to a hearer using socially accepted conventions for the purpose of producing belief in the hearer about a state of affairs in the world, then the speaker is committed to the truth of his utterance."  There is no way, Searle comments, that if I say to someone publicly, intentionally, explicitly, "There is an animal coming toward us," without being committed to the truth of the propositional content that there is an animal coming toward us.  Both the belief and the statement involve commitments, but the commitment of the statement is much stronger, for if the commitment of the privately held belief turns out to be false, I am free to revise it.  In the case of the statement, however, I am committed to not only to revision in the case of falsehood, but I am also committed to providing reasons for the original statement, I am committed to sincerity in making it, and I am publicly responsible if it turns out to be false.  A speech act is more than just an expression of belief; a speech act is a public performance.

To appreciate the significance that Searle attaches to language in humans, it is important to understand what Searle believes language added to our prelinguistic capabilities and therefore ask:  what are the features that prelinguistic human mentality and language have in common (and therefore what did language contribute over and above our prelinguistic mentality)?  The common features, according to Searle, are these:

• Perception.  These are our sensory capabilities.  Perception and the object perceived are causally self-referential, says Searle:  we experience an object only if the presence of the object caused our sensory experience of the object.
• Beliefs, desires, intending, and emotions such as hopes, fears and the like. These are the capabilities of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world.  This is referred to as intentionality (a concept not limited to "intending"). Beliefs, etc. are not causally self-referential.
• Intentional action. This capacity is embraces a causal sequence (intention and action are causally self-referential), assuming that action actually occurs.  There can be a prior intent to act; it can be an intention that is coincident to acting.  All actions require intentions-in-acting, but not all actions require prior intent.
• (At least) short-term memory.  Like intentional action, memory is causally self-referential: we recall something only if we experienced the thing that triggers our present memory of that thing.

Thus, in the cases of perception, memory, and intentional action, there is a match between the mind and the world.  Beliefs, desires, and the like are not necessarily tethered to the world, although they are derivative of perception, memory and intentional action, which are.  Because they are not tethered to the world in the same way, beliefs, desires etc are much more "flexible" in relating to reality.

While denying that he is engaging in speculative evolutionary biology, Searle asks us to imagine hominids with the full range of prelinguistic capabilities just noted, but not having language.  Evolutionary biology has, in fact, established that this scenario likely existed more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  (See January 31, 2013 post) depending on when we determine that language emerged in humans.  What we are capable of achieving with language, says Searle, that we cannot achieve with our prelinguistic consciousness is the ability to manipulate the syntactical elements.  Language consists of sentences composed of syntactical elements that can be manipulated; prelinguistic intentional states are not:  "the dog might think that someone is approaching the door but the dog cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone."  [This may or may not be true for a dog, but I am skeptical that it is necessarily true for the prelinguistic human --- to be discussed below when I touch on imagination.]  Importantly, speech acts come in five categories:  (i) assertives (representing how things are); (ii) directives (orders, commands); (iii) commissives (promises, pledges); (iv) expressives (apologies, thanks); and (v) declarations.  The first four speech acts have their analogs in intentional states (corresponding to beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions such as fear, hope and the like) and are not causally self-referential.  Declarations are different.  In the case of a declaration, "we make something the fact by declaring it to be the case."   Declarations, on the other hand, have no prelinguistic analog and they are causally self-referential:  the prelinguistic intentional states "cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing.  This remarkable feat requires language."  This has enormous significance for the construction of a social reality (derived from perception, intentional action, and/or memory).  But through a declaration we have the ability to declare things to be the case that were not necessarily the case prior to the declaration: that I am the shaman of this tribe, I am the leader of this tribe, these five persons comprise our governing council, this piece of paper shall be legal tender for all debts and obligations public or private.  Equally, if not more important for Searle, language creates speaker meaning for those prelinguistic intentional states, and, as noted in the opening paragraph of this post, with respect to those causally self-referential intentional states, language necessarily involves social commitments by declaring what we perceive, intend, or recall to the be the case. And so once we have language, we have a deontology --- the ability to establish duties, obligations, rights and the like that are desire-independent.  With collective acceptance of these duties, obligations, rights and the like, we can have collective intentionality. 

Not everyone concurs with Professor Searle's view on the importance of language.  Frank Hindriks, for example, surmises that collective acceptance and collective intentionality can arise through gesture (including sanctions):

"Consider  Searle’s example of a wall that decays and turns from a physical structure into an institutional boundary (94--‐96).  It is not obvious that any linguistic communication is required in the process.  People can observe each other’s behavior including sanctioning behavior such as frowning when someone crosses the boundary.  At some point it is true that the stones that are left form a boundary, and this fact involves the obligation not to cross it.  The stones form a boundary because the relevant people recognize it as such.  These people believe that it is a boundary, and recognize the deontic powers that come with being a boundary.  In light of this, it seems fair to say that the collective intentional states  that are involved in the constitution of the boundary have the double direction of fit.  Language needs not enter, neither to account for the double direction of fit [causal self-reference] nor to explain the normative nature of this institutional fact.  I am not sure what Searle has in mind when he mentions conventionally encoded commitments, but see no reason to believe that I have left anything out of the picture that essentially involves linguistic conventions.  So it seems that Searle overestimates the role language plays in institutions when he claims language is constitutive of institutions."

