Birth of the Moralizing Gods

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.summary

by reptation • 11 years ago

47 44 11 years ago

sciencemag.org

rntz• 11 years ago

full article link: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full

jdmichal• 11 years ago

The minor point at the end regarding the definition of "moralizing" reminds me of The Physician and the Priest.

http://www.jhuger.com/the-physician-and-the-priest

Things which had a visible adverse effect on these early societies tended to be encoded in religion. Slingerland's interpretation of mucking with the river as a moral hazard as opposed to a random taboo is exactly the kind of things the Physician came to find.

digi_owl• 11 years ago

Makes one wonder if one need to record not just the laws, but also the reasoning behind the laws. This to avoid having laws turn into the religious edicts, and also to allow future generations to examine of the reasoning still holds in their context.

mdturnerphys• 11 years ago

" . . . religions as dissimilar as Islam and Mormonism . . ." This seems like a strange pair to use as an example of dissimilarity. Islam and Mormonism have a number of commonalities that Mormonism doesn't share with other Christian faiths.

xlm17172• 11 years ago

"Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore."

I wonder if this is why the rise of the Internet and the decline of religious affiliation are so closely related.

"As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible."

In today's society, we can shame anyone in the world we want in a matter of minutes using the power of social media. People themselves can enforce society's morals through shame. God may or may not be watching, but the Internet is always watching, and it never forgets.

It's an interesting idea indeed.

"They hope to show that the more omniscient and punitive the gods that people worship, the more money they are willing to give to strangers in their own religious community."

I wonder if people would be more willing to give to strangers if they were told that their name, social media profile, and donation amount were being put on a website for the world to see (and judge).

mQu• 11 years ago

I wouldn't say that Internet always watching can have the same effect because it's just mob of peers (humans) and ultimately can be ignored or fooled. God by definition can't. That why the concept can be disciplinary and ubiquitous. God watches you over the Internet too.

However the concept of god (or God) in technology has been touched by sci-fi many times. Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, Serial Experiments Lain, GitS, Stanisław Lem's books and many more.

If as the article stipulates humans need an external factor to be kept in line with social norms than this could be the evolution of religion.

xlm17172• 11 years ago

They can certainly be fooled, even deliberately, but they can only be ignored at personal peril. For example, when a corporation does something someone doesn't like, or an employee (high-ranking or not) of that company does something that someone doesn't like, there are many instances where demands were made from a corporation (apologize for so-and-so, fire so-and-so for doing this) with the threat that the corporation would be boycotted if they didn't cooperate with the demands. Society is enforcing its morals via the internet shame mob through threatening a corporation's livelihood, which I would say has the same effect as God enforcing society's morals through eternal punishment.

If you'd like specific examples of what I mentioned, simply google "internet shame mob". There are many, many examples.

SomeCallMeTim• 11 years ago

I wouldn't say that Internet always watching can have the same effect

Studies of whether someone would steal a bagel/donut from a box, where payment for the pastry is on the honor system ("Take a donut for a dollar!"), show that if you paste up a pair of cartoony eyes above the food, theft rates are reduced.

So it's not just about whether people feel like the Internet can be fooled. Just the fact that the Internet feels like it's watching could be enough to cause (most) people to behave ethically.

orand2• 11 years ago

Fascinating implications. The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage prosocial behavior. As the article says, "Watched people are nice people."

With the rise of the global internet and the simultaneous decline of religious viewpoints, what is the new "big god" that is big enough to unify the world's prosocial behavior? Belief in an omniscient NSA??

danharaj3• 11 years ago

The bigger the society, the more it needs "big gods" to encourage people to accept the ladder of hierarchy and domination it has created.

The most "successful" cultures have also been the most violent, vicious, and hierarchical.

