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On reading books about war and religion.
Jul. 12th, 2021 04:22 pmTwo books that have been on my mind recently.
I have slowly been working my way through Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood, which is about the degree to which religions advocate for or support violence. It's basically an in depth "it's more complicated" rebuttal to the Islamophobic claim that Islam is a warlike religion, as well as to the atheist talking point that Christianity has been the cause of innumerable wars through the centuries.
Armstrong starts by noting that civilization, as traditionally defined, is founded in violence - the expropriation of food and labour from the poor by the ruling elite, on the one hand, and the destruction of the poor by the elite's soldiers in wars of conquest, on the other. Armstrong's expertise is the history of the major religions of Eurasia, but I found myself arguing with the book quite a lot in the early chapters where she relied on some out of date archaeology to talk about the origins of agriculture and cities.
Cities and civilization did not have to be founded on violence - we have the peaceful, undefended ruins of Catal Huyuk, an ancient city built without fortifications or other defences against attack, which also seemed not to have a ruling class of haves who stood above the have-nots. Kingdoms and empires, and the wars they engaged in, dominate traditional world history lessons because the warmongers conquered everyone else and got to write the histories. But they're not the only way our ancestors did civilization.
Recently I took a break from Armstrong to re-read another book on religion and war: Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Ehrenreich is a journalist rather than a scholar, and as a historian I found things to disagree with all the way through her book, but the core thesis seems pretty solid:
1. War is an ancient activity, but not universal - it seems to be a cultural disease, a meme that infects cultures. Once one group arms itself and attacks its neighbours, those neighbours have to follow suit or be destroyed. And thus the war disease spreads through the world. Always, however, humans seem to talk and think about war in religious terms, especially calling the death of soldiers "sacrifice."
2. Sacrifice, in turn, while not much practised by modern monotheistic religions, was the bedrock of all worship, including monotheistic worship, throughout the ancient world, and (often in a tamed and vegetarian form), still is the bedrock of polytheistic worship everywhere. The gods demand not prayers but fresh blood and meat. They are envisioned to actually be feeding on the meat that is burnt upon their altars. Gods are carnivores.
3. The gods of the ancient world were not humanity's friends, but rather dangerous and cruel beings with violent and destructive inclinations. Gods do not protect humans from natural disasters, they are the cause of those disasters. Worship and sacrifice is all about appeasing them and preventing them from destroying humanity.
4. Humans are prey animals: our distant ancestors often ended up as food for leopards, and even in the era of agriculture and civilizations, big cats continued to hunt and kill farmers and shepherds as well as their livestock, until humans exterminated enough of them that the threat became rare. (Ehrenreich speculates that the architecture of ancient settlements that had holes in the roof accessed by ladders instead of doors - eg, ancestral pueblo cultures in the US Southwest and the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk - was about reducing the threat of predators coming into people's houses at night).
5. Our gods are predators, and the original sacrifice to them, before domesticated animals were a thing, was human sacrifice. Whatever it might have become since then, religion started out as an attempt to prevent disasters (including predation) by appeasing predator-gods with gifts of fresh meat.
6. Naturally the best human sacrifices are people who don't belong to the community making the sacrifice. And thus, war began, in the distant past, as a religious activity, as raiding parties that enabled one group of hunter-gatherers to appease their gods with the blood of members of another group of hunter-gatherers. While everything else about war has changed beyond recognition, the religious language used for it, and quasi-religious way of thinking about it, remain unchanged from its roots as a religious practice, raiding one's neighbours in order to feed one's gods.
Religion has of course since then become a lot of other things: returning to the themes of Armstrong, the core of most of today's major Eurasian religions (Armstrong sadly has never written about precolonial religions of Africa or the Americas, this is her great failing) is a quest to ameliorate human suffering, to fight against the grim truth that life is full of suffering and ends in death.
All through the founding documents of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc, are exhortations for people to help the less fortunate, be kind to their fellow humans, and to treat others as they would like to be treated. And those exhortations coexist uneasily with passages that depict the gods who are supposedly asking us to be nice to each other as violent, abusive, capricious beings that would just as soon destroy us if we don't feed them plentifully and regularly with sacrificial meat.
There's a huge gulf between religious institutions, which, in cahoots with the rich and powerful, seek to suppress dissent and keep the common people from disrupting the rapacity of elites; and spiritual movements, which have always been about helping the downtrodden and demanding that the rich share their bounties with those who have nothing.
Ehrenreich's book has a lot about warmongering elites who delight in war. Some of it falls afoul of her lack of expertise in the history she's covering, but I think it's interesting that while sacrificial religion seems to predate agriculture and the creation of "civilizations" which divide people into elites and commoners, the main proponents and perpetuators of war-based worship over the past 12,000 years have been those elites, while the main proponents of being nice to each other have been common people.
The elites of the ancient world delighted in being "hunters" - of literal animals, including big cats who prey upon farmers, and of their fellow humans, through war. Instead of worshipping predators, they became them. Blood sacrifice to capricious gods became monetary sacrifice to overlords who held all the wealth and power in society.
