Download In What Is Religious Human Capital Fixed?

In What Is Religious Human Capital Fixed?
Paul Firenze
Special Lecturer in Philosophy
Providence College
<[email protected]>
April 2013
Preliminary Daft
Please do not circulate or cite without permission
The title of this paper is in the form of a question because it is an inquiry into the concept
of religious human capital, and does not provide anything like a settled answer regarding what
exactly religious human capital is, or what it is fixed in. However, I will suggest that potentially
important avenues for future study of religious human capital may be found by regarding religion
as a form of embodied social practice which carries within it normative constraints which guide
people toward valued ends. This approach to religion has the potential to influence our
understanding of religious human capital insofar as it provides new insights into how the
adjective “religious” ought to be applied to human capital. To begin, it is important to define
religion and to see what is at stake in that definition.
I. Defining Religion as Social Practice
Although the issue is far from settled, there is increasing agreement among scholars of
religion (or “religionists,” as many now prefer to be called) that “substantive” definitions of
religion are preferable to “functionalist” definitions. In this regard, many of the seminal figures
in the economic approach to religion have been on the right side of this debate. Laurence
Iannaccone, for example, has defined religion as “any shared set of beliefs, activities, and
institutions premised upon faith in supernatural forces.”1 Rodney Stark and Roger Finke define
1
Laurence R. Iannacone, “Introduction to the Economics of Religion,” Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1998),
1466.
1 religion as “very general explanations of existence, including terms of exchange with a god or
gods.”2 And while these definitions have their own shortcomings, they are right to include as an
important part of religion the substantive elements of gods and the “supernatural.” Many
religionists have come to favor such substantive definitions because functionalist definitions, that
is, those which say that religion can be identified by the social and/or psychological function/s it
serves (for instance social cohesion or mental contentedness), these functionalist definitions find
it difficult to say how it is religion specifically which is serving this function, and not some other
phenomenon which produces similar effects.3
But in trying to define the substance of religion, it will also be helpful to avoid looking
for some kind of “pure religion” or a “religious essence,” which would imply that religion itself
has some kind existence outside of human beings and their societies, a metaphysical claim which
many religionists, leery of being considered secret theologians, wish to avoid. Instead, I will take
what Kevin Schilbrack calls a “critical realist” perspective on religion, arguing that religion is a
“socially dependent fact” which is ontologically subjective (it would not exist without human
beings) but is epistemologically objective, and is therefore “independent of the scholar who
studies it,” and independent of any individual’s preferences or beliefs.4 This epistemological
objectivity prevents the scholar from claiming that just anything they wish can be fitted into a
definition religion. And even though societies in other places and times may not have had the
word or concept for religion that corresponds exactly to the way we have come to use it, this
does not mean we cannot find things out there in the world that correspond to what we have
come to recognize and define as religion—in other words, religion is not a culturally relative
2
Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2000), 91.
3
See William A. Arnal, “Definition,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, eds. Willi Braun and Russell T.
McCutcheon (New York: Continuum, 2000), 29.
4
Kevin Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010), 1119.
2 term, applicable only to the modern West. We can identify religion in the world because it takes
the form of contingent social practices, and “as it is performed it transforms bodies,” which are
the “intersubjective ground of experience.”5 Religion is thus best studied within the larger web
of social practices in which it is embedded.
But what is the substance which distinguishes religious social practices from other kinds
of social practices? Whatever is the substance of religion by which we come to define it, this
substance or content should be capacious enough to accommodate a wide range of its historical
and cultural manifestations, and yet it should be narrow enough not to allow in just anything
anyone might want to consider religion, thereby rendering the definition useless due to its lack of
discrimination.6 When anything can be described as religion or religious, nothing can.
Interestingly, one of the oldest social scientific attempts at defining religion has turned out to be
one of the most useful. E.B. Tylor’s substantive definition of religion as “belief in spiritual
beings,” while it contains problematic words such as “belief” and “spiritual” which tie it too
closely to Protestant conceptions of religion, does provide a good starting place by stressing the
importance of non-human beings to religious practices.7 So, following Stanley Stowers, I regard
religion as “variously linked social practices (involving arrangements of entities at sites) that
carry understandings involving the existence and activity of gods, ancestors, and various
normally unseen beings, and that shade off into other anthropomorphic interpretations of the
world.”8 This rather dense definition, and its grounding in practice theory, requires a brief
unpacking here.
5
Ibid., 1120.
This is one criticism of many functionalist definitions, in that by arguing that religion is anything which performs a
particular function in society, it is difficult to distinguish religion from, say, ideology.
7
E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: Murray, 1871).
