Hardware Religion versus Software Religion
— Does Worldwide Spirituality Exhibit Basic Ingredients?
Summary: “Hardware Religion versus Software Religion” by Brian J. McVeigh explores the idea that religions can be understood through the lens of computer metaphors, distinguishing between “hardware” and “software” religions.
Hardware Religions: These are deeply embedded in cultural traditions and rituals, passed down through generations. They are akin to the physical components of a computer—tangible, enduring, and often resistant to change.
Software Religions: In contrast, these are more like applications or programs that can be updated or replaced. They emphasize personal belief systems, adaptability, and are often more individualistic in nature.
The post suggests that understanding religion through this framework can shed light on how belief systems evolve and interact with human cognition, drawing inspiration from Julian Jaynes’s theories on consciousness and the bicameral mind.
By viewing religions as either “hardware” or “software,” we can better grasp their roles in shaping human thought and society.
It is possible (advisable?) to strip away all the variations, dissimilarities, and kaleidoscopic richness and search for major patterns in world religions? Of course, the question in the social sciences, ever since they took shape since the Enlightenment, has been “are there universal, uniform, and unchangeable deep truths about human nature buried under the messy, unique particulars of place and period?” Each discipline contouring the current intellectual landscape differs depending on how they characterize the human condition, i.e., as something either defined by commonalities or differences.
I submit that we can identify the “hardware” of religion that undergirds its “software.” The latter means the local conditions, circumstances, and vagaries that the hardware requires to produce something of socio-religious significance. “Hardware” requires more explanation. By this term I mean the basic ingredients or common denominators that were present when religion first appeared. An important aspect of hardware is what is hardwired or genetically-innate. However, we want to avoid simplistic geneticism, as if complex behaviors can be reduced to genes. The interplay between genetic predispositions and environmental influences is subtle and dynamic, not a one-way street of causality. In any case, hardware was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for religion to arise the way it did sometime in the Neolithic. Hardware may implicate “universals,” but this term can be misleading, as many assume it designates what is innate. But some behavioral universals are probabilistic outcomes evolving from the demands of society that are acquired via enculturation; they do not automatically unfold as if an instinct. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between “essential” universals (evolutionarily baked-in) and “high probability” universals (acquired for expedient, socially pragmatic reasons).
My arguments are inspired by the hypotheses proposed by Julian Jaynes (1990). He argued that three millennia ago cultural changes led to the development of subjective introspectable self-awareness. Before the birth of Jaynesian consciousness, people were guided by hallucinations interpreted as divine voices and visitations. While Jaynes himself was as sensitive to local cultural inflections as any good anthropologist, he isolated key mechanisms of religious hardware that have been globally ubiquitous: Bicamerality, vestigial bicamerality, the general bicameral paradigm, authorization, and aptic structures. To this list I add hallucinability and the Bicameral Civilization Inventory.
Diachronic Trajectories, Not Synchronic Comparisons, Reveal Crucial Patterns
It is historical analyses, rather than cross-cultural comparisons, that highlight meta-patterns relevant to worldwide spirituality A temporal approach makes the apparatuses of the hardware of religion discernible, allowing us to see how Jaynesian consciousness was built upon bicamerality. Though exceptions and variations exist, in the main we can trace out meta-patterns of change that characterize the transition from preconscious to conscious periods. We can see how variant software articulations (responses to demographic pressures, local conditions, social complexity, etc.) were channeled and shaped by the constraints of hardware.
The agricultural revolution was both a cause and consequence of bicameral mentality. But the very success of the double psychology of supervisory being and subordinate mortal led to its demise, as this type of mentality could not accommodate the cognitive processing power required to deal with exploding populations. Polities and mentalities were in a feedback loop, each driving the other. As population increased (due to the initial success of bicamerality), more pressure was put on our psychological architecture to scale up to meet the demands of social complexity. Demographic scale and sociopolitical organization expanded, from chiefdoms, to towns, city–states, to kingdoms, regional empires, and large-scale multiregional empires. Eventually god-governed theocracies gave way to more secular organizations. Officially the gods left the halls of human government, but we can see their stamp of approval of a society’s politics everywhere — monarchies colored by the traditions of the divine right of kings, Middle Eastern theocracies, Japan’s Shintoist emperor, America’s Christian-infused culture wars, etc.
The first change to be noted concerns the relation between gods and mortals. In the early Neolithic era, when individuals dwelled in small scale communities that lacked class hierarchies, supernatural beings were closer to individuals. A flatter social pyramid reflected a more intimate, even casual relation among individuals and their spiritual superiors. Also, the distinction among ancestors, chiefs, and gods was not yet clear. Theophanic events (what we term hallucinations) were fairly common. Supernatural visitations began to occur less as the bicameral period wore on, and became restricted to rulers and priests.
