a morally authoritative intangible

Lip-service is the purer behaviour.

It’s a quarter of a century since this book of interdisciplinary conversation came out. And I am only reading The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View now.

This book explores the ways in which contemporary evolutionary thinking might inform the study of the peculiarly human phenomenon of symbolic culture, including language, ritual, religion, religion and art. It draws together contributions from biologists, linguists, anthropologists and archaeologists in order to establish common ground where collaboration and interaction will be especially productive and challenging in the study of those fundamental aspects of our biology that makes us human. [blurb]

I am posting about it because of some prior art in the last contribution to the collection of essays, by one of the editors. Chris Knight’s “Sex and language as pretend-play”.

I read it as I was considering not reading it cover to cover, and had just read the introductory material. A phrase caught my eye,

a morally authoritative intangible

I had to go back and start at the beginning, “Sex and language as pretend-play” had not gone where I had assumed it would.

It covered ritual outside of the frames generated by our outcomes of our worlding/worldbuilding urges in creating our stately economies. Outside of ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ as used in the last few millenia. Outside of the sort of backformation that it (ritual etc) was a type of expression of magical belief of some sort.

of of of

of of

of

As if belief was always required, as if belief requires a just-so story of its own. Belief which is barely 2000 years old, does not go back into deep time. Its a new-fangled thing, belief is it own explanation.

Lip-service is the norm here folks. “Belief’ is ideological world-building tripe. No need to explain it, one just has to point out it was developed in an imperial context and move on.

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This phrase is from this sentence from page 244:

If this model is accepted, the first ‘word’ in human language betokened not a physical thing, but a morally authoritative intangible.

That’s what I call the world of our worlding, this essay covers the seed of it, the seed of a bias. It continues:

We can put this another way by saying that the founding speech-act must have been contractually effective (cf. Deacon 1997; Rappaport 1979: 173-221). It invoked the most general of all pretend-play representations, at the apex of the ritually constructed taxonomy.

So the world is “contractually effective”. It is a thing. A meeting.

Or should be, that is, the English for this morally authoritative intangible is ‘to should’. And that’s why we should, that’s why our shoulding has a selective advantage in organising groups, individuals survive better if we should ourselves into groups, and will do so as long as they get along. Groups help individuals survive better than individuals not in a group, i.e. not in the world we should into existence. Groups do not should, attempts to do so are world-building rather than worlding, and ideological rather than getting along. That is why ideologues and extremists hate lip-service. Lip-service belies the agreeable practicality of our groups.

Group selection is not a thing. Group selection is not of the world. Group selection would only work if groups were already around to be selected from among. Group selection does not create groups in the first place. So it has nothing to select from. Once it can however, Group selected “objects” can only be a parasites unless it can find another job to do.

What creates groups in terms of ideological world-building, i.e. in-and-out groups, actively destroys our ability to agree to be agreeable and get along. Worlding is prior, worldbuilding extremists hate that play towards agreeableness.

The play’s the thing.

Lip-service is the purer behaviour. Fanaticism, shamanism, devotee-ism are re-intensified ideological perversions of ‘lip-service’ as framed by the ideologues, and admired by all power mongers.

Lip-service is the original behaviour, it is not the paler fake version ideologues and (fear/war/power)-mongers love to shove on others, the version slaves are force to do going through the motions in nodding to who’s-in-charge-here?

“Do it once more with feeling!” the monger shouts, laughing.

Lip-service is the agreeableness of those trying to get along with each other, you never know, it might be good.

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The Evolution of Culture: An Interdisciplinary View. Edinburgh University Press, 1999 / edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight, and Camilla Power. 9780748610754