As a matter of anthropology and evolutionary biology, Hindriks may be closer to the mark as Chris Boehm's Moral Origins indicates. (See November 21, 2012 post).  Searle admits that cooperation among hominids is a characteristic of pre-linguistic humans.  But Boehm's thesis is that forms of human organization (egalitarian in nature) emerged as early as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (if not earlier in other homo species), primarily through sanctioning behavior (subtle or lethal), well before language emerged 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  It may very well be true that the kind of social institutions created by humans for the first time 10,000-35,000 years ago could not have occurred without language, but if Hindriks is correct, as some evidence suggests, then it means that humans were capable of non-linguistic declarations and that "hearer meaning" and collective acceptance in the pre-linguistic world was secured through a punch in the face.  And perhaps by virtue of mirror neurons.  (See October 25, 2011 and September 18, 2009 posts). 

This brings me to the more disappointing accounting in Searle's account of the creation of a social reality, although admittedly he does not ignore the subject.  Professor Searle is certainly correct when he says that what typically gets communicated in speech acts  are intentional states representing the world.  A previous post noted the research that truth telling is the default position of the human brain (see February 4, 2012 post) and this seems to make common sense as well.  But the human capacity to engage in both deception and self-deception cannot be overlooked.  (See February 4, 2012 and June 12, 2011 and May 22, 2011 posts).  This is missing from Searle's analysis, although he expressly acknowledges that the "one faculty that is left out of [his listing of intentional states], because it does not have a direction of fit, is imagination. . . unlike belief, which has the downward direction of fit, or desire, which has the upward direction of fit, my imagining something commits me neither to believing that what I imagine is the case, nor to the wanting it to be the case.  Sometimes one fantasizes what one would like to occur, but it is not an essential feature of fantasy or imagination that they are forms of desire.  One can fantasize what one fears or hates, as well as what one believes might happen, and indeed what one believes could not possibly happen.  There is no responsibility for fitting with imagination.  Another feature peculiar to imaging is that it is, or can be, free voluntary action. . . Imagination will have a role in our account of social ontology, because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination."  The mistake here, it seems to me, is  a virtual assumption that the truth-telling default position of the human brain is the only position.  We know that is not the case.  We lie and deceive more frequently than we care to admit, and, importantly for this discussion, we do occasionally engage in acts of deception and make our imagination fit the world by declaring it to be the case even though that is inconsistent with the objective facts.  The Catholic Church's denial of the Copernican System is an obvious example.  (See  December 17, 2012 and December 5, 2012 post). 

This is why, in discussing Searle's example of the dog who "cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone" I questioned whether this was necessarily true for prelinguistic humans.  If a prelinguistic human believed that the earth circles the sun, it is equally possible that the prelinguistic human could have held the false thought that the sun circles the earth.  There is no apparent reason why prelinguistic human mental states are not capable of manipulation on account of imagination. Human social reality can be constructed on the basis of false beliefs and by declaring that to be the case, and Searle admits that this can be the case as when "a community believes that someone has divine powers," where the belief goes beyond the fact.  He admits that "a whole system of status functions may be based on false beliefs," but he says that from the perspective of institutional analysis, it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false; it only matters whether the people do in fact collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions.  OK.  So we create a "social" reality that is not made of the same the brute physical facts made of "mindless, meaningless, physical particles."  I can accept that, but it seems to contradict the purpose of this book which is "not to allow ourselves to postulate two worlds or three worlds or anything of the sort.  Our task is to give an account of how we live in exactly one world, and how all these different phenomena, from quarks and gravitational attraction to cocktail parties and governments are part of that one world."

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (2010)

Imagine that approximately 160,000 - 200,000 years ago, a huge asteroid miles across is hurtling toward the earth as the earth's gravity draws it in toward a cataclysmic event.  The asteroid strikes the African continent in an area that is now called Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia.  Many forms of life are destroyed by the impact of this asteroid, including the entire population of an incipient large-brained species among the genus Homo, Homo sapiens (subspecies idaltu), that walked upright. Other species, including one which some have labeled Homo rhodensiensis, are destroyed as well.  At the time of this catastrophe, there were relatively small numbers of this incipient species, homo sapiens, alive.  As a consequence, the species homo sapiens went extinct, and modern homo sapiens (subspecies sapiens) never emerged.  To the north of Africa in the area now known as the Middle East and Europe, the species Homo neanderthalensis, who is believed by some to have evolved from a common ancestor with Homo sapiens,  Homo rhodesiensis (or perhaps Homo heidelbergensis), is not directly impacted by this catastrophe.  Only this species within the genus Homo survives.

