Animism
I frequently complain that atheists do not understand religion, varieties of religion, and different religious experiences. But I have to admit that I haven’t done much to help that along. So today is the first in a series of posts about alternative religious viewpoints — most of which I apply to myself. Let’s start with the often misunderstood concept of “animism.”
The initial understanding of animism was that so-called “primitive” cultures — American Indians, for example, or African tribes — attributed uniquely human characteristics to non-humans in an unsophisticated attempt to understand their surroundings. Unsophisticated, you see, because it suggests such people cannot recognize humanity’s divinely ordained superiority and dominion over lower life forms.
Those of us who call ourselves animists, however, have a slightly different take on the issue. We are not, from our viewpoint, anthropomorphizing anything. We just have a broader definition of what includes “people.” There are human people, and there are cat people, and there are tree people, and there are even rock people. To us, the tree in your front yard has a soul, a consciousness and an awareness — although those may be difficult for us to understand. What is consciousness to a rock? It is clearly not like human consciousness.
But even though the rock people might make so little sense to us we have trouble thinking of them as people, there are animals who are so similar to us it is only by great acts of will that any of us manage to ignore their personhood. Our cats, our dogs, our other mammalian kin. We’ve been told for decades that such animals do not think — they have only conditioned, instinctual response, and any attribution of thinking, emotion, or motivation is mere projection. But research is beginning to suggest otherwise. Cowbirds exhibit complex social behavior. Western scrub-jays predict and plan for the future. Much of what we thought was uniquely human has turned out not to be.
I doubt that science will suggest any time soon that animals, plants, and rocks have souls. But at least current scientific understanding seems to be moving in the direction that we are much more like everything around us than we are different.
Science would be hard pressed to suggest that humans have “souls”. Your entire foundation is off, I suggest you read some scientific literature before babbling your inane, baseless interpretations of reality.
Read my last paragraph again, o rude anonymous stranger.
What a freakin’ tool. I agree — these folks are worse than blogspammers.
It is rather ludicrous how much people like to degrade the realities of “not-people”. Every time I hear stories about people holding conversations apes or dolphins… I think, finally, people will realize that we aren’t the only intelligent things wandering around this world and start treating other beings more fairly. But no, the old mind frame of “everything is here is for us to utilize” always seems to keep its hold.
Personally, I don’t see the “soul” issue that, um, “sdadsasd” complains about to even be the point here.
I think that animism brings a sense of respect to other beings that most of the “modern” religions fail to do. I love hearing the old Salish stories of Sister Raven and Brother Orca. They are fun and always educational.
<span class=“caps”>BTW..</span>psychologists call the attribution of human characteristics to non-human entities personification or or anthropomorphism. Maybe they name it because they consider it a sign of mental illness?
Rock people are very diffirent to ourselves, but fun to tour with most of the time. Great drugs.
But seriously, I doubt that rocks have a consciousness in a sense even loosely related to our own. And I think you got it all wrong with the animals having human traits, it’s us who’re just another species of meat-headed animals.
Pstonie, that might be two different ways of saying the same thing.
True, but cat people?
Animals do have personality and the ability to make decisions about their future (mostly relating to food, sleep or when exactly to lick their own butts), but they don’t ever try to invent anything new for the betterment of cat- or dogkind. They eat, they sleep, they die.
Although I’m not convinced the ability to build electronic watches and atom bombs is necessarily a better kind of consciousness.
Point is, if I see someone having a funeral for the tree I would feel pity for that person.
My favourite bit from British comedian Eddie Izzard is about monkeys being taught sign language:
Researcher: “So, what’s it like being a monkey?”
Monkey: “I dunno… What’s it like being a human?”
It sounds to me like you’re still of the opinion that animism is simply anthropomorphizing non-humans; that we look at a tree or a rock, for example, and see another human. Although I know for a fact there are people who do this, that’s not necessarily the case. What I’m saying is that personhood is a broader category than merely human.
It sounds to me that what you’re saying is we should not acknowledge the consciousness of something other than ourselves because it is either different from ours, incomprehensible to us, or both. But you won’t go so far as to say it won’t.