I have slowly been working my way through Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood, which is about the degree to which religions advocate for or support violence. It's basically an in depth "it's more complicated" rebuttal to the Islamophobic claim that Islam is a warlike religion, as well as to the atheist talking point that Christianity has been the cause of innumerable wars through the centuries.
Armstrong starts by noting that civilization, as traditionally defined, is founded in violence - the expropriation of food and labour from the poor by the ruling elite, on the one hand, and the destruction of the poor by the elite's soldiers in wars of conquest, on the other. Armstrong's expertise is the history of the major religions of Eurasia, but I found myself arguing with the book quite a lot in the early chapters where she relied on some out of date archaeology to talk about the origins of agriculture and cities.
Cities and civilization did not have to be founded on violence - we have the peaceful, undefended ruins of Catal Huyuk, an ancient city built without fortifications or other defences against attack, which also seemed not to have a ruling class of haves who stood above the have-nots. Kingdoms and empires, and the wars they engaged in, dominate traditional world history lessons because the warmongers conquered everyone else and got to write the histories. But they're not the only way our ancestors did civilization.
Recently I took a break from Armstrong to re-read another book on religion and war: Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Ehrenreich is a journalist rather than a scholar, and as a historian I found things to disagree with all the way through her book, but the core thesis seems pretty solid:
1. War is an ancient activity, but not universal - it seems to be a cultural disease, a meme that infects cultures. Once one group arms itself and attacks its neighbours, those neighbours have to follow suit or be destroyed. And thus the war disease spreads through the world. Always, however, humans seem to talk and think about war in religious terms, especially calling the death of soldiers "sacrifice."
2. Sacrifice, in turn, while not much practised by modern monotheistic religions, was the bedrock of all worship, including monotheistic worship, throughout the ancient world, and (often in a tamed and vegetarian form), still is the bedrock of polytheistic worship everywhere. The gods demand not prayers but fresh blood and meat. They are envisioned to actually be feeding on the meat that is burnt upon their altars. Gods are carnivores.
3. The gods of the ancient world were not humanity's friends, but rather dangerous and cruel beings with violent and destructive inclinations. Gods do not protect humans from natural disasters, they are the cause of those disasters. Worship and sacrifice is all about appeasing them and preventing them from destroying humanity.
4. Humans are prey animals: our distant ancestors often ended up as food for leopards, and even in the era of agriculture and civilizations, big cats continued to hunt and kill farmers and shepherds as well as their livestock, until humans exterminated enough of them that the threat became rare. (Ehrenreich speculates that the architecture of ancient settlements that had holes in the roof accessed by ladders instead of doors - eg, ancestral pueblo cultures in the US Southwest and the inhabitants of Catal Huyuk - was about reducing the threat of predators coming into people's houses at night).
5. Our gods are predators, and the original sacrifice to them, before domesticated animals were a thing, was human sacrifice. Whatever it might have become since then, religion started out as an attempt to prevent disasters (including predation) by appeasing predator-gods with gifts of fresh meat.
6. Naturally the best human sacrifices are people who don't belong to the community making the sacrifice. And thus, war began, in the distant past, as a religious activity, as raiding parties that enabled one group of hunter-gatherers to appease their gods with the blood of members of another group of hunter-gatherers. While everything else about war has changed beyond recognition, the religious language used for it, and quasi-religious way of thinking about it, remain unchanged from its roots as a religious practice, raiding one's neighbours in order to feed one's gods.
Religion has of course since then become a lot of other things: returning to the themes of Armstrong, the core of most of today's major Eurasian religions (Armstrong sadly has never written about precolonial religions of Africa or the Americas, this is her great failing) is a quest to ameliorate human suffering, to fight against the grim truth that life is full of suffering and ends in death.
All through the founding documents of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc, are exhortations for people to help the less fortunate, be kind to their fellow humans, and to treat others as they would like to be treated. And those exhortations coexist uneasily with passages that depict the gods who are supposedly asking us to be nice to each other as violent, abusive, capricious beings that would just as soon destroy us if we don't feed them plentifully and regularly with sacrificial meat.
There's a huge gulf between religious institutions, which, in cahoots with the rich and powerful, seek to suppress dissent and keep the common people from disrupting the rapacity of elites; and spiritual movements, which have always been about helping the downtrodden and demanding that the rich share their bounties with those who have nothing.
Ehrenreich's book has a lot about warmongering elites who delight in war. Some of it falls afoul of her lack of expertise in the history she's covering, but I think it's interesting that while sacrificial religion seems to predate agriculture and the creation of "civilizations" which divide people into elites and commoners, the main proponents and perpetuators of war-based worship over the past 12,000 years have been those elites, while the main proponents of being nice to each other have been common people.
The elites of the ancient world delighted in being "hunters" - of literal animals, including big cats who prey upon farmers, and of their fellow humans, through war. Instead of worshipping predators, they became them. Blood sacrifice to capricious gods became monetary sacrifice to overlords who held all the wealth and power in society.