by Simon Smith
We’ve received a few positive
comments lately. This isn’t entirely unusual; comments trickle in and we’re
always grateful. One unhappy thing about academic philosophy is that you rarely
get more than a handful of readers and more rarely still does anyone get in touch.
The lucky few get cited, more often than not, in order to highlight how
mistaken (and possibly mental) they are.
Don’t get me
wrong, I’m no better. Peter Byrne and Edward Henderson have figured large in my
scholarly publications, but I’ve never told either of them how much they’ve
inspired me; which they really have, sort of. What I have done is point out at length the various ways in which they get
things spectacularly wrong (in both cases, it stems from a theological
commitment to incoherent realism). I’ve had fair mileage out that and I’ve
never once thanked them for it. Ain’t I a stinker?
Comments on
the blog, however, are welcome because
it’s genuinely uplifting when someone takes the trouble to say, ‘I read what
you wrote and it weren’t half bad.’ Fortunately those of you who’ve taken the
trouble to comment – and you know who you are – have actually been much kinder
than my inner critic. Believe it or not, some people have actually said they like what we’re doing. And as far as I
know, none of them are my Mum.
I say this
because at least one person has mentioned Twitter and my Mum thinks Twitter is
the End of Civilisation.
What struck me
as particularly interesting about the most recent comments was that they
referred to a piece from way back in February 2019.
Ah, February
2019, when we were young, ‘the taste of life was sweet as rain upon my
tongue….’.[1]
The particular
piece[2]
was ‘New Beginnings, Old Excuses, and Abortions for All!’, which is a dreadful
title. Nevertheless, the issue discussed there – about abortions, not the rest
– is a highly emotive and controversial one. Not that I give a flying flapjack
about that. I’m right and I know I am, but you’re free to disagree and be in
the wrong.
Nevertheless,
the controversial nature of the issue evidently makes for eye-catching content:
‘click-bait’, as I believe the right phrase goes. That made me pause as I was
contemplating this current post, the point of which I will get to eventually. I don’t really want to be deliberately controversial, especially not here. On the
other hand, perhaps my ruminations can be a bit surprising at times.
Excuses made, the
point: just what is the moral status of cannibalism?
To be clear,
I’m not advocating cannibalism: this isn’t some new diet regimen or cult –
assuming there’s a difference. I’m also putting health issues aside; we know
that eating one’s ancestors can so easily result in quite a nasty dose of Creutzfeldt–Jakob
disease. As the good doctor Beauregard has pointed out, that can be difficult to
get rid of.[3]
Lastly, nor am I going to talk about involuntary
cannibalism. Killing people, even for food, is a Bad Thing. Don’t do it.
I’m not
kidding. Just don’t.
What I am wondering
about, in my customary philosophical style, is the morality, or rather immorality of cannibalism: i.e. whether
it’s actually wrong to eat human flesh.
Let’s put this
in context. I’m currently reading Malinowski’s Magic,
Science and Religion, a discussion of what Levi-Strauss might call
‘religion without writing’ that is an entirely indispensable work for anyone
attempting to understand the nature and origins of religion and, by extension,
of human consciousness. This is not only because the essays in this collection
are brilliantly written, but also because they’re grounded in solid scientific
research, much of it fieldwork undertaken among the Trobriand Island peoples of
Papua New Guinea. Thus, we philosophical theologians have an opportunity to
underpin our ideas with real empirical evidence for once; something that’s
almost unheard of in modern philosophy.
Malinowski’s picture
of religious rite and practice among the Trobriand Islanders is one of belief
at its most immediate. Philosophically speaking, it is religious belief in the
first and, perhaps healthiest, stage of Feuerbach’s dialectic, before theological
purification gets to work. In many ways, it seems to be a clean and simple
faith based on experience.
The
experiential dimension is important, since many of those who style themselves
‘new atheists’ deny there is any such thing, predicating their claims on an excessively
narrow conception of terms like ‘experience’ and, more especially, ‘empirical’.
This allows them to focus on nonsensical rationalist-cum-realist arguments,
which, being constructed exclusively by and for philosophers and theologians,
are about as far away from religious praxis
as it’s possible to get.[4]
Malinowski rejects
Durkheim’s account of religion as belief in the divinity of society; instead he
grounds it in the individual’s experience of, encounter with, some form of ‘crisis’.
Society is important because religion
is the means by which society mediates and so mitigates that ‘crisis’. Crucially,
however, ‘crisis’ begins with the individual.
Since you know
my thoughts on personhood, you’re probably expecting me to side with Durkheim
here. Well I won’t. Though I’m not familiar with Durkheim’s theory of religion per se, this version of it seems quite
mistaken: Durkheim’s identification of the divine with society is too literal.
That said, I don’t think Malinowski himself has got this exactly right, but
that’s another story. For now, the interesting thing is that Malinowski grounds
religion, not just in the experience of ‘crisis’, but in a primal experience of
‘the forces of destiny and providence’ (25).
Perhaps the
most obvious instance of such forces is found in agricultural activities. Here,
Malinowski observes, the farmer will certainly encounter the hand of
providence:
[E]xperience
has taught him… that in spite of all his forethought and beyond all his efforts
there are agencies and forces which one year bestow unwonted and unearned
benefits of fertility, making everything run smooth and well, rain and sun
appear at the right moment, noxious insects remain in abeyance, the harvest
yield a superabundant crop; and another year again the same agencies bring
ill-luck and bad chance, pursue him from beginning till end and thwart all his
most strenuous efforts and his best-founded knowledge (12).
In philosophical terms, we have,
in this experience of providence at work, a kind of cosmological intuition: sprouting seeds of belief in a power at
work in the world that is not our own, that transcends
our own; and in transcending, must be reckoned with. The first reaction, naturally,
is to seek control. Hence: magic, which only later blossoms into religion, as
evidence by the ‘sacralization of food’ (25).
There is,
however, a more dramatic example of the hand of providence at work: viz. in
death. Death is, of course, the archetypal crisis for everyone involved. It’s not
great for the person doing it and it’s pretty grim for the living left behind.
Death is a
crisis that operates on several levels at once. Obviously, it’s a terrible loss,
both for the bereaved family and the tribe as a whole: both a loved one and a
self-enacting manifestation of the tribe’s culture and tradition; that is, of the
tribe itself. Crucially, however, the death of one person is a stark reminder of
our own mortality, that we too are on the same path. When the hand of
providence brings death, therefore, the burden of fear and grief must be shared
among the other members of the tribe, through rite and ritual, so that those
closest to the crises may not be overwhelmed by it.
Ritualised displays
of public grief; funerary and mortuary rites: the praxis of belief. And that, ladies and germs, is where the cannibalism
comes in…
[2][2]
In case you’re wondering, yes this is one of those long and rambling
introductions. There’s a good chance I won’t get to the point until next time
so feel free to dip out and come back later. I shan’t be offended.
[3]
See Dr B’s discussion of Stanley B. Prusiner’s discovery of prions in
Beauregard, J. ‘Michael Polanyi and the Practice of Contemporary Science’. Appraisal, 10-3 (2015): 35-42.
[4]
Incidentally, if anyone thinks Dawkins is ‘the pope’s dope’, I can assure you,
he’s little more than a novice, the merest catechumen when it comes to atheism.
If you want to see it done properly, have a look at A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. It’s the best there is: the very
model of clarity and simplicity in philosophical thought and the most important
challenge religious thought in the last 150 years.
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