The World, Explained

If you think the world's changed a lot in your lifetime, do yourself a favor and read something else.

As far as most of the things I'm interested in go, nothing has changed while I've been on earth or for the thousands of years that we've been around. Sure, how we do things has changed a lot, but we as people have changed very little, if at all. We still love and fight and bully each other and get hurt over the same things, we still try to make sense of the world and ask the same questions we always have.

We're pretty much the same as every other living thing on this planet, too, in the sense that we want things, but maybe different in that sometimes we can make that happen. A bunny might really want a carrot, but unless it bounces across one during its hopping, it's out of luck. We're pretty much unique, I think, in that we can make carrots happen. Sometimes.

And here's where it gets interesting.

I'll leave aside the question of whether or not we should change the world to be more to our liking and write a bit about just how it is we go about making that happen. Whether it's the love of a woman, a big pile of tasty carrots, rain to grow our crops, a healthy herd of goats, or the destruction of our enemies, humans have always wanted things and have tried any number of things to get the results they want.

As you can imagine, this wanting and trying isn't a recent thing, and is probably as old as humankind. Sir James G. Frazer, around the turn of the twentieth century, wrote about it. A lot. He came up with a twelve volume collection that described in agonizing detail the ways we've tried throughout our history to make the world more the way we want it to be.

He also put forth an argument that I think about quite a bit. I have no idea how well his ideas were accepted in the academic world (he was a Scot who studied at Cambridge), but whether or not they're true, they took hold with me.

We have to go back to the beginning to understand his thinking, back to the earliest cave men. Putting aside cultural, clothing, and other differences, they had a lot of the same problems we do. They needed their crops to grow, their enemies defeated, and that woman over there to love them, to give just three examples. How they tried to make that happen, and how we've tried ever since to make that happen is all cataloged in his work, The Golden Bough.

Simply put, Frazer came up with the idea that the first thing humans came up with is what he called primitive magic. Early man knew that it rained sometimes, but not always when and how much he wanted. So, they tried to change that, and the first thing they thought of was magic, as practiced by the witch doctors, shamans, and the like.

It started innocently enough with sympathetic magic, people going out with water and pouring it on their fields to show nature how it was supposed to act. What better way to get fertile crops than by taking someone out into the fields and screwing?

Maybe a bit later, or maybe at the same time, other magics were popular. If someone discovered that a spear with a bit of animal fur stuck onto it by chance killed a deer, they all started sticking fur on their spears. And so on.

The witch doctors kept track of all these coincidences and they became the way to do things (and were about as successful as you can imagine).

A bit later on, according to Frazer, some people weren't all that happy with the success rate and perhaps jealous of the power the witch doctor had over the tribe. And, instead of an impartial universe that would mimic our human activities in the fields, they came up with the notion that someone other than us was in charge of the rain and if we got on his or her good side, we'd be rewarded.

As Frazer put it, we progressed from magic to religion, and priests (in a generic sense) started telling their people who was in charge of the rain and how to please them. Gods for every big and little thing were worshipped and the priests soon replaced the witch doctors as the people in the tribe who knew how to get things done.

Every tribe, every culture, who'd had their own magical rituals and practices, pretty much all evolved to have their own religious practices and rituals, and Sir Frazer pretty much covers them all. Although his twelve volume compendium was later published as a much shorter one volume book, there's still pages and pages, chapter after chapter, detailing corn gods, dead, dying, and resurrected gods, and every other manner of things we've practiced and worshipped.

From there, we discovered science, and, in a nutshell, Frazer argues that sort of similar to evolution, we've gone from magic to religion to science to get things done, with each of these evolving in turn before being cast aside.

And I think there's a lot in what he has to say on the matter. We still practice magic with our lucky panties and underwear and it still seems to be true that chocolates and roses somehow get us love, and we still pray for rain or to get a job or score a point, and we've tried everything from seeding clouds to developing atomic weapons to get our way in the world.

So, at first we thought we were in charge of what happens, then it was god(s), and now it's us again. I didn't study any more sociology (Frazer's field) than I needed to graduate, so I have no idea if anyone is talking about him and his theory any more or if it's been disproven, but I still like it.

True or not, it explains a lot. Pretty much everything, actually.