One of the mysteries of Homo neanderthalensis is whether this species had the capacity for the spoken word and language (see August 31, 2009 post).  The earliest humans (e.g. 160 - 200,000 years ago at the time of our imaginary encounter with the asteroid in Africa) are not believed to have  developed language as we know it.  At best, early humans and some of their predecessors may have enjoyed some kind of capability for communicating by gesture or perhaps making sounds, what some have labeled a proto-language.  Exactly when the human capacity for language evolved is unclear, but it was at least 50,000 years ago ( the time of the out-of-Africa migration) if not earlier, in Africa.  (See also February 15, 2012 post).  Homo neanderthalensis was still a viable north-of-Africa species within this time frame, but if Homo neanderthalensis was already out-of-Africa in this time frame and language first emerged in Africa, this suggests that Homo neanderthalensis may not have had a language capacity.  For purposes of our asteroid story, let us assume that Homo neanderthalensis did not have the capacity for language (despite its large brain) and let us assume, as a consequence of the catastrophe brought about by our imaginary asteroid, that because Homo sapiens went extinct and never invaded the European habitat of Homo neanderthalensis, the latter remained undisturbed by another Homo species.

We can now imagine a number of alternative "histories" over the next tens or hundreds of thousands of years after the asteroid catastrophe for life on earth that might have evolved.  One such history witnesses that Homo neanderthalensis becomes the dominant hominid species on the earth, migrating across to North America and South America, into southern Asia, and back to Africa.  Another history witnesses the extinction of Homo neanderthalensis and the disappearance of the genus Homo entirely from the earth.  Other histories involve one of the first two just described plus the emergence of another large-brained species, perhaps an evolved Neanderthal or perhaps another evolving hominid species in Africa.  Undoubtedly, there are many other such "histories" that can be imagined, but in the interest of keeping these speculations simple, in any of the above scenarios it is possible if not most likely that 160 - 200,000 years after our imaginary asteroid struck the earth, the earth would be much different than it is today.  If the Neanderthals did not go extinct and survived today under the first scenario, we still don't know what their capacity for creating social structures and institutions might have been much less there capacity for creating technology as part of their historical evolution.  There is some evidence that their capacity for creating social structures would have been quite different than homo sapiens as Neanderthals may have lived in much smaller social units comprised of extended families, whereas humans lived in somewhat larger groups whose members included individuals from outside the family.  (See November 21, 2012 post).  It is possible that their brain structures may have been similar to homo sapiens given that the cranial capacity is similar to humans, but this is by no means certain.  What I am getting at, however, is the possibility that Neanderthals may have never had or developed the communications and language skills of humans, and this would have significant impact on how they perceived the world around them, including developing ideas, as homo sapiens later did, of the physical universe beyond the earth or even the biosphere on and around the earth.  In such a circumstance, we can imagine that no species would have developed an idea or belief in a creator of the universe; there would be no idea of a "god," and there would be no religious institutions.  Human social evolution described by Richard Boehm in Moral Origins (November 21, 2012 post) may never occur either. 

Physicist Stephen Hawking is a homo sapien who has spent all his adult life contemplating the physical universe beyond the earth, its origin(s), and the physical laws that describe its behavior.  Together with physicist Leonard Mlodinow (see November 20, 2011 post), they consider three questions, assuming that there are laws of nature:

• What is the origin of the laws?
• Are there any exceptions to the laws, i.e., miracles?
• Is there only one set of possible laws?

The first question is readily recognized as posing the question whether there was a Creator who established the laws of nature?  Or did the laws evolve as a result of some spontaneous event?

The second question examines whether the laws of nature establish a deterministic system or whether there are occasions when the laws are suspended, accomplishing something that physical law would not permit.  This question was resolved by Spinoza in the negative  (see December 17, 2012 post), and Hawking does likewise, although he notes that there is a long line of physicists before him who felt differently.

The third question receives a lot of attention in this book, The Grand Design, and draws on Richard Feynman's sum over histories approach to quantum mechanics.  This is a probabilistic approach to epistemology attributable to the uncertainty (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) in determining the specific historical pathway that an object takes to its present or future position.  For Feynman, the object of interest was a particle that we cannot see.  Particles can take an infinite number of paths to reach an endpoint, and each pathway has a probability associated with it.    As others have explained:

"The crucial point is that these different [probability] amplitudes have a wavelike nature, and as they spread through space they interfere with each other, their respective wave patterns either reinforcing or canceling each other out at various points. And if you sum over all the amplitudes of all the different paths, i.e. you sum-over-histories, then the different amplitudes will reinforce or cancel each other in such a way that the only path that survives this interference process is the one that the particle actually follows."

