Faith by Numbers...and One by One

Sociology is a subculture of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of all humans at all times. That is not to say it is like Paul’s admonition, “Pray always” (or was that in Psalms?), but it means generally that the study of anthropology is very broad based and reaches for many topics. You could say, for example, that dinosaurs are anthropology because humans study dinosaurs. Despite that dinosaurs lived so long before human time that any relevance to environmental factors analogous to what exists today is completely erroneous, human curiosity with dinosaurs makes them a subject of anthropology, though indirectly.

Anthropology is one of the newest studies to poke its head above the surface of the ‘ologies. It is perhaps more ambitious than the others, and imperialistic. Anthropology divides itself into four major fields: cultural, archaeological, linguistical, and biological or physical. Thus it swallows up older, established departments such as history, medicine, primatology, languages, art, classics, grammar, psychology, education, literature, and certainly sociology, that comes under cultural anthropology, Margret Meade stuff.

I thought sociology was that trendy study of the Fifties and Sixties. I didn’t know it existed any more as a department unto itself, without archaeologists to bring in rich, glamorous grants, real estate deals, sacred findings. Sociology is useful as a subfield of a subfield of anthropology, pitted in direct opposition against psychology—the study of group dynamics versus the individual.

Anthropologists have to study Freud and Jung and Chomsky and Dian Fossey and Dennis Tedlock, Foucault, Geertz, Marx, the Leakey’s, the brothers Grimm, Goodall, le Projet du Garbage, and Zora Neale Hurston. It’s like the doctor who only studies one animal versus the veterinarian who has to study all species of our kingdom. Anthropology is a great way to learn a lot of different things, even soil taxonomy.

All these things feed upon each other. The study of human beings is the study of individuals and groups, how their biology predisposes their behavior within a current natural and social environmental overlay, plus factors of the past and the dynamics of interaction, how vocal and physical discourse continues to reform throughout human experience.

Urbanization is a worldwide trend of human populations. Technology has freed us from the farm to seek abstract provision for our basic needs; in other words, non-tangible currency is sought to cover food, shelter, clothes, safety, warmth, and potable drinking water sources, such as Starbucks. Urbanization requires compaction, which is an adaptation many people can fit inside their cell phones. People squeeze into Facebook as they would into a New York subway. We short-cut language, fitting a noun into the concept of red, and what makes red and how that color makes us feel, and also making idioms to wear over time into the smooth casings of cliché, dropping vowels out of a text message, as in ancient Hebrew.

Being able to fit is a crucial adaptation. Conformity is vital to survival. To live closely with others, you must fit closely with others. You must seek out commonality and belonging in order to survive the city. McDonalds, mass transit, syndication are popular commodities—everyone liking the same thing, everyone eating the same thing, everyone listening to the same thing, everyone buying the same thing. The individuals combine to behave as one organism, single cells in the arteries of the city.

Safety in numbers can also result in mass annihilation. Conformity is as vitally important as mutation.

The breakdown of counter culture and subculture can be useful to an extent, but needs to be not so rigid as to view alternatives to mainstream culture as necessarily detrimental or inferior.

In heaven, I believe there will be groups and individuals. According to the Beatitudes, the population of heaven is made up of the poor in spirit and those who suffer persecution for the sake of the Lord. The former is surely a group of people, not necessarily those who do a lot of thought on their own, but those who love the Lord, and the Lord loves them. The latter, however, are the saints, the individuals who stood in the face of mass dissention and declared their love of God. They declared their faith in opposition to the status quo who were mightily armed and even more mightily determined not to hear the single voice of individuality.

Christianity may be the next form of adolescent rebellion, with sex, drugs, and rock and roll off the taboo shelf and integrated into mainstream culture. Perhaps Christianity is the new counter culture, subversive to the norm of what is going on, but this is not the first time Christianity has been in this position.

Harmony is impossible if we’re all singing the same note, and dissonance is important too.