Conceptual Fictions Aren't Real
And why that matters
This is more of an observation than any particular insight, but it has always fascinated me that until relatively recently in human history, there was no concept of religion, no concept of society, and no concept of the economy.
That may be a trite observation, but I think it's important to keep in mind. The fact that ancient people made no such distinctions tells us something about how they viewed their societies and the people who lived in them (even if they had no concept of what a “society” was). The separation between these aspects of modern life is an academic invention which since has become reified. We tend to think of it as normal, but it's actually a very peculiar way of looking at the world from a historical or anthropological standpoint.
It's like the old adage about the fish swimming in water. A fish swims by another pair of fish one day and asks them, “How's the water today, boys?” The fish turns to his companion, confused, and asks, “What is ‘water’?” You would have a similar reaction if you asked ancient people, “what religion do you follow?” or “how is the economy doing?” or “is society going in the right direction?” These questions would have been seen as utterly nonsensical by ancient peoples. As we'll see, most cultures didn't even have words for these concepts.
I always enjoy learning about how about how other cultures see the world because it reminds me that our own way of looking at the world is not the only one, nor is it necessarily the best one—it's just one particular set of interlocking beliefs, opinions and attitudes based on various circumstances, and that different beliefs can produce different outcomes.
The idea that human life was separate and distinct from all other forms of life was not the norm in ancient cultures. Here is philosopher John Gray discussing how the ancient Egyptians viewed the world in his recent book Feline Philosophy:
The ancient Egyptians had nothing like our modern conception of what it means to be human. Human beings were not unique in having a status in the world that other animals lacked. Later Greek and Roman ideas, in which the human mind came closest to a divine mind, were also absent, along with any idea of 'religion'. The modern separation of a sacred realm of worship from the 'secular' zone of everyday life did not exist. If you asked an ancient Egyptian what religion they followed, they would not understand you.
The idea of a supernatural realm, which is acquired from monotheism, did not exist either. The Egyptians inherited animist traditions on which the world was full of spirits. In these traditions humans were not superior to other animals. There were not two wholly distinct orders of things - one of insentient matter and another of immaterial souls - but one that animals and human souls shared in common. Many of our most fundamental and seemingly self-evident categories of thought were absent.
In his book “The Ancient City,” the French scholar Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges described how important religion was to every aspect of life in the pre-Christian Classical World, including the functioning of ancient city-states. Central to this set of beliefs (again, they would have had no concept of “religion”) was the ancestor cult—the veneration of deceased ancestors. It turns out that every element of Roman society somehow derived from the ancestor cult in some form, as the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard summarized:
The theme of The Ancient City is that ancient classical society was centered in the family in the wide sense of that word—joint family or lineage—and that what held this group of agnates together as a corporation and gave it permanence was the ancestor cult, in which the head of the family acted as priest.
In the light of this central idea, and only in the light of it, of the dead being deities of the family, all customs of the period can be understood: marriage regulations and ceremonies, monogamy, prohibition of divorce, interdiction of celibacy, the levirate, adoption, paternal authority, rules of descent, inheritance and succession, laws, property, the systems of nomenclature, the calendar, slavery and clientship, and many other customs. When city states developed, they were in the same structural pattern as had been shaped by religion in these earlier social conditions…
When people refer to “The West” as some sort of unified, coherent entity from ancient Athens down to present-day Western Europe—in other words, “From Plato to NATO”—they are mistaken. The pre-Christian world was profoundly different from our own—just as radically different as any of the so called “primitive” cultures studied by anthropologists today, and was thoroughly suffused with what we would regard as magical thinking and superstition. What we call “religion” was complex and integral to every aspect of people’s lives1. Rather than modern democracies with written constitutions and secular institutions, ancient Greece and Rome derived their political legitimacy form supernatural forces,2 and the interpretations of auguries and soothsayers carried as much weight as the rational deliberation of citizens in the assembly.
Wikipedia, although often maligned, has a lot of really interesting and useful writing on this topic. As Wikipedia observes, most ancient peoples wouldn't have thought of themselves as following any sort of religion, or even understood what the term meant. Religion is more accurately described as a mode of living rather than something cordoned off from every other aspect of life which is why it’s so hard to define even today3:
Though traditions, sacred texts, and practices have existed throughout time, most cultures did not align with Western conceptions of religion since they did not separate everyday life from the sacred. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the terms Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and world religions first entered the English language. Native Americans were also thought of as not having religions and also had no word for religion in their languages either.
