Category Archives: Contemporary Identities

The Environmental Forms of Religious Life

Biocultural Evolution, Contemporary Identities 
by Aaron Jonas Stutz
Lot Leaving Sodom. Detail from the Nuremburg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel, 1493.

A recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences statistically demonstrates something that is bound to get environmental determinists excited.

Here it is:

Human cultures incorporating concepts of “moralizing high gods” tend to exist in relatively harsh environments.

Of course, the authors of the study (Botero et al., 2014) cautiously point out that the relevant data consist of statistical patterns. And that the societies under study are constituted by human beings. There have to be multiple interacting factors at play, Botero and colleagues state. I mean, we’re talking about a rather complex pattern of cultural development: whether “moralizing high gods” concepts and representations have already reached historical widespread adoption and intergenerational persistence within a community.

Yet, the authors are clear about their theoretical perspective on the data:

In general, our findings are consistent with the notion that a shared belief in moralizing high gods can improve a group’s ability to deal with environmental duress and may therefore be ecologically adaptive … (Botero et al. 2014: p. 3)

From an interdisciplinary perspective, a wide range of experimental, historical, and ethnographic evidence supports sound theoretical argument. This is a darn plausible hypothesis.

And it’s certainly nice to document–with a robust pattern of scientific observation–support for the “environment influences religion” hypothesis.

This result will certainly not please everyone. Botero et al.’s (2014) study will effectively pull on a salient contemporary cultural tension, which exists between our own conflicting beliefs about agency and freedom versus genetic or environmental inevitability.

But that cultural tension is not really salient for a comprehensive and consistent  understanding of how religious beliefs persist or change in a culturally constituted environmental context. How can that really be? The main result seems to be a pretty clear point for the environmental determinism side.

What remains implicit in the study’s theoretical framework–but what warrants the authors’ point that many interlinked factors have to be involved in shaping cross-cultural variation in the religious structuration of moral commitment–is that there are multiple, historically dependent ways that large-scale societies can hold themselves together over many generations, in very challenging ecological conditions.

Basically, “moralizing high gods” are just one of many cultural possibilities for religious systems of moral commitment … even in harsh, unpredictable, low-biomass-production environments.

It’s just that, recently, there are many cultures from around the world that are documented to have concepts of “moralizing high gods” … AND they tend to associate–a bit statistically more, than not–with such difficult environmental settings.

Continue reading The Environmental Forms of Religious Life →

Were Baby Boomers the First Demographic Wave of Electoral Malaise?

Contemporary Identities, Contemporary Politics, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power 
by Aaron Jonas Stutz

When the first wave of baby boomers turned 18, it marked a turning point in American youth voter disaffection. But more on the baby boomers in a moment.

My previous post suggested that those of us who are both eligible to vote and actually vote in the United States … well, we aren’t talking seriously about who’s not voting and why it matters to all of us.

The Pew Center released survey results shortly before the November 4th elections, providing some helpful information about “non-voter demographics.” The Pew Center’s study is available here and I’ve embedded one of the report summary slides at right. The results overwhelmingly show that a large minority of American citizens who are struggling to make it economically, who feel alienated from community or economic institutional structures that the majority of citizens enjoy … well, that experience of everyday alienation translates into effective disenfranchisement. The economically marginalized tend not to vote. Continue reading Were Baby Boomers the First Demographic Wave of Electoral Malaise? →

Why Don’t We See the Impact of Voter Registration Drives?

Contemporary Identities, Contemporary Politics, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power
King Corpse, by Sam Francis (1986).
by Aaron Jonas Stutz

Talking about elections is hard.

That doesn’t stop politicians and news media.

But the thing that gets me …

I mean, there’s something that tends to go unacknowledged … About the complexity of democratic election results. From the local to the national. From votes on referenda and constitutional amendments to races for political offices.

Elections are almost always determined by a small minority of swing voters … But we talk about the results as if the electorate really was a coherent “body politic” that had deliberated, reached a decision, and announced it with ritual fanfare.

Of course, human social life is full of tensions and confusions between identifying-with and separating-from the bodies of others. The ambiguity and contradictory emotions involved in experiencing and committing to the similarities or the differences between self and other shape what it means to be human. Being part of, with, or even in others often defines identities through distance and intimacy, tenderness and violence. Bodies link us and keep us apart, very very metaphorically AND very very literally.