Another major development involved what conscious individuals refer to as “belief” at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Before the emergence of consciousness, society was unshakably theocentric and disbelief about the gods was culturally impossible. It was a world of total conviction and unquestioning certainty. Probing, existentialist longings were absent. Pantheologism prevailed, i.e., people assumed that the gods governed all lands and were worshipped and even foreign divinities needed to be acknowledged and accepted. As bicamerality broke down, doubt and skepticism spread and eroded unthinking super-religiosity. “Religion” as we think of it, or a set of beliefs tied to psychological motivations, stepped onto the stage of history. Proselytizing faiths were born, as was the curious notion of conversion (transforming an individual’s interiorized relationship with a deity). No longer could it be assumed that one’s observable, ritualistic behavior reflected one’s unobservable loyalty to the divinities and their stewards on earth, the politico-religious elites.
The relationship between the gods and the world was altered around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse. While in preconscious times supernatural powers were immanent in the cosmos and subject to cosmic laws, in the postbicameral era the gods were regarded as transnatural (beyond nature) and transcendent (beyond human comprehension). As the gods retreated to the heavens, they became invisible, omnipresent, and remote. This trend went along with a change in the nature of divinity. In bicameral times, the gods were anthropomorphic and superhuman (though human–animal hybrids were not unheard of), while in the lost bicameral period they became otherworldly and extra-mundane.
Another change involved understandings of nature. Initially it was animistic and anthropomorphized, i.e., gods controlled various natural phenomena. But the latter increasingly became de-anthropomorphized and viewed as processes in-and-of themselves, an intellectual trend apparent not long after the demise of bicamerality. Related to all this were novel interpretations of the human, natural, and heavenly spheres. In preconscious cosmologies, the mortal, natural, and divine realms overlapped. But in postbicameral times, intellectual movements began to more clearly separate these realms.
Concomitant with all these changes were how the nature of spatiality was redefined. In bicameral times two orders of existence were recognized, the macrocosm and the microcosm. However, the emergence of consciousness added to this order of reality a new spatiality positioned within the individual — the introcosm. The consequence of this momentous development was a duality of “outer” and “inner” worlds, i.e., consciousness opened up a mental space that was opposed to external reality.
New understandings of the natural world were related to how different features of consciousness, such as excerption and conciliation, allowed a more effective type of abstract thought. These allowed thinkers to metaframe knowledge. In other words, rather than accumulating and cataloguing concrete “facts” and pursuing classificatory endeavors that merely produced lists, intellectual pioneers began to engage in hypothetical, speculative, and philosophical meditation. By the mid-first millennium BCE a protoscience had taken root in all civilizational cores. Reasoning replaced revelation.
Early on writing consisted only of theocentric literature, such as hymns, prayers, and temple-centric administrative records and inventories. Eventually, writing became less god-centered, and more philosophical “wisdom” literatures developed. And since time was no longer viewed in only cyclical terms, more linear conceptualizations structured complex epics and more narrative writing styles. The quality of textuality changed. In preconscious times, the closest thing to “historical writings” were king lists, royal annals, and official chronicles. It was not until the mid-first millennium BCE that more explicit “histories” were written (e.g., Hecataeus, Thucydides, Herodotus).
Methodological Concerns and Caveats
A few points about research issues. First, no reason exists why an analysis cannot incorporate both a hardware and a software perspective. Indeed, the hardware-versus-software distinction is not as clear-cut as I have been presenting it, as if cultural icing is simply layered over the cake of an invariant, preprogrammed code. Second, the machinery of hardware religion is not a preset algorithms. Rather, they offer societies scripts that people freely interpret and play out on the historical stage, not rigid rules that must be strictly followed. Finally, the gadgets constituting the hardware of religion do not offer us a single-key explanation, as if spiritual phenomena can be reduced to a grammar of human behavior. The hardware perspective is not a shortcut, i.e., avoiding airy abstractions are still necessary and collecting empirical facts.
I remember a conversation I had with Julian Jaynes in which he said that his critics did not understand how science made progress. They believed that by highlighting one minor weakness in his arguments, they could, like pulling on a thread of a huge ball of string, completely unravel his claims. The point is that some struggle with his ideas because they have a hard time adopting a bird’s-eye view, of taking a “big picture” approach. Of course, details in any scientific endeavor cannot be treated cavalierly. But science relies on statistical significance, accumulation of data, and refinement of findings, not sweeping, definitive conclusions tottering on a few facts. When one is testing hypotheses as momentous as those proposed by Jaynes, we need to appreciate general principles that reveal probabilities, not inexorable, predictable laws.
Learn more about Julian Jaynes’s theory by joining the Julian Jaynes Society and reading our books.
