The World in Six Songs by Daniel Levitin

Author:Daniel Levitin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241987827
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Religion

or “People Get Ready”

When I was four years old, my grandfather took me to Kearny Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. My “cousins” Ping and Mae—the technicians who developed the X-rays in his radiology office—met us there. As he usually did, Ping lifted me up onto his shoulders and walked me around as I held onto his forehead, my hands sometimes excitedly slipping over his eyes and blocking his view. And what there was to see! Dancers in pink and purple costumes ran up and down the street, firecrackers exploded, floats decked out in fresh and plastic flowers carried waving local dignitaries, and traditional Chinese music came bursting out of loudspeakers, bullhorns, instruments, and mouths everywhere we went. The whole crowd was smiling, laughing, jumping, celebrating as free-spirited, barely coordinated parts of a single organism. I had never seen so many happy people in one place at one time. And it was infectious. When Ping lowered me to the ground, Grandpa and I danced in place, and he swung me around in circles, my feet lifted off the ground by the swirling centrifugal force. Mae gave me a whistle to blow and a pin to wear on my T-shirt. At home and at synagogue, we sang songs on Friday nights and we had even sung something a couple of months earlier at Jewish New Year, but those songs were solemn affairs, slow and tedious, nothing like the Chinese songs. Ceremonies didn’t have to be somber!

Human rituals around the world have many elements in common, suggesting either a common origin to them all or a common biological heritage. Some are joyful and some serious, some disciplined and others performed with structured abandon. When we break down these activities into their elements, we see a remarkable continuity with activities in the animal kingdom, strongly suggesting that evolution had a hand in guiding us toward the particular ways in which we express ourselves through movement and sound. The common conception that humans possess abilities that make us uniquely human—language is often trotted out as a crowning achievement, with religion and music not far behind—is sharply contradicted by some of the newest research in neurobiology. Animals are indeed capable of many of the things that only ten years ago we thought were our species’ sole inheritance, the abilities falling along a continuum rather than appearing abruptly in Homo sapiens. What is different is our species’ ability to discuss and plan these activities with self-conscious awareness of them, and to bind them in time and location to particular beliefs. Animals may perform rituals, even quite elaborate ones, but only humans commemorate and celebrate, and only humans tie these to a belief system. When the Edwin Hawkins Singers sing “Oh Happy Day,” they celebrate the day Jesus “washed away sin” with some of the most joyful and uplifting emotion ever recorded. No animals celebrate a particular date, a birth, or commemorate a decisive battle—to do so requires brain structures that they may possess but do not use the way we do.

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