Conceptual control, new religions, and the replication of thebalanced pattern

Sometimes such splinter groups, even some that introduce new levels of sensory pageantry to existing special agent rituals (e.g., Baptists) or in- troduce completely new special agent rituals (e.g., Latter Day Saints), neither collapse nor return to the mainstream religious systems like the cases Whitehouse discusses. This third outcome of splintering from balanced systems does not even remotely approximate the profile of the Melanesian cases. In this scenario, these splinter groups emerge as independent religious systems on their own. Why? The critical variables seem to be whether such systems can both avoid extermination and ob- tain what we shall call “conceptual control” over their ritual innovations. Among the many cases of breakaway groups that reinvigorate special agent rituals or introduce new or additional special agent rituals, those that survive as independent religious systems (such as the Baptists and the Latter Day Saints) in contrast to those that do not (such as the Pomio Kivung splinter groups and the Ghost cult in the Melanesian context or the followers of Jim Jones in the Western Christian context) are the ones that gain conceptual control over these new ritual means for motivation.

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And how is such control achieved? These religions' conceptual schemes must provide conceptual resources for characterizing the consequences of these rituals as fundamental transformations that result from the actions of CPS-agents without necessitating any empirically detectable changes in the world that the religious system cannot control. Otherwise, they are stuck with ritual failure, repetition of the critical special agent ritual(s), and the dilemma we outlined at the end of the previous section that guarantees that they will be short lived.

Some special agent rituals are particularly difficult to control. Ecstatic millennial movements are especially vulnerable here, if they include new climactic special agent rituals whose putative consequence is the CPS- agents' inauguration of the new age. A ritual so conceived is out of control from the outset unless the religious system's conceptual scheme can do- mesticate its millennial expectations the way Christianity did very early in its history. (Of course, even a millennial movement like Christianity that has this sort of conceptual control over its special agent rituals faces the perpetual problem of generating new millennial spin-off groups!) The domestication of these rituals is critical, since new ages, in which, for example, Jesus is (yet again) supposed to return to set up his kingdom on earth or to gather up all believers into heaven are the sorts of events that splinter group participants consistently expect to be able to detect! (Consider the pervasiveness of bumper stickers throughout America warning other drivers of the traffic dangers that will ensue in the event of the Rapture. ) Without conceptual control of specifically millennial special agent rituals, ritual failure is inevitable as is the gradual ascent from the second attractor, i.e., the simultaneous increase in the special agent millennial ritual's performance frequency and in its levels of sen- sory pageantry. This much of many splinter groups' stories can closely resemble the patterns among the Dadul-Maranagi and Ghost cult splin- ter groups. But, as we emphasized when we discussed the first two sorts of splinter group outcomes, tedium is not usually the precipitating circum- stance and these outcomes rarely involve ready reassimilation of splinter groups and often involve their demise.

The point about this third possible outcome is that neither splinter groups generally nor millennial splinter groups in particular must in- evitably crash. Millennial movements that do not include rituals designed to foment heaven on earth today, i.e., ones that can gain conceptual con- trol of their special agent rituals, and that include some special patient or special instrument rituals can achieve the same balance in their ritual complements that so many successful religions manifest. (See figure 5.7. )

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Figure 5.8 The consequences of excess conceptual control: deflated balanced systems

If anything, recent developments in the industrialized Western world in particular (but also, we suspect, in many parts of Asia) suggest that the greater threat to these bivalent, balanced systems may come from their conceptual schemes gaining what might be called excess control. Excess conceptual (in most cases — reflective, theological) control seems to re- duce sensory pageantry pervasively in a religious ritual system, i.e., in all of its rituals. ⁵ Not only does the system's baseline seem to decline but the difference between the levels of sensory pageantry associated with special agent rituals as opposed to special patient and special instrument rituals decreases too. (See figure 5.8. )

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What do we mean by “excess control?” This is our term for what looks like a growing and widespread preoccupation with theological and in- tellectual concerns among participants in a religious system. The re- sulting arrangements involve what we referred to above as “drastically diminished” levels of sensory pageantry associated with these systems' non-repeated, special agent rituals.

We hypothesize that widespread concerns with broadly intellectual matters in religious systems, resulting in what we have called excess con- ceptual control, may be the principal variable driving this decline of sen- sory pageantry in special agent rituals. Over the past four centuries in the West this increasing concern with theological niceties and intellectual nuance may have arisen in the face of challenges from a larger secular so- ciety armed with modern science. In the past century, especially, in which education sufficient to insure widespread literacy has become the norm in northern Europe and North America, the mainstream denominations of Christianity that prevail in these regions have grown increasingly un- comfortable with their more emotionally stimulating religious practices.

If, under such broader cultural influences, the balanced systems figure 5.7 represents tend to evolve in the direction of the deflated bal- anced systems figure 5.8 portrays, then we have good reason to expect one or both of two outcomes. If these systems uphold unyielding constraints on energetic, emotional outbursts in response to the tedium they induce (preventing their “re-inflation”), then they may decline to the point that they eventually face extinction. They may also lead to a second outcome

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The Church of the Latter Day Saints introduced new special agent rit- uals and it allowed for additional (though not an uncontrolled number) of performances of existing special agent rituals. Concerning the latter, mar- riage rituals are comparatively easy to manage and, for that reason, are especially good candidates for enhancing motivation. In many societies no special agent rituals contain any more sensory pageantry than wed- dings do, and their success as rituals, i.e., the success of the gods' actions, does not turn on bringing about any empirically detectable changes. The possibility of multiple marriage, then, gives the best of both worlds. At least some participants enjoy the motivational stimulation of multi- ple special agent rituals without the religious system losing conceptual control.