I'm not sure we can apply the sum-over-histories approach to the non-quantum world that earthbound hominids live in, such as the alternative histories of hominid evolution I described at the top, and it may just be mathematically too difficult because of the difficulty in describing "laws" applicable to animal evolution that would tell us who dies, who survives, and who prevails among those who survive.  But the evolutionary pathway is just as probabilistic as the elements of nature.  The real point here is the analytical model that Hawking brings to bear on looking at the universe:  something he calls model-dependent realism.  This concept goes back to the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein and what Bohr described as "observer dependent reality."  (See July 30, 2011 post).  For Einstein, he was certain that there was a reality that was independent of the observer; a tree falls in the woods even though no one has witnessed it falling.  For Hawking, our understanding of physical reality is dependent on what the observer perceives and senses, and it is quite possible that different observers will witness the same thing differently.  As noted in a prior post, Michael Shermer, borrowing Hawking's concept and applying it to his views of human belief, described a belief dependent realism.  (See June 12, 2011 post ).  The ultimate question for Hawking (and Shermer) is this:  it is pointless to ask whether a theory or model or belief is real, but only whether the theory or model or belief agrees with observation.  It is possible that more than one theory or model of explains the way things really are and observations can agree with both of them, and Hawking cites particle and wave duality as one example of co-existing models of the same thing.  Likewise, Hawking says "no single theory can describe every aspect of the universe."  It is likely that we will find multiple models explain our observations of different aspect of the universe.  Shermer, of course, is concerned about how certain tendencies of the human mind (biases) color our observations and cause us to believe something that is not real.

This is an epistemological issue.  It is different than the question of whether something actually exists.  Hawking does not deny that the observer and the observed are parts of the world that has an objective existence. 

The Grand Design is devoted in substantial part to explaining that the universe had a beginning and that beginning can have occurred spontaneously.  It then discusses what we know about how the microscopic elements that were present at the spontaneous beginning and, shortly thereafter, could yield the universe of complex compounds that we find in the universe we intelligent humans observe today.  Hawking asks us to think of the expanding universe as the surface of a bubble, and to imagine the formation of bubbles of steam in boiling water.  Many tiny bubbles (in our model, corresponding to alternative universes, each with very different or similar sets of physical laws) appear and then disappear again while still of microscopic size.  Since they do not last long, these "universes" (and their different physical laws) do not, as the universe that we humans now observe, develop galaxies and stars needed to create elements heavier than hydrogen, helium and lithium, like carbon that is essential for life and intelligent life.  But then, Hawking invites us to further consider, a few bubbles are able to grow large enough so that they are safe from collapse and they continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate and they form the bubbles of steam we are able to see.  These "bubbles" correspond to that beginning of universes in a state of inflation.  Others have described this scenario as well, such as Steven Weinberg in The First Three Minutes.  In the beginning there were tiny bubbles . . . and now there is a very large universe that includes intelligent life.  No help from a creator is needed to explain how the universe went from Point A to Point B.  But would imagination and storytelling ever have emerged?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (1875)

The subjects of personal identity and group identity have surfaced in a couple of previous posts in this blog,  (see April 1, 2012,  December 10, 2011 and December 2, 2011 posts), and now personal identity resurfaces in Dostoevsky's The Adolescent.

The circumstances here underlying the search for personal identity are not remarkable:  Dostoevsky's protagonist and narrator, Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky, has two fathers, a biological father and an adoptive father.   The more unique circumstance is that neither of these "fathers" has played much of a role in his life through adolescence.  Arkady does not really know either father. The adoptive father is a wanderer across Russia who returns home to Arkady's mother once in awhile; the biological father, a nobleman who has squandered his wealth, who like others of his class during the second half of the 19th century seem to flit back and forth between Russia and other European countries, while  arranging for someone to take care of Arkady as he is growing up. Alternatively, Dostoevsky's protagonist is referred to by some as Arkady Andreevich (patronymic name derived from his biological father) and Arkady Makarovich (patronymic name derived from his adoptive father). From which father does Arkady derive his personal identity?  "How can you not feel your father's blood in you?" Arkady is asked at one point, suggesting a blood or genetic basis for identity.  Personal identity, as another posting on this blog has observed, is a matter of autobiographical memory, and is not always a matter of genetic identity.  (See April 8, 2011 and December 2, 2011 posts). 

This is Russia, between the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) who authorized landowners to free their serfs and Tsar Nicholas II (1868-1918), the last of the Romanovs.  It is a period of great change in Russia, including the beginning of the industrial revolution and liberal reforms under Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881), including emancipation of the serfs.  The intellectual air in Russia at the time is full of "ideas," and Dostoevsky, I believe, more than any other Russian writer of his era, brings the exchange and conflict of ideas to dramatic life, not only in The Adolescent, but his more famous novels, Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov. 

