Living long versus living Well

There has been some counter-intuitive publishing in the medical field since the summer of 2025 that I only know became aware of.  

On the one hand, new cohort studies showed that even 150min/wk of moderate physical activity are strongly correlated with increasing life expectancy. [Liao et al., Journal of the American Heart Association April 2025 in ScienceDaily] [Ren et al. Dual-Cohort study May 2025]

On the other hand, to avoid age-related dementia, one needs to achieve in excess of 300min/wk moderate physical activity in order to change one's outcomes. [Wang et al 2025]

Admittedly, this is mostly a fail at the policy level. It makes no sense to spur people to live longer if they are going to suffer from dementia then, which is not only a horrifying experience for the individual, but traumatizing to their loved ones and incredibly expensive for socialized medicine. 

Economic History of the Fugger

This post just notes the important research of Aloys Schulte, Die Fugger in Rome, from 1904 (also available on Google Books).

Reading with Context in Mind: Plough, Sword and Book (Part 1)

The following discussion analyses a few pages of material from Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, London (Collins Harville) 1988. The idea behind the exercise is to distill out in exemplary fashion the contextual form of book contents that makes some of the strategies of statistical or pattern-based NLP less helpful than one might hope.

In addressing the problem of the role that primitive man plays in modern political thought (the chapter is entitled, "Which way will the Stone Age Vote swing?"), Gellner analyzes the way in which some philosophers talk about previous social states and their impact on morality.

In between the two extremes---candid fictional reconstructionists and paid-up professional anthropologists---there are other who, while not professional specialists in the area of early man, nevertheless intend their affirmation about him [i.e. early man] to be realistic, not mere fictions, but who wish them, all the same, to point a moral for the conduct of our own social life. (p.26)

The fact that this is Gellner's analysis means that this paragraph is his own, and he owns the words in it and the thoughts as well. Thus, if Gellner, to concoct an example, were to deny ever using the word "realistic", one would be justified in pointing to this paragraph and contradicting that assertion.

For instance, one of the profoundest and most influential of prophets of modern economic and other liberalism is F. A. Hayek. Hayek's analysis of the options and perils of modern society do in fact dovetail with a sharply delineated vision of the primitive social order and ethos. On his view, the strong social morality of early man and its survival in contemporary society constitute a positive danger to us: (p.26)

This paragraph is a potential mixture; it starts out as something that Gellner says about Hayek, but toward the end it becomes possible that Gellner uses diction that is more properly considered Hayek's than Gellner's. This is because Gellner is trying to reconstruct Hayek's thought, and when people do that, they often use the words that the author to be reconstructed employs. For example, if the expression "positive danger" strikes readers as interesting, this paragraph would be ill-suited to determine if Hayek or Gellner would use that expression.

Gellner then quotes Hayek, using a block-quote with reduced font-size to indicate that this is so (p.26):

There is ... so far as present society is concerned, no "natural goodness", because with his innate instincts man could never have built up the civilisation on which the numbers of present mankind depend for their lives. To be able to do so, he had to shed many sentiments that were good for the small band, and to submit to the sacrifices which the discipline of freedom demands but which he hates. The abstract society rests on learnt rules and not on pursuing perceived desirable common objects; and wanting to do good to known people will not achieve the most for the community, but only the observation of its abstract and seemingly purposeless rules.^(Fn6) (p.26)

Notice that this paragraph needs to be attributed to Hayek---as footnote 6 tells us, here indicated by ^(Fn6), the passage is from page 20 of Hayek's work The Three Sources of Human Values, published by the London School of Economics and Political Science in London in 1978. Thus, Hayek is the one who talks about submitting to sacrifices, and the discipline of freedom, not Gellner. (Gellner may of course share that view, but we have so far not seen any textual material to support such a supposition.)

Gellner then prepares to quote another passage from Hayek, which he relates to the first passage via an editorial comment on the stance that Hayek has taken.

And, should anyone not understand what this implies in practice, let it be spelt out: (p.26)

So even though Gellner is pointing out a relationship in Hayek's thought, Gellner is at least to some extent using his own words to express that relationship and thereby give an interpretive bias to the reading of the Hayek passage.

The following quote is again distinguished by a smaller font and a blockquote presentation, marking it as a direct quote from a writing by Hayek (minus the editorial [The] that Gellner felt should be inserted).

... the long submerged innate instincts have again surged to the top. [The] demand for a just distribution in which organised power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves is thus strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions. And it is these || widely prevalent feelings to which prophets, moral philosophers and constructivists appeal by their plans for the deliberate creation of a new type of society.^(Fn7) (pp.26f)

The passage is from the same work, as we learn from Fn 7, but two pages earlier, p.18. Notice that this casts an odd light on Gellner's transitional phrasing, because having the implication of a thesis precede the thesis is an odd way to present an argument, and cannot really be called a spelling-out, given that most people read from the low to high page numbers.

Gellner now tries to give Hayek a strong interpretation, one that makes plausible why someone would agree to Hayek's claims. That means, we should expect to encounter Hayek's thinking presented in Gellner's words with Hayek's phrases sprinkled throughout.

The picture is striking and suggestive. Men must have lived in something like "bands", groups too small to be capable of imposing abstract and impersonal rules, for a long time---during the overwhelming majority of generations since the inception of humanity, however that inception may be dated. So, on this view, throughout most of our history our situation instilled in us an ethic which is directly opposed to all that is innovative, creative, progressive in human civilization. Hence, civilization is based on the overcoming, not so much of our lowest instincts, but on the contrary of all that had usually been held to be moral: the social impulses of mankind, the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims. Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

We can see immediately that this is a paraphrase of Hayek's thinking; so far, Hayek has only spoken of  "abstract and seemingly purposeless rules", which under Gellner's reconstruction morph into "abstract and impersonal rules" or "abstract and incomprehensible rules", neither of which is far away from Hayek's meaning, but clearly not synonymous with it either.

After all, rules that are seemingly without purpose may still be personal and comprehensible---for example, the rule that after each 1000-point drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 have to apologize on public TV and do 20 push-ups. That rule is both personal and comprehensible, just not very conducive to any purpose that we associate with economics.

It remains possible that Gellner was citing phrases from other sections of the Hayek paper that he did not quote directly; we lack the information to determine this. But we can already see that the complex interplay of commentary ("The picture is striking and suggestive"), expansion of ideas (the speculation on the small groups, with the word `bands`, a term that Hayek uses without quotation marks, now in double-quotes) and summaries of arguments ("the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims") makes it very difficult to attribute phrases and ideas to either Hayek or Gellner directly. At the same time, I cannot shake the feeling that, if someone cited the sentence

Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

as Gellner's point of view, Gellner would probably protest, calling such use a case of being quoted out of context, and seeing himself as primarily elucidating Hayek---even if Hayek should object to the rules being labeled "incomprehensible".

It is important to note that Gellner strengthening Hayek's stance by paraphrasing and working to give it additional plausibility is not a fault at all, but one of Gellner's qualities as a good writer, as someone who tries to compact Hayek's writing for an audience unfamiliar with Hayek's views and takes the arguments of Hayek seriously.

Not very surprising, Gellner continues to unfold Hayek's thought, formally repeating the methods of the previous paragraph, elucidating and bringing in new notions from Hayek's extensive oeuvre.

In Hayek's vision, an unplanned, unintended culture, which was the fruit neither of conscious reason nor of animal instinct, had somehow arisen, and it alone made possible that automatic mechanism of response to need, that sustained innovative improvement, which is manifested in and fostered by the market. ... || ... Seeing how recent precarious our liberation from over-socialization is, it is surprising that we are not even more thoroughly in thrall to atavistic sociability than Hayek fears. It is a social ethic and cohesiveness, not their absence, which are our greatest threat. (pp.27f)

Even though Gellner explicitly labels the exposition as Hayek's (his "vision"), he is now bringing in terms that are not licensed by the quotes and that presumably come from the other parts of Hayek's oeuvre, key among which the notion of the market, or the notion of natural selection. (Gellner errs in not providing footnotes for the source of these concepts in Hayek's writing, but increasingly, footnotes have come to be viewed as pedantic and no longer in need of precision.)

At the same time, the paraphrasing with its subtle shifts of meaning continues; Hayek in the quotes at least never spoke of "animal instinct", but called them "innate instincts". For example, with Steven Pinker we could claim that language belongs to the innate instincts, but clearly is not a good example of an animal instinct, give how few (or none, if one follows Pinker) animals share our form of language.

Since the point of the exercise is not to understand either Hayek or Gellner's argument, just how the thoughts and the linguistic presentations of these thoughts co-occur in a specific text, we will not delve into the elided middle section of that paragraph of Gellner's (see the ellipsis in the quotation from pp.27f above) and continue straight to the next paragraph of Gellner's exposition, on page 28.