Multiple marriage is not the repetition of the same wedding over and over. Although two people need wed each other only once, one or the other (where it occurs it is usually the men) may be free to experience this special agent ritual again with another partner in a different wed- ding. Multiple marriage permits at least some participants to undergo this one special agent ritual more than once without undermining its special agent status and without facing the problem of ritual failure. The practical exigencies of married life insure that for any particular partici- pant performances of this ritual are still unlikely to occur very rapidly or very often, so the gradual ascent from the second attractor toward the hazardous region of habituation is effectively forestalled.

The Church of the Latter Day Saints provides an interesting case in point of a splinter group that hit upon this solution for preventing evo- lution from the balanced profile to the deflated profile that figure 5.8 describes. It not only survived but thrived, despite early attempts to elim- inate the group violently. Although external political forces required the ecclesiastical hierarchy to prohibit this practice, it has, in fact, persisted now for more than a century sub rosa. This very fact is an indication of just how adaptive this solution is.

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If current trends persist, some of the mainstream Protestant denomi- nations in the developed world may prove candidates for the first of these two outcomes. During the second half of the twentieth century most of the mainline Protestant churches in contemporary northern Europe and North America have witnessed precipitous declines in both their official membership and their actual participation. In the meantime evangelical and charismatic groups, which constitute a reaction to the tedium that arises in deflated balanced systems, and Southern Baptists, whose spe- cial agent rituals have not declined in their levels of sensory pageantry, have been enjoying increasing popularity. (Theological elites in the lan- guishing mainstream denominations have been in particular turmoil over these cultural developments, given both their religious allegiances and their commitments to rational reflection. See Wiebe, 1991. )Whether splinter groups arise from a standard balanced system or a deflated one, if

What do these analyses show about the factors that contribute to the com- parative fitness of religious systems? Another way of putting that question is to ask about the sorts of ritual arrangements that tend to increase the probabilities of participants transmitting their religious system.

We argued that, whatever else may be required for the transmission of a religious ritual system, accurate recollection is necessary in settings where religious leaders do not have Orwellian levels of power to coerce com- pliance. Early on we pointed out that religious rituals tend to gravitate toward either of two attractors in the space of possible ritual arrange- ments. At the first of these attractors, the high performance frequencies typical of special patient and special instrument rituals tend to insure their recollection. We also argued that with the appropriate cultural and conceptual support, the higher levels of sensory pageantry characteristic of special agent rituals at the second attractor will tend to enhance participants' recollections of those rituals.

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To increase the probabilities that participants will transmit their re- ligious systems, some religious practices must pack enough emotional wallop to convince them that they have had dealings with the divine. This, it seems, is overwhelmingly where special agent rituals enter the picture. We demonstrated why such climactic rituals always end up having special agent forms. For reasons having to do with the apparent phylo- genetic primitiveness of episodic — as opposed to semantic — memory, both Whitehouse (2000) and Merlin Donald (1991) argue that such rituals have more ancient origins in our species' prehistory than do those that rely on frequency effects. Jared Diamond (1998) and Boyer (2001) suggest that the development of a priestly caste and the preoccupation with elab- orate, rigidly codified doctrines (and the special patient and special in- strument rituals that the accompanying ritual systems include) probably arose only in the past ten thousand years or so with the invention of agri- culture, the growth of urban centers, and the consolidation of political power.

If these various scholars have these chronological relations right and if religion existed prior to the invention of agriculture, large human groups, and centralized political power (and virtually everyone agrees that it did), then forms of religion existed in which special patient and special instru- ment rituals may have played little or no role. If so, then at least under what Diamond (1998, especially pp. 268–269) refers to as the conditions of early “bands” and “tribes, ” religious ritual systems may have exhibited a third general pattern, viz., a second (but very old) and different sort of unbalanced system that included only special agent rituals at the second attractor position or, at least, one that overwhelmingly emphasized such rituals.

Do such religious ritual systems exist anywhere today? Barth's account of the Baktaman suggests that such systems may have survived into the twentieth century. It is difficult to know, though, whether to describe the Baktaman system this way is to characterize it accurately or merely to characterize accurately what Barth chose to emphasize about it. It seems clear from Barth's book that the Baktaman do have some repeated special

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patient and special instrument rituals. (See the discussion of composi- tionality in Baktaman rituals in chapter 2. ) That Barth gives them al- most no attention may indicate nothing more than that he approached these materials with different questions in mind. We should note straight- away that even the notion that the Baktaman have a standard, balanced ritual system is fully consistent with Barth's text. Still, granting all of this, both Barth's discussion and the theoretical considerations that both Whitehouse's analysis and our own raise all suggest that the Baktaman ritual system may at least approximate this second sort of unbalanced arrangement.

Diamond's and Boyer's views of the history of culture and Donald's, Boyer's, and Whitehouse's views of the natural history of human cogni- tion all suggest that some religions have existed that have had no special patient or special instrument rituals. This suggests that special agent rituals must play a more fundamental role in the transmission and persistence of religion than do special patient and special instrument rituals. At least under some social conditions, special patient and special instrument rituals are not necessary for a religious ritual to persist. Arguably, the patterns we have explored in this chapter suggest the same. What the three profiles we have discussed indicate is that, ultimately, whatever the status of spe- cial patient and special instrument rituals, no religious ritual system can survive without at least the periodic performance of special agent rituals capable of energizing participants and motivating them to transmit their religious systems. If various social conditions have tended to squelch those special agent rituals' levels of sensory pageantry (in the modern Western world) or even to suppress those rituals outright (in at least one phase of recent Melanesian religions), then participants will inevitably experience new insights or revelations and either revitalize performances of existing special agent rituals or invent new ones. Such are the ways of the gods.