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A book on the evolution of modes of thought, from primitive times up to today.

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Excerpt from the Preface

Because I work in the field of religion and science, I have long been concerned with truth-claims made by both religions and the sciences, as well as with the methods for judging whether those truth-claims are true. It was in this context, over twenty years ago, that I was re-reading some material by Piaget on cognitive development. At about the same time I first read Robert Bellah's essay "Religious Evolution." Though Bellah focused mostly on the content of religious beliefs, he also noted differences in the methods or modes of thought in the different stages of religious development. Bellah’s descriptions of the sequence of modes of thought in religion, and in the cultures in which these religions flourished, matched fairly well with Piaget’s categories of individual cognitive development. Rather naive at that point about the history of arguments in anthropology about cultural evolution, I started spending time in the library hunting down sources that might tell me more about this match-up.

There was relatively little available. I discovered that Piaget himself had occasionally ventured to compare individual and cultural development, but backed off from the topic. A few studies in anthropology offered some supportive evidence, but mostly indirectly. Talcott Parson's The Evolution of Societies, described a developmental pattern in cultural change. As he and Bellah had once taught a course together on this, it was not surprising that his outline was highly similar to Bellah’s. An excellent work by Peacock and Kirsch, The Human Direction, supported the Parsons and Bellah theory, and provided further illustrations. But in general, Piagetian interpretations of cultural evolution were conspicuous by their absence. So I presented a small paper on this at the 1978 American Academy of Religion annual meeting to get leads on relevant sources for further study. The reaction at the AAR was mild but rather unfruitful. No one could point me towards constructive studies of this sort.

Still interested, I kept running across other theories of cultural development that were at least consistent with a Piagetian interpretation of history. The Soviet anthropologist Alexander Luria had proposed in the 1930's that individual cognitive development might have its parallel in cultural development. Luria’s student, Lev Vygotsky agreed, emphasizing the importance of cultural invention to provide new cognitive tools. Luria and Vygotsky suggest that the logical and analytical thinking taught in formal schooling may not be a "natural" stage in individual development, as Piaget thought. We humans may all share in a capacity to learn this cognitive style. But the many years of training required to become skillful in it implies it is not something to which we are naturally inclined, as we are, for example, to learn to speak a language. Where Piaget described mainly a growth of internal and innate capacities, albeit in interaction with the cultural context, Vygotsky gave more credit to cultural development. Nonetheless, Vygotsky’s description of the sequence of cognitive skills matches well enough with Piagetian descriptions of individual cognitive stages. Michael Cole and others developed further ways to test Piagetian theory in non-Western cultures.

There are other theories of cultural development that fit well with Piagetian stages. Bernard Lonergan argues that over the centuries Christian theology went through three stages, from common sense to rational analysis to modern critical method. These nicely parallel the three final stages of Piagetian development. By 1981 James Fowler had published Stages of Faith. His summary of individual faith development includes a cognitive dimension which matches well with Lonergan’s historical analysis. (After some years of relative quiet on the topic, Fowler has interpreted pre-Enlightenment, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment thought as similar to his own Piagetian theory of development in the individual). Haydn White likewise proposed a Piagetian reading of Western history, using literary tropes as guides. More recently, Richard H. Schlagel uses Piaget to explicate the differences he sees between mythic thought and the kind of development represented by Parmenides’ law of contradiction and Aristotle’s formal logic. Schlagel wonders whether the differences in thought styles in children depending on their stage of development might be true of humankind in general. Most of these studies have a European focus, raising the suspicion that the Piagetian developmental pattern is entirely a product of Western European culture. But the Siberian tribespeople with whom Luria and Vygotsky worked had a culture with clearly non-European roots. Moreover, I was already finding evidence of a Piagetian pattern in non-Western cultures. Later chapters here will provide extensive references on this. Also recently, Kieran Egan has shown a clear similarity between the stages of types of thought in school-age children and the development of thought styles in culture, though he follows Vygotsky in arguing that much of this development is produced by cultural changes rather than by innate tendencies alone.

