Earlier this year, while reading The Ancient City, I thought constantly of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In that fascinating and insane book, Julian Jaynes hypothesizes that
…human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3,000 years ago and still developing.
With a variety of kinds of evidence, from the medical to the archeological, Jaynes argues that the modern mind arises from a prior stage of development in which we hallucinated the voices of others and obeyed them nearly automatically. My favorite claim is that in ancient works such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, there is little evidence of “inner, subjective experience.” There is a flatness to individuals, and their “deliberations and reflections” occur almost solely in the form of gods who appear to them and determine their choices. Jaynes derives from these observations a theory of the structure of our current psychology, which integrates once-heard voices into an internal monologue, verbal to differing degrees in different individuals. We centralized, as it were, a disparate group of hallucinated models of others into a single “self” that we seem to experience as personhood. You are your own hallucination.
In The Ancient City, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges argues
…that primitive religion constituted the foundation of all civic life … "Religion," the author states, "constituted the Greek and Roman family, established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the order of relationship, and consecrated the right of property, and the right of inheritance. This same religion, after having enlarged and extended the family, formed a stull larger association, the city, and reigned in that as it had reigned in the family. From it came all the institutions, as well as the private law, of the ancients."
In the early portion of the book, Fustel paints a rather beautiful picture of the “primitive” religion, which was familial in scale. In his telling, each family had a hearth and a fire; the fire was the god and preserved or represented all the ancestors. It burned often and was fed animal sacrifices and offerings of various kinds. The connection between a family and its god was literal and inviolable, although its domain was usually limited, apart from their afterlife, to their land and persons. For all the rites of a life, the family had a private religion with its own customs and traditions, its own beliefs and stories. A patchwork land of family-sized religions! One can imagine their intermingling along shared borders, myths fusing and diverging here and there; one can imagine travel, visiting homes, where a family member was also the chief priest of a unique religious world. Fustel’s presentation is rich, touching on many dimensions of ancient existence, before he moves on to his main thesis:
According to Fustel, the formation of [ancient] societies was, in fact, based on a belief common to all the [people], namely, that after death the soul continues to live, associated with the body, in the tomb. The earliest religion was ancestor worship, and the family unit that tended the sacred fire in the home became the basic unit of the ancient societies. This primitive social organization expanded by gradual stages: the gens, the Greek phratry, and the Roman tribe. [These are each larger organizations embodying the same style of belief]. The end point of the development was the city, which Fustel defined as “a religious association” open only to its citizens, that is, only to the members of patrician families. Over the centuries these primitive institutions lost their simplicity [Fustel argues: because belief in underlying reasons for these organizational structures declines]. The priest-kings who had governed the cities lost their political authority. The gens lost its cohesion; the plebs, which had been outside the city, entered into it. Then the Roman conquest transformed the character of the old cities bit by bit, by destroying their traditional municipal regimes. The triumph of Christianity was the final blow to traditional city government.
Well: RIP traditional city government.
Together, these books seem complementary. I’ve been sadly unable to find any abler exploration of how they connect than my own observations. To me, they together tell a somewhat charming story of our origins:
At first, barely more than animals who use tools, we can nevertheless communicate with one another orally, barking or whooping or perhaps shouting primitive commands.
Over time, some humans seem to “hear” the oral expressions of other humans even when they’re apart from them; they hallucinate their barking or whooping, in doing so operating a predictive model of “how another person would react to what I’m doing.” Selection pressures favor these humans because they are less likely to blunder into conflict with other humans by angering them; they are modeling others as patterns of speech they hear intermittently, delusionally. This may have started straightforwardly as people continuing to hear the voices of those who died, but is in any event socially advantageous.
This continues as languages evolve, and within recorded history we have evidence of early humans with language who do not seem to have subjective experience as we understand it; instead, they strike us nearly as automata, with very limited introspection. It appears as though they are not conscious by our standards; their behavior is sometimes senseless to us. And they have a tendency to see gods whenever they experience great stress or must make decisions.
These gods of hallucinated authority and ancestor worship evolve alongside technology-driven social structures —the shift to agriculture, to farms, to states which are semi-stable over generations— and become farm-gods, family gods, living fires in whom one’s ancestors reside and whose health and worship will mitigate one’s own cruel fate in life: to suffer, to die.
As cities —a new technology that comes in fits and starts— begin to produce much better outcomes for many, they grow past this form of social structure and eventually, they weaken belief in its principles; as belief weakens, so too do the bonds that hold many of society’s structures together, a mutually reinforcing process that rapidly creates tumult.
Many social systems arise from these phases, as writing and the administrative state are more influential than ever and so e.g. patriarchy, though surely not ex nihilo, is reified in patrilineal laws and customs. This happened to many phenomena, some good, some bad.
There is an interesting parallel here: centralization of mental conceptions —voices, gods— leading to discrete chapters of human experience. Everything in history is bundling and unbundling. It also implies not one but many chasms between us and our forebears, as it is hard to imagine relating one’s experience to that of someone who hears either selfless inner silence or the voice of a dead tribal chief yelling not to steal meat from the store. Similarly I can only look from afar with jealousy at someone who was born and died in an unchanging world in which their family god seemed to take care of them. (I of course pity the many members of such societies for whom life was no idyll, and suspect our population ratio of “suffering” to “content” is vastly better than theirs).
Other worlds, and these other worlds had possible overlap! I’m not sure why, but I find it touching to imagine these other sorts of people. And our world perhaps will be an “other world” to the future!
One can’t help but reflect on how both of these chapters influence us still. Jaynes talks a bit about schizophrenics, and there’s a schizoid quality to many of our social structures as well, especially in how different parts of civilization interrelate while undergoing varying rates of change. We’re all kind of still hearing things (and we also experience social tumult when our beliefs shift). To the extent that these books are true, we’re not that many generations of iteration removed from radically different mental worlds, and thus different individual and social contexts, and we’re probably still enacting some of their dynamics today.
I am not fully persuaded, I should say. Both books have critics and certain flaws; Richard Dawkins said of On The Origin of Consciousness that it is “one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.” In any event: I’m not especially fastidious about the source of a story I enjoy, and both are extremely fun to read.