Back to Contingency

For Plato, human reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary, whereas concrete objects and appearances of objects, as long as their existence is not explained through reason, are contingent. Real is only what can be rationally explained. Laplace's determinism continued to build upon these convictions. But despite the popularity of this powerful paradigm, science and philosophy never entirely neglected the idea of contingency. On the contrary, it remained a relevant philosophical topic during a time span ranging from Aristotle to Descartes. As mentioned, Aristotle was opposed to any deterministic denial of contingency: coincidences were not just subjective perceptions but real. Aristotle even created an ontology of contingency in which an aggregative totality called “the world” was composed of both necessary essences and contingent beings. For centuries, contingency would be discussed along these lines, and most of the time, this happened in theological contexts. It is only after Descartes that contingency would disappear from major philosophical debates—though not because it had been scientifically solved, but, paradoxically, because science and philosophy had abolished divine determinism. Contingency was worth targeting only as long as it represented the opposite of providentialism. Once philosophy was de-theologized, the modern world was freed from contingency much as it would later be freed from God. For the historians of philosophy Graevenitz and Marquard (1998), the intellectual history of contingency is therefore a major philosophical episode that ends with Descartes. In the aftermath of this long episode, contingency could still be seen as an antidote against scientific determinism. However, compared to earlier theological projects, these new discussions remained relatively marginal. It would only be with the rise of Darwinism and other important scientific theories such as atomic theory in the nineteenth century (which put forward the coincidence) that discussions of contingency once again became more prominent. In the twentieth century, relativity theory and chaos theory theorized contingency in their own ways. None of these sciences ever claimed to have solved the problem of contingency; they merely reformulated it in different fashions.

The Greeks did not accept cosmological contingency and believed that the universe had always existed as an eternal and unchangeable being. As has been shown above, in the Middle Ages, the theory of contingentia held that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was still sustained by a divine will.

This final chapter explores the ways in which Eastern philosophies avoid the obsessions with necessity that are so common in Western philosophy and culture, and which have led to a conspiratorial mindset, among other things. More consistently than Western philosophies, Eastern philosophies have tried to see the world in terms of contingency, or rather, as a realm in which the contingency/necessity dichotomy has been overcome. These views contrast most clearly with conspiracist ways of thinking, as the conspiratorial mindset's main occupation is to construct permanent and rigid identities, beliefs, foundations, and opinions. The purpose of these constructions is to create security. Eastern philosophies acknowledge that contingency can be difficult to bear, but the contingency-coping devices they offer are usually different from Western ones. Instead of replacing contingency with necessity, they recommend seeing necessities as non-essential. The conspiratorial mindset would certainly be the textbook example of a person in whom Buddhist teachers would try to instill an awareness of impermanence.

Strangely, the conspiratorial mindset can at times sound vaguely “Buddhist” as it tries to bring relief from the so-called real world or asks us to “awaken” to a reality that remains hidden from ordinary people. Such a Buddhist air seems to permeate the conspiratorial mindset because, on top of it, it preaches that the conspiracy must be borne like karma. But it is precisely non-Buddhist, because it is a non-dynamic perception of destiny or karma, or a view that refuses to see the contingency of time and history. The conspiratorial mindset cannot overcome its destiny and declare its shaping forces to be non-essential, but rather reifies destiny through ressentiment, and perhaps even to the point of seeking revenge.

Buddhism

Buddhism is traditionally rooted in doctrines of impermanence (anitya), emptiness (sunyata), no-self (anatta), as well as in conditioned or dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada). It teaches us to let go of such supposed necessities, as we tend to cling to them in the form of rigid images of our selves, or of fixed conceptions of how we think the world should be. The Buddhist philosophical view is that everything is impermanent, conditional, and thus contingent. Buddhism does not presuppose the existence of a god who controls the destiny of humans, with the result that, a priori, concepts of possibility and contingency can enter this philosophy more freely than in monotheistic religions and cultures.

