"In order to mitigate... [their] fear, human beings and communities have surrounded themselves—not only with the walls of their houses and cities, with instruments and weapons, laws and institutions, but also—with protective spheres of symbols: myths and religions, values and belief systems, hypotheses and theories, the shining constellation of works of art. In a word, with a brilliant construct: civilization" (p 2).
The genesis of culture is fear, argues Hungarian sociologist Elemér Hankiss in this ambitious study, and in order to prove his thesis, he examines an array of human symbols, behaviors and other cultural phenomena as manifestations of how people cope with what frightens them.
The author, who is director of the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, begins with a survey of existing literature from social scientists and concludes that they have undervalued the role of fear as a motivating force in the creation of culture. He then grounds his theory in three basic concepts: the state of fear, the use of symbols to combat fear and the nature of the hostile world in which humans exist.
Subsequently, he turns to the fundamental duality of refuge/outside world and applies the duality to cultural categories such as the explanation for evil, human feelings of guilt, the need to see the universe as a rational entity, art and beauty as reflections of the breakdown and/or restoration of order, and later takes up phenomena such as jokes, play and games, and human "trivialities"—here he focuses on advertisements for perfume. Hankiss also borrows from a vast range of fields, citing thinkers and theories from not just sociology, anthropology and psychology, but also from areas such as literary and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, mythology, drama, music, the visual arts and others.
Perhaps such a task sounds too ambitious? Yes, certainly. But isn't it marvelous that someone has made a serious effort to take it on?
To his credit, Hankiss has incorporated lots of good material, and has produced many useful distillations of various works or bodies of thought. Along the way, he has amassed some very nice quotations which relate well to his ideas—such as Sartre on evil ("L'enfer, c'est les autres") or Samuel Johnson on the gods and human fate ("As we drown whelps and kittens, [the gods] amuse themselves...with sinking a ship"), or Jung on the meaning of the individual life ("I am a question addressed to the world").
The author is at his best when summing up the theories of others, or analyzing individual works. The section on tragedy, for example, elucidates the ways dramas rationalize the hero's death—from martyrdom to justice to making a symbol out of one's passing on—drawing on examples from antiquity and the great European national traditions.
Cherries and chance
Unfortunately, the author quite often launches into speculation based on personal observations. This tendency results in many unsubstantiated generalizations, superfluous detail and rambling—as, for example, in the chapter on play, where Hankiss attempts to rationalize play(s) and games by citing how he used to throw cherries up into the air and try to catch them in his mouth "as a naughty boy of ten." He uses this anecdote as the basis for assumptions about causality and chance. It's an interesting thought; it may all indeed have some connection; but the book does not flesh out the connections, nor does the author subject the ideas to any rigorous examination.
Hankiss writes in the Introduction that the book is intended for academics and the general public (p 4), but the serious academic will find much about the book unscholarly. The author tends to accumulate and analyze evidence without reaching any new conclusions or taking the argument deeper. Also, the structure is opaque—the reader is forced to supply the underlying rationale for the progression of the argument, and fill in gaps along the way.
He also uses figurative language which may alienate some readers. In the chapter on guilt, for example, Hankiss writes as if at some point in history, humankind—like a smart shopper about to make a big purchase—had the conscious choice of whether to take on the responsibility of having feelings of guilt.
"On the one hand, guilt... liberated man... It explained the presence of evil... It gave people... a kind of control... and offered hope... It guaranteed the help of God... On the other hand, this may not have been such a good bargain after all. According to all available evidence, humankind has had to pay an exorbitant price for living in the safety of this moral universe" (p 159).