I first came across the idea that "our brains are programmed for us to live in
communities of less than 200" in Lorenz' On Aggression, where I think he gave
the figure of 30 - 100 people, pointing out that the number of entries in most
people's personal address books is in this range.  This lower number makes
more sense to me than 200.  There must be some anthropological studies of the
average size of hunter-gatherer groups.

> What Robin Dunbar was
>stressing was that in large groups of people the problem was with
>freeloaders who took all the advantages without giving anything back.

Some anthropologists speculate that this only became a problem with the shift
to agriculture/domestication.  Hunter-gatherer bands operate on a total-loss
basis:  once everything everyone needs to survive has been used, there's
nothing left, and if one person who has extra refuses to share with another
member of the band who doesn't have enough, then that selfish person will go
without when the situation is reversed, as inevitably it will be.  So the
economic parameters of survival automatically enforce equal distribution. 
It's only after agriculture and domestication of animals have created surplus
that freeloaders can appropriate for their own use some of the surplus which
they haven't themselves created.  Then the freeloaders become chiefs due to
their power to redistribute some of the surplus.

I sometimes wonder if the Iliad doesn't reflect the transition to this surplus
stage.  It might be seen as the story of a chief who is awkwardly trying to
manage the distribution of surplus (in this case war booty.)  He has to walk a
fine line between maintaining his moral authority by distributing surplus
fairly and maintaining his power and prestige by appropriating a
disproportionate share for himself, and he blows it.  Many chiefs must have
made Agamemnon's mistake.

Freud provides a basis for envisioning how we are programmed for religion.  To
say we are "hard-wired for religion" can be seen as a technological metaphor
for saying that religion is rooted in our unconscious.  (I don't think the
equivalence of the two statements, or their validity, is at all affected by
the question of whether the "hard wiring" corresponds to actual specific human
genes.)  To say that "the human brain is fundamentally flawed which is why we
have such a thing as religion" is also not incompatible with psychoanalysis. 
The "fundamental flaw" from Freud's viewpoint is our inability to reconcile
the pleasure principle with the reality principle.  The impossibility of such
a reconciliation is the ultimate unbearable truth of human life; it is why
"human kind cannot bear very much reality."  

Life is too dreadful to be lived but it must be.  The possible solutions to
this double bind are madness, suicide, or denial, and religion is denial writ
large, it's simple hysterical denial (the most elemental and most profound
defense mechanism) raised to mass delusion. Religion addresses the dilemma by
assuring me, for instance, in the case of Christianity, that my mother is a
virgin, that my father loves me and will make me whole even though he wants me
to be crucified (i.e. castrated), that I will never have to die, that my
goodness will be rewarded by evelasting joy, and that everyone who was ever
nasty to me will roast howling in hell forever. What chance can reality stand
against such a deeply satisfying fantasy?

Well, one chance maybe, and that is poetry.  The poet, like the psychic dream
worker, can express truths which, because they are universal but unbearable,
are both unsayable and undeniable.  This must be done, as in dreams, by
creating a special type of language in which the poet, speaking through the
mask of self, can teach us to care and not to care, can escort us into the
controlled laboratory of the Theatre of Dionysos where our confrontation with
the impossibility of life makes it possible for us to live, since the magic of
his mimesis transmutes our solitary madness and despair into pity and terror,
which we are cleansed of by sharing.


=====================================
Jon Corelis   [log in to unmask]   

    www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
=====================================


____________________________________________________________________