8
Stanley Stowers, “The Ontology of Religion,” in Introducing Religion: Essays in Honor of Jonathan Z. Smith, eds.
Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Equinox, 2008), 442.
6
3 Insights from practice theory, in particular the work of philosopher Theodore Schatzki,
allow religionists to talk about religion as having an ontology (as existing in the world), because
social practices, including religion, are regarded as ontologically basic, as opposed to the way
“mind, individuals, or social wholes” are considered basic to other forms of theorization.9 When
the particular shared understandings of a religious group take the form of practices (organized
doings and sayings) which can be observed and explained (that is, redescribed by the scholar),
religion can be seen to concern not simply the posited existence and activity of normally unseen
beings, but also the posited interactions between humans and these beings.10 These interactions
make the difference between what we might describe as purely human endeavors and practices
and religious ones. That is, they serve a function identifiable as religious because there is an
effect, influence or difference made in that group or society by beings for which there are
practices of identifying as religious. The substance of religion (human interactions with gods,
etc.) thereby carries within it its own function, which may be quite different in different places
and times, depending on the manner in which religion links to other practices within a particular
place and time. So while religion will always have some social function, we cannot accurately
say that religion is (just) its social function. In fact, it is normally better to avoid the contentious
use of the word function altogether, with its mechanistic connotations, and instead to say that
religion has certain verifiable “social effects.”
For Schatzki, social practices (bundles of activities) occur at what he calls social sites,
which are made up of human beings and non-human entities (chairs or gods), ordered in such a
way that the human and non-human entities and their actions and arrangements “relate, enjoy
meaning (and identity), and are positioned with respect to one another. All social life exhibits, as
9
Ibid., 438.
For the importance of the practice redescription to the religionist see Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays
in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
10
4 a result, relatedness, meaning, and mutual positioning.”11 However, in this arrangement,
meaning (the understandings carried in practices) cannot be said to come merely from an entity’s
“subject position,” as might be the case according to structuralist theories. Instead, rather than
meaning deriving from difference, meaning “arises from actuality: actual relations among
entities, and what these entities actually do.”12 This is why “what something is is, fundamentally,
what it is understood to be. Understandings, moreover, are carried in social practices and
expressed in the doings and sayings that compose practices.”13 Thus, specifically religious
understandings are carried in the social practices of human interactions with gods, ancestors,
non-obvious beings, etc. As a practice, then, religion has both substantive and functionalist
elements. The substance of religion (religious practices) is the actuality of “relations among the
entities” humans and gods, and the function (or rather, the social effect) of these practices is
“what these entities actually do” as a part of these relations. Like Schilbrack’s “socially
dependent facts,” which include religion and are independent of any individual’s beliefs or
desires, the shared understandings of religious practices are “‘out there’ in public space
accessible in principle to anyone” who has been properly socialized.14 Individuals carry
embodied versions of these practices as a part of their understandings of the practices.
II. Embodiment and Religious Practices
For some time, attention to embodiment has been a growing concern within the
humanities and the social sciences, including the field of religious studies. This has been an
important move for religious studies in particular in its attempts to break away from theology as
an academic discipline. In particular, attention to the body has “corrected the Protestant-style
11
Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and
Change (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 38.
12
Ibid., 57; emphasis in original.
13
Ibid., 58.
14
Theodore R. Schatzki, “A New Societist Social Ontology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (2003), 184.
5 tendency to equate religion with interiority and belief”—thus my earlier concern with
Iannaccone’s definition of religion as “premised on faith in supernatural forces.”15 The religious
subject is now being studied less for its beliefs or theological commitments and increasingly for
the ways that religious practices are made manifest in bodies. This attention to embodiment has
two trajectories, both of which have tended toward an increasingly empirical approach to religion.
On the one hand, as mentioned above, a focus on embodied religious practices and their
accompanying norms shifts the focus from the inaccessible, private religious experience of an a
priori “self,” and toward the accessible, public religious practices of groups and the persons who
comprise them. On the other hand, attention to the body shows how the individual body can be
resistant to social conditioning, thus helping to undermine claims of cultural relativism and
structuralism.16 The body potentially provides accessibility and universality to the religionist.
Focus on embodied practices grounds the object of study (the religious subject) in society
and biology. In many ways this is a radical departure from what has been the focus of earlier
scholars of religion, the figure now properly seen as an “imaginative pattern of the
Enlightenment”: the individual. The figure that in an earlier time would have been called the
soul, a (no longer necessarily immortal) “will using an intellect.”17 If the body was considered at
all, it was as the lesser/lower half of the Cartesian mind/body duality. Religion was seen as the
realm in which the soul/intellect, with the aid of the will, attempted to master the recalcitrant
flesh and reached toward truth, knowledge, and enlightenment. Here again, in some important
ways, the economic approach to religion has found itself on the cutting edge of the study of
religion, in particular in its opposition to so-called “secularization” theories of religion, which in
15
Constance M. Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 80 (2012), 8-9. Emphasis added to the Iannaccone quotation.
