Beginnings - Philosophy and the Scientific World View

BOOK I: Greek and Roman Thought

Beginnings — Philosophy and the Scientific World View

1. THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY

A number of young men with wealthy fathers and plenty of leisure have deliberately attached themselves to me because they enjoy hearing other people cross-questioned. These often take me as their model, and go on to try to question other persons. Whereupon, I suppose, they find an unlimited number of people who think they know something, but really know little or nothing. Consequently their victims become annoyed, not with themselves but with me, and they complain that there is a pestilential busybody called Socrates who fills young people’s heads with wrong ideas. If you ask them what he does, and what he teaches that has this effect, they have no answer, not knowing what to say. But as they do not want to admit their confusion, they fall back on stock charges against any philosopher, that he teaches his pupils about things in the heavens and below the earth, and to disbelieve in the gods, and to make the weaker argument the stronger. They would be very loath, I fancy, to admit the truth—which is that they are being convicted of pretending to knowledge when they are entirely ignorant.

Socrates, in Plato’s Apology

of Socrates, 23cd

One might well question the value of philosophy. Its questions seem to bear on nothing practical or concrete, and enjoy a disturbing reputation for never getting settled. The doctrines of the schools are often disconcerting and implausible, deepening our perplexities, rather than removing them. Many, of course, take no interest in the matter. They have their views, no doubt, but feel no need to articulate them any further than casual bar talk might require, and certainly no need to search out justifications. They have not really conceived they could be wrong, or could fail to grasp the nature and consequences of their beliefs. All men of good sense agree with them, or so they think, and their opinions need no defense.

Philosophy begins only with the suspicion that we may not have a correct view of ourselves, of the world, and our place in it, and tries to figure out which views here are correct, what reasons there are for accepting them, and to what way of life they lend their support. For those already certain about such things, philosophy questions what cannot be questioned, and doubts what must not be doubted. Surely, they suppose, we do altogether better to avoid it and rely on tradition, religious revelation, or plain common sense.

But philosophy is not so easily avoided. Even the most dogmatic imagine that there is a justification for their beliefs, and if they can be brought to state that justification, they have been brought to do a bit of philosophy. One might hope to avoid philosophy entirely by arguing that there is no evidence for the truth of anyone’s world view, but that takes showing, and showing it would be philosophy. Moreover, if one gave some reason to accept beliefs even though there can be no evidence for them, that too would be philosophy.

So we might believe the Chief is the descendent of the Lion God, and have faith in him and follow his orders without question, providing social stability and making us more effective in warfare. No convincing reasons in favor of this belief are likely to be provided, and it is almost by design immune to counter-evidence. If something does throw doubt on it, we can reinterpret it to avoid the issue—he is the spiritual descendent of the Lion God. It will do no harm to dodge the issue in this way, for the belief works because it is edifying, forming our attitudes, not because it actually describes the way the world is, providing a guide to the likely outcomes of our actions. Clearly, some beliefs work by describing the world, by being true or guiding us to other beliefs that are true —for instance, the belief that antelopes are to be found in one place rather than another. Such a belief will naturally be subjected to the test of experience, and it is absurd to hold onto it by dodging counter-evidence, claiming, say, that the antelope is there spiritually even if it can’t be seen or touched. One can’t, after all, eat spiritual antelopes. But other beliefs, including many whose apparent function is to justify our way of life, help us in another way. Does it matter whether it is true that he is the descendant of a god? We don’t need to talk with his ancestor, we only need to have faith in his leadership.

Still, a skeptic might ask us to explain why it is that faith in his leadership is a good idea, so that we can explain why the edifying belief is a good belief to have. Once we have done this, we ourselves might well suppose we can do without the belief, for we see the real reason why we must have faith in him. Why the talk about the chief’s ancestry, then? Well, perhaps most people aren’t smart enough to see the real reason for having faith in the Chief, and so we need to tell them the Lion God story. Some philosophical traditions are ‘esoteric,’ holding that philosophy is necessary for those smart enough to question common edifying beliefs, but should not be revealed to most of the population.

