It’s Memorial Day and Gil Scott-Heron is dead. Clearly we should listen to Kanye’s “Who Will Survive in America,” which samples GSH and gives him a fabulous beat. The best line:

“We learned to our amazement untold tale of scandal, two long centuries buried in a musty vault, hosed down daily with a gagging perfume: America was a bastard, the illegitimate daughter of the mother country whose legs were then spread around the world and a rapist known as freedom - free doom.”

I for one am glad to own our bastard, illegitimate, immigrant heritage.

Meet the world’s oldest known temple at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey: http://bit.ly/jw9har It is almost 12,000 years old, predating Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, and the great monumental architecture in Mesopotamia. What’ peculiar about it? No city. It stands by itself in its archeological stratum. The people who built the temple were probably simple hunter-gatherers who lived in small, family-centered villages. They had no writing, no metalwork, no agriculture. They didn’t even have the wheel. And yet they built a magnificent temple, complete with animal reliefs and towering stone pillars.

What are the implications? For one, it makes it very hard to maintain the position that religion originated in a utilitarian impulse for social organization. Much of the scholarship I’ve read on city development holds to the theory that organized religion started after cities, as a means to organize urban life and to legitimate social hierarchy. Why am I a king, and you’re a slave? Ask a priest. But the Göbekli Tepe Temple testifies to a deeper, more fundamentally human urge, not merely to connect with a reality beyond ourselves, but to organize ourselves around it. It seems that cities may have developed to provide stable material infrastructure for pre-existing religious institutions, and not the other way around.

And this, in turn, strengthens J. Z. Smith’s arguments about the role of place in human culture. Smith famously said that the fundamental work that we do as humans is to construct a place from which to orient ourselves towards the cosmos. We need to get our feet under us before we can look up at the stars. By Smith’s theory, practical matters like economic institutions would develop subsequent to religious institutions, or at least in tandem with them, since they are inherently more fundamental to our existence.