[HuShifang]

On the flip side, let's also not forget that the earliest civilizations (so to speak) were also rather different from later ones in some striking ways. Put simply, they were a lot more literal-minded, and didn't engage in as much abstraction as did their descendents. Ancient fertility statues (even as late as classical Greece and Rome) are grotesquely over-endowed; ritual sacrifices of food and symbolic objects have in many places taken the place of sacrificed slaves or wives. Mesopotamian city states would fight wars because, like a frat prank, one would steal a statue of a god like Marduk from the other's temple -- only, there was no notion that it was a statue, rather it was the god. Early Egyptian murals speak to the power of kings by showing piles of dicks their soldiers had cut off of defeated enemies (unlike Egyptians they were uncircumcised). And there's the whole mummification thing, which betrays a certain literal-mindedness about immortality. So yeah, it's a spectrum - but both before and after the "rise of civilization"

[Ar-Curunir]

This seems like unjustified speculation; people could look at e.g. people leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve as an example of how modern Americans are poor at abstraction and have to give literal offerings to their god Santa Claus.

AFAWK there has been no significant change in the anatomy of humans in the past 200k years, and similarly nothing to indicate that we’ve had major changes in things like our ability to abstract. The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.

[HuShifang]

You can always find examples of irrational behavior, but the difference is scale. Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa are prepared using the finest ingredients (say, a few million dollars' worth of gold) by the most accomplished bakers, and then placed on a dish so large that it can be seen from space (and hundreds or thousands of people died making it).

If you can show me the tomb of a prominent world leader from the last, let's say, 500 years that's decorated with images of his/her enemies' severed genitalia, I'll concede the point.

[mr_toad]

> Today a major state isn't spending inordinate resources to ensure that the cookies left for Santa

I get the impression that the degree to which people took religion literally varied a lot from person to person, and even priest to priest throughout history.

It’s not clear whether more people took religious belief literally, or if they just said they did for political and social reasons.

[Ar-Curunir]

I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Generally every theory which talks about these great leaps in human cognition, and ties these to human "development" while ascribing diminished intellectual capabilities to our ancestors, seems to fall apart after scrutiny (e.g., Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, bicameral theory of mind).

Also, we've seen plenty of "undoing" of abstraction in long-continuing cultures. E.g., in Hinduism, idol worship wasn't really a thing in Vedic times, and only became popular in Puranic times (over a 1000 years later). Many Hindus do believe that some idols contain portions of gods, especially those idols that reside ones in "big" temples. I would not say that these folks have lost their ability to abstract. As another example, post-Vedic religion underwent a large amount of abstraction in the Upanishads, but then reverted to personification of deities via the bhakti movement and in Puranic religion. Again, I wouldn't say that Hindus lost their ability to think abstractly.

[astrange]

> I feel that the problem with your claim is that within 500 years all humans everywhere have suddenly become abstracters extraordinaire, which just seems terribly unrealistic.

Isn’t something like this the general explanation for the Flynn effect? (that newer generations in modern societies are better at IQ tests because they’re better at IQ test-style abstractions)

[hoseja]

Christmas is a major part of economics.

[astrange]

> The bicameral theory of mind has been thoroughly discredited.

Sure it claims way too much, but I don’t think every nearby direction is discredited. That would mean everyone in history had the exact same theory of unitary consciousness we do (that we have free will, our actions come after conscious thought, there’s a conscious/subconscious/unconscious or id/ego/superego, dreams come from our own memories, etc.)

There’s a lot of Buddhists out there to this day, and they do officially belong to a religion with a you-don’t-exist policy. How this is integrated with resurrection depends on the lineage of course.

Myself I just want to know if the Babylonians were taught math by a fish alien named Oannes. Maybe he can tell us if P=NP.

[ativzzz]

> grotesquely over-endowed

Download almost any anime-style game off the Google Play store and you'll see the exact same thing

[HuShifang]

Yeah, that's why I hesitated to include it on the list, but I don't think such representations are very common in religious contexts today (and these statues do seem to have been religiously significant, e.g. all the Venus statues from prehistoric Europe and the Middle East)

[thechao]

I'm not sure I've ever seen "literal mindedness" argued like this in recent works? Do you have any papers or books you could point to where an archeologist or historian argues this?

Most of the recent academic work I'm familiar with tends to emphasize the opposite case, tempered by the fact that ancient religion and culture tend to be very alien. Take, for instance, popular reviews by Irving Finkel in his "Noah" book, or Ed Barnhart's work on the Moche, etc.

[HuShifang]

Well, I am a working professional historian of the premodern world, and this is certainly my impression from years of reading Chinese-language primary sources about China during the Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties. Spend some time with the literature, and you'll read how Mohists coupled careful logic and quasi-scientistic reasoning with "ghosts who will punish you if you're bad," about how Han dynasty tomb exterior-door inscriptions talk extensively about how the decedent's family loves them but earnestly hopes to never, ever see them again, because if they did it would mean the decedent left their tomb to punish them for their unfilial conduct. (And you'll read how gingerly the subject of human sacrifice in the distant past, or emperors indulging itinerant "Daoist" rainmakers, to the considerable chagrin of more secular-minded officials, is handled.) I can't point to anything synoptic on the Chinese case -- early China scholars tend to make a lot (frankly too much) out of a little (we don't have that many texts -- but Herbert Fingarette's "Confucius: The Secular as Sacred" was formative for all the early China people I studied with on a more intellectual register. One controversy that gets lots of play: whether Confucius urged performing the rituals "as if" the dead were present, or if they were actually present. Linguistically, the phrasing is entirely open to the latter, even if people like to make the thinking presented in the "Analects" out to be more modern-seeming. At the risk of giving too much of a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, broadly speaking -- this being several decades since Foucault made his mark -- careers get made by either emphasizing the past's surprising lack of alterity or by finding some spectacular, flamboyantly surprising new form of alterity. And the former is rather easier to pull off than the latter.

But, I read about the piles of genitalia in Toby Wilkinson's "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt" and about the god-statues in Trevor Bryce's "Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction."

[thechao]

Sounds like I have reading to do! I guess I really just take exception with the claim that the currently living are any more (or less) literal than our (distant) ancestors. For instance: my wife wants to get two, adjacent, cemetary plots so that we can "be together after we die, and our kids can visit us easily." I want to be mulched. Where I'm living, now, the number of Biblical literalists isn't a "quirky few" its the bulk of the people; these aren't hicks, either: this is one if the wealthier exurbs in the country.

[astrange]

Reading about Çatalhüyük (thanks autocorrect for making it properly squiggly) I was struck by how actually different it seems to have been despite being city-shaped.

There aren’t streets, rather everyone supposedly traveled on top of everyone else’s roofs. There were family homes but not public buildings. And they buried their dead family members right inside their own houses and sometimes kept their skulls out for decoration.