Hayek's way of presenting our general condition differs from what might be called the simplest or classical formulation of laissez faire liberalism, in his conscious stress on the cultural preconditions of an open or market society. The classical formulation suggests that its only important condition is a political one: a just, effective and unrapacious state must be present, a political authority which uses its power to keep the peace and uphold the rules, and does not use it simply to despoil civil society. Hayek's new way of defining the problem makes him insist that mere political order is not enough, that a certain kind of abstract culture is also required, the emergence of a sense of and respect for abstract rules, and a detachment from communal, cooperative ends. The Hidden Hand can operate only in a suitable cultural milieu, amongst men who are not too sociable, men who respect rules rather than social aims. (p.28)

At this point, Gellner is contrasting two stances simultaneously, what he calls the classical formulation of liberalism and Hayek's form. These two stances are distinguished, according to Gellner, in their emphasis, the one putting the accent on the political and the other on the cultural preconditions.  Because the paragraph has the potential for losing even the interested reader, Gellner has begun to use emphasis (italics) in the typography to distinguish the key terms that identify the stances. Such an emphasis would have been even more effective if he had not been forced, by convention, to also italicize the French (i.e. non-English) phrase "laissez faire" in the same paragraph.

We observe that Gellner's use of italics for emphasis is in general ambiguous to its precise meaning; on p.27, he used it to mark the introduction of important economic term of the market. That market's regulatory force, the Hidden Hand, however, receives no such emphasis and is capitalized as an agentive force instead.

Our little excursion is almost completed at this point, as we turn to the last paragraph in Gellner's consideration of early man. Gellner turns to the social theory of Hayek's one-time colleague at the London School of Economics and former compatriot, Karl Popper.

A very similar sense of the struggle, not with destructive animal instincts, but on the contrary with an oppressively social morality and the deep feelings which underline it, is also found in the social thought of Karl Popper.^(Fn8) This Hayek/Popper vision might well be called the Viennese Theory. One may well wonder whether it was not inspired by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, the individualistic, atomized, cultivated bourgeoisie of the Habsburg capital had to contend with the influx of swarms of kin-bound, collectivistic, rule-ignoring migrants from the easter marches of the Empire, from the Balkans and Galicia. Cosmopolitan liberals had to contend, in the political sphere, with the emerging breed of national socialists. This "Viennese" vision is an inversion, a denial all at once of romanticism -- it elevates || Gesellschaft (society) over Gemeinschaft (community) --- and of Marxism. Marx anticipated the restoration, rather than the overcoming, of the alleged social proclivities of early man. (pp.28f)

The literature referenced for Karl Popper in Footnote 8 is his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies, London 1945. We observe that we again encounter the use of italics to highlight terms, e,g, national socialists such as the Austro-Fascists as compared to economic socialists in the sense of the followers of Karl Marx, as well as non-English terminology, such as the German words Gesellschaft or Gemeinschaft.

In this paragraph, the reader has to pay careful attention to attribute stances properly. Not only is Gellner discussing Popper, but he is aligning Popper with Hayek and even combining them into a single theory or "vision" (cf the Viennese Theory versus the "Viennese" vision).  At the same moment, for the first time in the selection that we have been analyzing, Gellner actually engages in historiography (we will get to this problem soon), so he is reporting background information to justify his postulate of a Viennese Theory. Thus, because he is not describing the stance of the theory, but its genesis, Gellner owns this paragraph and its terminology.

To summarize: In roughly three pages, Gellner has given us an exposition of at least two intellectual stances that he may or may not share, namely those of F.A. Hayek and of the classical formulation of laissez-faire liberalism; Popper really received one sentence only and was not given a single quote. Gellner has presented these positions in quotes, which are typographically distinct, and in paraphrases, some of which make inexact use of the terminology found in the reconstructed texts. Gellner has interleaved these reconstructions which his comments and in the case of the Vienna Theory, even with an origins story that draws additional background information into the text. Notice that the brevity of the sample did not allow some other occurrences one should expect in a book the size of Gellner's, such as direct quotes of other writers' interpretations of Hayek or Popper, or paraphrases of others' reconstructions of the texts under consideration.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the typical techniques of corpus linguistics cannot succeed readily in such a setting; even though there is a sense in which Gellner's book is a corpus of conceptual stances. Perhaps the reading is not distant enough.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- I.4 Alienation

(<< Chapter 3 -- Theodicy || Chapter 5 -- Secularization >>)

Religion and Alienation

Berger now re-iterates the difference between a physical event and an event with social meaning, taking the example of an accident versus an execution (pp.81f).

The individual may "co-operate" in the execution in a way in which he never can in the accident---namely, by apprehending it in terms of those objective meanings he shares, .... Thus the victim of an execution can die "correctly" in a way that would be more difficult for the victim of an accident. (p.82) 

Giving an example involving polygamy and monogamy (pp.82f), Berger reiterates that the fantasies are lesser realities because of the objective social reality is internalized; even the individual feels real only in his internalized role.

What concerns us here is simply the important fact that the social world retains its character of objective reality as it is internalized. It is there in consciousness too. (p.83)

This consciousness will decompose, analytically speaking, into a socialized and a non-socialized component (p.83).

... the duplication of consciousness [t.t., RCK] brought about by the internalization of the social world has the consequence of setting aside, congealing or estranging one part of consciousness as against the rest. (p.83)

In other words, the duplication of consciousness results in an internal confrontation between socialized and non-socialized components of self, reiterating within consciousness itself the external confrontation between society and the individual. (p.84)

Just as some of the things that man does become part of the objective reality of society and "escape" him (p.85), so even part of his own self escapes, the part shaped by socialization.

As a result, it becomes a possibility not only that the social world seems strange to the individual, but that he becomes strange to himself in certain aspects of his socialized self. (p.85) 

There are time when the externalized self can be reappropriated; but wherever that fails, and the "socialized self confronts the individual as inexorable facticities analogous to the facticities of nature", we can call this process "alienation" (p.85).

... alienation is the process whereby the dialectical relationship between the individual and his world is lost to consciousness. The individual "forgets" that this world was and continues to be co-produced by him. (p.85)

The effect is that social world and natural world merge, because the constructed character of the social world is lost in the alienated, undialectical and false consciousness (p.85). This leads to an inversion of the relationship between man and world and to a loss of meaning.

The actor becomes only that which is acted upon. The producer is apprehended only as product. In this loss of societal dialectic, activity itself comes to appear as something other---namely, as process, destiny, or fate. (p.86)

Berger emphasizes that such alienation is a state of consciousness, a typical stage in onto- and phylogenetic development (p.86), but is different from anomy (p.87), because if anything at all the world as opus alienum is "seemingly everlasting" (p.87).

Berger now observes that the success of religion as "the most effective bulwark against anomy throughout human history" lies in its "alienating propensity" (p.87) due to the numinous presenting itself as the totaliter aliter (p.87).

... the ultimate epistemological status of these reports [of an other reality somehow impinging or bordering upon the empirical world, RCK] of religious men will have to be rigorously bracketed. (p.88)

... whatever else the constellations of the sacred may be "ultimately", empirically they are products of human activity and human signification---that is, they are human projections. (p.89)

Thus because these produced projections of meaning are experienced as external to the individuals, they are alienated projection (p.89).

The fundamental "recipe" of religious legitimation is the transformation of human products into supra- or non-human facticities. (p.89) 

The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production. (p.89)

The human nomos becomes a divine cosmos, or at any rate a reality that derives its meanings from beyond the human sphere. (p.89)

Berger believes that "simply equating religion with alienation"  is too much, as that would "entail an epistemological assumption inadmissible within a scientific frame of reference" (p.89), but is prepared to contend that

the historical part of religion in the world-building and world-maintaining enterprises of man is in large measure due to the alienating power inherent in religion. (p.89)

Again Berger insists that "the presence in reality of beings and forces that are alien to the human world" is an assertion that "in all its forms, is not amenable to empirical inquiry" (p.89).  [[RCK: My philosopher friends would assert that the onus is on the side of religion to provide the empirical proof, not on the side of modern agnostic science. In general, we should eschew entities that are not amenable to empirical inquiry in our theories, even if some entities are very a]]

What is amenable, though, is the very strong tendency of religion to alienate the human world in the process. (p.89)

Thus, religion has contributed to the mystification of the world by allowing man to live with a false consciousness (p.90).