Before proceeding to the analysis of contingency-necessity problems in conspiratorial thought, the term “conspiracy theory” needs to be clearly established. Given that the definition of the conspiracy theory has been a hotly debated topic in recent years, it is necessary to carefully present the methodology that I intend to use. I define a conspiracy theory as a framework of analysis that seeks to explain events through a conspiration. Often, conspiracy theories lean toward a belief that a group of people who share a common ethnic, political, national, or religious origin plot to harm another group’s interests. These theories can be warranted or unwarranted, though in common language the assumption that they are unwarranted is most current. It does not mean that the warranted ones are rare. Often, conspiracy theories that are labeled as unfounded have later been substantiated. Very often, attempts to point out illegal acts and atrocities authored by governments and big corporations are too easily discredited by labeling them conspiracy theories. Famous cases are the Watergate affair, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, the Iran-Contra affair, or, more recently, the vast surveillance program by the NSA. Multinational companies have a history of plots and counterplots to benefit themselves at the cost of the general population. Another example is Enron’s conspiracy to manipulate the supply of electricity to inflate rates in California (see Orr and Husting 2018). Or a classical case is that of the tobacco industry when, in 1999, a Florida jury declared the seven largest American tobacco companies guilty of misrepresentation and conspiracy to conceal the addictiveness and dangers of cigarette smoking. It is certainly true that the U.S. government regularly lies about its programs and agenda and famously misled other governments into the Iraq War through a conspiracy. These patterns are systemic and theorizing about them means revealing them. Governments and companies lie and dub those who reveal their barbarities “conspiracy theorists” as if that alone were proof enough for the irrelevance of their concerns. “Peaceful, law-abiding people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration,” writes Hagen (2022: 140).

The meaning of “conspiracy theory” is ambiguous (warranted or unwarranted), and the question arises whether the term should be dropped from academic vocabulary altogether. The ambiguity already concerns the term “conspiracy.”

The present book concentrates on how the conspiratorial mindset handles the phenomenon of contingency. Contingency can appear everywhere: in science, art, politics, religion, and everyday life. As mentioned, conspiracists tend to search for necessities and are reluctant to attribute certain events to chance. Everything happens for a necessary reason. So, what is contingency? When seen in isolation and abstractly, contingency is a logical and philosophical concept; however, even as an abstract concept, it has various shades of meaning, some of which need to be clarified first. Most basically, when what happens is neither necessary nor impossible, we speak of coincidence or of contingency. Sometimes the coincidence’s causes are known, sometimes they remain unknown. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “contingent” as “of uncertain occurrence; liable to happen or not; happening by chance; fortuitous; conditional; not predetermined by necessity […]” (Stevenson 2007). The coincidence is thus the event, and contingency is the concept trying to grasp the fortuity or the “coincidentality” of the event. In German, the coincidence is characteristically called Zufall, which means that an event unexpectedly “falls” into an environment and potentially determines other events. “Coincidence” expresses here the scholastic accidere, which means “to occur” (which is vorfallen in German) and which obviously gave its name to the accident. In Greek, the coincidence is endechomenon or symbebekos. Aristotle speaks in his natural scientific works (for example Physics, Β 6: 197 b 32–35) as well as in his logical treatises (for example Prior Analytics 46b–47b) and Metaphysics (for example 1025a) of the “kata symbebekos” (chance event),1 which subsequent generations of philosophers saw as an undetermined cause in the sense of the accidens. Scholasticism applied the symbebekos to language by seeing it as that which is not necessarily present in language, but which occurs unnecessarily and is thus accidental (see Mauthner 2012: 61). Aristotle applies the word endechomenon in various slightly differing ways, but most often it is that which is “neither necessary nor impossible” (On Interpretation, 25a37–41, 29b29–32, 32al8–29, 33b17, 22–23). “Contingent” as the modern translation of endechomenon has thus become common.

In modern thought, contingency and coincidence are commonly used interchangeably, a convention that was most probably introduced by Kant. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1974: 119), Kant uses the words “das Zufällige” (and not der Zufall) for what Leibniz, in his Theodicy, had called Kontingenz (I, §39).

