History of Perception

Psychological History as the History of Perception

Donald M. Lowe outlines a procedure for the history of perception:

"Phenomenology describes thought as prospective reality. . .The history of perception [italics Lowe’s] is the intermediary link between the content of thought and the structure of society. Its procedure is to
1. periodize a society, in terms of its multi-level structure;
2. within the context of the period, constitute the ongoing field of perception, in terms of its communications media, its hierarchy of sensing, and its epistemic order of discourse;
3. within that perceptual field, describe the lived experience of time, space, and bodily life."


It is precisely by illuminating epochal changes in human perception that psychological history can contribute to “defamiliarizing the past.”



Bruce J. Malina makes the startling claim that ancient people had no psychology, and he is correct in the sense that their interior life was doubtless far different from ours. How, then, can there be such an animal as psychological history? Malina clarifies his claim by pointing out:

"Jesus group members, like their fellow Mediterraneans were individual persons in collectivistic cultures. Their principal concern in life was family or group integrity. . Collectivistic persons are non-introspective; they are simply not psychologically minded. This means that all events we might ascribe to psychological, mental, or internal sources were generally ascribed to personified entities outside the person: angels, spirits, demons and the like."

But lacking in introspection does not mean lacking in subjectivity or perceptiveness. Moreover, as Michel Foucault argues, the Greco-Roman philosophical “cultivation of the self” arose simultaneously with the growth of “Christianity” during the early centuries C.E. It is true that the “self” of the ancients was not the modern “self” and that their self-contemplation is not identical to our introspection, but it is not an exaggeration to say that among “Christians” and “Pagans” alike, this era witnessed the “discovery of the self.”

Mentalités

The French call aspects of social-psychological history the study of mentalités, how different groupings of people – peasants, artisans, nobles, shopkeepers, and so on, have perceived their surroundings. Some historians call this process reconstructing a worldview. But I agree with Karen-Claire Voss in her excellent article on spiritual alchemy:

"In contemporary usage, the term “worldview” mostly performs a distancing function: it is used to refer to a set of beliefs, doctrines, or philosophical ideas. However, when we say that the alchemists had a particular worldview for which they claimed validity we cannot mean that they merely held a set of beliefs about the world, or that they merely accepted a set of ideas concerning the world on an intellectual level. . . . To have a worldview both implied and entailed, for the alchemists, a specific experience of the world. [Italics Voss] That experience of the world not only gave rise to beliefs, doctrines, or philosophical ideas, but also supported a praxis that was consistent, congruent, with the worldview. Theory and practice were inextricably woven together."

I use the term “thought world” rather than “worldview” precisely because it implies more than just possessing a set of ideas. Our thoughts are us: our experiences, our emotions, and our beliefs. Attempting to reconstruct the thought worlds of past times is an extraordinary challenge requiring the historian to make the (inevitably unsuccessful) effort to suspend all judgments and preconceptions.

Memes vs. Ideas

In reconstructing Jesus’ thought world, we will attempt to navigate the perilous shadow world between memes and ideas. We think we know what ideas are, especially philosophical ideas, but most people, even highly educated people, do not think in strictly philosophical terms. A much closer approximation to how humans actually think, what runs through our minds is memetic, not philosophical. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." He goes on to say, “Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.” My argument here is that all transmitted knowledge is memetic. As Peter J. Vajk notes:

"It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. The meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. Nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme."

And Heith Michael Rezabek observes:

"My favorite example of a crucial meme would be "fire" or more importantly, "how to make a fire." This is a behavioral meme, mind you, one which didn't necessarily need a word attached to it to spring up and spread, merely a demonstration for another to follow. Once the meme was out there, it would have spread like wildfire, for obvious reasons... But when you start to think of memes like that -- behavioral memes -- then you can begin to see how language itself, the idea of language, was a meme. Writing was a meme. And within those areas, more specific memes emerged."

To put it another way, in exploring Jesus’ thought world we are dipping into his meme pool.