But it may be that faith in the Chief’s leadership cannot be produced simply by considering the reasons why it is a good attitude to have—even we intelligent folks have to tell ourselves stories, talk ourselves into it, entertaining hopeful, but groundless beliefs. Moreover, we value some attitudes for their own sake, not for the way they guide our behavior. It is a good thing to be optimistic and cheerful, regardless of the situation. Perhaps we ought to hold certain edifying beliefs, then, even against all evidence. Surely we ought not to do philosophy, for it might undermine such beliefs. But even this line of argument falls under philosophy—it attempts to show that it is rational to hold the world view it recommends, even if its rationality is established by purely practical considerations—and even this approach respects the truth and seeks out evidence for it, even if it is not the truth of our beliefs, but the truth that our beliefs are beneficial to us.

It seems that, however hostile we might be to philosophy, we do have a world view, and we think that our world view is true, or that there is some good reason to believe it, and so we think it has some rational defense beyond the insistence that it shows bad character to believe otherwise. Of course, these beliefs are usually taken to be obvious, and no one feels a need to work out a defense for the obvious. But if things just aren’t going well for us despite our correct world view, or we meet someone who seems to be doing well despite an incorrect one, or we attempt to answer the arguments of a skeptic and find the task more difficult than we would have supposed, then our beliefs may cease to be obvious to us, so that we find a need to defend our world view and way of life, or change them. Perforce we turn to philosophy. Philosophy does not begin with wonder, as Aristotle naively remarks. Rather she is, like Athena, goddess of wisdom, a child of battle, springing into existence fully armed from the head of Zeus. Where world views conflict, there only does philosophy begin.

Still, even with all this, why study the history of philosophy? Shouldn’t we get on with doing philosophy, if there seems to be some need? Why rehearse old errors? Well, we might look into its history precisely so we can avoid the old errors, as well as the uncertain labor of rediscovering old insights. If one thinks that this no longer makes sense, given how advanced the subject has become, no more than it makes sense to study the history of astronomy in hopes of new astronomical insights, we might still observe that philosophy is one of the things that make human beings and their culture what they are. We might hope to gain an understanding of the origins of the philosophies that dominate the scene today, without expecting to join in the current discussion, simply because we think it valuable to understand our own culture, and one understands nothing if one does not understand its history. Or we might do it to gain an understanding of old and alien cultures through their own picture of their ideals and world views and the reasons they thought they had to hold to them. Or we might note that our friends embrace many different approaches to life, approaches which philosophers of the past have explored sympathetically, and perhaps have understood and expressed better than our friends have, unconscious Stoics or Platonists though they be. But most of all, a complex and modulated reaction to the world embodied in a mature philosophy is a work of art, and the great systematic philosophers who explore and articulate these works are artists whose masterpieces have an interest independent of their truth or falsehood. To fully understand humanity, we must understand philosophy and its history.

2. INTELLIGENCE AND RATIONALITY

All men by nature desire to understand.

Aristotle, Metaphysics I 1, 980a22.

The practice of Philosophy presupposes an interest in justifications for our beliefs and practices, and this need for justification, more than anything else, separates human beings from the other animals. Whence comes this most human need?

It begins with intelligence. An intelligent animal forms beliefs on the basis of evidence, mostly the evidence of its senses, and reassesses those beliefs when it obtains new evidence. Intelligence has evolved to guide action, and intelligent animals depend on intelligent action to accomplish their aims. To act intelligently is to act with intention, from one’s beliefs and desires, not from instinctual or automatic response. Desire and belief interact within a single system—beliefs can only shape our actions toward what we want, and our aims cannot guide our actions if we have no beliefs about how those aims might be secured. That intelligence should shape belief in response to evidence is practical enough, for it is necessary, if beliefs are to guide action efficiently, for them to reflect the world in which we act. So an intelligent animal’s beliefs will usually be true, or close enough as makes no difference, else a belief system directing behavior could not have established itself in the species.

But intelligence alone, even great intelligence, is insufficient to create an interest in justification for our beliefs and actions. For this a certain sense of responsibility to others must be present, a sense how one looks to others and a concern that one look good. It is the others who first demand we justify ourselves, and if we share a society with the others, there may be standards of justification conventionally agreed to within that society, as well as a language developed within it in which the whole drama of justification can take place.

