Charles Mathewes reviews Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution and ponders his "bold claims":
Most interesting perhaps is the role [Bellah] ascribes to “play” in human affairs, the seemingly non-functional part of human existence. On his account, the things we call “religions” today originated not only around gathering groups together, á la Wade, to make war and keep social order, but also around exercising certain human energies through various modes of play. Indeed, the importance of play is a core conviction of the book. Here Bellah is less an empiricist than a philosophical anthropologist, using Romantic philosophers like Friedrich Schiller, but also philosophically minded scientists such as Gordon Burghardt (author of The Genesis of Animal Play (2005)). This tradition proposes that humans are a playful species, and we are most fundamentally ourselves when we are not functional. Play is not the antithesis of seriousness but the antithesis of work, of sustaining the general scheme of the everyday in which we spend so much of our time.
In contrast to work’s anxious drudgery of constantly reinforcing social structures and hierarchies, of reestablishing who gets to be a parent and who a child, who the boss and who the employee, and so on, play is what we do when we “log off” from the grid of social structures. Play involves a dialectic of freedom and constraint, or better, freedom within constraint. This is obviously so in games, but equally so in any form of play. The boundaries of play, the delimiting and the defining of the conditions of play, themselves can stand in a kind of dream-like state of critical assessment, a kind of Habermasian reverie. In short, play nourishes us, makes us fully human, equips us for reflective agency and enables us to understand that behind (or above) the routines of the everyday there can be a carnival of an altogether different sort.
Previous Dish discussions of Bellah's work here, here, and here.
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