The socio-cultural world, which is an edifice of human meanings, is overlaid with mysteries posited as non-human in their origin. All human productions are, at least potentially, comprehensible in human terms. (p.90)

Berger then turns to the example of marriage and kinship, noting that all societies have worked out "more or less restrictive `programs` for the sexual activity of its members" (p.90). One way to accomplish faithful adherence

is to mystify the institution in religious terms. (p.90)

(to be continued)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 3 -- Theodicee

(<< Chapter 2 -- World Maintenance || Chapter 4 -- Religion and Alienation >>)

The Problem of Theodicy

Every nomos is established, over and over again, against the threat of destruction by the anomic forces endemic to the human condition. In religious terms, the sacred order of the cosmos is reaffirmed, over and over again in the face of chaos. (p.53)

Nevertheless, human society is faced with anomic and destabilizing phenomena, such as "suffering, evil and, above all, death" (p.53). 

An explanation of these phenomena in terms of religious legitimations, of whatever degree of theoretical sophistication, may be called a theodicy. (p.53)

Berger is especially insistent that theodicies per se need not be theoretically sophisticated (p.53), though he admits that they will vary in rationality (p.54). Fundamentally, theodicy is an attitude that surrenders the self to a social transcendence.

[E]very nomos entails a transcendence of individuality and thus, ipso facto, implies a theodicy. (p.54)

The nomos locates the individual's life in an all-embracing fabric of meanings that, by its very nature, transcends that life. (p.54)

Berger illustrates this insight with reference to social rites of passage.

The social ritual transforms the individual event into a typical case, just as it transform individual biography into an episode in the history of the society. (p.54)

In other words, he may "lose himself" in the meaning-giving nomos of his society. (p.55)

In consequence, the pain becomes more tolerable, the terror less overwhelming, as the sheltering canopy of the nomos extends to cover even those experiences that may reduce the individual to howling animality. (p.55)

This means that the basic theodicy precedes all individual societies.

Theodicy proper, then, as the religious legitimation of anomic phenomena, is rooted in certain crucial characteristics of human sociation as such. (p.55)

Berger analysis this situation through the interplay of masochism and sadism, where the one individual erases themselves to make the other the only reality. Berger correctly points out that this must fail

... the self cannot be annihilated this side of death and ... the other can only be absolutized in illusion .... (p.56)

Berger uses this as an analogy to describe the self-loss of totalitarian submission.

... the self-denying submission to the power of the collective nomos can be liberating in the same way. Here, the concrete other of social experience is vastly magnified in the personifications of collective order. (p.57)

Berger then widens the view to the religious self-abnegation, whose other is properly transcendental and makes no mistakes.

The sadistic god is not handicapped by ... empirical imperfections. He remains invulnerable, infinite, immortal by definition. The surrender to him is ipso facto protected from the contingencies and uncertainties of merely social masochism---for ever. (p.57)

In short

... the masochistic attitude is one of the persistent factors of irrationality in the problem of  theodicy, no matter what degree of rationality may be attained .... (p.57)

Berger reminds us that theodicy does not preserve "happiness", "but meaning" (p.58).

These experiences, however painful they may be, at least make sense now [under "an appropriate plausibility structure", (p.58), RCK] in terms that are both socially and subjectively convincing. (p.58)

The suffering believer desires "to know why these misfortunes have come to him in the first place"  as badly as "relief from these misfortunes" (p.58). This reconstruction allows Berger to distance any claims that all theodicies have to necessarily be coupled to redemption (p.58).

Because societal collectives are made up of individuals, the benefits scale to the social in predictable ways.

Entire collectivities are thus permitted to integrated [sic RCK] anomic events, acute or || chronic, into the nomos established in their society. (pp.58f)

And these anomies need not be external to the social order.

One of the very important social functions of theodicies is, indeed, their  explanation of the socially prevailing inequalities of power and privilege. In this function ... theodicies directly legitimate the particular institutional order in question. (p.59)

[T]heodicies provide the poor with a meaning for their poverty, but may also provide the rich with a meaning for their wealth. (p.59)

And if the same theodicy can serve both groups, Berger argues, it "constitutes an essentially sado-masochistic collusion, on the level of meaning" (p.59). There are cases of multiple theodicies as well, historically speaking (p.59). Berger cannot provide a full classification of theodicies, but observes that the more irrational ones claim that the individual is defined through their group membership.

The individual's innermost being is considered to be the fact of his belonging to the collectivity---the clan, the tribe, the nation, or what no. (p.60)

This identification is typically apprehended as being congenital and thus inevitable for the individual. It is carried in his blood, and he cannot deny it unless he denies his own being. (p.60)

Biographical anomies become episodes in the larger and continuing narrative of the collectivity (p.60). This is helpful because "the collectivity" unlike the individual "can usually be conceived of as immortal" (p.61).

This approach is often found in primitive religions, where mana or some mythological speculative version thereof allows society and nature to be embedded in the same totality of meaning (p.61).  And Berger is adamant about such theodicies not needing any particular story of hopeful afterlife or immortality, as "the ultimately meaning-giving fact" is simply "the eternal eurhythmy of the cosmos" (p.62).  Such religions tend toward "ontological continuity between the generations" (p.62), providing immortality to the line of descent.

The entire collectivity ... carries with it through time the same fundamental life that is incarnate in each of its members. (p.62)

The flip-side of this belief is that enemies must work the much harder to interrupt this flow of life.

To destroy this immortality, an enemy must eradicate every last living soul belonging to the collectivity---a far from uncommon practice in history, it may be added. (p.62)

This solution also has clear answers for the imbalance in resources and power.

The same participation of all in the life of all ... legitimates whatever social inequalities may exist within the collectivity. The power and privilege held by the few is held, as it were, vicariously for the many, who participate in it by virtue of their identification with the collective totality. (p.62)

Berger then points to the Chinese conceptions of ancestors and descendants to show that there are more complex models of the same basic theodicy (p.63).

Another flavoring of the same strategy is any form of mysticism that seeks to become one with the ultimate being.

We can define mysticism, for our present purposes, as the religious attitude in which man seeks union with the sacred forces or beings. ... all individuality vanishes and is absorbed in the all-pervasive ocean of divinity. (p.63) 

[[RCK: Notice how this is also the claim of monophysitism, which perhaps not incidentally came from a country with a strong monastic tradition.]]

Berger underscores how mysticism across cultures tends toward masochism

... as evidenced by the cross-cultural recurrence of ascetic self-mortification and self-torture in connection with mystical phenomena. (p.64)

Because:

Where the perfect union is achieved, the annihilation of the self and its absorption by the divine realissimum constitute the highest bliss imaginable, the culmination of the mystical quest in ineffable ecstasy. (p.64)

Berger then cites a mystical poem of Jalalu'l-Din Rumi, a Muslim mystic (p.64), to show that the sophistication and complexity of mystical speculation cannot mask their origin in a "prototypical theodicy of self-transcendence" (p.65).

A different position on the spectrum of irrationality and rationality of theodicies is taken by the Indian thought of the combination of karma and samsara, that is, cosmic causal law and eternal rebirth (p.65).

[T]he life of the individual is only an ephemeral link in a causal chain that extends infinitely into both past and future. (p.65)

It follows that the individual has no one to blame for his misfortunes except himself---and, conversely, he may ascribe his good fortune to nothing but his own merits. (p.65)

The karma-samsara complex thus affords an example of complete symmetry between the theodicies of suffering and of happiness. It legitimates the conditions of all social strata simultaneously and, in its linkage with the conception of dharma (social duty, particularly cast duty), constitutes the most thoroughly conservative religious system devised in history. (p.65)

Berger reminds us that the system spread, via the Brahmins qua "social engineers", from princely house to princely house in the Indian subcontinent. And the advantages to the upper strata of society are in Berger's view documented in the Code of Manu (p.65). [[RCK: E.g. Manu 5:96ff, on the ritual purity of the king as incarnation of the eight guardian deities; Manu 5:147-169, on controlling women and their duties.]]

Berger argues that folk religion---magic and mystical exercises and divinities intervening---managed to soften the blow of such a harsh symmetry (p.66), as well as

the simple faith that obedience to one's dharma will improve one's lot in future reincarnations. (p.66)

The harshness was also dealt with by escaping back to the irrational form of the theodicy, as the mystical union between the individual soul and the divine unity, in the atman-brahman complex (p.66).

Here [in the atman-brahman, RCK] ... the perfect rationality of the karma-samsara, having extended itself to its ultimate limit, overreaches itself and falls back into the irrational prototype of self-transcendent participation characteristic of all mysticism. (p.67)

Buddhism is in Berger's interpretation a radicalization of that rational thought, especially in the Pali tradition (p.67). [[RCK: Berger's dismissiveness of the folk religion of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity can be defended as an expression of the fact that this is the rational pole of the theodicic expression, thus requiring special attention to speculation of the experts.]] After purging all gods, demons and magic (p.67), only man remains and the three fundamental insights, "anichcha or impermanence, dukkha or sorrow, anatta or non-selfhood" (p.68), from which man constructs his own salvation to reach "nibbana (or nirvana)" (p.68).