Consider a cat. Surely it will be intelligent enough about matters that concern it, and it has beliefs, but does not, of course, have the language to express them. Its beliefs reveal themselves, not in what it says, even to itself, but in what it does, in the way they shape its actions. But even though the cat has beliefs, and its beliefs are based on evidence, it would never consider whether its beliefs are justified. In this, the cat is like ourselves most of the time. Usually we simply believe, perhaps on the evidence of the senses, without considering whether such a belief is justified, or even taking note of the fact that we have the belief. An explicit consideration whether we are justified rarely enters into the production of belief. We justify after the fact, when a concern arises whether we can expect others to credit our beliefs. Without some system of signs through which members of the society can inform one another when they think a belief reasonable or not, justification cannot occur.

How much is required here? Well, we must first be able to indicate what it is that is approved or disapproved, and display some sign of approval or disapproval. Perhaps a dog can understand another’s disapproval of its actions. A sign of disapproval immediately following the discovery of an offending act can easily enough be understood to refer to it, and a dog may feel shame in response to such signs of disapproval. But how could a sign of disapproval gain reference to a dog’s belief? Well, many a bird dog is accustomed to hunting with other dogs and, of course, expressing its beliefs about where birds are hidden by pointing. If a pointer makes a mistake in pointing, the other dogs might make their disapproval plain, and she might come to worry about this, eventually framing the question whether a belief would gain their approval in advance of any dog’s expression of its opinion. She might become hesitant and uncertain of herself, chiefly in the presence of the other dogs, after being mocked for a series of particularly egregious errors. Perhaps she could then be said to be concerned whether her belief is justified. The development of human language enables us to express a much wider range of beliefs than a dog or chimpanzee can, and our continual linguistic exchanges, a form of social grooming, gives the justification of belief a central place in human life.

Rational animals begin as animals capable of dealing with others’ views of themselves, of justifying themselves before others. But why should they worry about such things? Rationality only evolves in social animals, who need others to cooperate with them if they are to accomplish their aims. It is important to a social animal that its companions trust it, and justification is an attempt to defend or create that trust. In defending itself it must defer to standards of justification that others recognize. These may be conventional social standards, learned as the culture is learned, or they may be more fundamental than that, rooted in an ability, possessed even by merely intelligent animals, to test whether their cognitive apparatus is functioning well or not. More advanced practitioners of rationality may even formulate new standards and convince others to accept them, perhaps by extending old standards, or by pointing out how old standards fail and the new may rectify the situation. They may also question conventional standards peculiar to their society, and try to work from fundamental, purely rational, standards which should be recognized by all intelligent, social creatures, at least of their own species. The notion of rationality presupposes such standards, and assumes that agreement on matters of rational justification is obtainable, with enough work, even if the disputants come from completely disparate social backgrounds. These standards depend on the underlying common structure of reasoning and belief formation within human beings, a structure which is fundamentally reliable, under normal conditions, in producing true beliefs. First, we are concerned that we may have malfunctioned, and feel ourselves justified if our belief or action is not due to some sensory malfunction, error or oversight, to some failure of natural intelligence. Later, we may question if even our best natural functioning might be improved upon, and construct new ways of functioning where our instincts fall short. Reason begins to reconstruct itself.

This ability to modify one’s intelligent functioning is one of the great advantages of rationality. In its youth a rational animal will try to anticipate the other’s judgment, to play-act at being the other, to see itself as others see it, and so come to judge itself, criticize itself, change itself, keep itself up to the mark, and do all of this even when others are absent. If it is a member of a society with conventional social standards, it will internalize the society and its peculiar demands. It will become a member of its culture. Thus a rational animal learns to review and control its own behavior in a way impossible to mere intelligence. But the trick of self-criticism, once learned, is hard to constrain within bounds. The animal may begin to review and criticize its society’s standards as well. It might turn to the examination even of those standards that seem fundamental to intelligence and rationality itself.

It might also raise the question whether a goal or ideal is reasonable, or whether the standards used to decide that question are reasonable. It can answer such questions by considering what the world is like, and arguing that it is such that their ideals and standards are not only reasonable, but such as would be pursued by any reasonable person who understood the situation. Thus a rational animal comes to have a world view. It may even come round full circle, and try to justify the rules of belief-formation that in fact govern its thinking, or the world view that justifies adherence to the ideals and goals guiding its behavior. That is, it can, given time, and enough intelligence, raise the questions of philosophy.

