More on Mumford

Just back from road trip from Texas through OK, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and NE Oregon. Whats up Manhappenin Kansas!! Nebraska is lame. Wyoming is beautifull. Crater of the moons in Idaho is spectacular. See my photos on Picasa.

In this entry I'll relate Mumfords thoughts on dreaming, ritual, and their relation to the growth of distinctly human thinking and culture. Mumford sees dreaming as an overflow mechanism of the brain. (Mumford, 49) He thinks humans got to know their own minds and the creativity the mind engenders through dreaming. The notion of a life beyond death, the other world or ancestoral realm inhabited by spirits and gods could have originated in the act of dreaming. We could explore our own unconscious and irrational side through dreaming, and bring order to it through instruments. "The invention and perfection of these instruments - rituals, symbols, words, images, standard modes of behavior - was....more neccesary to survival than tool-making, and far more essential to his later development." (Mumford, 51)

Since humans had to a degree cast off instinctual animal behavior, they had to develop a method of ordering their schizophrenic consciousness (waking, dreaming), of relating current events to past. The origins of ritual are in repetive dance and gesture in response to or recognition of natural or social events. Meaning could be applied to this behavior only if done over and over again by a group, "shared feelings" produced by "sequences of connected actions." (Mumford, 60) This type of communication is very different from any other animal communication because of its abstraction and the creative role played by the group. We used our bodies as the technology to express individual expierence through ritual behavior with meaning shared by the group.

Humans display a need for order and repetition that can only be satisfied by ritual behavior. You can see this in the infants insisitence on hearing a story read exactly the same way night after night. Repetitive play gives much satisfaction, thus showing how the human brain is geared toward the performance ritual. This order seeking aspects counters the openess and instability of human intelligence. Ritual does not always function this way, it can retard innovation and delay the development of intelligence. Rituals are group habitual behavior, and lend a conservative aspect to culture; they are concerned with doing things as they have always been done. But the establishment of order on the human psyche is what is important, and how this order was then discovered in the natural world.