Perhaps it's time to move beyond big gods, big leaders, big masters, and big individuals.

qzcx3• 11 years ago

There is a good reason why successful cultures have hierarchies. Specialization and structure improve efficiency and standard of living for everyone under it. Do you think companies could do without CEOs?

riemannzeta5• 11 years ago

Great question. What if it's something like the Internet itself -- i.e., the potential that somebody will capture and share a private act in a way that will become completely public and forever.

orand2• 11 years ago

I think that would do it. The Ashley Madison leaks are just the tip of the iceberg. What if someone released a dump of _everything_ the NSA has captured about certain groups of individuals over their entire lifetimes? (assuming there are torrent sites with enough storage to handle it...)

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there.

It is the total surveilance society before the surveilance society was a thing.

That allows mobilization and control of larger groups of people.

And although it sounds kind of mean and critical, it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc...

danharaj3• 11 years ago

it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc...

Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors? Why do you think ruling people makes them behave in this way?

I mean, what I'm saying is, I think your points are commonly accepted wisdom, but I find them extremely contradicted by my experiences with other people. It sounds like a whole lot of propaganda from a machine that produces propaganda in order to perpetuate itself.

The reason a moralizing god is important and those religions win is darwinian in a way -- a moralizing god lets the priests or the leaders of the religion control people more efficiently. They can convince people that god is watching them if they are mean, naughty, have bad thoughts, even when the priests are not there.

Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them?

I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest.

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

Why do you think people need to ruled in order to display these behaviors?

They don't necessarily. But slowly over the ages groups that held those beliefs somehow proliferated more than those that din't. It could just be a fluke, a correlation with some other hidden variable. But maybe it was the cause and a light statistical advantage over a thousand+ years can make a large difference.

Are you saying that people aren't able to think about how their actions affect their peers materially and socially unless they buy into the idea of a magical faerie that always watches them?

Thinking independently and rationally vs being 100% controlled is not how it work. There is something in between the two. When it comes to religion, it usually forms and ideological framework that gets instilled early on. At a young enough age it became part of background (the world view) such that even if the person is thinking they are thinking rationally, chances are they are still influenced by that ideology.

I find this article deeply unconvincing, to be honest.

Well I am an amateur as well so don't take my words for anything. I just offered a perspective (that is probably obvously wrong in some way if an anthropologist/sociologist/historian would look at it).

fweespeech• 11 years ago

And although it sounds kind of mean and critical, it also allowed and generated a lot of nice things -- co-operation, altruism (one can argue forced altruism, "god said, be nice to your neighbor Jimmy, or you'll burn in hell forever! -- Erm..., ok, will do definitely" might not be a true altruism, but that is a different discussion), it allowed for the care of the sick, etc...

I don't agree.

The "nice things" that religion enabled already existed before religion. Any of the "nice things" that got in the way of business for the powerful, well, became unimportant pretty fast. Charitable activities were funded by the wealthy as a political tool before a "moralizing god" existed, let alone became a common belief system.

You cooperated with other people in your society for mutual benefit, primarily. People cooperated long before religion the popularity of a handful of monotheistic, moralizing gods.

Being uncooperative on the level a religion punished [and sometimes, violent] is almost never beneficial except in extreme circumstances.

rdtsc3• 11 years ago

Like I said in a sibling response. It is not all or nothing.

Maybe a better way to put it is that moralizing religion just acts as an amplifier. It can amplify over time either those "nice things" or "negative things". And over thousands of years that kind of a religion just gave enough of statistical advantage.

Maybe another way to think about it is that a moralizing god religion is more brutal and violent such that those adherents managed to wipe out and conquer all the rest.

qzcx3• 11 years ago

Doesn't sound like you read the article. It states that these things came before, but religion enabled them to expand them to larger societies.

Torgo• 11 years ago

The moralizing god is a policeman installed in your brain, so you obey the rules when the corporeal police aren't around. It is a social hack to minimize cheaters.

joe_the_user• 11 years ago

Despite the rhetoric of using science, the enterprise described in the article seems too fuzzy and ill-defined to be able to support any strong conclusions.

Generalizing the result of psychology to other fields is a dicey affair. Determining what a "big god" even is, is a matter of interpretation. And determining that a change in religious belief is a cause or an effect of a changed social structure is a difficult problem. And the researchers describing the enterprise give a strong impression of having an agenda (talking about things they noticed growing up, etc).