It has been said in the introduction that the conspiratorial mindset very often creates its own alternative world. Just as superstitions were part of the medieval lifestyle, in modernity, for many, the unwarranted conspiracy theory has become a way of life. And like all lifestyles, conspiracism is often not a matter of epistemic representation but of acquaintance, repeated perception, and habit. The term “belief” is here justified to some extent. Beliefs are often created not on a scientific or factual basis (believing that) but on a cultural basis (believing in). Many overarching assumptions about how the world works are acquired, not through analysis, but through acculturation. That this is a matter of mindset and not of rational cognition is evidenced by the fact that people who believe in one baseless conspiracy theory do very often also believe in many others. They can even believe in theories that mutually exclude each other. Hagen (2022: 158–60) believes to have shown that writings by Wood et al. (2012) and Goertzel (1994), which attempt to demonstrate that such contradictory beliefs exist, are scientifically flawed. The problem is that both the former and Hagen’s argumentations are purely epistemological. In aesthetic terms it is rather normal that somebody is attracted by two theories that are not entirely compatible. Just like I can like two types of music that “exclude” each other. Unwarranted conspiracy theories are therefore not only false theories, but also cultures, subcultures, or tastes that develop a dynamic of their own. And just like the latter, they cannot be opposed by working with “true” and “false” as criteria, but, at best, with the criteria of “likely” and “unlikely.”

What is the conspiratorial mindset more precisely? Before delving into problems of contingency and necessity and their relationship with conspiracism, it is useful to identify the functions and the particular places that unjustifiable conspiracy theories occupy in the lives of modern citizens. Are these theories against any “enlightened” way of thinking, are they compatible with it, or perhaps even products of modernity and Enlightenment? The preliminary argument that I formulate in this chapter is that “Western Enlightenment,” as broadly understood as possible, has always produced a non-Enlightenment thinking or an alternative Enlightenment movement in its margins, and that the unwarranted conspiracy theory is a quintessential product of this development.

Through the death of God and the gradual disappearance of theological determinism, modern humans gained more liberty to shape their world. Their lives were neither predetermined, nor were humans considered victims of what the Middle Ages could still see as “satanic powers.” As philosophy— and with it, all theoretical thought about necessity and contingency—became “detheologized,” humans could feel as they saw fit. Compared with former times, life was less mightily determined by inherited expectations: a new horizon of possibilities opened up, which provided a hitherto unknown freedom. At the same time, it brought about a dramatic loss of order.

Contingency is the “air” that Marx famously speaks of in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto when announcing that in modernity “all that is solid melts into air”: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations […] are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify” (2012: 38). Baudelaire echoes this view in 1863 when framing modernity as “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” (2006: 403). The ever-increasing speed of change creates contingency.

On the one hand, contingency had become more prominent than ever because God's will no longer established necessity; on the other hand, contingency was felt and feared less because a larger variety of psychological and technical coping mechanisms had become available. To some extent, the lost order could be pragmatically reestablished by eliminating a big chunk of contingency from public and private life. The above-described post-industrial “perfect world” model represents the latest version of this anti-contingency utopia. From the nineteenth century onward, technology began to compensate for the loss of theological landmarks and created the sober modern certitudes that everybody in the industrialized world is now used to. Insurance companies helped in the handling of accidents, and applied science, with its capacity to foresee the future and to prevent disasters (one can think of meteorology or earthquake foreshock detection), helped reduce contingency. Vaccinations protect against coincidentally contracted diseases and epidemics. In daily life, much bad fortune can now be prevented through more precise and professional planning. This planning is increasingly supported by modern technology of communication that continues to be improved to this day: thanks to cell phones, messaging apps, and GPS, fewer appointments have been missed “by bad luck.”

While German biologists experimented with organic models, France produced an anti-deterministic intellectual current called “la science du hasard” (the science of the coincidence). A related anti-deterministic philosophy had emerged earlier in the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth cen-tury, about three decades before the publication of Sartre's La Nausée, it would reach its climax. Sartre was indirectly influenced by this philosophy, mainly through Bergson, who was loosely linked to this science of coincidence. What was really more of a French philosophy of contingency (instead of a science of contingency) is interesting because it represents a rare example of a rationali-zation of contingency. While Engels had rationalized history to the point of letting the mystery of contingency disappear under the glaring light of determinism, these French philosophers adopted the opposite approach. They depicted the world as a manifestation of contingency and demystified it to the point of making it coterminous with reality. As will be shown below, this is directly opposed to the conspiratorial mindset, which cancels coincidence and mystifies necessity. The French philosophy of contingency is vaguely reminiscent of Hegel's speculative idealism, which sees chance as a necessary event and conceptualizes it as an “absolute contingency” (see above). Coincidence is real because, without it the world could not be (see Henrich 1971: 164n8).