But when democracy seems only to enhance the ambiguity between separate, free, and variable versus collective and coherent and constrained bodies … well, that seems to undermine the point of democratic rule and accountability, for citizens and elected rulers alike. It would hardly be the only instance in which ritualized, mass media drama makes it seem like the very performance of elections is enough to make our bodies and their connections to others’ sufficiently safe and orderly. Continue reading Why Don’t We See the Impact of Voter Registration Drives? →

We’ve Seen Our Carrying Capacity … And It Is Us

Biocultural Evolution, Contemporary Identities, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power
An extraordinarily simple model of how human population grows in feedback with our environmental carrying capacity was introduced by Joel E. Cohen in 1995. Shown here by the orange curve, the model allows us to interpolate the pattern of demographic change between historical estimates of global population in 1 CE (ranging between ca. 200-400 million) and the registration of our global census size reaching 7 billion in 2012. Note how the Cohen model curve fits the historical estimates much better than a comparable interpolation based on a traditional logistic growth model with a fixed environmental carrying capacity. Moreover, the Cohen model is consistent with UN population projections of slowing population growth through 2100 CE. It is expected--based on recent trends of falling fertility--that human population will fall somewhere between 6 and 17 billion in the year 2100, involving stalled or negative population growth.
An extraordinarily simple model of how human population grows in feedback with our environmental carrying capacity was introduced by Joel E. Cohen in 1995. Shown here by the orange curve, the model allows us to interpolate the pattern of demographic change between historical estimates of global population in 1 CE (ranging between ca. 200-400 million) and the registration of our global census size reaching 7 billion in 2012. Note how the Cohen model curve fits the historical estimates much better than a comparable interpolation based on a traditional logistic growth model with a fixed environmental carrying capacity. Moreover, the Cohen model is consistent with UN population projections of slowing population growth through 2100 CE. It is expected–based on recent trends of falling fertility–that human population will fall somewhere between 6 and 17 billion in the year 2100, involving stalled or negative population growth.

Nearly twenty years ago, the mathematical ecologist Joel E. Cohen published a landmark book scientifically evaluating the question, “How many people can the Earth support?” In a companion article in the journal Science, Cohen introduced and explained what he called a mathematical cartoon of human population change. He made two very simple suggestions about how we should alter our assumptions concerning the relationship between our population size and the ecosystem resources that feed its growth. First, Cohen said, don’t worry first and foremost about absolute physical limits to key resources–of fresh water or arable land, say. Second, worry more about the social relationship between the number of people and the efficiency of economic production.

Mathematically, this involves a minor change in notation. We’ll get to that in a moment, but it is worth noting that it is almost absurdly simple.

Let’s consider the traditional model that Cohen wanted to update. The classic logistic growth model represents how finite resources will limit a population’s growth–specifically when there is a constant population level, denoted by the letter K, at which that population’s aggregate extraction, consumption, and impact on resources is in equilibrium with the wider ecosystemic renewal of those resources. K–or the population’s ecological carrying capacity–is known as the largest size the population can reach while leaving just enough material, nutrients, and energy to sustain demographic replacement in the next generation. In nature, a population at this ecological limit would not literally be in perfect harmony from one generation to the next. But it is an equilibrium level to which slight fluctuations in population growth or decline will return. What did Cohen change? He suggested that we should no longer see K as a constant. Rather, we should see carrying capacity as a factor that changes over time. Thus, he suggested designating carrying capacity as a mathematical function of time, K(t), which would vary in a mutually causal relationship with population change.

Continue reading We’ve Seen Our Carrying Capacity … And It Is Us →

Culture and the Democratic Form of Government

Contemporary Identities, Contemporary Politics, Human Sociality, Culture, and Power, Teaching-Learning-Thinking

How does the process of culture influence democratic participation and social fairness?

Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull (1819), oil on canvas. Much of the early public discourse aimed at mobilizing political support for independence and particular aspects of constitutional organization of legislative representation and executive and judicial power was philosophical and legal in form, emphasizing logical deduction from first premises.

We usually take it for granted that concepts of democracy and justice are so overarching–so encompassing over the structure and maintenance of social order–that they have an independent, fixed, objective definition. This is certainly a practical narrative. As long as things are OK for most citizens of those societies institutionally defined and overtly committed to democracy and rule of law, the notion that our access to legislative, executive, and judicial decision-making is fundamentally fair … well, it’s quite convenient to confuse fundamental political fairness with the experience of not being treated unreasonably unfairly in daily life.

In other words, notions of social fairness and justice have a tendency to take an unmarked symbolic form in relation to the markedness of unfairness and injustice. The succinct, iconic narrative that the system is basically–or at least sufficiently–fair … this is easy for us to tell ourselves, easy to think. It diverts our attention from pervasive instances in which local, regional, or national governing institutions–with claims to sovereign powers over their jurisdictions–actually abuse their power and unfairly harm civilian individuals or groups. It diverts our attention from the ways in which governing institutions unfairly ignore or flaunt legal protections and democratic accountability.

Continue reading Culture and the Democratic Form of Government →