3. PRELITERATE THOUGHT — SPIRITS AND MAGIC

The owners of fish magic will often dream that there is plentiful fish. The cause of it is the magician’s ancestor spirit. Such a magician would then say, “The ancestral Spirit has instructed me in the night, that we should go to catch fish!” And indeed, when we get there we find plenty of fish, and cast our nets.

A Pre-literate Fisherman

How men saw the world and their place in it before writing arose must be inferred from the thought of early literate and modern preliterate societies. Although these societies vary a great deal in their views of the world and in their ways of life, they share one underlying notion to which modern civilized cultures, or at least their intellectual elites, do not subscribe—everything that happens in the natural world happens because of the activities of spirits.

Why? It is probably because human beings are far more anxious about events than most animals, since they spend so much time anticipating what may happen. They live in continual awareness of an imagined future, and in memory of the past, while animals with less in the way of rationality and language live much more in the present. So when a human being anticipates a bad event, and, casting around for a way to prevent it, finds none, he often becomes obsessive, imagining the event over and over in a desperate attempt to find a way to make it come out right. This is dysfunctional, of course—other things need our attention, the stress involved damages the body, and so on. But even if we recognize this, it is not easy to modify our emotional reactions to fit rational specifications. So we turn to belief. Beliefs not only guide behavior, they also affect our emotions, because emotions are a kind of preparation for what we believe we have to deal with, anger when we need to meet a challenge to our position, fear when facing danger, and so on. We control emotions with beliefs—if we can’t simply believe by ourselves on cue, perhaps others tell us stories to reassure us or motivate us, and we tend to believe what others say. Our community reassures with myths that treat the world as human, so that we can use interpersonal strategies to deal with the shame of the past or the dreaded event in the future.

Now pre-literate people don’t see spirits where we see trees and rocks. The physical world looks the same to them as it does to us. Nor do preliterate peoples always act as if they must address a personality when dealing with the world. More often than not, they proceed without taking any note of the spirits. The difference lies in the ultimate reality they see behind the behavior of everyday physical things. Instead of a machinery of atoms and physical forces, they find spirits endowed with desires, perception, plans and actions, all the elements of psychological explanation. Where a full blown spirit does not lie behind events, a preliterate human being is likely to see a semi-personal power, originating in a spirit, but now separated from it, and operating on its own. So, she might think the Great Spirit provides the power by which a person moves her body, and reclaims that power when she dies. Spirits will actually be talked about only in connection with an unexpected misfortune or stroke of luck, uncharacteristic behavior, and other events not readily explicable using common sense, and in connection with important events that common sense provides no way to control. A disease might be attributed to the enmity of some ancestral spirit angered by a breach of kinship morality. Such a theory, by the way, might easily survive empirical testing, since a policy of treatment based on the theory, repairing the kinship breach, might well yield clinical success. (We would say the disease was psychosomatic, or stress induced. To form an advance over an earlier theory, a later theory must hold forth at least the hope of explaining the successes of the earlier theory it replaces.) Even if it makes no difference, one can attribute a natural recovery to a successful intervention in the spirit world, and if the person dies, then we can observe that sometimes people are unreasonable and the breach is too deep to repair. In general, beliefs that function to control our tendency to emotional over reaction are well defended against possible empirical refutation. They are too important to lose to mere evidence, and as long as they are only used to guide our emotions, or to guide us to emotion-guiding actions that do no harm (it can’t hurt to pray, we say), it doesn’t matter if they are true. In this defense of myth lies the beginnings of philosophy.

Fragmentary powers wandering about separately from the spirit that generates them could well prove dangerous to those inimical to such a spirit, or to weaker beings unable to handle such power. So any powerful person or thing is dangerous because of its power, which may, quite independently of what the person intends, infect the things he uses and pose a danger to others. That is why one must avoid eating the food prepared for a chief, and avoid touching the image in which the God dwells, or for that matter, a cockroach. Pollution occurs whenever we are infected with a hostile power, or a power too great for us, and ritual, magical means must be contrived to rid one of pollution when it occurs. Much of magic involves itself with the manipulation of displaced power.