I introduce the French science du hasard, which is representative of a French Renaissance of philosophy that happened around 1900, not only because it is a rare example of the rationalization of contingency in the Western world, but also for another reason: this philosophy, which has, most of the time, been seen as a philosophy of science, bears resemblances to Eastern philosophies of contingency that will be presented in Chapter 11. The main idea is that contingency is real and that necessities are only abstractions. Despite its name, the French “science of the coincidence” had no intention of being primarily in the service of science, and rather deemed itself to be in the service of life in more general terms.

What do baseless conspiracy theories, algorithms, and meritocracy have in common? All three avoid contingency and frantically look for necessities. The COVID-19 crisis has brought about a proliferation of baseless conspiracy theories that reject, among other things, official accounts of the virus’ origins and remedies, and sometimes even the existence of the virus itself. Conspiracy theories very often link events to secret plots concocted by powerful conspirators, whether it be Bill Gates or Big Pharma. The exceptionally powerful surge of unjustified conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 crisis has several already famous causes: there are increasing ways for new media to massively spread misinformation, and there has been a growing distrust for conventional scientific ideas among large parts of the population. In this book, I examine another dominant driving force: the desire to find apparently reasonable explanations for phenomena that are purely random and contingent. Many baseless conspiracy theories emerge because contingency is not accepted, and necessities are looked for at all costs. David Aaronovitch defines conspiratorial thought as a reasoning that “attributes deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended” or which attributes “secret action to one party that might more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another” (Aaronovitch 2011: 5). Nothing happens by chance and there must be a plan or an intelligent design behind everything. A large part of this book deals with “contingency phobia.” This special phobia is not only manifest in the conspiratorial mindset, but it appears in Western culture as a recurrent psychological, cognitive, and scientific pattern. It is the cause of a variety of other phenomena that have become emblematic for liberal democracies, such as the contemporary algorithm culture or the obsession with merit and ranking. Not only does the conspiratorial mindset reject a world of contingency and strive to create a universe structured by a necessary order: life coaches, algorithm engineers, and neoliberal meritocrats all do the same. This book analyzes these phenomena by using the same criteria: How do humans deal with contingency, and how do they try to establish necessities?

Conspiracy and Contingency

For the most part, conspiracy theories are political or scientific; some combine political themes with religious convictions, while a few are also cultural or racist.

Contingency Skepticism

Usually, contingencies are perceived with surprise, especially when they have tragic consequences, such as those following major natural catastrophes or accidents. And tragic coincidences can happen in history, such as when the accidental death or sickness of a ruler significantly alters the affairs of state. As mentioned above, whenever the repercussions of coincidence appear disproportionate to the actual event that sparked them, a certain skepticism toward contingency is likely to emerge and to question whether the event really happened by chance. Like all events, coincidences are due to causes, but in the case of coincidence, it is either impossible or too difficult (the difference between the ontological and the epistemic coincidence will be explained below) to state why the event was caused by a particular cause and not another one. Coincidences are no miracles. Coincidences have no finality, but they have a cause, whereas wonders have no cause (and are often retrospectively equipped with finality). Strangely, coincidences can incite the same kind of skepticism that occurs when we are faced with wonders. This is paradoxical because normally, an explanation involving coincidence is meant to suspend hypotheses about the wondrous and the mysterious. But coincidence can become wondrous and mysterious in its own right. Should an insignificant event like a cat crossing the street lead to a car accident killing an important politician, the accidental character of the event is likely to be challenged. Why would a cat cross the street right at this time and in this place? Behind Princess Diana’s mortal accident, the conspiratorial mindset sees an organized assassination because of Diana’s symbolic importance. In their view, this importance cannot have been compromised by a simple accident. Coincidence-skepticism is bound to arise more often when the consequences are negative and produce considerable damage; less skepticism will emerge when the coincidence brings fortune, though this can happen, too. For example, when a corrupt politician says they did not embezzle any money and simply inherited it, the general framework of the event incites us to trace the event to causes other than mere coincidence.

Both science and conspiracy theories look for necessities in a world where a necessary order that had once been guaranteed by religion has largely disappeared, and where life and the entire world can easily appear as contingent. Warranted conspiracy theories find such necessities; unwarranted ones don’t, but they believe that they have found them. When viewed through the optics of these “contingency versus necessity” relationships, the conspiratorial mindset turns out to be inscribed not only in a Western metaphysical tradition but in an even broader civilizational development.