No one self-identified as a Hindu or Buddhist or other similar terms before the 1800s. "Hindu" has historically been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of religion since there was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning, but when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this idea.
This seems to be the standard everywhere around the world—most ancient cultures had no word for “religion” in their vocabulary. In many ancient cultures, what we call “religion” would have been perceived as something more like “law,” demonstrating how much the sacred was intertwined with moral behavior. Ancient law codes were almost always thought to derive from some sort of supernatural source, with secular law being a much later innovation. Judaism was much the same—although there were plenty of laws, rituals, and proscribed behaviors, there was no concept of a “Jewish religion” among Jews until they were living as minorities among Christians and Muslims:
In the Quran, the Arabic word din is often translated as religion in modern translations, but up to the mid-1600s translators expressed din as "law". The Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes translated as religion, also means law. Throughout classical South Asia, the study of law consisted of concepts such as penance through piety and ceremonial as well as practical traditions...
...there is no precise equivalent of religion in Hebrew, and Judaism does not distinguish clearly between religious, national, racial, or ethnic identities. One of its central concepts is halakha, meaning the walk or path sometimes translated as law, which guides religious practice and belief and many aspects of daily life...The very concept of "Judaism" was invented by the Christian Church, and it was in the 19th century that Jews began to see their ancestral culture as a religion analogous to Christianity.
The very word “religion” itself is a recent invention. It was coined in the aftermath of the social and military conflicts which roiled Western Europe in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. After the Peace of Westphalia, the right to follow one’s own personal religion was enshrined as a central tenet. The notion of “religious freedom" meant that there had to be such a thing as “religion,” of course, which was not really thought of in those terms before.
Not only that, but around the same time Europeans came into contact with indigenous peoples all around the world during the Age of Exploration. In order to convert pagans from their “heretical” beliefs to the “true” Christianity, you had to have a concept of what “religion” was in the first place. Before the advent of Christianity and other doctrinal religions, the idea that following one particular set of beliefs and practices meant abandoning every other belief was alien—religions were inherently syncretic (as some still are today):
Religion is a modern concept...ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written.
According to the philologist Max Müller in the 19th century, the root of the English word religion, the Latin religiō, was originally used to mean only reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, [or] piety (which Cicero further derived to mean diligence)...The Greek word threskeia, which was used by Greek writers such as Herodotus and Josephus, is...sometimes translated as "religion" in today's [New Testament] translations, but the term was understood as generic "worship" well into the medieval period.
The concept of religion originated in the modern era in the West. Parallel concepts are not found in many current and past cultures; there is no equivalent term for religion in many languages. Scholars have found it difficult to develop a consistent definition, with some giving up on the possibility of a definition. Others argue that regardless of its definition, it is not appropriate to apply it to non-Western cultures…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
In the same vein, there was no conception of an “economy” apart from the activities of everyday life. No behaviors were considered to be particularly “economic,” and “think like an economist” would have been nonsensical4. There was no artificial construct called “the economy” which operated independently from the rest of life. The word “economy” derives from the Greek word for a household, oikos—with oikonomia being the management of an individual household which contained many individual members. This was eloquently expressed by Moses Finley in his masterpiece, The Ancient Economy:
[The ancients] in fact lacked the concept of an “economy”, a fortiori, they lacked the conceptual elements which together constitute what we call “the economy.” Of course they farmed, traded, manufactured, mined, taxed, coined, deposited and loaned money, made profits or failed in their enterprises. And they discussed these activities in their talk and their writing. What they did not do, however, was to combine these particular activities conceptually into a unit, in Parsonian terms into “a differentiated sub-system.” (p. 21)
The historian Karl Polanyi observed the same thing in his extensive study of pre-capitalist economic systems. He coined the term “embeddedeness” to describe how ancient economies were “embedded” in people’s social relationships, and that people acted primarily to safeguard those relationships rather than maximize their own individual gain, despite economists’ claim that this is intrinsic to human behavior. The notion that one should act “economically” in one aspect of life (that is, amorally), and a different way in all the other aspects (for example, with one’s friends and family), would have been seen as utterly ridiculous before capitalism. From Wikipedia’s article on “Embeddedness”:
Rather than being a separate and distinct sphere, the economy is embedded in both economic and non-economic institutions. Exchange takes place within and is regulated by society rather than being located in a social vacuum.
For example, religion and government can be just as important to economics as economic institutions themselves. Socio-cultural obligations, norms and values play a significant role in people's livelihood strategies. Consequently, any analysis of economics as an analytically distinct entity isolated from its socio-cultural and political context is flawed from the outset.