How did the spirit theory become established? Preliterate peoples would naturally light on explanations in terms of personality when asked what lay behind a thing’s powers or activity, for as social creatures we tend to respond to the world in social terms, and act as if we are dealing with persons even when no persons are present. Moreover, one often sees the image of a man in dreams and visions, which are interpreted as a second reality outside the waking world. Dreams of dead people might naturally lead one to take the image as whatever it is that gives people life and activity, and is drawn out of them in sickness, sleep, trance, or death. Once such shadow souls were conceived, it would be natural to find them in plants and animals, and whatever else moves of itself. And surely some such shadow souls would be without physical bodies, for instance, the souls of one’s ancestors. Perhaps some never did have bodies.

Almost always, the spirits are conceived to form an organized society. Generally they enjoy kinship relationships among themselves, so that related spirits have a mutual sympathy with one another, and what affects one of them will affect the others. These kinship relationships are useful, for they lie behind totemist magic. Totemism seems to have developed out of ritual re-enactments of the history of the kinship group to draw on the wisdom and power of the ancestors. Its basic idea is that a particular kinship group should take charge of certain magic rituals because the group concerned, and the animals, plants or other targets of its particular form of totemist magic, in fact share a common ancestor. So one may belong to the turtle clan, which has charge of turtles, and be required to participate in magical ceremonies reenacting the turtle ancestor’s story, in order to increase the number of turtles and make them easy to catch.

Magic is a technology, rooted in the notion that pre-enactment of an event one wishes to occur, using something with which the object of one’s magic is sympathetic, can bring about that event. So one may, after praying to the Deer Spirit, shoot an arrow into a deer trail, thus making the deer likely to be shot in tomorrow’s hunt. Such magic won’t help anyone who is a bad hunter to start with, of course, but it may make a difference for a good hunter who wishes to avoid ill luck, or get every advantage he can. The sympathy between the deer and the trail might be traced to the deer’s frequenting the spot, so that the Deer Spirit is to be found all along the trail. Totemist magic relies on sympathy rooted in kinship, so that a member of the Deer Clan might play the deer in the ritual rehearsal of a successful hunt.

A more abstract view of magic, found in many preliterate cultures as well as the mythologies of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, takes some spirits to inhabit more than one individual. Coyote, say, would be considered a single, independent reality found in all individual coyotes, and in whatever has the powers characteristic of coyotes, and perhaps in the members of the Coyote clan. In some cultures a single power may be postulated behind the world as a whole, a power that dwells in all things, from which all other spirits and powers draw their being. This supreme spirit, like our own God, typically leaves most of the affairs of the world to lower beings, and in pre-civilized cultures one does not usually seek its help. The order seen in the natural world mirrors the order of society, and justifies it, so cultures lacking a centralized political order usually view the lower spirits of nature as capricious things only sometimes interested in the good of the whole, and just as often interested in self-assertion, their own welfare, or practical jokes. They will view the highest spirit as a distant parental figure, interested in the welfare of the whole, but remote from the everyday affairs of human beings for just that reason. In a civilized culture, with a supreme ruler supposed to be interested in the welfare of the people, a benevolent supreme spirit with an interest in justice will be postulated, and the evils in creation will be attributed to conflicts and incompetence among the lower spirits, just as the evils in the Kingdom supposedly arise from conflicts and incompetence among the administrators serving the King.

The ancestor-spirit and the common-spirit theories usually coexist, and so Coyote, or an Egyptian God, will be viewed simultaneously as an ancestor and an existing spirit to be found in each thing with the powers and characteristics of Coyote or the God. The result may look inconsistent to us, but it is best not to make too much of this. For one thing, the Neoplatonists, perfectly civilized philosophers, faced similar inconsistencies explaining how their eternal, unitary, spiritual being could give rise to a temporal, passing, partly material, world to which it was supposed to be identical. For another, the inconsistency is usually apparent to the culture’s intellectuals, who have some way of resolving it. The intellectuals’ resolution might appear scandalous to a layperson, of course, since it often involves taking some ordinary belief to be metaphorically, but not literally, true, and, partly for that reason, such notions may be kept secret within, say, a guild of Shamans. The adherents of myth handle apparent absurdities in their world view the same way we do. They refer the questioner to experts, who often turn out to be heretical, though the heresy, if suspected, is tolerated in them because it is thought that an ordinary fellow cannot really understand or judge their esoteric notions.