As The Adolescent opens, Arkady, age 20, fresh from completing the equivalent of high school in Moscow, arrives in Petersburg with an "idea" in his mind.  He has developed the naive, if not "adolescent" idea that he can achieve a life of independence of mind and solitude, whereby he is liberated from a life that depends on others.  Moving into adulthood he has to be prepared to no longer be a dependent.  But solitude, he believes, requires"power."  And to achieve power, his idea is to become a "Rothschild."  He is therefore determined to work, earn and save, with "persistence and continuity" until he is financially independent and can control his own destiny. His family now resides in Petersburg, including his adoptive father, his biological father, his mother and sister, as well as coterie of friends of immediate family members.

Ideas have a way of not maturing to actualities, which certainly happens here. As the plot progresses our protagonist is unable to flee the mix of his adolescent friends, family and relatives, and friends of relatives.  Instead of a life of solitude, Arkady encounters an ocean of social interactions, social emotions and feelings (see November 21, 2012 post) and by the end of his narrative he admits that his "idea" is "no longer recognizable."  Instead of working to accumulate the wealth he believed he needed to pursue a solitary life, Arkady believes he must now work to support his mother and his sister.  Even "Rothschild's", as another posting in this blog describes, cannot live and succeed in solitude.  (See June 30, 2012 post).

Arkady's first discovery is that his biological father possesses a moral anchor.  Andrei Petrovich is embroiled in litigation over an inheritance.  After arriving in Petersburg, Arkady is presented with a document, which he is told contains information that is inconsistent with his biological father's claim to the inheritance.  Arkady is presented with his own moral crisis: should he deliver the document to his father? or should he deliver it to the other party to the litigation? or should he conceal it?  After all, there is a possibility that Andrei Petrovich's inheritance might trickle down to his mother and even Arkady.  Arkady is assured that the document has no decisive legal significance because his father would win his case even if the court knew of the contents of the document: the testamentary instrument (will) is clear; the document, on the other hand, contains only precatory language that expresses a hope or a wish and does not create an obligation or a command.  The document, then, presents "a matter of conscience."  Arkady agonizes over the correct course of action before finally deciding to place the document in his father's hands, who in turn, after the court has ruled in his favor, renounces his claim.  Arkady is a "dumbstruck, but delighted" about his father's noble choice.  Arkady repents his own "cynicism and indifference to virtue" in light of his father's example.  Comparing his father to the example of Joshua of Nazareth:  "this man was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found."

The Adolescent reaches a crescendo as Arkady (who is recalling and recording the events of his reunion with his fathers and others a year later) recalls a conservation with his biological father in which the latter imagines a life without God.  "A calm has come, and people are left alone, as they wished:  the great former idea [of god] has left them; the great source of strength that had nourished and warmed them all then is departing, like the majestic inviting sun in Claude Lorrain's painting, but it already seemed like the last day of mankind.  And the people suddenly realized that they remained quite alone, and at once felt a great orphancy.  My dear boy, I've never been able to imagine people ungrateful and grown stupid.  The orphaned people would at once begin pressing together more closely and lovingly; they would hold hands, understanding that they alone were now everything for each other.  The great idea of immortality would disappear and would have to be replaced; and all the great abundance of the former love for the one who was himself immortality, would be turned in all of them to nature, to the world, to people, to every blade of grass.  They would love the earth and life irrepressibly and in the measure to which they gradually became aware of their transient and finite state, and it would be with a special love now, not as formerly.  They would begin to observe and discover such phenomena and secrets in nature as they had never supposed before, because they would look at nature with new eyes, the  eyes with which a lover looks at his beloved. *** Every child would know and feel that each person on earth was like a father and mother to him."  If we stopped loving god, Andrei Petrovich suggests, we would naturally turn to loving each other and becoming more appreciative of nature  after experiencing only a brief period of orphancy.  Profound, but not implausible given what we know about the origins of morality and conscience.  (See November 21, 2012 post). But it may leave one to wonder:  who is the adolescent, the son or the father? And then Andrei Petrovich explains, "this is all a fantasy, even quite an incredible one; but I have imagined it only too often, because all my life I've been unable to live without it and not think of it.  I'm not talking about my faith:  I have no great faith, I'm a deist, a philosophical deist, like all the thousand of us."  Arkady realizes his father's love more mankind is genuine ("the falseness I had feared wasn't there") and he realizes that his father is extremely comfortable with himself --- happy.  "I wouldn't exchange my yearning [for brotherhood among mankind] for any other happiness," his father confesses.  "In this sense, I've always been happy, all my life.  And out of happiness I came to love your mama then for the first time in my life." 

