Jeff Russell

What follows is a random dump of thoughts on reading your post ;-)

I tend to be wary of efforts to instrumentalise religion to achieve an end. The thing with the word technology is that it is generally tied to this idea of an instrument, so when we say 'social technology', I hear 'some way of instrumentalising social behaviour to some end', as if we still believed in a clockwork universe. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'social capital' is closely aligned in many people's eyes (though the full complexity of what he was getting at was missed by pretty much the entire academic field of sociology - in some ways he was trying to get beyond the structure-action dualism (ie determinism vs freewill) by finding a third thing that bridges the gap).

Regarding marriage, in the wider field of economics it is classified as an 'institution', and so to is the rule of law, property rights, family relationships in general, and religion. All these things are governed by arbitrary conventions that possess a persistence solely on account of their social basis. But it could always have been different - never forget the role of history in these things (one of my favourite books on the evolution of Economic Thought is called How Economics Forgot History).

What Coulange seems to be doing (I haven't read him either LOL) is to create a Just So story (go Rudyard Kipling!) for how certain religions came about at a high level. This is all good and well, but it is not a step-by-step guide any more than our understanding of human evolution can help us shape our future evolution.

I think I am in alignment with you in thinking that religion is an outcome, the convention that arises when people perform acts of ritual in ways that persist over time as internalised patterns in the sense of what Christopher Alexander came up with in A Timeless Way of Building. We can suggest new rituals, but unless we practise them and pass them on to those who follow to practise and let them become internalised as 'the way things are done', they will not become part of the religion. Like someone came up with on Ecosophia recently: rather than Be Here Now, Do Here Now. We 'practise' a religion - we may not get it right, we may not even know what getting right would be, but it is a doing. I was going to add 'in the faith that the outcomes will be to our benefit', but the more I consider the deeper examples of religion, the more I think it is outcome independent - it is a convention, an arbitrary way of doing, whose meaning derives from egregore built up by it.

Which brings me to ask would egregores be considered a form of 'social technology'?

I just realised that nowhere in the above did I bring up the idea of emergent properties ... my bad