The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

Author:Carl Sagan [Sagan, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Nonfiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Cast your mind back some hundreds of thousands of years. Those who can do that readily will have demonstrated some of the issues that I considered dubious earlier, but apart from reincarnation let's try to think about what were the circumstances of the greater part of the tenure of the human species on Earth. That surely is relevant to any attempt to understand our present circumstances.

The human family is some millions of years old, the human species perhaps one million, with some uncertainty. For the greater part of that period by far, we did not have anything like present technology, present social organization, or present religions. And yet our emotional predispositions were powerfully set in those times. Whatever our feelings and thoughts and approaches to the world were then, they must have been selectively advantageous, because we have done rather well. On this planet we are certainly the dominant organism of some fair size. An argument could be made for beetles or bacteria at smaller scales as being the dominant organism on the planet, but at least on our scale we have done quite well.

Now, what were those characteristics, and how 'would we know what they are? Well, one way we can know is by examining the groups of hunter-gatherers that are still tenuously alive on the planet today. These are small groups of people whose way of life predates the invention of agriculture. The fact that we know them means they must have made some contact with our present global civilization-and that immediately implies that their way of life is in its last days. They are the essence of humans. They have been studied by dedicated anthropologists who have lived with them, learned their languages, been adopted into the group in those cases that permit outsiders to have such an experience, and we can learn something about them. They are by no means all the same. This is a large topic, called cultural anthropology. I do not pretend to be expert in it, but I have had the benefit of spending a fair amount of time with some of the anthropologists who have been at the forefront of studying some of these groups. And I think it's relevant to the task before us.

There are, as I say, different kinds of groups, including some that we might consider absolutely horrendous and some that we might consider astonishingly benign, and I'll try to give a sense of each.

For the latter let me say just a few words about the!Kung people in the Kalahari Desert in the Republic of Botswana. These are a people who now have been drafted into the army of apartheid South Africa, and their culture has been irrevocably abused. But up until some twenty years ago, they had been well studied. We know something about them.

They are hunter-gatherers, which mainly means that the men hunt and the women gather. There is a kind of sexual division of labor, but there is very little in the way of social hierarchy.

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