Atheism is common in Western Europe yet the area doesn't seem to have much trouble engaging in large scale cooperation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe

riemannzeta5• 11 years ago

I find it pleasing that their theory is consistent with Julian Jaynes's theory about the origin of consciousness. One could view this even as an extension of Jaynes's theory. First, we became conscious, then self-conscious. Consciousness was a prerequisite to any form of society. Self-consciousness was a prerequisite to a moralistic society. The details of the form of deity seem to me a proxy for the underlying question about how the brain was evolving over this period.

Although the article notes that this fact is in dispute, at least to me it seems striking that there do not appear to have been any large-scale wholly atheistic or agnostic civilizations in history until recently. To continue the thought about the biological substrate for consciousness and self-consciousness, I wonder what that implies about whether or how are brains have evolved in the recent past? Is there some allele or set of alleles that express for pro-social tendencies that are required for pluralistic, capitalistic, atheistic/agnostic civilizations?

outofcuriosity• 11 years ago

Seems like a just-so story until the methodology of their quantitative analysis is publicly-available.

crimsonalucard3• 11 years ago

There's been a lot of research proving that people who lie to themselves are more successful then those who are honest with themselves. In fact research indicates that lying to yourself is actually the norm; its' the people who are honest with themselves that are more likely to be clinically depressed.

This is the first time I've seen this theory applied to civilization.

riemannzeta5• 11 years ago

what do you mean by "more successful"?

pharrington2• 11 years ago

Probably something like better matching their societies' standard fitness functions

e: what i probably meant to say was "more likely to pass on their memes"

crimsonalucard3• 11 years ago

in everything really. From business to passing on genes.

louithethrid• 11 years ago

My own private theory is that alcoholics developed agriculture first. Nothing makes you settle down, herding bees for mead and cultivate wheat- then a neverending desire for beer around the year.

The irony is that even moralizing goods are in the end just ways for declaring some overspending behaviour holy and thus in the long run blood thirsty. Non-scientific societys loop allmost always into (civil)war - moralizing gods just allow for a higher piling up of social dynamite before the blow.

crimsonalucard3• 11 years ago

Survival drives us harder then the taste of beer.

MaysonL• 11 years ago

"Malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man."

A. E. Housman

kafkaesque• 11 years ago

(This turned out to be a semi-rant.)

I will play "devil's advocate".

The first thing I thought about when the researchers explained this:

Norenzayan thinks this connection between moralizing deities and “prosocial” behavior—curbing self-interest for the good of others—could help explain how religion evolved. In small-scale societies, prosocial behavior does not depend on religion. The Hadza, a group of African hunter-gatherers, do not believe in an afterlife, for example, and their gods of the sun and moon are indifferent to the paltry actions of people. Yet the Hadza are very cooperative when it comes to hunting and daily life. They don't need a supernatural force to encourage this, because everyone knows everyone else in their small bands. If you steal or lie, everyone will find out—and they might not want to cooperate with you anymore, Norenzayan says. The danger of a damaged reputation keeps people living up to the community's standards.

[...]

Norenzayan points out, however, that the complexity of most of the cultures analyzed is limited—they are small-scale chiefdoms, not large agricultural societies.

was tribalism. This seems like they're trying to put a different spin on it. Before political systems were formed, this is how tribe members developed trust within their societies. This is on a low-scale population or society.

The article continues with this:

As societies grow larger, such intensive social monitoring becomes impossible. So there's nothing stopping you from taking advantage of the work and goodwill of others and giving nothing in return. Reneging on a payment or shirking a shared responsibility have no consequences if you'll never see the injured party again and state institutions like police forces haven't been invented yet. But if everyone did that, nascent large-scale societies would collapse. Economists call this paradox the free rider problem. How did the earliest large-scale societies overcome it?

Isn't this exactly what happened? Or to what "large-scale societies" are they referring? I studied Latin American and Spanish history the most, so I'll stick to the best example I know of.