A substantivist analysis of economics will therefore focus on the study of the various social institutions on which people's livelihoods are based. The market is only one amongst many institutions that determine the nature of economic transactions. Polanyi's central argument is that institutions are the primary organisers of economic processes...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddedness
In an often-cited essay entitled Primitive Money, anthropologist George Dalton describes the many ways in which money in traditional cultures differs from our own anonymous, disembodied, fungible units of account:
Primitive money performs some of the functions of our own money, but rarely all; the conditions under which supplies are forthcoming are usually different; primitive money is used in some ways ours is not; our money is impersonal and commercial, while primitive money frequently has pedigree and personality, sacred uses, or moral and emotional connotations. Our governmental authorities control the quantity of money, but rarely is this so in primitive economies.
Anthropologists discovered that many cultures around the world have defined categories of items where like can only be traded for like. For example, the Tiv people of Nigeria have three distinct spheres of exchange: (1) food items like vegetables; (2) more prestigious items like brass rods and horses; and (3) dependent persons. The Siane people of New Guinea also have three spheres: (1) food items like bananas and taro; (2) luxury items like tobacco and nuts; (3) ornaments like seashells and headdresses5. Exchanging goods between different spheres is considered a serious infraction. The Kula Ring in the South Pacific described by Bronislaw Malinowski is another example of ritualized exchange not based on personal gain but rather maintaining social relationships and acquiring status. The idea that these activities can all be all boiled down to something called an “economy” as differentiated from every other aspect of human life would be profoundly mistaken, which is why anthropologists don’t do it6. It is an imaginary invention of Western commercial culture.
In fact, even well into the twentieth century there was no such thing as “the economy,” to most people, despite the fact that there was plenty of discussion and debate surrounding topics such as business, trade, employment, money, banking, regulations, monopolies, and so on. Yet, despite this, most people didn’t really talk in terms of “the economy” and its needs until sometime after the Great Depression:
If you had asked somebody 100 years ago, ‘How’s the economy doing?’ they would not have known what you were talking about. At the time, people talked about things like banking panics, and national wealth, and trade. But, according to Zachary Karabell, this thing we call the economy—this thing that we constantly measure with specific numbers—was not really invented until the 20th century. Specifically, around 1930. “It was invented because of the Great Depression,” says Karabell in his book called The Leading Indicators. He writes:
“It was invented because there was clearly a perception that there was something really, really bad going on but they didn’t really know what. You could see there were homeless people on the street, you could see there were the Okies heading from their Dust Bowl farms off to California by the tens of thousands, but there was no way of really grasping it.”
“So the government begins calculating this single, official number called national income. It is the forerunner of today’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, and it is basically the value of all the goods and services produced in the country in a year. When it is released in the depression, this wonky statistic becomes an overnight sensation. A report on national income submitted to Congress becomes a bestselling book. And soon, you cannot turn on the radio without hearing those numbers and what they are measuring.”
“How’s the economy doing?” (Real World Economic Review blog)
Finally, even the notion of “society” is a recent invention. Before then, society was something everybody simply took for granted. In order for something like a “society” to exist, you needed to invent the concept of “the individual” as something distinct from society, maybe even opposed to it. This was an invention of the European Enlightenment. Ancient cultures had, for the most part, no conception of “the individual” apart from his or her social group7. This fact can be clearly seen in the study of ancient legal codes, as Henry Sumner Maine observed in his study, Ancient Law:
[Archaic Law] is...in all its provinces, of the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families.
The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the Individual. We must be prepared to find in ancient law all the consequences of this difference. It is so framed as to be adjusted to a system of small independent corporations. It is therefore scanty, because it is supplemented by the despotic commands of the heads of households. It is ceremonious, because the transactions to which it pays regard resemble international concerns much more than the quick play of intercourse between individuals. Above all it has a peculiarity of which the full importance cannot be shown at present. It takes a view of life wholly unlike any which appears in developed jurisprudence. Corporations never die, and accordingly primitive law considers the entities with which it deals, i.e. the patriarchal or family groups, as perpetual and inextinguishable.
