The Power of Symbols: Taboos Demanding Lack

In cultures ancient and modern, symbols and words that are ‘taboo’ are censored or cut down in some way. Monday and Sunday discuss this phenomena.

SUNDAY: The more I thought of the idea of symbols having tangible meaning that must be defended against or avoided, I realized how prevalent this is throughout various Human cultures and religions.

A modern non-secular example would be censoring swearwords or highly offensive language. Aniconism in Islam and Judaism is a religious one. Ancient religious examples would be certain Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic treatments. I could go on.

Symbols have power over us. Languages are visual symbols, so of course words would also be triggering in the same way to people. They are stand-ins for the real thing—and if the real thing is problematic or negative, why shouldn’t the symbol, the abbreviated representation of it, be as well?

Perhaps it is how our brains are wired. We can see a picture of food and can be hungry. We can find comfort in religious symbols. So too can we feel fear or repulsion at symbols of ideas that we culturally deem offensive or dangerous.

MONDAY: It seems that not all censorship is the same. I can identify two specific types: moral censorship and symbolic censorship. Moral censorship is any censorship which is performed for the "morals" of society. Symbolic censorship, in contrast, is any censorship that involves accepted symbologies without moral content.

Examples of moral censorship include bans on slurs, certain types of pornography, instructions in meth production, etc. Symbolic censorship, in contrast, is often seen in religious contexts, such as the Islamic ban on depicting Muhammad or God in iconographic art.

The distinction, perhaps, is that moral censorship can tangibly be associated with harms against individuals not related to their belief system. Symbolic censorship, however, only harms someone if they are prepped to view it as harmful beforehand. Depictions of sex and violence are censored for younger children on account of their proposed ability to warp the child's mind in damaging ways. As one ages, however, this is less likely to occur, and full adults have far less capacity to be malignly influenced by these depictions in lifelong ways. However, visual depictions of deity are only offensive to those who have accepted an ideology that deems it offensive. Symbolic censorship isn't an issue except in contexts where the symbol-system is already accepted.

Perhaps it is easy to understand moral censorship, but symbolic censorship is a little less clear in its motivations. Still, it is a cross-cultural phenomena.

One historical account that haunts me is the situation of the "Old Believers" in Russia. Russia converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in the 900-1000s, but during the 1600s, reforms were introduced into Russian worship in order to align them more closely to Greek Byzantine practices (as the Eastern Orthodox Church came from Byzantium). This was met with fierce resistance by part of the Russian Orthodox. These resisters are now dubbed the "Old Believers" in Russia. They did not actually differ theologically from the main Russian Orthodox Church. Their differences were purely in terms of ritual. But these differences were so important that the Russian Orthodox Church was willing to kill over it, and the Old Believers were willing to die.

Rationally, that doesn't make sense at all. And yet it's a feature of human behavior, obviously — we cling to symbols so zealously that they can be more important than human life. We will kill and die for symbols.

I'm tempted to think that the actual subtext is tribal loyalties. Symbols, in this model, designate tribal loyalties. And it makes sense, evolutionarily speaking, for tribes to possess neurological mechanisms that foster competition and loyalty. We are hyper-motivated in that regard. The actual symbols in themselves matter less than the tribal loyalties that they specify.

There is a concept known as a "social verifier". The idea is that a large portion of the population won't accept something as "true" unless they see many other people accepting it. The Asch conformity experiments are another example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

This isn't to say that all symbols are tribally motivated, though. It's certainly possible that people can have the same feelings in regard to symbols that they alone value. That something begins as a social display or social connector doesn't mean it remains that way, neurologically. Even so, the deep connection between symbols and tribal loyalty seem obvious.

I'd add, though, that this is in radical confrontation with how humans are normally perceived. When we cling to symbols, we see them as meaningful in themselves. We do not see evolutionary tribal loyalties at work. Similarly, much of our apparent reasoning is emotionally motivated. It appears logical, but it is, in fact, just a means of retaining a "rational self" image in the face of rationality.

The same is true on a larger scale in cases of tribal warfare. When the enemy is symbolically dehumanized, more atrocities can be performed on them.

Symbolism, in other words, often provides the excuse to be worse than we otherwise would be...

SUNDAY: I would quibble on slurs being moral censorship—since they do require cultural conditioning to perceive them as an issue. There are slur words that have very negative meaning in one cultures but not in others (’cunt’ being the example I am thinking of). You have to know that the slur is offensive to see it as offensive. It has no intrinsic…offensiveness to a person hearing it.

There are more primal symbols that are more negative or that have power to be inferred as negative or offensive effectively regardless of society. Like a fearsome snake or someone being decapitated or some visceral depiction of death or torture.

Beyond the most blatant symbols…it’s up to cultural interpretation to really gauge how we react to it. We have to be conditioned to see or interpret things a certain way.

I can only link this video to share the thoughts running through my head:

But, going back to my initial thought, though rephrased: language is a critical part of Humanity and how we react to it is constant across various tribes. But that it impacts us is common throughout. It’s borne of our tribes, but not of our tribes in power and passion. How that is used can be for good or for ill.

What is your opinion on the use of symbols and the avoidance of certain terms and concepts that vary from culture to culture?