There is no place here for any religious attitudes except the coolness of rational understanding and rational action to attain the goal of understanding. (p.68)

[T]he problem of theodicy is solved in the most rational manner conceivable, namely by eliminating any and all intermediaries between man and the rational order of the universe. (p.68)

As the anomic issues are revealed to be illusionary, they disappear and with them theodicy, now devoid of a problem to solve (p.68). The individual is dispenses with through anatta, the insight of non-selfhood (p.68).

Between these two poles of irrationality and rationality lie multiple rationalizations of theodicy that form Berger's next focus of investigation (p.68). Into this bucket belong all forms of "messianism, millenarianism, and eschatology" (p.68), who promise a resolution of the present anomic state by recourse to a future nomic state (p.68).

For example, the sufferings of the Black Death gave birth to a number of violent millennarian movements, but so did the social displacements brought on by the Industrial Revolution. (p.68)

Though this strategy is prevalent in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim orbit, it also found "[w]ith greater modifications" "in such movements as the Taiping Rebellion, the Ghost Dance, or the Cargo Cults" (p.69).

[T]he anomic phenomena are legitimated by reference to a future nomization, thus reintegrating them within an over-all [sic RCK] meaningful order. (p.69)

Berger correctly points out that the need to have a present and a future requires historiographical capabilities.

[The messianic-millennarian, RCK] theodicy will be rational to the extent that it involves a coherent theory of history (a condition ... that is generally fulfilled in the case of messianic-millenarian movements within the Biblical orbit.) (p.69)

It [i.e. the messianic-millennarian complex, RCK] will be actually or potentially revolutionary to the extent that the divine action about to intervene in the course of events requires or allows human co-operation. (p.69) 

Of course this approach "is highly vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation" (p.70)---and parousia delay is just one case thereof. Thus, a common refinement is to transpose the nomic state into another reality, where "compensation is promised in other-worldly terms" (p.70)---a strategy that suggests itself in settings where "notions of immortality" were entertained (p.70). [[RCK: That this theodicy was "needed" in "the origins" (p.70) of such notions seems to overplay Berger's hand.]]

One now looks for it [i.e. divine compensation, RCK] beyond the grave. There, at last, the sufferer will be comforted, the good man rewarded, and the wicked punished. In other words, the afterlife becomes the locale of nomization. (p.70)

Both Egypt and China worked out such theodicies, and Berger reminds us that there is no revolutionary spirit to be had from these strategies (p.70); the "suffering servant" in DtrJs is another example (p.71). The key contribution of this theodicy is that the empirical verification [[RCK: and typically falsification]] is blocked (p.71).

An alternate solution is the dualistic theodicy (p.71).

In these formations [e.g. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, RCK] all anomic phenomena are, of course, ascribed to the evil or negative forces, while all nomization is understood as the progressive victory of their good or positive antagonist. (p.71)

Here, redemption becomes participation on the right side (p.71).  Theodicies such as the Gnostic one solve the problem by "transposing its terms" (p.72), making the world not part of the cosmos, but either the arena or the realm of chaos (p.72). The effects of negating the world are clear:

... dualistic theodicies tend to be acosmic, ascetic and ahistorical. (p.72)

Theodicy becomes a big problem for monotheistic religions (p.73).

If all rival or minor divinities are radically eliminated, and if not only all power but all ethical values are ascribed to the one God who created all things in this or any other world, then the problem of theodicy becomes a pointed question directed to this very conception. (p.73)

[[RCK: It is in this sense interesting that both the NT and the early Christian Erbauungsliteratur such as the Acta Petri, maintain the dualistic touch of a divine antagonist, the Devil, but project his defeat as having begun and being completed soon.]]

Berger emphasizes not only the soteriological solution of pushing the anomic resolution into an unverifiable future (p.73), but also the Masochistic tendencies that remain in Christian theology (p.73), caused by the "totally powerful and totally righteous God" (p.73), a problem whose locus classicus is the Book of Job (p.74). Berger argues that the rejection of the right of man to question God in this fashion, as Job resolves the issue---Berger calls this an argumentum contra hominem--- leads directly to the iustificatio of man (p.74).

The question of human sin replaces the question of divine justice. (p.74)

Berger then draws out the trajectories of this theodicy to the radical submission of Islam on the one side, and the predestination discussions in Protestantism on the other (p.75).

The Calvinistic glorying in the inexorable counsel of God, who from all eternity has elected a few men for salvation and relegated most men to a destiny in hell, is probably the culmination of the masochistic attitude in the history of religion. (p.75)

Berger reminds us that in early Calvinism, there was no way to tell whether oneself belonged to the elect or not, so one could spend an entire life as a worshipping Calvinist---a dangerous life in the Spanish-occupied Netherlands (p.75)---devoted to a God who "had already condemned the worshiper to damnation from the beginning of time" (p.75). [[RCK: Spoken like a true Lutheran, Berger.]]

The sovereignty of God and the negation of man reach a terrifying climax here in a vision of the damned themselves joining in the glorification of that same God who has sentenced them to damnation. (p.75)

That this theodicy was only for the religious specialist is indicated by the fact that in practice its tenets were quickly softened by positing a future state where the punishing would cease (p.76), or at least knowledge of the certainty of election (p.76).

Berger now turns to christology as the fundamental motif of solving the theodicy problem for Christianity (p.76).

... it is crucial that the incarnate God is also the God who suffers. Without this suffering, without the agony of the cross, the incarnation would not provide that solution of the problem of theodicy to which, we would contend, it owes its immense religious potency. (p.76)

[[RCK: Thus, docetism is not Christian.]]

Only if both the full divinity and the full humanity of the incarnate Christ could be simultaneously maintained, could the theodicy provided by the incarnation be fully plausible. (p.77)

From this point of view Berger rejects the origin of the great Christological controversies in "some obscure metaphysical speculations" (p.77).

However, the solution comes with a barb.

This condition is the affirmation that, after all, Christ suffered not for man's innocence, but for his sin. It follows that the prerequisite for man's sharing in the redemptive power of Christ's sacrifice is the acknowledgement of sin. (p.77) 

Berger discusses the potency of this shift by noting that the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II led to questions of anthropodicy, other than the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755.

[E]ven the nightmares of Nazism [were, RCK] being taken not as a terrible question about the credibility of the Christian God but as a confirmation of the Christian view of human sin. (p.79)

With the ongoing collapse of the plausibility of Christian theodicy, the call for "replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice", as Berger quotes Camus, has become the revolutionary goal:

History and human actions in history have become the dominant instrumentalities by which the nomization of suffering and evil is to be sought. (p.79)

Berger there departs from explaining religions and points to the theodicy as the central problem of all Weltanschauungen (p.80).

Our purpose has been accomplished if we have indicated the centrality of the problem of theodicy for any religious effort at world-maintenance, and indeed also for any effort at the latter on the basis of a non-religious Weltanschauung. (p.80)

Unless anomy, chaos and death can be integrated within the nomos of human life, this nomos will be incapable of prevailing through the exigencies of both collective history and individual biography. (p.80)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 2 -- World Maintenance

(<< Chapter 1 -- World Construction || Chapter 3 -- Theodicy >>)

Religion and World-Maintenance

Supported by human activity, ... [all socially constructed worlds, RCK] are constantly threatened by the human facts of self-interest and stupidity. (p.29)

The institutional programs are sabotaged by individuals with conflicting interests. (p.29)

The role of keeping everyone with the program and in line is delegated to the process of legitimation.

By legitimation is meant socially objectivated "knowledge" that serves to explain and justify the social order. ... legitimations are answers to any questions about the "why" of social arrangements. (p.29)

At the basis of legitimation is pure ontology, the "what's what" that distinguishes the categories that the rules then utilize (p.30) --- Berger illustrates that with an incest example. These categories should not be confused with ideas.

There are always some people with an interest in "ideas", but they have never yet constituted more than a rather small minority.  (p.30)

Clearly o some extent, all social knowledge is legitimating (p.30).

... the socially constructed world legitimates itself by virtue of its objective facticity. (p.30)

The need for legitimation beyond that is to address the "why?" questions of the new members of society as well as to help all, including the adults, remember (pp.30f). In the face of any challenge, the legitimacy of the social world order must be defended (p.31). Berger divides up the forms of legitimization, which range from the maxims (p.31) to the Weltanschauung (p.32), which Berger glosses as the level where "the nomos of society attains theoretical self-consciousness" (p.32).

The essential purpose of all forms of legitimation may thus be described as reality-maintenance, both on the objective and the subjective levels. (p.32)

Though there is no congruence between legitimation and religion, there is significant overlap.

... religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation. (p.32)

Religion is so good at this because it has access to the category of the "ultimate reality" (p.32).

The tenuous realities of the social world are grounded in the sacred realissimum, which by definition is beyond the contingencies of human meanings and activities. (p.32)

Because of its need to appear just like nature, which is unchanging and from the beginning, society is best served by a legitimization that obfuscates its origin ex nihilo.

Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. (p.33)

Thus, Berger can recap

Religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. (p.33) 

There are multiple ways to implement this: The mode of direct reflection means that the down here mirrors the up there (p.34)---Berger calls this the "microcosm/macrocosm scheme" of legitimization (p.34). Berger points out that later civilizations would transform this obvious scheme into something more subtle.

Israel legitimized its institutions in terms of the divinely revealed law throughout its existence as an autonomous society. (p.35)

Thus, in religion,

... the humanly constructed nomoi are given a cosmic status. (p.36)

This is beneficial for institutions and for individuals.

 [Through religious legitimations, RCK] institutions are ... given a semblance of inevitability, firmness and durability that is analogous to these qualities as ascribed to gods themselves. Empirically, institutions are always changing as the exigencies of human activity upon which they are based change. (p.36) 

Looked at from the viewpoint of individual subjective consciousness, the cosmization of the institutions permits the individual to have an ultimate sense of rightness, both cognitively and normatively, in the roles he is expected to play in society. (p.37)

He is whatever society has identified him as by virtue of a cosmic truth, as it were, and his social being becomes rooted in the sacred reality of the universe. (p.37)

Even if society were not to withdraw the identifications, e.g. because the others forget or change the identification (p.37), threatening his own recollections of identity (p.38). The godhead is above such fickleness, becoming "the most reliable and ultimately significant other" (p.38). Such roles are then even stable against the foibles of the individual (p.38). Berger illustrates this with the example of fatherhood (pp.38f).

If social legitimation is tied to the cosmic order, then rebellion is a compact with the dark forces of chaos and the realm of demonic monstrosities (p.39).

Because men forget, religion must remind, and it does so through ritual re-enactment (p.40).

Both religious acts and religious legitimations, ritual and mythology, dromena [i.e. "the things that have to be done", RCK] and legoumena [i.e. "the things that have to be said", RCK], together serve to "recall" the traditional meanings embodied in the  culture and its major institutions. (p.40)

This reconnects the moment to the transcendental history.

It has been rightly said [by Maurice Halbwachs in Les cadres sociaux de la memoire, Paris 1925, RCK] that society, in its essence, is a memory. It may be added that, through most of human history, this memory has been a religious one. (p.41)

This insight implies

the rootedness of religion in the practical concerns of everyday life. (p.41)

Religion thus serves to maintain the reality of that socially constructed world within which men exist in their everyday lives. (p.42)

That reality is challenged by marginal experiences, some of which such as sleep occur very regularly and frequently (p.42).

The reality of everyday life, therefore, is continuously surrounded by a penumbra of vastly different realities. (p.42)

Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality---of the world, of others, and of self. (p.43)

Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality. (p.44)

Because the meaning of the marginal situation has been preserved,

[it RCK] is thus possible to have a "good death", that is, to die  while retaining to the end a meaningful relationship with the nomos of one's society---subjectively meaningful to oneself and objectively meaningful in the minds of others. (p.44)

Berger points out that such effects are not limited to individuals, but might affect larger groups or the entirety of a society.

... in other words, there are events affecting entire societies or social groups that provide massive threats to the reality previously taken for granted. Such situations may occur as the result of natural catastrophe, war, or social upheaval. (p.44)

Berger also reminds us that the need for religious legitimation is especially high when a marginal situation is induced, e.g. through killing in war or through execution in the case of capital punishment (p.44).

The ongoing maintenance of the socially constructed world generates a plausibility structure that can be subverted---Berger gives the example of Pizarro killing the Inca Atahualpa (p.45)---which effectively destroys the world of those participating in that society (p.46). The plausibility structure is therefore related to the specific community for which this structure is meaningful (p.46).

The reality of the Christian world depends upon the presence of social structures within which this reality is taken for granted and within which successive generations of individuals are socialized in such a way that this world will be real to them. (p.46)

This means that a world under threat will ratchet up its legitimization effort.

The less firm the plausibility structure becomes, the more acute will be the need for world-maintaining legitimations. (p.47)

Berger points to the mutual pressure generated by Christendom and Islam to legitimate and vindicate one's own stance with respect to the other (p.47).

This example is particularly instructive because the antagonistic theoreticians employed an essentially similar intellectual apparatus for their contradictory purposes. (p.47)

Berger however wants to guard against being misunderstood in one crucial way.

The implication of the rootage of religion in human activity is not that religion is always a dependent variable in the history of a society, but rather that it derives its objective and subjective reality from human beings, who produce and reproduce it in their ongoing lives. (p.48)

Religious ideation can cause social processes and social processes can cause religious ideation (p.48); that is their dialectic, as Berger insists repeatedly.

The opportunity for such "social engineering" to maintain the plausibility structure of a particular religion, however, is tied to the reach of the group. In a situation of little competition, such as the Christian Middle Ages, other moves are possible (p.48) than in the situation of religious plurality (p.49), where competing interpretations exist. Extermination and segregation are less successful in this case (p.49).

The problem of "social engineering" is then transformed into one of constructing and maintaining subsocieties that may serve as plausibility structures for the demonopolized religious systems. (p.49)

The plurality of solutions reveals the precarious nature of the individual solution and undercuts the inevitability effect.

Since every religious world is "based" on a plausibility structure that is itself the product of human activity, every religious world is inherently precarious in its reality. (p.50)

This means that conversions remains a possibility, and the de-ghettoized Jews of the Modern era are more prone to it than their Medieval ancestors, as Berger illustrates (p.50). There are modes of conversion control---apologetics (p.50) on the one hand, and other forms of defense

education, and sociability, voluntary restrictions of social contacts that are dangerous to reality-maintenance, voluntary group endogamy (p.50)

to name but a few,  yet the co-existence makes these more difficult to implement.

At the same time, once the migration from one plausibility structure to another has taken place, the individual has to work hard to maintain his new attachment (p.51). "Evangelism" and "care of souls" are two sides of the same coin (p.51).

Every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death. The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men ... as they walk, inevitably, toward it [i.e. death, RCK]. (p.51)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 1 -- World Construction

Religion and World-Construction

Berger locates the role of religion in the fundamental dialectical process of world creation, where man creates the world and the world creates man.

The fundamental dialectic process of society consists of three moments, or steps. These are externalization, objectivation and internalization. (p.4)

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and mental activity of men. (p.4)

Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity [i.e. objectivation, RCK] (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. (p.4)

Internalization is the reappropriation by men of the same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness. (p.4)

In short:

It is through externalization that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man is a product of society. (p.4)

The need for externalization is coupled to the "unfinished" (p.4f) character of man.

... man's instinctual structure at birth is both underspecialized and undirected toward a species-specific environment. (p.5)

The world-building activity of man, therefore, is not a biologically extraneous phenomenon, but the direct consequence of man's biological constitution. (p.5)

[Man, RCK] ... produces himself in a world. (p.6)

World here designates "culture" (p.6).

[Culture's, RCK] ... fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for human life that are lacking biologically. (p.6)

However, because they are man-constructed and not backed by natural laws like the physical world, culture is more fragile.

Culture must be continuously produced and reproduced by man. Its structures are, therefore, inherently precarious and predestined to change. (p.6)

Worlds must be built, yet it remains difficult to keep them going. This ongoing activity produces what we often call society.

Society is constituted and maintained by acting human beings. It has no being, no reality, apart from this activity. (p.7)

Berger rejects any more natural foundation than that man is a world builder; all the other specifics of culture are not founded in the natural world. The reason society is privileged has to do with the fact of man as a social animal.

Homo sapiens is the social animal. This means very much more than the surface fact that man always lives in collectivities and, indeed, loses his humanity when he is thrust into isolation from other man. (p.7)

... the world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise. (p.7)

Men together shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on. (p.7)

Society structures, distributes, and co-ordinates the world-building activities of men. And only in society can the products of those activities persist over time. (p.7) 

Berger sees in the identification of these external entities, such as the family or society or the economy, one of the key contributions of the sociological point of view: it strips them of their hypostasized status (p.8).

Berger now turns to the problem of internalization, the fact that the collective products of men acquire a reality of their own.

Once produced, this world cannot simply be wished away. (p.9)

The material case is easy to illustrate: once plows have been constructed, they are physical objects that are in the way, can hurt people falling over them, and begin to impact the agricultural logic [[RCK: e.g. through activities such as a proper time for plowing]]. The argument is then extended to the non-material objects.