The pre-literate world view was a religious one, for one of its functions was to reconcile people to the fact of evil in the world. Evils arose because the various spirits, including human beings, had opposing interests and inevitably came into conflict with one another. The world was not seen as an uncaring, impersonal place, but as a place in which evils need not occur as long as the various spirits could get along with one another. Wisdom consisted in respecting the needs and views of others, and knowing how to get along with them, and how to get what one needed from them without arousing conflict. The Shaman had to learn this wisdom, and extend it from the human into the spirit world. This wisdom became more complicated in the civilized religious world view. Now one had to reconcile oneself to one’s place in society, whether it be human society or the common society embracing human beings and the gods, accepting that others, belonging to a higher class, would be better off and get more of what they wanted, regardless of their level of effort, skill, or wisdom. A human being had to accept that death was his lot, even though it was not the lot of the gods, and a peasant had to accept his poverty as irremediable even as he witnessed the wealth of the nobles and priests. Any attempt to break loose from one’s allotted place would bring inevitable, and just, retribution. Among the Greeks, it was a commonplace that the wise avoided hybris, the prideful overreaching that brought disaster from the Gods. The new religious ideal supported the political system, of course, but it also had some validity as a way of facing irremediable evils. One needs to recognize and accept those evils he can do nothing about.

Even among pre-literate peoples it was often recognized that some evils were unavoidable—death or temporary shortages of food. But these evils were not attributed to an oppressive personal agency. They were thought to following directly on the underlying nature of spirits and human beings. Human beings, in particular, were generally viewed as composite beings, joining a number of different spirits of different sorts within them, and death resulted when the composite came apart again, the life force returning to the higher spirits from which it had come. The question why things were that way was not raised. It was assumed that there was simply no other way they could be. Among such necessary evils, built into the world, civilized peoples included those evils made inevitable by one’s place in the social order. Of course, it is easier to conceive of alternatives here, and some of the Greeks moved beyond acquiescence in the existing social order. But they also continued to see acquiescence in the cosmic order, the order that places the Gods above us, as necessary and wise.

4. MESOPOTAMIA

... She is sovereign, she is the lady of lands,

In the Apsu of Eridu [the primeval waters] she has received decisions [i.e. authority].

Her father Enki has given them to her,

The high-priesthood of kingship he has put in her hand.

With Anu, in the great shrine, she has set a dwelling,

With Enlil in his land she fixes destiny.

Monthly at the new moon, in order to make proper the divine order,

The gods of the land assemble before her.

The great Anunna do reverence to her,

My Lady pronounces the judgment of the Land in their presence.

Ancient Sumerian hymn to the goddess Ishtar

A systematic world view is present already in the very earliest records of human thought, the written documents of the first civilizations in the great river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia. These valleys became so crowded, due to progressive desiccation of the surrounding territory, that their people could support themselves only with ever more intensive agriculture. In most preliterate cultures, even after agriculture has been introduced, a clear class structure does not form. Perhaps the difficulty is the need to mobilize nearly the whole male population when warfare breaks out. This makes it impossible to restrict the warrior class to a small portion of the population (and that a force whose mobility is limited by the possibility of revolt at home), if destruction by one’s neighbors is to be avoided. Also, of course, technology must reach a stage at which single workers can produce significantly more than their own upkeep if kept steadily at the job, before enslavement becomes more profitable than the usual preliterate strategy, simple massacre to free up natural resources for the use of one’s own tribe. In any case, there are rich and poor in pre-civilized societies, but not nearly as great a distance between them as we are accustomed to, and the rich do not typically live on the forced labor of the poor.

The fertility of Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile enabled a single laborer to produce a large surplus beyond his upkeep, and the desert at the edge of the river valley supported only a very low population density, and so provided very little military threat. Combat with other civilizations occurred at first on a narrow front, fighting upstream or down, and was moderated by the requirement on both sides that reserves be held in place to forestall peasant revolts. Moreover, the river provided sufficient means of communication and transportation to allow the formation of unified polities of some size. So once technology made it profitable, some were conquered by others and forced to remain in subjection, a relatively small army being sufficient to defend the state. Robbed of the political power that comes to those needed to defend the group, the conquered became peasants, forbidden to learn the military arts, and the conquerors became overseers, priests, and lords. For the first time there were rulers and ruled, and social classes took form. In the old days, what government there was only occasionally intervened in people’s lives, to prevent the outbreak of ruinous conflict. Now there were laws, courts, and rulers, and a standing army enforcing the whole system. The new political arrangement greatly increased the efficiency of agricultural production, and the state became indispensable to the vastly increased populations that grew to match the new, enforced productivity.

