Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [441]
Are memes real, actual, cultural basic units of transmission or just heuristic devices for understanding how cultural norms can be transmitted through culture and achieve stability over time? If memes need to be real, which part of a myth provides us with the basic unit? These are very hard questions to answer and must be left for other books. Nor is it entirely clear that culture provides the same evolutionary environment for the survival of “mutations” that nature does. Memes perceived to be helpful within one area-for instance, religion-may actually prevent progress in another area, like the economic or social sphere. There are no easy standards for what progress is. However one chooses to refer to culturally transmitted ideas, religion plays a significant role in the perpetuation of culture. It does so because it answers human needs, including the desire to survive over time. We have already seen how “martyrdom,” which involves people giving up their individual lives, can be functional in establishing the perceived social truth of a minority position in society, as self-evidently as soldiers can be judged heroes for sacrificing their lives for country or companions. That we can understand such altruism as self-evidently heroic and honor it on monuments is part of what we call religion.16
One of the most interesting functions of memes has been articulated by John Gottsch.17 Following Susan Blackmore, he suggests that one of religion’s functions is to provide ways to deal with the fear of death.18 Gottsch suggests that fear of death or death anxiety is a consequence of human self-consciousness and that the early ancient Near East provides us with many examples of myths designed to provide culturally plausible ways to reduce death anxiety.19 Gottsch demonstrates that many of the religious doctrines of the ancient Hebrews are actually “fitness enhancing”—that is, they increase the chances of survival of the people—even though the ancient Hebrews have few specific memes relating to the afterlife. These would include their abhorrence of human sacrifice and ritual prostitution, on the one hand, and their civil code, on the other. In this regard Gottsch holds out that religion is, or can be, a positive and important fact in human evolution while Blackmore seems much more convinced of its virtually unique ability to delude us. Religion is not inevitably adaptive or non-adaptive in any evolutionary sense. However one chooses to treat “memes”-as real or heuristic-this perspective allows us to ask questions about the value of religious structures over considerable periods of time, not just in any snapshot of the culture.
In her book Little Saint, Hannah Green discusses the religious life of Conques, a small French village of the Languedoc.20 Madame Benoit, a venerable Aquitainian, justifies a heretical practice, praying to St. Foy as to the Virgin Mary, by suggesting that the Conquois are rooting themselves to their place of origin. “Life is an envelope,” she tells Hannah Green. “We come from the unknown and we are going toward we know not where in this envelope we call our life.” Because St. Foy is the martyr closely associated with their pilgrimage town for so many centuries, the Conquois understand where they are in this void more completely by identifying the saint with the role that the Virgin has in wider Catholicism. St. Foy is both an historical datum and somehow an allegory for faith. Christian notions of the afterlife play significantly in this process of finding one’s identity but they are only part of the process. Our modern theorizing is but an unpoetic way of describing this envelope which culture provides us as we go through life.
Transcendence Again and How We Express the Value of Our Lives
ONE OF BALKIN’S most interesting definitions, dependent on considerations such as this, is the existence of transcendent values in different societies. A transcendent value in his definition is one that can never be perfectly realized