I also don’t understand why you would feel pity for someone — or someones — who has a funeral for a tree, either. Even from a strictly scientific materialist standpoint a funeral is less about the passing of the individual and more about the people who feel its loss. If a tree is important to you, and it dies, why not mark its passage somehow?
Eh, because it’s a tree. It does nothing to set it apart from other trees. It has no personality and it does nothing that every other tree can’t do as well.
Also, if you held funerals for the trees and birds and badgers around you, that would pretty much tie up your whole day which means your life would be about death, but I digress. Trees and animals don’t hold funerals, and that should be proof enough that it holds no significance to them.
I also believe that death is part of life, that other things need to die for me to live. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. I’m not saying that animal consciousness is not important (that trees don’t have, by the way), but that the ability to make and play computer games is afforded by the same process that causes suicide.
Our consciousness is both a blessing and a curse, we earn it with the kind of existential pain that dogs don’t feel, and that comes with some benefits that they don’t get, in my opinion.
Well, the first paragraph I disagree with; if you were to see a stranger person performing a funeral for tree, to you that would be “just a tree.” To this person, it might be something more important. Perhaps the tree was planted as a memorial to his grandfather. Perhaps the tree sheltered his undergraduate studies. Etc.
You don’t (I hope) go around inserting yourself in funeral rituals for people you don’t know who have no connection to you; don’t assume I’m going to do the same for trees and badgers. Whether or not funerals have any significance to trees or badgers is kind of beside the point; a funeral is a human ritual and it is designed for human needs.
Do dogs not feel existential pain? Have you asked a dog? How do you know this? I hold out the possibility that they may. They are unlikely to write No Doggie Exit because of it, but I will not deny the existence of something when it is my perception that may be at fault.
And yes, death is a part of life. More to the point, killing is a part of life. Life eats life. Animism on its own is not an argument for vegetarianism or passivity or going through life not trying to harm anything. That probably needs another post.
The values you’re describing for the tree are all that the imagined person themselves assigned to it. I do believe in assigning value to things and that even inanimate objects can have special significance in people’s lives, but that really isn’t saying much about the objects themselves, only the person assigning that value to them.
I love my car, for instance, I can see a lot of similarities between cars and people and even that the cars themselves represent a special significance in our society and our lives, but that doesn’t come close to me thinking of them as car people.
Everything is alive at some level, but to me the fact that a rock’s existence is so different from our own that we can’t even imagine it means that makes it unable to fit in the category of ‘person’.
It’s also an African belief that if you put your bed on paint cans you can avoid angering the Tikoloshe. There are many people in my country that believe this. I’m not saying all of their beliefs are useless, but they likely intended the concept of ‘rock people’ very literally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikoloshe
What I’m suggesting is that “person” is a broader category — “person” is not synonymous with “human.” So when I refer to “rock people,” I do not mean “rocks are like humans” — I mean rocks may have consciousness, intentionality, and intellect. Even if those are currently unrecognizable to us as such, or difficult or near impossible to explain.
Beyond that, I really don’t see that much distance between what you’re saying and what I’m saying.
I can buy that maybe dogs, cats, plants, and perhaps even lower life forms have a consciousness and perhaps a soul. They can be unique, even if only in small ways, and we don’t fully know exactly how their brains (or analogs) work; heck, our “consciousness” is physically just a bunch of electrical signals running around our brains.
I draw the line at rocks. Rocks are naught but a bunch of minerals gathered together in one deposit, and outside of some sort of “spiritual plane” or something rather silly like that, a rock is just a rock; it can feel no pain or take any other input and has no life whatsoever.
Spirits and souls are proportional to how much something can care about something else outside of its own sake. A true act of selflessness indicates a more advanced, purer soul; if we didn’t care, anything we did would be nothing but instinct and logic.
Oh yeah, and beware the Flaming Troll.
http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/index.php/Flaming_Troll
Uberguy, I can understand if people feel the need to draw the line at rocks, just as Pstonie is inclined to. As I said earlier, however, I’d rather not deny the existence of something when it is my own perception that may be faulty. If I’m willing to accept the notion that things very different from me, like trees, have a consciousness I see no reason to then stop at rocks.