Contingency has been on the minds of thinkers throughout the ages, but within various phases of Western civilization, its position has changed multiple times. In Antiquity, historians would attribute unexpected events to the goddess Fortuna (Tyche) or to divine Providence and thus turn the coincidence into a necessity by tracing it to a pseudo-cause (see the Greek historian Polybius [in Polybius: 29]). When no pertinent cause could be found for events such as floods or droughts, such fortuities could be connected to Tyche or divine providence, which became very important in late antiquity. This technique could even be used for events in politics. Dylan Burns shows in his Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy how in the first centuries CE, Hellenic and Christian philosophers elaborated notions about providence, divine care, and fate that would shape the European mindset. Today such devices are less available, and as a result, conspiracy theorists invent new pseudo-causes. This chapter will provide a rough historical sketch of how contingency has been dealt with by thinkers throughout history.

Antiquity

In Antiquity, almost everything was perceived to be necessary, and, compared with today, contingency could not cause existential problems for the Greek or Roman individual. It is true that the ancient world did have unwarranted conspiracy theories, for example, about “bad” emperors such as Nero, malevolent Christians, immigrants, or slaves. The existence of secret societies in Athens already spurred some conspiratorial thinking. Greek plays tell us much about conspiracies “that involve almost every facet of Athenian life.” According to Daniel Pipes, a conspiracy mentality can “be traced back to the dualist religions of Iran or the mystery religions that swept the Roman Empire” (1997: 53). Secret societies were often built around mystery cults such as the cult of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis (the Eleusinian Cult), the cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace, and the cult of Isis.

Classical Western (Platonic-Aristotelian) philosophies tend to split the world and everything that exists in it into two sections. According to Rorty, Kant “splits us into two parts, one called ‘reason,’ which is identical in us all, and another (empirical sensation and desire), which is a matter of blind, contingent, idiosyncratic impressions” (1989: 32). Reason reveals necessary structures whereas contingency is ignorance and blindness. It has been mentioned that already Epicurus tried to overcome this opposition by seeing coincidence as a rational explanation. The division of the world into necessity and contingency became one of the most inveterate principles of Western thought, and the last chapter demonstrated how the French “science of the coincidence” acted against it.

Contingency and Creativity

The necessary-contingent opposition is related to the Platonic opposition of the real versus the appearance. In the Republic (6: 509d–511c), especially in the Allegory of the Cave (Book VII: 514a–517a), Plato differentiates between perceptible and intelligible phenomena and explains how the ever-changing realm of physical objects (particulars) is separate from the invisible and eternal universals, that is, from ideas or “forms.” The latter we perceive through reason (noesis) or—with regard to mathematical objects and abstract ideas—through intellect (dianoia). Physical objects, which are more random than reason-based ideas, can only be cognized through opinion (doxa), practical reason (phronesis) or trust (pistis). Images and appearances of objects occupy an even lower level of cognition than physical objects. Reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary whereas concrete objects and the appearances of objects remain more contingent. When it comes to images in art, we can even judge them by using taste rather than reason.

The light of reason illuminates the world of objects and appearances and shows necessary ideas; thus, and only thus, randomness disappears. Causal determinists like Laplace would merely reformulate this same idea at the end of the eighteenth century. The coincidence is not real but only a dream or an appearance that we perceive because we are scientifically incompetent. As sciences progress, the unreal world of coincidences will be replaced with the real world of necessity.

Conspiracy and Ressentiment

Most of the time, the conspiratorial mindset is motivated not by the will to objectively judge the life world but rather by other elements, one of which is resentment. Many unwarranted conspiracy theories spring from feelings of “sublimated revenge”: some injustice has occurred, sometimes a long time ago, and cannot be amended because the opponent is too powerful. Scapegoating (blame-shifting) and conspiracism are closely linked. However, the injustice and the enemy who caused the misfortune are rarely clearly identified, and the source of the evil remains diffuse. Max Scheler, following Nietzsche, calls this diffuse feeling of vengeance “ressentiment,” and ressen-timent is also a core reason for the existence of the conspiratorial mindset. Ressentiment—derived from the French word for resentment—is deeper seated and more durable than mere resentment and can be defined as an individual’s frustration over his or her own powerlessness. Both resentment and ressentiment differ from anger because they include bitterness. Apart from being more intense, ressentiment is typically directed against sources that are more abstract than those that spark a simple resentment. In his 1915 study of resentment and the role it plays in moral behavior, Scheler gives the following definition:

