Silence8
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FirmhandKY
quote:
ORIGINAL: Silence8
I think Christianity (and most of the world religions) emerged originally as a response to the rise of long-distance anonymous trade, so-called market societies where the professional realm focused entirely on product, profit, and material gains for arguably the first time in human history. To counteract this, society developed a religious realm that ostensibly dealt only with the spiritual, non-material, metaphysical, etc., a sort of 'antidote' to material excesses.
In the case of America, the unprecedented cultural diversity and social distances only heightened this already existent effect.
Do you have any ... and I do mean any ... support for this theory of yours?
Firm
Glad you asked.
Here's a quote from a well-respected anthropologist David Graeber, from an article he did in Harper's in 2007, but which I only recently came across one a blog of some guy who liked the article enough to retype it out.
from a GREAT article http://www.sleepykid.org/blog/2007/01/13/army-of-altruists/ <-- MUST READ! This article is so true my eyes actually started watering upon reading. I'm not lying here; I was in a coffee shop at the time, and luckily I was facing the wall or else it would have been somewhat embarrassing.
Quote from the article:
First of all, I should make clear that I do not believe that either egoism or altruism is somehow inherent in human nature. Human motives are rarely that simple. Rather, egoism and altruism are ideas we have about human nature. Historically, one has tended to arise in response to the other. In the ancient world, for example, it is generally in the rimes and places that one sees the emergence of money and markets that one also sees the rise of world religions–Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. If one sets aside a space and says, “Here you shall think only about acquiring material things for yourself,” then it is hardly surprising that before long someone else will set aside a countervailing space and declare, in effect: “Yes, but here we must contemplate the fact that the self, and material things, are ultimately unimportant.” It was these latter institutions, of course, that first developed our modern notions of charity.
Even today, when we operate outside the domain of the market or of religion, very few of our actions could be said to be motivated by anything so simple as untrammeled greed or utterly selfless generosity. When we are dealing not with strangers but with friends, relatives, or enemies, a much more complicated set of motivations will generally come into play: envy, solidarity, pride, self-destructive grief, loyalty, romantic obsession, resentment, spite, shame, conviviality, the anticipation of shared enjoyment, the desire to show up a rival, and so on, These are the motivations impelling the major dramas of our lives that great novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immortalize but that social theorists, for some reason, tend to ignore, if one travels to parts of the world where money and markets do not exist–say, to certain parts of New Guinea or Amazonia–such complicated webs of motivation are precisely what one still finds. In societies based around small communities, where almost everyone is either a friend, a relative, or an enemy of everyone else, the languages spoken tend even to lack words that correspond to “self-interest” or “altruism” but include very subtle vocabularies for describing envy, solidarity, pride, and the like. Their economic dealings with one another likewise tend to he based on much more subtle principles. Anthropologists have created a vast literature to try to fathom the dynamics of these apparently exotic “gift economies,” but if it seems odd to us to see, for instance, important men conniving with their cousins to finagle vast wealth, which they then present as gifts to bitter enemies in order to publicly humiliate them, it is because we are so used to operating inside impersonal markets that it never occurs to us to think how we would act if we had an economic system in which we treated people based on how we actually felt about them.
Nowadays, the work of destroying such ways of life is still often done by missionaries–representatives of those very world religions that originally sprang up in reaction to the market long ago. Missionaries, of course, are out to save souls; but they rarely interpret this to mean their role is simply to teach people to accept God and be more altruistic. Almost invariably, they end up trying to convince people to be more selfish and more altruistic at the same time. On the one hand, they set out to teach the “natives” proper work discipline, and try to get them involved with buying and rolling products on the market, so as to better their material lot. At the same time, they explain to them that ultimately, material things are unimportant, and lecture on the value of the higher things, such as selfless devotion to others.
< Message edited by Silence8 -- 4/21/2010 8:55:40 PM >
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