I continued to read anthropological literature in particular, as well as historical studies of moments of shift in thought styles in several cultures, including China and India, and prepared a more substantial paper for a Midwestern conference. At a "history of religions" section, I briefly described aspects of the pattern as I then saw it, describing overall cultural evolution, but with an emphasis on changes in cognitive skills or habits. Human beings are first of all language-using hominids. From our earliest life as homo sapiens, we have used language to name and interpret and govern our life. Eventually, the neolithic agricultural revolution made it possible for thousands of people to live together in more complex societies. Beliefs about powerful gods appeared, as the society of the numinous echoed the human society in which a few people of great power lorded it over many others.

Then in the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Sumer (perhaps also in Egypt), literacy was invented. Other cultures inherited and improved upon Sumerian writing or invented their own. Literacy changes the human world by enabling people to encode ideas, to accumulate thoughts for comparison, to transmit them to far-away strangers, to leave them to later generations. In the sixth century B.C.E., give or take a couple hundred years either way, several major cultures took another step into reflectively explicit logic. In the classical eras of China, India, and Greece, a literate elite began to explicitly test logical relations among their ideas, seeking an overall coherence. With this came also the idea of a single universal Whole, in the form of the cosmos, the Tao, Brahman, God, or other single Ultimates. Intellectuals in these societies argued over the difference between the "real truth" as opposed to mere opinion or tradition.

Almost as soon as the desire for universal and reliable logical knowledge appeared, so also did a form of skepticism. Our ideas are our ideas, said the skeptics, not eternal and perfect truth. Skeptics in China, India, and Greece all pointed to the fallible character of human knowing. It was not until recent centuries, however, that European thinkers stumbled across a set of methods for applying some of this skepticism and getting reliable knowledge out of it. The classical search for logical and certain truth was modified by the semi-skeptical methods of modern science, which demands that every plausible theory be subjected to on-going and publicly shared testing and application to see how well it really works in practice.

This outline seemed to me to be rather unexceptional. The history of religious thought in particular was clearly a history of development of the content of beliefs, their mode of expression, and the style of thought, from primitive uncritical stories about spirits and magic, to more complex set of mythological narratives about great gods, to later more abstract belief in a single universal and unifying Ultimate, and perhaps then to a modern self-consciousness about all beliefs as human interpretations. Other pieces of the picture had long been appearing in various scholarly sources, many of which will be reviewed and analyzed in these pages.

By this time the faces of those I was addressing at the Midwestern meeting were strangely still, even stony. I continued. There is a rough parallel, I claimed, between the Piagetian stages and the pattern of cultural development. According to Piaget, we begin as children by categorizing and lumping ideas together in small stories or narratives. As we get older we take more care to distinguish between stories about Santa Claus and information we learn in school about Thailand or other strange places, to establish which is merely a story and which is true. By the age of twelve and later we begin to develop competence in formal logical analysis, leading to the great challenge of high school algebra and geometry. During adolescence we come to rejoice in the dogmatic certitudes we grasp with our intelligence, but as we get a bit older and more experienced, we develop a somewhat skeptical caution about truth-claims, no matter how intelligent the argument or how informed the source. Language, literacy, logic, and a degree of reflexive skepticism emerge roughly in that order in the life of individuals and cultures. This comparison is inexact and incomplete, too brief to be clear yet. Not all individuals follow the same path of development, and cultures ride bumpy roads as they move along. It will take the contents of several chapters to describe the parallels in cultural and individual development more accurately. But this is approximately the outline I presented to the Midwest meeting.

The reaction this time was anything but mild. It was my first clear experience with postmodern political correctness. One of the listeners offered this succinct criticism: "For shame, Michael." Other listeners gave more precise objections: Any theory of cultural development nominates some types of culture for the role of the less developed and other for the more developed. If cultural development parallels individual development, then cultures called less developed are being compared to children. This is a dangerous continuation of harmful colonialist attitudes. Moreover, a theory of cultural development based on Piaget uses standards of Western science to judge cognitive development. A theory that has arisen in one's own culture, Piaget's in this case, is given the privilege of judging the other cultures. This is another instance of "Western hegemonic discourse." More on these objections will appear in later chapters. They are worth taking quite seriously.

