The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
and Robert McCauley, who provided the first fully developed theory of the cognitive science of religion, a cognitive account of ritual.[65] A ritual is a human act; although it is religiously directed, it is understandable as an action with a cognitive basis. As they put it, “ritual drummers ritually beating ritual drums are still drummers beating drums.”[66] Within their schema, rituals are construed within a human “action representation system” and are reducible to agent, instrument, and patient.[67] The basic structure of a ritual is that someone (agent) does something to or for someone (patient), often with something (instrument). What distinguishes a ritual from an ordinary act—baptism is different from playfully splashing water—is the role of a superhuman agent, which makes the action ritualistic and determines its features.[68]
Special agent rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is the one who brings about the change, often through a proxy human. Because the superhuman agent is the force behind the rituals, they tend to be highly efficacious, therefore permanent and infrequent. Special patient rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is the recipient and the humans are the agents. These tend to be less efficacious, therefore impermanent and frequent, such as sacrifices. Special instrument rituals are those in which the superhuman agent is most closely aligned with the material used in the ritual. These also are less efficacious, because a human is the agent driving the ritual, and therefore these are also often repeated. An example of this could be a blessing with holy water or Jewish ritual self-immersion. Levels of pageantry are in accordance with the efficacy and frequency of the rituals. Infrequent special agent rituals involve higher levels of pageantry than do the more frequent and temporary special patient rituals.
Dan Sperber began to study the transmission of ideas from one individual to another in a manner analogous to the field of epidemiology, which he termed the epidemiology of representations.[69] Wondering why some beliefs are more “contagious” than others, he concluded that some ideas fit more naturally with panhuman mental structures.[70] Memories that are easily transmitted are those that easily fit into the brain’s natural processing or those that are surprising or attention-grabbing by being counterintuitive.[71] In other words, ideas that make perfect sense or contain some unexpected, but easily grasped, element of surprise are readily transmitted. Boyer, picking up on Sperber’s work, developed minimal counterintuitiveness theory. Here he proposes that ideas that violate our intuitive understanding of the world are attention-demanding and therefore memorable, but only if they are also readily understood.
To illustrate this idea of minimal counterintuitiveness, Barret asks that we imagine several stories about a brown dog. The first story is about a brown dog that is barking on the other side of wall. The second is a barking brown dog that can pass through the wall. The barking dog in the first story is completely intuitive and uninteresting. The second dog is slightly counterintuitive and therefore requires more attention, but is not radically difficult to imagine. Barret then tells us about a third brown dog. This dog “passes through solid objects, is made of metal parts, gives birth to chickens, experiences time backwards, can read minds, and vanishes whenever you look at it[.]”[72] Assuming that this description is even coherent, it is a maximally counterintuitive concept, and will not be remembered. Boyer’s view is that the second dog will be better remembered and more faithfully transmitted than the first or third.[73] This is supported by research on memory, which has shown that accounts with minimally counterintuitive elements are remembered better than wholly intuitive or wildly counterintuitive narratives.[74] For example, when asked to remember lists, subjects better remembered counterintuitive word pairings such as “thirsty door” and “closing cat” than wholly intuitive pairings such as “thirsty cat” and “closing door.”[75]
Harvey Whitehouse, using the work of Sperber, Boyer, and Lawson and McCauley, developed the theory known as the modes of religiosity. In this, he seeks to further explain why some religious ideas and behaviors persist and are successfully transmitted while others are not. He agrees with Sperber and Boyer that, “our cosmologies, eschatologies, ethics, ritual exegesis, and so on, are all firmly constrained by what we can encode, process and recall.”[76] With ritual, however, we have additional constraints with regard to authority and the distribution of information, and the social status of those with and without information and authority. Drawing on Boyer, he concludes that some concepts regarding supernatural agency are much easier than others for us to create, encode, store in our memory, and then later recall.[77] Following Boyer and using language from the field of epidemiology, some ideas are more contagious and easier for us to catch.
Unlike the division of ritual into special patient and special agent, Whitehouse’s modes are differentiated by the type of memory on which they rely, namely episodic and semantic. The rituals that rely on semantic memory are termed “doctrinal.” They are frequent, with minimal emotional arousal, and the meaning of the event is heavily scripted and reliant on repetition in order to be passed along. This repetitive nature allows for establishing verbal knowledge in the semantic memory, such as long and difficult narratives and doctrines, something which could not be accomplished by the infrequent repetition of rituals.[78] This successful transmission strategy has a major drawback, however, since repetition can result in a loss of motivation. Having empirically demonstrated this problem, Whitehouse terms it the “tedium effect.”[79] To combat this tedium effect, successful religions seek balance, including “imagistic rituals.” Imagistic rituals rely on episodic (flash-bulb) memory, and are infrequent and emotionally arousing, with the meaning of the event primarily being internally generated rather than scripted. Highly emotional rituals cannot be repeated frequently enough to convey scripted or complex nuance. Whereas the doctrinal mode of ritual risks tedium, the imagistic mode is too costly in terms of resources and emotional energy to be enacted frequently.
Examples of Use of Cognitive Science in
Biblical Studies
Perhaps the essential insight that gave rise to the cognitive turn in biblical studies is that while our ability to study the past is complicated by the differences between our current economic, social and political models and those of the ancient world,
what makes cognitive science special [is that] we can make the assumption that the basic mental architecture of ancient people was very close to ours. . . . Since we share the anatomy of our brains and bodies with ancients, we can understand their thoughts and feelings by studying how brain, body, thoughts, and feelings are related in general.[80]
What connects these variegated studies is an interest in the human cognitive capacities that we share with people living in the ancient Near East, and an appreciation and utilization of the scientific tradition that studies the minds and brains hosting these cognitive structures.[81] Two related points can be made, in that within biblical studies both the text itself and the religious phenomena described provide material to be examined. Because the texts and archaeological data we study are artifacts of human cognitive activities, understanding these cognitive processes can aid our study of these artifacts. Further, cognitive theories can also help explain the religious phenomena reflected in the Bible or in the archaeological data.[82]
The following brief survey will provide an example of how an increasing number of scholars and research programs are endeavoring to study the Bible, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christian origins by focusing on the insights that have been brought to the study of rituals and the transmission of ideas.[83] Here we will examine how these two scholars, Kimmo Ketola and Risto Uro, are utilizing the work on rituals by Lawson, McCauley, and Whitehouse to examine sectarian differences in both Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. Then we will see how Uro examines the transmission of ideas utilizing the work of Whitehouse and that of Boyer and Sperber on minimally counter-intuitive narratives.
Within the cognitive approach to rituals, as briefly discussed above, two related but distinct schemas have been developed to understand their form. It is necessary here to note the basic ways in which ritual systems can be either balanced or imbalanced. The first, by Lawson and McCauley organizes rituals according to the role of the superhuman agent. If the superhuman agent is the one doing the act (a special agent ritual),