There’s a political science technique called rational choice theory. Essentially it treats people as ’utility’ maximizing units and then tries to calculate how they’ll behave. This can tie into a lot of game theory with specific games like the prisoners dilemma and chicken. Anyways even those that use rational choice theory note that while it can be useful, it certainly doesn’t capture the full range of human behavior.
I think a key part of what it leaves out is allegorical thinking. This may include cultural rules, religious ones, and various other stylized assumptions about how the world works. Moreover, I think that’s okay. Morale, faith, and various other less than rational sentiments can provide and edge in performance or society building. That said, there are obviously a lot of downsides, see religious wars and the spam in your inbox.
Anyways, this was prompted a bit by those recent fake memoir scandals and an interview with pan-religious theologian Karen Armstrong. Armstrong argued that outside of the last few centuries, nobody took most religious texts as literal facts. While I certainly buy that fundamentalism is a more recent movement, I’m highly dubious of that statement. It seems much more plausible to me that people’s ability to solidly differentiate between fact and allegory probably was tied to the development of the scientific method. It’s also not a new idea that perhaps these days a lot of people want more allegory but instead go seeking extraordinaire facts and implausible memoirs.
Anyhow, allegory can be a tough beast to pin down. Its utility varies from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age. I don’t think there is a simple way to integrate it into rational choice theory or that sort of thing. Heck a widely publicized study of allegory may change their utility. That said, I think it’s important to not just evaluate allegories as factual or not, but to analyze them as whether they are useful and whether they accurately describe human nature.
Moreover, I don’t think this is just something that needs to be done for the masses while a rational elite can dispose of them altogether. I tend to think Holden Caulfield is right, we’re can all be phonies at times, and going the absolute rationalist path doesn’t tend to lead to that much success in the happiness part of life (although it is of course quite necessary professionally in many fields including my own). In addition, some use this as a reason to bash atheists. I don’t think that holds, being an atheist means you put all the religious and spiritual stuff in the realm of allegory and not fact. That doesn’t mean there won’t necessarily be allegories that appeal to you.
Anyhow, that was rather rambling, but hopefully can be a basis for making points in the future.
Comments