We See The Sacred From Afar, To See It The Same

[Source]

Robin Hanson

Abstract 

68 reported correlates of treating things as “sacred” are listed, and collected into seven themes. Most can be plausibly explained via two hypotheses. The first, taken from Durkheim, is that treating things as sacred mainly functions to bind groups together via a shared view of it. The second hypothesis, suggested by psychology’s construal level theory, is that humans acquired a habit of seeing sacred things as if from afar, even when they are close, to more consistently see those things the same as others in their groups.

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"Humans have many important but messy and complex behaviors associated with the words “religion”, “holy”, “sacred”, “revere”, and “awe”. After a careful examination, my judgment agrees with that of many social scientists: the core concept here is “sacred”. And I find myself especially interested in this concept, as I specialize in institution innovation, and the sacred is often invoked to explain why such proposals are infeasible. Let us now focus on the sacred. Humans have long treated some especially important things in a distinctive special “sacred” way. For example, the following are widely seen as at least somewhat sacred: family, love, charity, courage, honesty, liberty, school, art, music, dance, fiction, innovation, epiphanies, inquiry, religion, spirits, sky, space, nature, sport, talk, friendship, health, medicine, children, democracy, law, sex, death, war, royalty, and nation. While we see wide variation in who treats what as how sacred, almost all of us treat some of these in a similar substantially-sacred way. Yes, we have many good reasons to value such things, but why value them in this special “sacred” way? "