Ressentiment is charged with a diffuse kind of anger combined with fear that does not really know toward what it should direct itself. Most of the time, res-sentiment is caused by hierarchies that arouse feelings of envy, humiliation, and helplessness. The ressentiment person feels dispossessed because they believe they are threatened and dominated by an ungraspable alien power. Again, this evil power is not simply frightening, but also uncanny because it is not clearly identifiable.

Ressentiment distorts our perception of reality, which also concerns our perception of irregularities and contingencies. Often the source of the evil cannot be identified beyond vague affirmations that “this is not a coincidence.”

How to live with contingency? The Greeks elevated Fortuna to the status of a goddess and worshipped her in order to diminish arbitrariness. The Middle Ages managed to separate the contingent from the necessary by creating a solid theological framework. In these times, people could retreat, whenever facing contingency, into a quiet center of necessity guarded by God. Today, too many “necessities,” many of them complex, incomprehensible, not necessary at all, or simply fake, invade our lives. In our consumer-oriented societies, more than in the Middle Ages, we are overwhelmed with so-called “necessities.” These “necessities” are not as fixed and well established as they were in the past but are rather fleeting and impermanent. They are no longer rooted in a lifestyle transmitted from generation to generation following traditional, unchanging structures. In the past, the quietude of a religious center could overlap with the law-bound and purposeful environment of the almost universally rural communities, from which contingency was largely excluded. In modernity, both necessity and contingency are fluid phenomena and less clearly distinguishable.

Contingency is feared more than ever, as the loss of central authority and the multiplication of relationships between individual elements lead to disorientation and anxiety. The conspiratorial mindset “solves” the problem by creating transcendental or imaginary unities. However, it does not establish “real” necessities, nor does it manage to cope with existing contingencies. In the end, unwarranted conspiracy theories lead to even more stress and ressentiment. Similarly, merit-oriented societies treat individuals as though they could be in control of everything, when obviously, way too many things are beyond our control. In this way, meritocracies create new anxieties.

Conspiracy Skepticism

At the same time, the conspiratorial mindset does not have the serenity of Greek Pyrrhonians, who strove to live in a state of eternal suspension of judgment in order to avoid all obligations that could reach them in the form of necessities. Skeptical thought was initiated in Greece by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Xenophanes and Theophrastus; Democritus can be seen as a proto-skeptic, and Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BCE) molded skepticism into a subtle form of psychological philosophy.

In her lucid account of religion and evolution, Barbara King intends to tell the narrative of the origin of religion that she locates within the social realm in what she calls “belongingness.” She admits that her position on the social origins of religion is not new, and she shares an evolutionary perspective when she writes, “Over the course of prehistory, belongingness was transformed from a basic emotional relating between individuals to a deeper relating, one that had the potential to become transcendent, between people and supernatural beings or forces.” She continues by defining religion as a practice and emotional engagement with the sacred and not necessarily about beliefs dealing with supernatural beings, a position that puts her at odds with some researchers using findings from cognitive science. King does not adhere to the position that beliefs can serve as a means of cementing social unity and enhances a more permanent social body. Instead of such a role for beliefs, King refers to empathy. She explains, “All primates … exhibit empathy that is based on emotional linkage with others of their own kind.” What she is referring to at this point is cognitive empathy that she claims represented a turning point in the development of evolution's social and emotional patterns. Social patterns demonstrate humans communicating with each other by adjusting to the actions of each other. This pattern of behavior is part of a quest for the sacred, a search for meaning. Drawing a parallel between humans and primates, King calls attention to communicative actions of these respective groups that bear similarities with non-symbolic ritual. Because early religion is not intellectual or related to beliefs, it is not something subjective. It is instead emotional and social.

Although ritual has social features, not all scholars agree with King when she stresses its social origins. Robert Bellah thinks, for instance, that ritual and religion emerge from play. Play presupposes a shared intentionality, which suggests its social nature in the final analysis. The anthropologist Roy Rappaport claims that emotions are the source of ritual, and that religion comes from ritual.