The sociologist Michael Mann, in his book “Sources of Social Power,” argues that the bounded, unitary concept of “society” completely misrepresents what a society is and how individuals relate to it. Rather, he sees a society as overlapping systems of social relations:
Societies are not unitary. They are not social systems (closed or open); they are not totalities. We can never find a single bounded society in geographical space. Because there is no system, no totality, there cannot be "sub-systems," "dimensions," or "levels" of such a totality...Because there is no bounded totality, it is not helpful to divide social change or conflict into "endogenous" and "exogenous" varieties. Because there is no social system, there is no "evolutionary" process within it. Because humanity is not divided into a series of bounded totalities, "diffusion" of social organization does not occur between them...Yet most sociological orthodoxies...mar their insights by conceiving of "society" as an unproblematic, unitary totality...There is no one master concept or basic unit of "society." It may seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt; but if I could, I would abolish the concept of "society" altogether. (pp. 1-2)
A theoretical assumption lies at the base of the unitary conception: Because people are social animals, they have a need to create a society, a bounded and patterned social totality. But this is false. Human beings need to enter into social power relations, but they do not seed social totalities. They are social, but not societal, animals…
Let us examine the etymology of "society." It derives from the Latin societas. This elaborated socius, meaning a non-Roman ally, a group willing to follow Rome in war. Such a term is common in Indo-European languages, deriving from the root sekʷ, meaning "follow." It denotes an asymmetrical alliance, society as a loose confederation of stratified allies. We will see that this, not the unitary conception, is correct. Let us use the term "society" in its Latin, not its Romance, sense. (p. 14)
This leads to Mann's working definition of a society:
A society is a network of social interaction at the boundaries of which is a certain level of interaction and cleavage between it and its environment. A society is a unit with boundaries, and it contains interactions that [are] relatively dense and stable; that is, internally patterned when compared to interaction that would cross its boundaries. p. 13
Strangely, modern economics banishes the concept of society (and even politics) from its analysis. This was most forcefully articulated by Margaret Thatcher, who declared, “There is no such thing as society. There are individuals, and there are families.” Instead, the economy is conceptualized as the aggregate of spot trades between unrelated individuals who will never see each other again. This is quite strange.
In addition, government actions are derided as “interference” despite the fact that the entire market apparatus is created and continually sustained by government laws and regulations including contract enforcement, copyright protection, and the provision of money and banking among other things, without which market exchange would fall apart in its present form. These institutions, laws and regulations have been theoretically established by society for its collective benefit, and yet we see that “the economy” often seems disconnected from society, even prospering while the well-being of many people detriorates. Economics and sociology are considered to be unrelated disciplines—perhaps even antagonistic to each other.
It was not always so. Before the so-called “marginal revolution” of the late nineteenth century when economic transactions became described by mathematical formalisms derived from physics, economists routinely centered their analyses around institutions, integrating both history and political decision-making (for example, Max Weber and Karl Marx). Modern economists, by contrast, construct abstract models based on questionable theories of human behavior and only decry “interference” when laws and regulations privilege certain actors and outcomes over others (for example, workers over owners, or rising wages over rising profits).
I’m not sure what the moral of all these observations is, except to say that it’s important to keep in mind that all of these things are merely intellectual abstractions, and that’s why they’re so devilishly hard to define or study on their own in a vacuum. In reality, everything is connected which is why siloed academic fields like economics, sociology, and religious studies (among others) rarely give us an accurate or complete picture of the human experience. Sorry for all the blockquotes—hopefully you found them informative!
Wikipedia has a fascinating section on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_ancient_Roman_religion If your only knowledge of ancient Roman religion is Edith Hamilton’s Mythology or Clash of the Titans, it’s quite an eye-opener. A lot of these words have come into English but have nothing like their original meaning.
For example, the emperor had his own religious cult with its own priesthood, the Sodales Augustales. The word 'cult' comes from the same root as 'cultivate', meaning cultivating relationships with supernatural powers. Serving as high priest, or Pontifex Maximus, was considered to be a required stepping-stone to higher office.
For example, the difference between philosophy and religion. Ancient Greeks who followed Epicureanism were supposedly following Greek philosophy as opposed to a religion, even though Epicureans believed in empiricism and materialism making them effectively agnostics. Similarly, Hinduism is considered a religion even though it produced schools of thought like Charvaka which was materialistic and denied the existence of gods and an afterlife. The definition I cite comes from Andrew Mark Henry of Religion for Breakfast: a mode of living which encompasses, beliefs, behaviors and belonging.
And probably would have been seen as a form of mental illness—as it should be.
From Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History has Shaped Us by Kabir Sehgal.
The same problems arise when trying to determine how much "work" people do in traditional societies like hunter-gatherers.
Which is not to say that they had no idea that individual people existed—obviously they did, but this mundane fact was not considered important. The individual’s needs were not considered to be distinct from those of the rest of society, and the idea that the individual could thrive while society deteriorated would have been seen as ridiculous.