Pre-modern societies tend to have an integrated cognitive order, spanning most areas of knowledge and perception.
In its first appearance in premodern societies as a coherent, recognizable force, the cognitive order tends to be fused into a single continuous domain. At the center is something that nowadays we call religion, but the integrated realm typically also encompasses magic, art, music, dance, literature, and science (especially astronomy), all linked into the same core view of the world.
An integrated cognitive order can persist with amazing durability over the course of social evolution. We just tend to have a little more trouble recognizing one when a culture has evolved past the mud-and-wattles stage.
Europe's integrated cognitive system was not seriously challenged until the Renaissance and Reformation ushered in the modern era. During medieval times, the church was its primary source of knowledge, art and learning. The extent to which the church served this integrative function is probably what made it seem natural (to a degree that we moderns have trouble fathoming) for church leaders to assume the role, in Gallileo's case, of final arbiters in matters of astronomy.
In China, a central integrated belief system persisted into even more recent times. Confucianism, while not a religion in the Western sense of recognizing a god, is nevertheless such an all-encompassing system of belief and knowledge that right up through the nineteenth century, China's "civil service exams" (required for participation in the governing elite) were all about Confucianism.
(c) COPYRIGHT 1998 ROBERT WINTER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