There is more to this novel than what I have focused on, and what I have focused on prefigures themes that later appear in Dostoevsky's final novel, The Brother's Karamazov.  As a first-person narrative written as young Arkady's "notes" of events that occurred only several months earlier, the notes have the character of autobiographical memory that lies at the core of extended consciousness and the autobiographical self.  (See April 8, 2011 post). 

Jose Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda (1982)

While I was reading Jose Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' commentary published in The New York Times titled The Moral Animal caused me to reflect on what I was just reading and connect with some thoughts of writers whom I have read in the past, including Christopher Boehm's Moral Origins (see November 21, 2012 post). The question provoked by the juxtaposition of Rabbi Sacks' commentary and the 1982 novel by Nobelist Saramago, a humanist-atheist, is whether we are a less violent (implication: more altruistic) species now than we were just a few centuries ago. In a book that I have not yet read, The Better Angels of Our Nature,  Steven Pinker answers this question affirmatively. I have read that Pinker's conclusion is well documented, but day-to-day news stories can still make one skeptical about Pinker's conclusion. The numbers may be trending in the right direction, according to Pinker's data, but atrocities still remain.  Some of these atrocities are inspired by religious beliefs, as this year's shooting of a young woman, Malala Yousufzai, by Taliban in Pakistan demonstrates.  And while not likely inspired by religious beliefs, sexual predation on the young by Christian clergy reveals that religious leaders can be just as corrupt, oppressive, and immoral as anyone else.

Sacks' commentary:  "At first glance, religion is in decline. In Britain, the results of the 2011 national census have just been published. They show that a quarter of the population claims to have no religion, almost double the figure 10 years ago. And though the United States remains the most religious country in the West, 20 percent declare themselves without religious affiliation — double the number a generation ago.

 

"Looked at another way, though, the figures tell a different story. Since the 18th century, many Western intellectuals have predicted religion’s imminent demise. Yet after a series of withering attacks, most recently by the new atheists, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, still in Britain three in four people, and in America four in five, declare allegiance to a religious faith. That, in an age of science, is what is truly surprising.

 

"The irony is that many of the new atheists are followers of Charles Darwin. We are what we are, they say, because it has allowed us to survive and pass on our genes to the next generation. Our biological and cultural makeup constitutes our “adaptive fitness.” Yet religion is the greatest survivor of them all. Superpowers tend to last a century; the great faiths last millenniums. The question is why.

 

"Darwin himself suggested what is almost certainly the correct answer. He was puzzled by a phenomenon that seemed to contradict his most basic thesis, that natural selection should favor the ruthless. Altruists, who risk their lives for others, should therefore usually die before passing on their genes to the next generation. Yet all societies value altruism, and something similar can be found among social animals, from chimpanzees to dolphins to leafcutter ants.

 

"Neuroscientists have shown how this works. We have mirror neurons that lead us to feel pain when we see others suffering. We are hard-wired for empathy. We are moral animals."

 

So far, Sacks has compiled a neat summary of views covered in previous posts in this blog.  (See September 12, 2012, September 17, 2012, November 21, 2012, December 5, 2012, November 9, 2010, October 13, 2010, June 17, 2010, May 12, 2010, November 4, 2009,  September 18, 2009 posts).  His commentary continues:

"The precise implications of Darwin’s answer are still being debated by his disciples — Harvard’s E. O. Wilson in one corner, Oxford’s Richard Dawkins in the other. To put it at its simplest, we hand on our genes as individuals but we survive as members of groups, and groups can exist only when individuals act not solely for their own advantage but for the sake of the group as a whole. Our unique advantage is that we form larger and more complex groups than any other life-form.

 

"A result is that we have two patterns of reaction in the brain, one focusing on potential danger to us as individuals, the other, located in the prefrontal cortex, taking a more considered view of the consequences of our actions for us and others. The first is immediate, instinctive and emotive. The second is reflective and rational. We are caught, in the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrase, between thinking fast and slow.

 

"The fast track helps us survive, but it can also lead us to acts that are impulsive and destructive. The slow track leads us to more considered behavior, but it is often overridden in the heat of the moment. We are sinners and saints, egotists and altruists, exactly as the prophets and philosophers have long maintained.

 

"If this is so, we are in a position to understand why religion helped us survive in the past — and why we will need it in the future. It strengthens and speeds up the slow track. It reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct, through the rituals we perform, the texts we read and the prayers we pray. It remains the most powerful community builder the world has known. Religion binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism, creating relationships of trust strong enough to defeat destructive emotions. Far from refuting religion, the Neo-Darwinists have helped us understand why it matters."

