Sunday, January 30, 2011

Fundamentally speaking...


I’ve dropped the name Julian Jaynes a couple of times in this blog without observing that his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) was responsible for blowing my mind thirty years ago. Jaynes hypothesized that, due to an anatomical feature of the brain, humans once obeyed voices in their heads that they attributed to “the gods,” and he backs up his theory with a lot of convincing evidence from antiquity.

Without attempting to support or refute that argument here, I’ve come to observe a close correlation between Jaynes’s theory and the way fundamentalists think. I’m referring here not only to Christians who take every word of the Bible as truth; I’m also thinking of political fundamentalists, a.k.a. constitutional originalists, who want to govern the United States as if it were stuck in the late eighteenth century.

A similarity between religious and political fundamentalists can be found in Jaynes’s ideas, and it’s really quite simple: some people would rather defer to a higher authority than think for themselves. They need somebody to tell them what to do. And if voices in their heads aren’t there anymore (but who’s to say they aren’t?), sacred texts will do.

Take for example the Ten Commandments, which stand at the cusp of religion and law. Hebraic tradition has it that Moses went up to the mountain and Jehovah personally dictated the commandments, which ol’ Mose dutifully chiseled into stone. All these centuries later, not only do people still subscribe to those rules but modern lawmakers also seek to enshrine them in public places – all because of their purported provenance. Ancient texts say that the laws came from God, therefore they must have come from God, therefore they are to be forever revered. It’s the next best thing to Yahweh whispering in your ear.

Laws aren’t carved in stone anymore. They have to take into account the times in which they function. Context is everything, and coveting thy neighbor’s ass doesn’t resonate much nowadays (unless of course one replaces “ass” with “42-inch flat-screen TV”). But thanks to Antonin Scalia and his cronies, our Supreme Court often operates from the mind-set that what was good enough for the Framers is good enough for us today.

This isn’t rational judicial thought. It’s nothing but fundamentalism that blindly defers to authority. And as with our forebears who responded to auditory hallucinations they mistook for divine instruction, many people today wouldn’t presume to question authority. It’s just another instance of black-and-white thinking, with shades of gray (or the exercise of gray matter) not welcome.

When I consider the extent to which conservatives – and many if not most of my fellow citizens – take pride in this deferral (which is usually cloaked in the veil of tradition so as to defy challenge), it saddens me to think that thinking for oneself bears such a stigma.

And the irony is, that’s how this country got started.

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