The new order required justification in the face of the complaints of the oppressed, for things worked best when the lower classes cooperated more or less willingly with the upper classes, and the upper classes felt most comfortable when sure that their privileged position had good reasons behind it. Now myth traditionally justified social arrangements. So in Mesopotamia it was explained that the Gods had produced the world, and made men to till the land and provide them with food through sacrifices. They assigned the King and his government to manage the land. The arrangement was usually certified by a marriage between the local Goddess and the King, celebrated in an annual festival. The King was not regarded as divine himself. Among the gods, things were much as they were among men. The rulers were latecomers, who had conquered and slain their predecessors, although the conquered remained, and provided the fertility of nature, for the world was made from their bodies. Originally a wise old man headed the Gods, but he had to step aside in favor of the vigorous young warrior who overcame the old order. The Gods, unlike the anarchic collections of spirits typical of pre-civilized peoples, formed a political order, an organized pantheon, and political events such as the conquest of one state by another were reflected in the mythology. So the Goddess of a conquered state might be said to have entered a forced marriage with the conquered’s God, with its consequent transfer of property. Arrangements on earth mirror the arrangements among the Gods, arrangements that are reasonable, just, beneficial, and well-meaning. The world itself demands these political and social arrangements. We are all, aristocrats and peasants alike, trapped in a world of death, disease and other misfortunes that the Gods do not experience. Human aristocrats try to provide a little security for everyone by organizing production, assuring that the Gods are satisfied, and defending the state against foreign attacks. If they receive certain privileges, it is only reasonable that they should, given their service to the community. Without the aristocrats and the discipline they impose things would fall apart. The Gods themselves care for the people, but they demand service, and have their own problems. One cannot expect too much from them, and must not ignore their gift of government and justice. Indeed, the highest God is generally the God of Justice, for justice befits the King of the Gods, and supernatural sanctions for morality assume a much more prominent place in the religions of civilization than they do in the pre-literate societies from which civilization evolved.

5. EGYPT

Praise to you, O Osiris, Lord of Eternity,

King of the Gods...

Great One, First of his brothers, Eldest of

the Primeval Deities,

who established Maat [Justice, the Law] throughout

the two banks of the river,

who put the son upon the seat of the father,

whom his father, Geb, favors, and his mother, Nut, loves,

great of strength when he overthrows the rebel,

mighty of arm when he kills his enemy,

who inherited Geb’s kingship of the Two Lands.

Hymn to Osiris, about 1550 bce

The myths of Egypt took a somewhat different turn, for they insisted that the ruling Pharaoh was himself a god, not a mere vassal or consort of a god. Indeed, he was the most powerful of the gods. Early on the Pharaoh even used magic to compel the other gods to his will. Later, he was viewed in his own capacity as an embodiment of Re, the Sun God, and as Horus, the son of Re, inasmuch as he is the son of the previous Pharaoh. He took on the character of Re himself when he goes in to his wife, so that his successor too, was Horus. Upon death, the king became Osiris, the god of the underworld, who is, once more, Re, but Re in the afterlife, visited nightly in the underworld by Re, the Sun God proper. The privilege of an afterlife could not long be restricted to the kingship, and in later dynasties, first the nobles directly under the king, and at last anyone who could afford the right ceremonies, would be identified magically with the king, become an Osiris, and lead an afterlife as a subject of King Osiris in the underworld.

Egyptian mythology as we have it is reconstructed from the ritual of Kingship. It is quite throughly and systematically adapted to the exaltation of the Pharaoh. The various mythical traditions found within the Egyptian empire are blended so that the character of the individual traditions are lost in the mix. There are no stories here like the Epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, no heroes opposing the gods, and above all, no subversive questioning of the gods’ arrangements for the world, no suggestion that the world may be deeply unsatisfactory for human beings.