Man invents a language and then finds that both his thinking and his speaking are dominated by its grammar. (p.9)

Man produces values and discovers that he feels guilty when he contravenes them. (p.9)

At the same time, the objectivity also has the connotation of being shared.

Culture is there for everybody. (p.10) 

... the cultural world is not only collectively produced, but it remains real by virtue of collective recognition. (p.10)

Thus

... society is a product of human activity that has attained the status of objective reality. (p.11)

Society confronts man as external, subjectively opaque and coercive facticity. (p.11)

Thus the appropriate moniker of culture as our "second nature" (p.11).

... society manifests itself by its coercive power. The final test of its objective reality is its capacity to impose itself upon the reluctance of individuals. (p.11)

Society directs, sanctions, controls and punishes individual conduct. In its most powerful apotheoses (not a loosely chosen term, as we shall see later), society may even destroy the individual. (p.11)

This compelling force is a key constituent for something being a social reality.

... no human construction can be accurately called a social phenomenon unless it has achieved the measure of objectivity that compels the individual to recognize it as real. (p.12)

Berger illustrates this with reference to the English language.

The objective reality of culture thus makes for a box in which an individual's biography can take place.

... the individual's own biography is objectively real only insofar as it may be comprehended within the significant structure of the social world. (p.13)

... the individual's own life appears as objectively real, to himself as well as to others, only as it is located within a social world that itself has the character of objective reality. (p.13) 

... the objectivation of human activity means that man becomes capable of objectivating a part of himself within his own consciousness, confronting himself within himself in figures that are generally available as objective elements of the social world. (p.14)

It is only when these objectivated structures begin to influence man's own consciousness (p.15) that internalization has taken place. This comes to the fore especially in socialization,

... the processes by which a new generation is taught to live in accordance with the institutional programs of the society (p.15).

This is not just learning, but shaping, acceptance of the precepts as one's own. The measurement of success of this undertaking is the degree of symmetry between objective reality and subjective internalization (p.15). This is the origin of meaning for the individual (p.16) [[RCK: see also (p.21)]].

The processes that internalize the socially objectivated world are the same processes that internalize the socially assigned identities. (p.16)

... the individual appropriates the world in conversation with others, and, furthermore, that both identity and world remain real to himself only as long as he can continue the conversation. (p.16)

That need to continue the conversation expresses the precarious nature of the construction.

The difficulty of keeping a world going expresses itself psychologically in the difficulty of keeping this world subjectively plausible. (p.16)

The vital role of the conversation follows from the fact what happens when the conversation ceases.

If such conversation is disrupted (the spouse dies, the friends disappear, or one comes to leave one's original social milieu), the world begins to totter, to lose its subjective plausibility. (p.17)

Berger illustrates this with the role of the uncle in matrilineal society, and how the internalized man will act avuncular and be an uncle (p.17).

Berger disavows a deterministic or mechanistic interpretation of that dialectic; the fact that the individual is a participant in the conversations that shape his stance indicates this and speaks of active appropriation rather than passive absorption (p.18).

... the individual continues to be a co-producer of the social world, and thus of himself. (p.18)

Berger illustrates this in the language (p.18) and its change over time through use (p.19).

Thus,

... the socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering of experience. A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals.  (p.19)

Though that ordering capability never terminates and becomes total, it tends toward that and is thus better described as totalizing (p.20). The parts that are difficult to relate to, the marginal experiences, have their own logic in the setup (p.20).

In what it `knows`, every society imposes a common order of interpretation upon experience that becomes `objective knowledge` by means of the process of objectivation discussed before. (p.20)

Though some of that knowledge is theoretical and rule-like (often the socially most important parts) (p.20), the majority is pretheoretical [[RCK: heuristic]] (p.21).

 Most socially objectivated `knowledge` ... consists of interpretative schemas, moral maxims and collections of traditional wisdom that the man in the street frequently shares with the theoreticians. (p.21)

It is by virtue of this appropriation [of the nomos of the social ordering of experience, RCK] that the individual can come to "make sense" of his own biography. (P.21) 

The future attains a meaningful shape by virtue of the same order being projected onto it. ... to live in the social world is to live an ordered and meaningful life. (p.21)

Society is the guardian of order and meaning not only objectively, in its institutional structures, but subjectively as well, in its structuring of individual consciousness. (p.21)

Thus the anomic disruptions are immensely powerful, as they can bring about a loss of any "sense reality and identity" (p.21) for the individuals, Such disruptions can occur at the social or the individual level.

They might involve large collective forces, such as the loss of status of the entire social group to which the individual belongs. They might be more narrowly biographical, such as the loss of significant others by death, .... (p.21) 

This psychological and moral threat justifies considering the socially established nomos "a shield against terror" (p.22).

... the most important function of society is nomization. The anthropological presupposition for this is a human craving for meaning that appears to have the force of instinct. (p.22)

Men are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality. This order, however, presupposes the social enterprise of ordering world-construction. (p.22)

... the danger of meaninglessness ... is the nightmare par excellence, i which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness.  (p.22)

Thus the despair of suicide, as well as the amounts of sacrifice people are willing to undertake to return to a nomically satisfying state.

... existence within a nomic world may be sought at the cost of all sorts of sacrifices and suffering---and even at the cost of life itself, if the individual believes that this ultimate sacrifice has nomic significance (p.22).

The most acute marginal threat is death (p.23).

Death presents society with a formidable problem not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions of order on which society rests. (p.23)

... the marginal situations of human existence reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds. (p.23)

See in the perspective of society, every nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle. (p.23)

[The "alien forces of chaos", RCK] ... must be kept at bay at all cost. (p.24)

If socialization was successful, then the social world can be taken for granted. The more inevitable the social construction appears, the better for society at large.

... institutional programs are endowed with an ontological status to the point where to deny them is to deny being itself---the being of the universal order of things and, consequently, one's own being in this order. (p.24)

The result of this is that the social construction merges with the natural universe.

Nomos and cosmos appear to be co-extensive. (p.25) 

 This is the point where religion enters into the argument.

Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religion is cosmization in a sacred mode. (p.25)

By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience. (p.25)

Berger admits that the forms of the religious have a bewildering variety, but posits some underlying uniformity, which he refuses to attribute to either diffusion or an internal logic of man.

Although the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a away in which other non-human phenomena (specifically, the phenomena of non-sacred nature) do not. The cosmos posited by religion thus both transcends and includes man. (p.26)

Because the sacred cosmos is fundamentally antagonistic to chaos, it is also a fundamental shield.

The sacred cosmos emerges out of chaos and continues to confront the latter as its terrible contrary. ... The sacred cosmos, which transcends and includes man it its ordering of reality, thus provides man's ultimate shield against the terror of anomy.  (p.26)

Berger then draws a differentiation between how cosmization can play out; specifically, they need not all be religious (though historically they have been for the majority of man's existence).

Cosmization implies the identification of this humanly meaningful world with the world as such, the former now being grounded in the latter, reflecting it or being derived from it in its fundamental structures. (p.27)

Particularly in modern times there have been thoroughly secular attempts at cosmization, among which modern science is by far the most important. (p.27)

But religion has been the standard mode of maximizing man's externalization.

... religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant. (p.28)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

History of Transportation before 1860

Early Trails

The Appalachian mountains separated the Ohio-Mississippi hinterland from the Atlantic seaboard, and overcoming this separation was the task of early trails (p.3). The efficient sea communication on the Atlantic shore had the curious effect of providing "a stretch of ocean ... over which goods could be transported at less expense than they could be carried overland for distances which to-day seem inconsiderable." (p.3) 

... the colonies throughout the colonial period were commercially closer to Europe than they were to one another. (p.3)

Trade routes into the interior were still necessary, however, as the "seaboard communities could not themselves produce the commodities required by this traffic".

Prior to the Revolution intercontinental commerce was inconsiderable, and intercolonial trade-routes, where they existed, were entirely inadequate. (p.4)

The coastal plain was well opened up by rivers, whose branches led into the valleys and gaps of the mountains.

A study of the spread of settlement up to 1775 shows that the immigrant population ran up the river valleys as far as the fall-line, and there generally stopped. (p.4)

After the Revolution, the twin patterns of the westward migration and the eastward flow of products made the question of how to traverse the Appalachian system "a dominant issue in national politics, involving the economic welfare and growth of every section of the country" (p.4)

The parallel ranges of the Appalachian, a system 300 miles wide and 1300 miles long, reached from the Green Mountains in Vermont, to the pine-hills of Alabama. The rivers could not be navigated up to the mountains, but the headwaters revealed good passes, though in the South these paths ended up being somewhat roundabout.

