Big “intangibles”

We will address two more intangibles here before we evolve, with humankind, into trade and the use of money as part of economics. Those intangibles are religion and art. From the dawn of man to the present, religion has been integral to the human concept of reality and of community, for reasons which may not initially be apparent. Certainly modernity is rife with thinkers who not only challenge the intrinsic value of religion, but declare it a net destructive influence on human survival which should be dispensed with once and for all. It must be argued, however, that early man adopted or created literally nothing which was not of immediate value to survival, and that social patterns which not only fail to help, but actively harm, should, by their own action and their own inertia, vanish from the ken of man. A society which adopts and promotes suicidal patterns and practices should vanish. Yet here is mankind, after millions of years, still practicing religion. How? Why? What possible survival value could inhere in it? And why would people spend the produce of their labors on religion’s priests and its edifices, when there are mouths to feed and houses to build? 

The first and most basic value of religion is superstition. This is an actual value. From the very beginning, religion explained the unexplainable without resort to science or other rigorous examination of reality, such being unavailable at that time. The value of superstition is that it explains events, and it focuses the mind. A person who is frantic, terrified, unable to understand their circumstances, cannot organize their thoughts well enough to take any useful action in pursuit of their own survival. A superstitious person has “explanations” and almost certainly rituals and sacred objects, to calm and focus the mind, enabling coherent planning for survival to take place outside of and beyond religious practice. 

The next value of religion is ritual and ceremony. Dietary laws, for instance, seem largely to have arisen from the observation that (the) God(s) punished people who ate certain things or certain combinations of things which at first blush “should” have been harmless. Dietary laws reduced the incidence of things like trichinosis and food poisoning. Ritual circumcision reduced the spread of disease. Commands to make live sacrifice motivated agrarian peoples to produce surplus food. One way to assure sufficiency is to strive for excess. Mandatory charity has a similar effect, in addition to helping the poor survive and broadening the gene pool. Any number of rituals and ceremonies are without immediate objective value, but are at worst neutral in their effect on community survival for the most part, while others have at least some marginal objective worth. Purely harmful rituals should eventually (sometimes VERY eventually) die out, and can be perpetuated only so long as the authority which preserves them is perceived independently as being essential to the community -as the unhelpfulness of such rituals themselves cannot remain unseen to the adherents of the tradition indefinitely. (The human capacity for self-deception, while seemingly boundless, is in fact limited by what one might refer to as the Darwin effect – whereby reality eventually catches up to the deluded.) 

A third value encompasses cooperation, cohesion and compliance. Religious communities and states are more easily directed into group activity, mutual defense, patterns of “brotherly love” (at least, mutual non-aggression), etc. and, as such, are resilient against adverse conditions and adverse peoples. 

A fourth and final value is less concrete, yet no less real and effective. That value is one of “spiritual survival,” an “afterlife,” multiple “incarnations” or similar. At first blush, this might appear to promote death-seeking, because if one survives death and is already dead, one has forever escaped the dangers inherent in bodily mortality. And certainly, various forms of fanaticism take advantage of this calculation to promote their own ends of coercing the behavior of those peoples they perceive to be adverse to their interests (via suicide attacks, etc.). However, the concept of an afterlife and and ultimate reward or penalty can also be useful in motivating “moral” behavior – which is certainly a societal adhesive and may in many cases also objectively be a route to enhanced survival. 

It would appear, however, that in the vast majority, biological imperative rules the day. The conception that virtuous earthly activity can earn one eternal life helps to promote various virtues, most of which derive initially from mundane observations of what types of behavior promote individual or community survival. The further conception of spiritual brotherhood between humans or between all life forms tends to promote a pattern of thinking which entails an extremely high long-term potential for survival. It causes a human being to attempt to calculate and to act in accordance with such principles and conditions as will promote the long-term survival of the maximum possible numbers of people and species. Granted, this type of calculation is entirely possible without any perceived spiritual component whatever. It could even be said to embody the highest rational calculation of which mortal man is capable. It would appear to be strengthened, however, by some concept of ultimate personal reward, wherein “the universe,” and the individual as an enduring part of it are better for one’s acts. The survival of a single planet in all the universe is a necessarily finite concept and as such is, arguably, a less powerful concept than one that entails more life and more time than earth by itself.

For these reasons, religion persists, and all things considered, likely will persist for the foreseeable future. 

Religion having been beaten to death, art will be dealt with more summarily.

Art (and to a lesser degree religion) works upon mood and imagination (one might say “vision”) – two powerful influences upon the individual’s potential for survival.   People of more positive mood, who embrace a vision of future action and future reality, statistically live longer.  These traits both objectively and provably enhance biological sturdiness in an individual, and promote activity by that individual which materially enhances their prospects for survival.  In short, art promotes an positive outlook.  Those with a positive outlook do better and live longer, on average, than those with paucity of spirit and gloomy attitudes.

The survival of both religion and art throughout the history of man are prima facie evidence that they carry intrinsic value, else they would have been abandoned long since.  The brevity of our visit with art should not be taken as a sign that it is of limited importance.  Rather, it is of such great importance that volume upon volume could be written on it and still fail to do it justice.  So I leave that discussion for another time and place.

People pay for, or sponsor, both religion and art. They do this to gain the benefits and rewards of each, which are of objectively verifiable (if not readily quantifiable) value.  This is to say that there is demand for these intangibles, and that makes them part of any economy.