 

Up until this last quoted paragraph, Sacks appears to have got it right.  Then he stumbles.  According to Sacks, "[Religion] reconfigures our neural pathways, turning altruism into instinct . . ."  I will concur with Rabbi Sacks that religion is a "powerful community builder" (see May 12, 2010 post)," but as the post discussing Christopher Boehm's Moral Origins documents (see November 21, 2012 post), the evolutionary and cultural pressures that favored altruism and community building among humans preceded religion by tens of thousands and perhaps a hundred thousand years.  Religion, by the time it became a human cultural institution, merely co-opted this pre-existing "instinct."  Sacks claims too much for religion: religion has not configured our neural pathways; the need to survive as a member of a cooperative group favored the development of the social instincts long before religion evolved.  Nor can religion claim that religion necessarily binds individuals into groups through habits of altruism.  Religion binds individuals together in other ways have nothing to do with altruism.  His commentary received a fair amount of constructive criticism, much of which is sincere in my view, as well as praise.  Religion has succeeded because cultural institutions promoting religion, religious institutions, religious rituals, and religious stories are generally successful at capturing the curious imagination of the child before the child has had an opportunity to think critically for itself.  Studies of early-childhood establish that humans seek explanations about the world around them from the very beginning, and religiously "locked-in" parents are significant influencers in guiding their children to the same religious institutions and their stories and values.

So what does any of this have to do with  Baltasar and Blimunda?  Sacks' commentary does not address human violence and does not assign a role to religion in reducing human violence, and my opening paragraph suggests that maybe it did.  But paeans to the virtues of religion and religious institutions and religious leaders in human life, such as Sacks' commentary, often overlook the dark side of religion, of which I cited only two examples above.  And while the early history of the Catholic Church was absorbed in a curious debate about whether a man could be both corporeal and incorporeal,  once the Church was joined at the hip with the State in Rome, religion became a partner in state-sponsored terrorism. It is difficult to describe the history of Judaism (just read the portions of the Bible following the Torah) and Islam much differently. 

In Baltasar and Blimunda, Saramago introduces the reader to the auto da fe  (in Portuguese, "act of faith").  This was the Inquisition's punishment of heretics and non-believers of the Catholic faith.  The most severe form of punishment was execution, including a public burning, some form of torture, or a banishment to an area outside the community after a public shaming.  If the recent story of young Malala Yousufzai's punishment at the hands of Taliban is not enough to convince us that religion is capable of motivating non-altruistic behavior, Saramago's detailing of an auto da fe reminds us, "Oh yes, we used to burn people to death because their religious beliefs differed from ours."  (Today, some merely stone people to death, a practice part of a long religious tradition).  But wait, you may say, did not Christopher Boehm suggests that the development of the Golden Rule and egalitarian sharing in hunter-gatherer societies during the Late Pleistocene, evolve because of just those same kinds of punishment (capital or otherwise) involving shaming?  True, but forcing religious beliefs on others is not (and cannot logically be) contemplated by the Golden Rule.  Correlatively, shaming other humans because they don't agree with your religious beliefs is just as divisive, capable of promoting violence and instability, as it is promoting social cohesion.  Here is Saramago's description of an auto da fe, including sarcastic observations of the rituals, both individual and public:

"Today, however, there is an air of general rejoicing, although that might not be the right expression, because the happiness stems from a much deeper source, perhaps from the soul itself, as the inhabitants of Lisbon emerge from their homes and pour into the city's streets and squares, crowds descend from the upper quarters of the city and gather in the Rossio to watch Jews and lapsed converts, heretics, and sorcerers being tortured, along with criminals who are less easily classified, such as those found guilty of sodomy, blasphemy, rape and prostitution, and various other misdeeds that warrant exile or the stake.  One hundred and four condemned men and women are to be put to death today, most of them from Brazil, a land rich in diamonds and vices, fifty-one men and fifty-three women in all.  Two of the women will be handed over naked to the civil authorities by the Inquisition after being found guilty of obdurate heresy, of having steadfastly refused to comply with the law, and of persistently upholding errors they accept as truths, although denounced in this time and place.  And since almost two years have passed since anyone was burned at the stake in Lisbon, the Rossio is crowded with spectators, a double celebration, for today is Sunday and there is to be an auto da fe, and we shall never know what the inhabitants of Lisbon enjoyed more, autos-da-fe or bullfighting, even though only bullfights have survived [in the 20th century].  Women cram the windows looking on the square, dressed in their Sunday best, their hair groomed int he German fashion as a compliment to the Queen, their faces and neck are rouged, and they pout their lips to make their mouths look dainty, so many different faces and expressions trained on the square below as each lady wonders if her make-up is all right, that beauty spot at the corner of her mouth, the powder concealing that pimple, while her eye observes the infatuated admirer below, while her confirmed or aspiring suitor paces up and down clutching a handkerchief and swirling his cape.  The heat is unbearable and the spectators refresh themselves with the customary glass of lemonade, cup of water, or slice of water-melon, for there is no reason why they should suffer from exhaustion just because the condemned are about to die.  And should they feel in need of something more substantial, there is a wide choice of nuts and seeds, cheeses and dates.  The King, with his inseparable Infantes and Infantas, will dine at the Inquisitor's Palace as soon as the auto da fe has ended, and once free of the wretched business, he will join the Chief Inquisitor for a sumptuous feast at tables laden with bowls of chicken broth, partridges, breasts of veal, pates and meat savouries flavoured with cinnamon and sugar, a stew in the Castilian manner, with all appropriate ingredients and saffron rice.  But the King is so abstinent that he refuses to drink any wine, and since the best lesson of all is a good example, everyone accepts it, the example that is, not the abstinence.

