Empiricism Then and Now

In Part I of The Nature of Paleolithic Art, which we read for Monday, R. Dale Guthrie tried to explain that Paleolithic Art is not religious, and although some of his arguments made a lot of sense, there was still the burning question (for me): Why would those ancient humans draw so much if it wasn't religious? I have very little experience with art myself, so I couldn't think of any proclaimed benefits of art besides it making people "feel good" by engaging their creativity, etc. But I couldn't imagine how the drawing of such repetetive images of large animals and the like would satisfy their desire for creativity. Why didn't they draw something different for a change?

In Part II, Guthrie found, in my opinion, a very good reason: this art was not just a hobby, it was part of an intense lifestyle that demanded skill and quick thinking just to survive day to day. Because of their "frequent life-or-death decision making," these early humans had to perfect their skills of observation and reasoning if they were going to succeed at catching prey. This is why people of all artistic skill levels practiced drawing in remarkable detail the animals on which they depended for food and survival. (419) This "look-draw-look-draw" (433) method forced them to be very attentive to all the details of the physical world around them--from the coloration of the animals to their characteristic movements to how they look at a distance (the 3D images from Lascaux Cave). Not until life became easier with the improved climate of the Holocene did symbolic images start to appear in cave art. According to Guthrie, as people started to live in bigger communities sustained by this better climate, individualism and abstract ideas began to emerge, replacing the previous preoccupation with the natural world. (419-20)

Upon reading Noelle's latest post, I noticed an interesting connection between her quote from Karen Armstrong and Guthrie's point about Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. Armstrong is quoted as saying, "One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. ... One of [this pov's] consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the 'spiritual'..." This sounds exactly like what the Paleolithic peoples were doing before the Holocene--examining and recording the physical world without any concern for the metaphysical. The difference is that the Paleolithic people were pre-religion and pre-spirituality while modern people are (according to Armstrong) post-religion and post-spirituality. Instead of "edit[ing] out" (Armstrong) the spiritual, the Paleolithic humans never had it in the first place because they hadn't yet moved on past the physical.

Guthrie raises another very interesting idea, saying that after life had improved in the Holocene, people came to expect survival instead of always expecting hardship. Yet, life is never perfect, so they still encountered some hard times. Guthrie proposes that because hardship had become the exception to the norm, people tried to find reasons for it and started looking for things to blame (418). Robin Marantz Henig's concept of agent detection (from last week) would agree with this interpretation, saying that humans look for reasons-- empirically verified or not--for everything (41). In Paleolithic times, only physical reasons were useful because all decisions had such immediate and severe consequences that any mystical ideas of cause and effect would quickly become evolutionarily extinct. In contrast, in the more "leisurely" times of the Holocene or, consequences were less essential to survival, allowing more room for mystical interpretations.

Yet, somehow, humans began to venture back toward empiricism, leading to the "scientific culture" (Armstrong) of modern centuries. One might think that with the entry of larger communities and eventually civilizations, life would only improve, but Guthrie asserts that humans were made for intimate, small groups (419), which might explain the origin of many of the problems that spawned a later return to empiricism over spirituality. Guthrie's speculation about physical and mental heal problems stemming from excessively large social groups may be over-the-top, but the fact remains that early humans DID live in small groups, and we DID evolve from them. Maybe the best thing to do is to return to the small hunter-gatherer groups of the ancient past, rejecting religion and technology in favor of campfires and javelins.