In  Pennsylvania the chief route to the Ohio followed the West Branch of the Susquehanna. Farther south was another route by the Juniata to a tributary of the Allegheny. (p.4)

Bibliographical Record
Balthasar Henry Meyer, History of Transportation in the United States before 1860, Washington (Carnegie Institute of Washington) 1917.

Potash and Pioneering in the US of A

In his 1951 article Origin and Occurrence of Commercial Potash Deposits in the Proceeding of the Academy of Science of Oklahoma, Volume 32, Section D, p.123-125, Robert Fite gives a one paragraph summary of potash production before 1850 in the US of A (1851 was the year the Germans discovered natural or geological potash in Strassfurt).

Potash has been an important item of commerce for centuries. Until recently, its use was restricted to the manufacture of soap, glass, and black gunpowder. The salt was obtained by leaching ashes of wood and other vegetative wastes tn large iron pots-hence, the name "potash," It became the principal product of the chemical Industries in America before 1850 as a byproduct of clearing the virgin forest lands for agriculture. The total annual supply for these chemical uses, however, never amounted to more than a few thousand tons for the entire world. (p.123)

As far as the production is concerned, the American Academy of Sciences ran a short article in 1793 that may be relevant to this, Aaron Dexter, Observations on the Manufacture of Pot Ash [sic!],  in: Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1793), pp. 165-170.

First of all, the book repeats the information given by Mark L. Staker in his Whitney in Ohio article for BYU Studies 42.1 (2003), pp.75ff. So this makes it likely that when Staker speaks about "manuals", he had something this information in mind.

Dexter argues that quality of the potash needs to be improved (p.165) and that this low quality is not the fault of either the equipment or the impurities (p.166), but rather of the technique.

Too often, not all of the salts are extracted from the ashes.

For this purpose, rain or river water ought always to be preferred. The ashes should be saturated, and remain with about an inch of water over the top of them for twelve hours at least. (p.166)

By straining the leach out of the tub, either with a small hole or a false bottom, so that none of the ashes can escape, water can be continuously replenished. The lies needs to be boiled

... until they are so reduced in strength, as they will no longer pay the expense of boiling. The ashes however, still to be preserved; and fresh water applied as before. And when drawn off, they may be used with profit on fresh ashes, as long as there remain in the lies any salts, which may be discovered by the taste. (p.166-167)

Next, Dexter recommends double-filtering the lie, as it exits the tub and as it enters the receiver. Then it needs to sit for 24 hours. When transferred into the kettle, the sediment needs to be left behind in the receiver (p.167).

Every precaution should be taken to let nothing fall into the lies previous to, and whilst boiling. Therefore, that injurious practice of laying wood on the kettles for drying must be avoided. (p.167)

[[RCK: it is hard to believe that putting wood on the kettles did dry them instead of steaming them.]]

The first drawn lie should be boiled down to half; later lies even more so. At that point, lime can be added, though mixing the lie into the ashes is fine too.

The lie should now cool off to the point that it is body temperature ("to the state of blood heat" (p.167)), and again there will be sedimentation,  a "chalky earth", which needs to be detained. Once the earthy matters and the common salt (p.168) have been removed, using the same process as salpeter production uses for the common salt, the lie is ready to be fluxed. This involves boiling the lie down completely (p.168). Then the fire is increased to "for the purpose of destroying the inflammable substance" (p.169). Dexter provides a sliver-based test for evaluating the quality of the potash, which is re-dissolved in water and then a silver coin turned dark or black with it if the "inflammable substance" has not been removed. If the potash contains the "inflammable substance", then either re-dissolving in pure water and re-fluxing is required; or the potash is turned into "pearl ashes ... by calcination" (p.169).

Dexter knows that the process is discouragingly long, believes that the cleaned lie not only fluxes faster, but that the superior quality of the potash with fetch a better price (pp.169-170).

Dexter closes with the observation (p.170), that the importance of the subject matter, since potash production is even discussed by legislatures, and the need to be comprehensible to the business people and workers who produce the chemical, have led him to write the article in the straight-forward language chosen. (As an example, on (p.169), Dexter uses the term "oily substance" as an analogon for his "inflammable substance", because that is the term the workers use.)

Joseph Smith Fielding on Evolution

A thought to ponder

But the strong restorationist impulse in Mormon thought made the present only a copy of the past and had the effect of shortening the historical perspective that supported evolutionary thought. If present and past could be brought together in this way, the possibility of the kind of elaborate systems of social and cosmic evolution as that envisioned by Spencer would certainly be questioned. Furthermore Mormon anthropomorphism made God the prototype of man. Adam was literally his offspring. T o think of a being made in the literal image of God as only the result of descent from other forms of life was a difficult move indeed.

(Journal of Mormon History, 1978 (vol 5) (p.38) 

When Campbell's Delusions were published

Oh my Goodness, I had no idea that Alexander Campbell published his Delusions an analysis of the Book of Mormon already on February 7th, 1831, two days before Joseph Smith Jr received the first part of his revelation on the Law of Consecration (D&C 42). And Rigdon only converted in November of 1830. That's a three month turn-around time!

One thing that this implies is that Campbell in the Delusions, when speaking of common stock [via the Munster incident, RCK] (p.6), cannot criticize the Smith version of the common stock system of D&C 42---similarly to how his father, in his exchange with Rigdon, cannot have (Hayden 1875, p.217) [= (Howe 1834, pp.116-123), since that dates from February 4th, 1831, cannot have meant the Smith version (Howe 1834, p.121)---but must be targeting the Rigdon version that Campbell had only heard about at the Austintown Mahoning Society Meeting that summer (Hayden 1875, p.299).

Campbell and Rigdon in Richardson 1870

Richardson (2:43) points out that in the aftermath of the Walker debate, the "undenominational independence of belief" [that stemmed from Alexander Campbell's anti-creedal attitude, RCK] was a big problem for the Baptists.

Bentley and Thomas Campbell had once met on the way from Philadelphia without proper introduction (2:43) around 1809.

Bentley had organized Baptist ``ministers' meetings'' in the Western Reserve, from which on August 30, 1820, the Mahoning Baptist Association was born (2:44). In 1821, Bentley read the Walker Debate, and decided to visit Campbell as soon as possible. When he and Sidney Rigdon, then the great orator within the Mahoning Association, were on the road on association business, they took a day's ride detour to stop over in Kentucky and converse with Campbell, thus becoming part of the reformation project (2:44; Hayden 1875, p.19). In turn, Alexander Campbell began to attend the association meetings, starting with the summer of 1821 (2:47).

Sidney Rigdon and Adamson Bentley of Warren Ohio were brothers-in-law, being both married to daughters of Mr. Brooks, of Warren (2:47).

(2:47) believes that Alexander Campbell's continued influence with the Redstone Association and preaching in Baptist churches helped Sidney Rigdon to receive a call from the Pittsburg Baptist church in 1822. At the same time (2:48), Campbell wanted Rigdon and Walter Scott, who was a New Testament lecturer at Mr Forrester's church,  to join forces. Campbell wanted the congregations to merge as well, but the communities resisted this idea.

By late 1822, weakened from the labors of the Buffalo Seminary, Alexander Campbell closed the school and switched to a mode of supporting the Reformation that took a cue from the success of the publication of the Walker debate (2:48). After consultation with his father, Thomas Campbell, and Walter Scott, Alexander Campbell issued a prospect for The Christian Baptist in the spring of 1823 (2:49f). Campbell built his own printing office on his farm ``near the creek-fording, at the foot of the cemetery hill'', purchased type and press, hired skilled laborers and published some 46,000 volumes of his own writing over the next seven years (2:50f).

In May 1823, a Presbyterian minister and former lawyer, Mr [William L., RCK] McCalla, from Augusta, Kentucky, began to correspond with Campbell regarding a new debate on infant baptism (2:51). They settled on Washington, Kentucky and October 14th, 1823, as place and time for their debate. Campbell humorously reminded McCalla that even the Archangel Michael had not railed against the Devil when they both contested the body of Moses (cf. Jude 1:9).

In October 1823, with the Ohio too low for steamboat navigation, ALexander Campbell travelled by horseback to Kentucky to debate Mr McCalla (2:70). He was accompanied "by the pastor of the Baptist church in Pittsburg, Sidney Rigdon, who wished to be present at the discussion".

After the debate, which did not go well for McCalla, who could not refrain from demonizing Campbell (2:86) and did not give reply to his arguments (2:80), Campbell was glad that he had participated.

And we are fully persuaded that a week's debating is worth a year's preaching, such as w generally have, for the purpose of disseminating truth and putting error out of countenance. (2:90). 

