Taken from the New Scientist 20 September 2014 issue. Made-up world Large societies and the glue that holds them together are completely made up, says Bloch. Nations, tribes, religion, marriage, money and the law-enforcing powers of a judge are arbitrary products of our creative thought. So to create them, our ancestors must have had fantastic powers of imagination. If people belong to a clan, says Bloch, they might say we are members of this clan, we came to this land 200 years ago and will be there 200 years from now. But that idea can only exist in imagination. Without these imaginary structures, interactions within social groups are limited to being physical transactions between animals that exchange favours. If you want to have large-scale societies you have to move to a transcendental level of social cognition, says Bloch. So, according to Bloch, the thing that was stirring in our brains 10,000 years ago and that triggered the sudden world domination of our species was a significant upgrade in human imagination to a level that can conceive of the existence of abstract concepts like laws, nationality or religion. Since then, he says, humans have been using their remarkable imaginations to dream up and then create social structures and institutions, including religion, money, laws, nation states, science and much more. That is an amazing feat that may explain why we alone among the creatures on Earth have developed technological civilisations. But Bloch suspects there is a subtle downside. The imaginary fabric of human society makes it inherently fragile, he says. This is only a hunch for now, but I think there are moments when suddenly the arbitrariness of the system appears. Legalising gay marriage may be one such momentous issue for some people, he suggests. Im fascinated by the people who have been demonstrating against gay marriage in France, says Bloch. Talking to them, he found that what really worried them was this notion that if gay marriage is possible then everything will collapse. What I think is going on is suddenly an awareness of the imaginary nature of the institutions that we live in.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 15:17:39 +0000
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