16
Furey, 13.
17
Mary Midgley, “The Soul’s Successors: Philosophy and the ‘Body,’” in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 54.
6 part have been based on the idea that as the rational, intellectual functions of religion are better
served by other, more secular social institutions (like science, for example) religion will wane.
The idea that religion is solely about rational beliefs which can be shaped and changed by the
introduction of new value-neutral facts and logical arguments is not borne out by the fact that
increasing secularization has not resulted in a diminution of religious participation (and for this
observation the study of religion has the supply-side economic approach to thank).
In other ways, however, the economic approach has been hampered by its commitments
to this very same idea of the a priori self, unbound by social conditioning or the body, especially
to the degree this approach is committed to methodological individualism, that is, to taking
individuals as ontologically primary in its explanations. Now, methodological individualism can
take the (individual) body into account, but this seems to come at the price of making that body’s
choices determined by biological forces, as opposed to its being determined by cultural
conditioning. Alexander Rosenberg has suggested that preferences (the drivers of choice) can
be considered stable only by making them a “schedule of needs,” and tying those needs to the
biology of homo sapiens rather than to the subjective preferences of homo economicus.18 I
would not go as far as Rosenberg in his rather thoroughgoing biologizing of preferences, in
particular because we can also see the accounting for preferences to be within the domain of
cognitive science, which, as we will see below, shows that when value concepts are instantiated
in the body via social practices, these values become constraining needs. However, the freely
choosing subject constrained only by the logic of prior human/social capital investments cannot
be found here.
18
Alexander Rosenberg, Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 166-170.
7 Despite being ostensibly concerned with the material aspects of human life, the economic
approach to religion can be burdened by its ontological commitments to a libertarian form of
freedom as well as to a value monism (based in hedonism). While on the one hand this approach
sees religious human capital as fixed in individuals, it might also discuss capital as a form of
embodiment resulting from the social practices in which individuals are engaged. Human capital
often seems to be regarded as a purely “mental” phenomenon, a matter of the “brain work” of
education and beliefs. This seems to be a result of theoretical commitments: 1) to seeing all
choices as “rational” (that is, formally logical, conscious, and dispassionate); and 2) to subjective
preferences as stable and pre-given (not constituted by and then reformed as a part of
engagement in social practices). By underplaying considerations of embodiment and its role in
normativity, we miss dealing with the potential plurality of forms value can take, especially
regarding potential forms of value experienced as intrinsic, and in doing so underestimate the
importance of embodied social practices to normativity and to the variety of forms of rationality.
One way to approach this apparent shortcoming might be to ask the same question of the
concept of human capital that is being asked of religion in section one. That is, are we interested
in giving a substantive or a functionalist account of human capital? If human capital is
substantive, of what is it comprised? As in the discussion of religion in section one, whatever
answer one might give does not guarantee that capital will make any difference until it can be
shown how human capital works in different contexts. This leads to a potentially functionalist
definition of human capital, which raises the question of whether the effects attributed to human
capital are in fact attributable to it, and not to some other thing that has a similar function and
produces similar outcomes.
8 A notion of human capital tied specifically to practices may be a way of overcoming this
substantive/functionalist problem, as I argued that focusing on practices could do with the
substantive/functionalist problem with religion. In fact, I want to suggest here that human capital
is best seen as a form of embodied practice. Practices are plural in their ends and in their logic.
The logic of the practice, what it makes sense to do in a particular case, will be contained within
the practice itself. This is why it may not always make sense to maximize some good or state of
affairs in a particular situation, while in others it might make perfect sense. If human capital can
be thought of as being fixed in anything, I suggest it is best to think of human capital as fixed in
particular practices, or rather, perhaps, to think of certain practices themselves as a kind of
human capital, the produced means of production.
III. In What Is Religious Human Capital Fixed? Bodies and Practices
Research in the cognitive sciences is increasingly showing that what we have
traditionally thought about the mind and its ability to reason are constrained by the brain’s
embodiment. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued, our faculty of reason itself is
shaped by the body, and our conceptual systems become “neurally instantiated in our brains,
[meaning] we are not free to think just anything.”19 This instantiation of our reason and our
concepts occurs as we engage in various practices which require reasoning and conceptualization.