However, Campbell was unhappy about being misread as supporting the Baptists, rather than baptism. As he mentioned to a group of Baptists in the evening, after a heavy day of debating McCalla:

For let me tell you that I have almost as much against you Baptists as I have against the Presbyterians. They err in one thing and you in another; and probably you are each nearly equidistant from original apostolic Christianity. (2:88)

Upon arriving home, Campbell began immediate work on the publication of the McCalla debate, using not only his own notes, but also those kept by Sidney Rigdon for the occasion (2:95).

[[RCK: McCalla published his own response, in 1828 in Philadelphia, where he had moved; cf. William Latta McCalla, A Discussion of Christian Baptism, Philadelphia 1828, Volume I & Volume 2. For a more general appreciation of Alexander Campbell's debates, cf. Jesse James Haley, Debates that made History: The Story of Alexander Campbell's debates ...,  St Louis, 1920, one volume.]]

After the Redstone Association meeting of 1823, Walter Scott and Sidney Rigdon collaborated more closely with regards to their congregations, and a union was established in 1824 (2:99). Campbell's congregation at Wellsburg, Virginia, was received into the Mahoning Association that same year, sending Campbell as their messenger to the meeting at Hubbard, Trumbull county (2:100). The questions submitted showed an increase of interest in the primitive Church.

In 1825, Alexander Campbell published his Essay on the Ancient Order of Things in the Christian Baptist, vol 3, Nr.9, p.360 (2:127), arguing for the appropriateness of reimbursing the bishop for their work.

The abuses of the principle have led many to oppose even the principle itself. (2:128)

 Sidney Rigdon at the same time returned to Ohio, while Walter Scott was still teaching school and getting married, but in 1826 he moved to Steubenville, where he started an academy (2:128). At a meeting in Warren, Ohio, where an even more aggressive push for the primitive church was urged (2:129), Campbell considered the need for an evangelist (2:130), as he wrote in the Christian Baptist, Vol 4, p.37.

In the fall of 1826, Alexander Campbell attended the Mahoning Association meeting at Canfield (2:163), and when he preached, Sidney Rigdon and Thomas Campbell were invited to a seat, as was Walter Scott, who was visiting the Western Reserve for the first time (2:164).

In the fall of 1827, the Mahoning Association met in New Lisbon (2:173). Campbell met with Walter Scott in Steubenville, who was working on a prospectus for a monthly paper to be called Millennial Herald (2:173)., but Campbell talked him into coming to the meeting. There, Walter Scott and Sidney Rigdon were asked to sit in the association (2:173), and in the evening (2:174) Sidney Rigdon delivered a discourse on John 8. Walter Scott was elected evangelist (2:174) and an initial collection of funds taken up, netting $11.75 (175). [The Christian Baptist was $1 per issue. RCK]

During the fall months of 1827, Margaret Campbell knew that she was succumbing to her sickness and entreated her husband to marry her friend Miss Bakewell after her departure (2:176).

Bibliographic Record

Dr Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 2 volumes, Philadelphia (J.B. Lippincott & Co) (Volume I 1868, Volume II 1870).

Biographical Notes on Stephen Mack

Here are some key socio-economic indicators for Stephen Mack from the writings about him.

Pratt's Edition of Lucy Mack Smith's Memoirs from 1853

(Note: The 1853 edition at the Internet Archive can be found here; the clean copy of 1845 at the JSP here; the rough draft begun in 1844 at the JSP here.)

While living in Tunbridge, Vermont, as a teenager, he was recruited for and served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War from 1781 to 1784 (p.30). 

In Tunbridge, Stephen Mack owned a farm and a store. Mack operated a mercantile and tinning business in Chelsea, the county seat of Orange County (p.31).

Even back in 1796, when Joseph Smith Sr and Lucy Mack Smith married, Stephen Mack was already a successful business man. Together with his business partner John Mudget (p.45), they gave a

wedding present of $1,000 to Lucy to get her started.

The merchant, Stevens, of Royalton, Vermont, who swindled Joseph Sr out of his ginseng profits in 1803, had rented his ginseng factory's accommodations in Tunbridge from Stephen Mack (p.50).

Stephen Mack moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he  established trading relations with the Indians (p.31). [[RCK: the 1800 is wrong, it was 1807, and the author suspected that, providing the date under the restriction "if I recall correctly".]]

During the War of 1812, before the occupation of Detroit by the British Stephen Mack served as Captain under General Hull (pp.31f).

His business in Detroit was successful enough that he had a beautiful house, which was used to quarter British officers, and several stores, one of which held several thousand dollars of cash in its counting room (p.32). 

Stephen Mack, who was then an agent of the Pontiac company, was instrumental in founding Pontiac, Michigan, the second settlement in Oakland County (p.26), in 1818. 

Stephen Mack engaged in farming and building there, and operated a saw and a flour mill (p.31).

Stephen Mack financed the construction of the Pontiac-Detroit turnpike road (p.31).

By November of 1820, his mercantile business had expanded so that he operated several stores in Michigan and Ohio, one of which employed six clerks (p.31). 

Stephen Mack build a saw-mill in the city of Rochester [= i.e. Michigan Territory, RCK] (p.33).

Stephen Mack bequeathed "an estate of fifty-thousand dollars, clear of encumberance'', to his family (p.33) upon his demise [in 1826, RCK].

Durants' History of Oakland County

(The history can be found in the Internet Archive here.)

Before going to Michigan, Stephen Mack became a colonel in the Green Mountain regiments of Vermont (MH, p.i).

In 1824, Colonel Stephen Mack, together with the Hon. Roger Sprague, was the representative for Oakland County to the legislative council for the Territory of Michigan (p.21).

Stephen Mack build a saw-mill in the city of Rochester, Oakland County (p.29). 

Stephen Mack was the actual founder and the most prominent business man of Pontiac, Michigan, as part of the Pontiac Company, which had purchased the land (p.70); for the text of the incorporation, see (pp.68ff).

Mack, Conant & Sibley built the first dam in Pontiac, and there the first sawmill, during the winter of 1818-1819 (p.70). 

The first flouring mill was constructed in 1819-20 (p.70).

Colonel Mack built a distillery in 1823 and a woolen mill that did carding, spinning and weaving in 1824. (p.71)

Colonel Mack did not remove his family from Vermont to Detroit until 1822, and then brought them to Pontiac in 1823. (p.71)

Colonel Mack build a grist mill at Rochester in 1824. (p.71)

Joseph Smith [Jr, RCK], the Mormon prophet, was a cousin of the Macks, and visited Oakland County several times previous to his removal to Illinois. Almira Mack joined the Mormons at an early day and followed their fortunes to Utah, where she is still living [in 1877, RCK].” (p.71)

Indeed, Pontiac sent troops for the Zion Camp (19, to be exact), and Brother Fosdick as the local representative received letters from JS and the council. Almira Mack already joined the Church in April of 1830, coming down for a visit from Pontiac. Thereafter, shortly after her arrival in Kirtland, Lucy visited her widowed sister in law and family at Pontiac.

In the assessment of Durant, the legacy of Colonel Mack does not quite hold up to scrutiny.

After the colonel’s death his sons Almon and John M. were appointed administrators upon his estate, which was involved in the collapse of the Bank of Michigan. Colonel M[ack, RCK] was on the bond of James McClosky, the cashier of this institution, who defaulted to a large amount, and, being the one who had available means, his entire estate, with the exception of a moiety saved as dower for the widow, was absorbed in the settlement, and his heirs were virtually left penniless. (p.71)

A Google snippet from the Michigan Historical Society runs thus

McCloskey was cashier of the second bank to be chartered in this state, the Bank of Michigan, established in 1818; John R. Williams was president.

The case of the Bank of Michigan against Steven Mack went all the way to the supreme court of the territory, as did the case against the cashier James McCloskey, whom Mack had signed for. Some of the selected papers for Case #1136 against James McCloskey are included in the transactions. Because of the mess, Stephen's son Almon Mack petitioned to get out of being an executor of the estate, leaving just his brother John M. with the troubles. 

As Paper #9 in Case #1136 shows, James McCloskey was being prosecuted for a missing $20,000.--, which is albeit a hefty sum, only 2/5 of the sum claimed by Lucy Mack Smith for the legacy of her brother Colonel Stephen Mack. Confusingly, paper #14 of Suite #1136 is prosecuting for the amount of $12,000.--. It also alleges that James McCloskey did not keep proper books, or kept books inaccurately, or the wrong books.

The Michigan Old Pioneer and Historical Collection, Volume XXX, p.410-423, contains an article by Friend Palmer, entitled The Old Bank of Michigan.  Stephen Mack belonged to the corporaters of the Bank of Michigan (p.411), and its establishment was pursued because the territory was only trading in coin, coin fragments or in paper money from the East, almost worthless, causing the merchants much embarrassment and losses. Here the amount of money missing is reported as only $10,300 (p.414).