After taking the train from Bordeaux down to the border town of Hendaye, I slept there in a semi-communal “hotel”. It was basically the upstairs of someone’s house, and they rented out rooms. So I had my own bedroom, but we shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. But truth be told, I never saw the other people who were staying there. Then today, I woke up, put on the backpack and hiking shoes, and started walking. That’s what I’ll be doing for the next two weeks of this journey.
My good wife and I started hiking together after she got back from doing a stretch of the Camino de Santiago with a friend. At first I thought that might be her thing to do. And then COVID hit and there was much for me to do, so I joined her on hikes. And as we walked, we talked about doing the Camino together sometime. Last year when COVID took a break, I was in Spain for a work meeting, and Chris came to join me at the end and walked from Sarria to Santiago — just far enough to get the official certificate from the priests in Santiago (which if you’re Catholic, gets you out of Purgatory because it was a special jubilee year). As soon as we were done with that one, we started planning the next.
So now I’m in Europe for this sabbatical, trying to understand the spiritual journey of Homo sapiens, and I figured this Homo sapien should have a spiritual journey of his own. I crossed the river that separates France from Spain, which took me to Irún, the official starting point of the Camino del Norte — the northern route along the coast. If all goes well, a week from Friday, my wife will meet my in Bilbao, and we’ll walk from there with some friends to Santander. So far, this northern route is a bit more rustic and hillier than the stretch we did last year. But wow is it beautiful (have I mentioned that this country looks like a postcard everywhere you turn??).
I did 15.8 miles today, with a change in elevation from the sea up to almost 2000 ft (and back down a ways, and back up a ways). I had no reservation for where I was going to stay tonight, because part of the charm (?!) of the Camino is figuring that out as you go. There is a network of hostels called “albergues” and I thought I’d give them a try. So I found this place called “Doce Tribus” which means “12 Tribes”. I walked up and an old French man greeted me warmly and asked if he could bring me a cold drink of orange and mint, which they make themselves. I accepted and asked if there are any beds available for the night, and he said, “Yes, yes, we will give you a bed.” We sat and chatted a bit, with his rough English and my really rough French. It turns out this is a Christian commune. They bake bread and sell it in the village (I took a tour of the bakery this afternoon), and then welcome pilgrims here for anything they’re willing to pay (which is not the way most albergues work).
I’m staying in a room with eight beds (no semi- here, we’re full-on commune). I had a good hot shower (by myself, no commune there!), and a good communal meal with about 12 people sitting around tables together (with bread they baked here, dipped in olive oil they pressed from their own olive trees!). I’m the only American here, and almost all the others are Spanish speaking, so they put me with the old French guy, who was pretty fascinating. He’s a young earth creationist — or at least some equivalent of that. He was telling me how from the Bible we know that the first humans were created six thousand years ago. I said, “Yesterday I was in your country, in Lascaux where I saw paintings made by human beings more than 20,000 years ago.” He said, “Those scientists, they think they know everything.” The next topic was space travel, which he said God would never allow, and then seedless grapes and how they are not what God intended. Then he switched to talking about the evils of socialism, at which I remarked (all in good humor) that it was kind of odd for someone at a commune to be so favorable toward capitalism. To which he said, “this is communism here — communism with God, otherwise it would never work.”
This afternoon I read another chapter of Dunbar’s Evolution of Religion book. It was arguing a slightly different view from what I’ve seen before for why religions developed (again, from a purely naturalistic view, which again, again, is a legitimate part of the story to tell, so long as you don’t pretend it’s the only legitimate story to tell!). Other people (like Yuval Harari in his wildly popular book Sapiens) have claimed that religion was a way of keeping bigger populations in line. Once you cross that threshold of 150 people, our size brain can’t keep track of all the relationships. And that means the peace in the community can’t be kept purely through the reputations that each of the people have. So instead, you invent a god and get the masses to believe that god is always watching, and will reward you if you’re good and punish you if you’re bad. And that makes people behave.
That always struck me as a very simplistic view of things. Dunbar’s thesis instead is that religion, through its rituals, provides social cohesion that keeps larger population sizes (mostly) friendly. He’s got lots of data, and it’s really fascinating. There are studies about population sizes and when different kinds of religion develop, and how far away from the equator different kinds of religion develop (because of a combination of the length of growing season and the rate of infectious disease, which allow bigger populations to develop). His thesis is that bigger communities developed as a way of protecting themselves against raiders. But when you put a lot of people together, problems start happening. He also had data about the number of people who die violent deaths in larger and larger communities (among hunter/gatherers), and the bigger they get, the worse it is. So there is a kind of glass ceiling on community size, until there is some fundamental transformation in the culture. His claim is that the communities which developed religion were able to push through that ceiling and grow even bigger, because the rituals gave them a sense of belonging (he has brain scans to support this claim) and then they’re willing to put up with more from their fellow citizens.
That all seems to me a pretty plausible reading of why religion works. But as I claimed a few days ago, that doesn’t at all mean it can’t also be true that religions developed in response to an actual God. Once we discovered scientifically why sweet things taste good to us, that didn’t mean that their tasting good was all a sham. Same thing.
Anyway, I was wondering if I should try to get all my roommates tonight to do some ritual together, so that we might bond a bit and not get too upset at each other. But that sounds like a lot of work. I guess I’ll put up with the bigger sleeping community for one night, but I decided to book myself a single room for tomorrow.