Certain ideals and values (and the reasons for pursuing them and the concepts by which they are
understood) are embedded as the ends or goals of social practices, and these practices are then
embodied by individuals who undertake these practices. The objectivity of these practices (that
they are “out there” and available in the world) enables the cognitive agent simultaneously to
“take on” these practices (to embody them) as a part of their own understandings, and at the
19
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western
Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 5.
9 same time to become an “extended entity,” one which can use these practices as efficient “short
cuts” to production. Practices can thus be regarded as a way human beings “off-load” labor on to
the world. This off-loading can be seen as a form of capital in that the practice is an analogous
technology (or technique) for fulfilling particular ends and projects (for realizing particular ideals
and values) in which the particular group or individual is engaged.20 Nevertheless, this technique
for producing human capital should not be equated with the view of capital as the conscious
“product of labor and waiting.”21
The philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark argues that while evolution is
constrained to build solutions gradually through “a series of simpler but successful ancestral
forms,” an engineer starting from scratch might take a radically different approach to solving the
problem.22 From the engineer’s ahistorical perspective, the biological solution currently in place
may appear strange, and most likely will appear inefficient. The concept of human capital as the
product of labor and waiting is, I would suggest, the attempt at starting from an ahistorical
perspective on individual preferences (they are pre-given and stable over time) while still trying
to account for the appearance of change through the purposeful and efficient production and
consumption (implementation) of one’s various forms of capital. But I would suggest that it is
better to view capital formation as part of a practice which guides people toward particular
valued ends. As the always already produced means of future production, human capital’s value
is found in its ability to help create future value through an already-existing (and therefore
already normatively constrained) practice. However, to be constrained should not imply that
these practices are determined, because the practices are taken on, embodied, and thereby given
20
See Andy Clark, “Where Brain, Body, and World Collide,” Daedelus 127.2 (1998), 273.
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume, 8th ed. (1890; London: Macmillan, 1920),
587.
22
Clark., 259.
21
10 particular, unique instantiations by individuals, which allow for modifications of the practices.
This is how we are able to account for change.
Returning now to religion, according to a practice theory approach to religion and human
capital, human bodies (or at least parts of them) are the product of as well as the producers of
religious goods. That is, human bodies are the produced means of production; human bodies are
themselves, in part, religious human fixed capital. This should not sound too foreign to what I
take to be traditional understandings of religious human capital. Like other forms of human
capital identified by economist Gary Becker, religious human capital is necessary for both the
production and consumption of particular religious goods. As the already produced means of
future production, “Religious capital is both a prerequisite for and a consequence of most
religious activity.”23 What I am hoping to add to this conversation about religious human capital
is that human bodies are not simply the producers of religious human capital, but they are the
product as well. Here the words of economist Amartya Sen seem appropriate when he argues
that the human capital approach should be supplemented by the “human capabilities” approach,
because “human beings are not merely means of production, but also the end of the exercise.”24
As the product of prior religious capital investments, humans embody religious goods. What
makes them “goods” is manifested in the logic of the practices, what it makes sense to do in a
particular situation, thereby giving practitioners reason to value them. These reasons are tied to
practices and are understandable only within the context of these practices.
So the question with which this paper will end is, what difference might it make to the
empirical study of religious human capital if it is seen as embodied in persons as a result of their
23
Laurence R. Iannaccone, “Household Production, Human Capital, and the Economics of Religion,” in The New
Economics of Human Behavior, eds. Mariano Tommasi and Kathryn Ierulli (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 177.
24
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor, 1999), 296.
11 practices? In this understanding, religious human capital is not merely something one has, but is
also something one is. The object of study (the religious subject) would not be a soul/intellect
which accumulates and possesses capital, and relates to this capital as one might to other capital
stock in one’s portfolio, but would be a body which acts out of norms based in practices built on
the interactions between humans and gods, ancestors, or other normally unseen beings. These
interactions would include, but sometimes also go beyond, relationships of “exchange” between
parties. These normally unseen beings might also serve as normative exemplars in a wide
variety of ways, from paragons of physical beauty to just legislators, from courageous warriors to
moral standard-bearers. These interactions could also take the form of gift giving by the god(s)
(as in the Christian concept of grace) or by the human group (as a form of thanksgiving or piety).
Once embodied and understood in these ways, religious human capital would be marked,
perhaps even more strongly than it is now thought to be, by its inalienability and
incommensurability, a result of its physical instantiation via practices which carry within them
their own logics and their own understandings, understandings not only of what one has and
what one wants, but what one is, and what one ought to do and to be.
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