"Another example, which no doubt will be of greater profit to the soul since the body is so grossly over-fed, is to be given here today.  The procession has commenced, the Dominicans in the vanguard carrying the banner of St. Dominic, followed by the Inquisitors walking in a long file until the condemned appear, one hundred and four of them, as we have already stated, all carrying candles and with attendants at their sides, their prayers and mutterings rending the air, by the different hoods and sanbenitos you can tell who is to die and who will be sent into exile, although there is another sign, which never lies, namely that crucifix held on high with its back turned on the women who are to be burned at the stake and the gentle, suffering face of Christ turned toward those who will be spared, symbolic means of revealing to the condemned the fate that awaits them, should they have failed to understand the significance of the robes they are wearing, for these, too, are an unmistakable sign, the yellow sanbenito with the red cross of St. Andrew is worn by those whose crimes do not warrant death, the one with the flames pointing downward, known as the upturned fire, is worn by those who have confessed their sins and may therefore be spared, while the dismal grey cassock bearing the image of a sinner encircled by demons and flames has become synonymous with damnation, and is worn by the two women who are to be burned at the stake."

There is much more to Saramago's description of this public spectacle in paragraphs that follow.  Among the condemned is Sebastiana Maria de Jesus, "one quarter Jewess," a converso who has "visions and revelations that the Tribunal has dismissed as fraudulent."  She "hears heavenly voices, but the judges insist that they are the devil's work."  She has been accused of "intolerable presumption, of monstrous pride, and of offending God," and she has been found guilty of blasphemy, heresy, and evil pride.  She is to be punished by a public flogging and exiled to Angola for eight years. As she is paraded through the streets of Lisbon, she wonders, "Where is my daughter Blimunda?"  Then she briefly catches sight of Blimunda, and at her side is Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco.  Standing behind Blimunda is a stranger she does not know, a man with a missing left hand lost in a recent war that was replaced with a hook, who later introduces himself as Baltasar Mateus.  The sentences and punishments are announced.  "Sebastiana Maria de Jesus had already passed, along with all the others who were sentenced and the procession came full circle, they whipped those who had been sentenced to a public flogging, and burn the two women, one having been garroted first, after she declared that she wanted to die in the Catholic faith, while the other was roasted alive for refusing to recant even at the hour of death, in front of the bonfires men and women began to dance, the King withdrew, he saw, ate, and left, accompanied by the Infantes, and returned to the Palace in his coach drawn by six horses and escorted by the royal guard . . ."  On seeing her mother disappear, Blimunda cries, "Where are we, Who are we, and Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco replies, We are as nothing when compared with the designs of the Lord, if He knows who we are, then resign yourself, Blimunda, let us leave the terrain of God to God, let us not trespass his frontiers, and let us adore Him from this side of eternity, and let us make our terrain, the terrain of men, for once it has been made, God will surely want to visit us, and only then will be world be created."

The fictional story that emerges from this religious atrocity is the meeting of Baltasar and Blimunda and Lourenco:  for Baltasar and Blimunda, a story of love and devotion that is filled with humanity but virtually devoid of religious piety; for Lourenco, a story of scientific exploration that challenges religious belief and superstition.  It is the second decade of the 18th century.  Spinoza has been in the grave for nearly forty years, and Galileo has been dead for almost 80 years. (See December 17, 2012 post).  Bernard Mandeville is writing The Fable of the Bees (see January 30, 2010 post), and stock trading is emerging as a financial force for commerce (see November 16, 2011 post).  As he did in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reiss (see June 28, 2011 post), Saramago weaves his imaginary characters Baltasar and Blimunda against the background of history and historical lives.  Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco is a historical person, and so is the King, Joao V of Portugal, and so is the construction of the Convent at Mafra, which consumes much of Saramago's tale.  The combined power of the clergy and the State committing substantial national economic resources for their own purposes is the background for this love story.  Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco also has his moment of doubt, as he cannot bring himself to substantiate the trinity and he is haunted by the auto da fe.  Lourenco's grand pursuit is the creation of a flying machine.  Toward the end of his life, he is pursued by the Inquisition.  And years later at the end of his life, Baltasar disappears and the book closes with Blimunda, back in Lisbon during an auto da fe, searching for Baltasar when she sees the body of a man burned at the stake whose left hand is missing.