As the chapters to follow will argue, however, there is a lot of evidence that cultures do develop certain thought styles or cognitive methods in an identifiable, albeit sometimes uneven, sequence. The objections can make us hesitate. We can ask ourselves whether there are good grounds for developing another theory of cultural development, no matter how much evidence, when this runs the risk of such arrogant and harmful error. We human beings obviously differ from each other in important ways. We each live in a specific society, and each society may have its own values and practices and beliefs, and each such set of values and practices and beliefs may deserve a hearing on its own terms. Each of us also differs individually from others in our own society. Learning to accept "otherness" and to respect the "other," as we say now, is healthy and constructive.

A major reason to learn to accept and respect the other, however, is that beneath all our differences, we also share a common humanness. We should be concerned to discover common elements, including any patterns of development that may influence both individuals and cultures. Out of this we may find a few more things that bind us together in our common humanness. We all learn to communicate through complex languages. We construct meanings and process information with the same kind of brains. We all interpret reality through stories. We are all born capable of learning to write. If there are a few basic thought styles that are fairly natural to humans, or if there are useful thought styles that are clearly cultural creations for which people in general have some aptitude, this is well worth attending to, because it tells us what we already share, or it tells us what we can teach one another, or it helps to make sense of our differences so that we can appreciate those differences with greater sympathy.

Interaction among cultures might be made smoother with greater understanding of similarities and differences in cognitive style. Some cultures are similar to one another in that they rely on certain similar Piagetian cognitive styles more than other cultures. Both Japanese and Americans use logically structured approaches to major aspects of life, and tradition-oriented chauvinism towards other aspects. Both the Confucian tradition and the Marxist theory in China are alike as attempts to structure society as a whole, but different in their approach to the value of tradition as an authority. Within any single culture, different cognitive styles co-exist. It can illuminate human relations within the culture to recognize patterns of such differences, so we can deal with them deliberately and intelligently. There is very much still to be learned about us humans. If the picture of cognitive styles to be drawn here is at all accurate, we should address it, not avoid it. Until we humans stop causing one another great pain, we need to keep learning about ourselves, including patterns in how we think.

The charges of renewed colonialism should still be taken quite seriously. For one thing, they warn us against simplistic notions of "primitive" or pre-modern ways of life. In childhood we form our first images of paleolithic culture or the hunter-gatherer forms of life. Comic books and bad movies portray stone-age people as only semi-human, and current foraging cultures as menacing savages. Anthropologists, on the contrary, learn from their prolonged stays among primitive people that once the language barrier is overcome, once the odd food and ritual become normal, then the people turn out to be surprisingly like small-town neighbors. The people are as intelligent as humans in general; they share in laughter and anger and tears; they apply traditional construction techniques with skill and good sense; they find ways to head off a fight; they learn how to brew some sort of beer and have a good party now and then.

Yet they may still be "primitive." As foragers, they must normally live in relatively small groups and move from encampment to encampment as they exhaust local resources. They do not have the option of city life, for better or for worse. Limited in technology, they must live intimately with the discomfort of fleas, lice, mosquitoes, and biting flies, with diseases that kill half the children by the age of ten. Lacking literacy, they cannot track their own history over many hundreds of years to reflect on the many major changes of that history, or to chose what to re-appropriate from the past. Many aspects of their lives are bound by limitations that they themselves are happy to overcome, with the help of steel axes, outboard motors, penicillin, and books for their children. It is not colonialism to observe all this.

This book is a history of the search for methods to determine which ideas about the world are true, beginning with the styles of thought of hunting-gathering people.  More precisely, it is about the search for methods of determining factual truth about the world, not about what are sometimes called moral truth or aesthetic truth. Although morals and aesthetics matter greatly, they are not the focus here. The focus is on ways religious traditions, scientific approaches, and philosophical analyses have been devoted to discovering how to distinguish truth from error. The history of such attempts turns out to have a developmental pattern. This pattern puts current arguments about methods of knowledge in intelligible and useful perspective.

[This page last changed July 26m 2008]