Forgotten forerunners: Macalister’s invention of tradition
What is the ultimate evolutionary explanation, if any, for such cognitive depletion, euphoric arousal and prosociality occurring during religious ritual? Unfortunately, Harrison did not provide any answer.
Baldwin, instead, concluded his chapter on religion included in Darwin and the Humanities by stating that ‘religion is both a moral satisfaction and a social weapon’, whose ultimate cultural role was to provide the cognitive scaffolding for implementing normative decisions to strengthen in-group cohesion (Baldwin 1909: 108). Indeed, according to what Darwin himself suggested, and later discussed in evolutionary biology and genetics, selection might be exerted on different, interacting levels, i.e. genes, cells, individuals, family, groups, providing a multilevel environment for selective forces to act upon. Group selection, in particular, is a much discussed theory that sees evolution as acting at the levels of groups instead of that of individuals, with extended cooperation and altruistic behaviour among the members of the group as the driving force to outcompete other groups (Pievani and Parravicini 2016). This most basic Darwinian approach was one of the earliest to inform the scientific study of religion.6An interesting study of in-group cohesion was already advanced in 1882 by Cambridge professor of Anatomy Alexander Macalister (1844-1919), during the Inaugural Meeting of the Dublin Presbyterian Association. Published as Evolution in Church History, Macalister's contribution was a historico-philological analysis of the modification through time of the social composition of the ‘office-bearers' of the Presbyterian Church, i.e. the presbyters or elders. In an anti-fundamentalist tone, Macalister rejected the Presbyterian claim of historical continuity and preservation of the Presbyterian polity since the primitive church, disassembled Biblical inerrancy, and acknowledged human interventions in religious matters (Macalister 1882: 7-9).
Then, he defined evolution as ‘a capacity of variation in the train of sequences and external modifying influences, and the latter may be either the direct action of the environments on the phenomena, or may be due to a power from without, overruling and directly ordering the modifications'. In cultural matters, this ‘power from without' was human action (Macalister 1882: 10), which, insofar as socio-political environments were changing through time, devised new ways to adapt successfully to them. Therefore, Macalister identified the cultural forces within and without the community of believers, from ancient times to the Reformation, which shaped the creation, divergence, selection and modification of the Presbyterian polity (e.g. the need to institutionalize a ‘moral police force' to assist a limited number of pastors during the Reformation, the rapid diffusion of Protestant churches, etc.). Most importantly, and quite remarkably from a cognitive perspective, Macalister highlighted the historical appeal to authority and tradition to justify the invention and the continuous modification of such an institutional office (Macalister 1882: 28, 30-1).