In an infamous story of Spanish colonisation in modern day Cajamarca, Peru, and what would precipitate the Battle of Caxamarca and initiate a 2000-people massacre and the destruction of the Incan empire, Friar Vicente de Valverde y Alvarez de Toledo in a deceitfully kind manner asked Emperor Atahualpa to essentially convert to Catholicism. This was after Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro wanted a friendship pact that Atahualpa had already heard rumours was a trap. So, Atahualpa refused. Later Friar Vicente gives Atahualpa the Bible, which he knows indigenous peoples do not know what one is since they had not even discovered writing, much less books, at that time. Atahualpa naturally throws the book and this is taken to be an "attack" on the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish armada guns down 2000 natives, erects a church at the Incan capital of Cuzco, and proselytises the entire kingdom. Don't read the garbage Wikipedia article on it. Instead read Spanish Friar Bartolme de las Casas' A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.

Then juntas were formed. The Spanish empire was spread thin. Dutch Revolt. The Napoleonic Wars? British West Indian labour unrest?

These researchers should look up the word PROSELYTISM. They seem to have ignored the beginnings of the Christinisation of a large part of the world. It was tainted with killings, political deceit and motivation and to control societies, as was the case with Constantine

The article says:

In some societies, belief in a watchful, punishing god or gods could have been the key, Norenzayan believes. As he wrote in Big Gods, “Watched people are nice people.” Belief in karma—which Norenzayan calls “supernatural punishment in action”—could have had a similar psychological effect in the absence of actual gods, a proposition his colleagues are investigating in Asia.

The researchers conflate obedience with some type of moral "niceness". For example, Japanese society has been constructed to publicly humiliate you if you step out of order. And humiliation and losing face is the worst social burden for them. There is no way to scientifically define what is "nice" without involving at least some type of philosophical underpinning; e.g., utilitarianism, consquentialism, deontologism. And even then, the only thing that may be proven is good ethics, not necessarily morality.

The article:

All you need, he argues, is a sufficiently affluent society in which people can afford to prioritize long-term goals (like the afterlife) over short-term needs. Studying Eurasian societies between 500 B.C.E. and 300 B.C.E., Baumard recently found that moralizing religions were much more likely to emerge in societies where people had access to more than 20,000 kilocalories in total energy resources each day, from food, fuel, and draft animals, for example.

This is partly right. Add syncretism to the mix and you see that religion is far more than a "cognitive byproduct", but not because it helps our modern societies maintain order. Anthropologically, we understand that tribes and early civilisations used superstition, fables, and parables to explain morality and ethics. In my opinion, modern societies's idea of "right" and "wrong" is too complex to analyse as a whole. Advancements in philosophy, science, neuroscience, and a more connected world have probably all contributed to our idea of what is right or wrong. Some of these happened to be aligned with Christianity's or religion's view of what is right and wrong. Remember that the Bible was written by many men who philosophised about the nature of what is right and wrong and that the most advanced moral philosophy stops at the 18th century, with Immanuel Kant. After that it's just philosophy of science.

Animats• 11 years ago

That's an interesting thesis. There's a Western bias; Shinto has a large number of gods, rather than one big one.

It's convenient that the "moralizing god" religions predate the concept of the corporation. The Christian Bible talks of kings and rich individuals, but has little to say about powerful organizations. If the Bible had more to say about moral organizational behavior, it would be a lot less popular with economic elites.

(It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.)

vanattab• 11 years ago

(It's sad that the Greek and Roman religions are extinct. There should be some group trying to get the Pantheon in Rome back from the clutches of the Catholic Church.)

This popular trend of bashing Catholics and their faith is really starting to grow tiresome. The "current" Pantheon was a Pagan Temple for ~483 years well over 1000 years ago. It has been a Catholic church for ~1406 years up until the present time. It's conversion to a church when Italy was converting from various forms of paganism is the only thing that saved it during the middle ages. It is located in a country where > %80 percent of the population describes themselves as Catholic(although far few say they are observant). I think you would have to have a very perverted sense of justice to think that it would be just to take ownership of the Pantheon away from that catholic church. Besides who would take control of it? The Italian government? If so, why make tax payers foot the bill for its preservation when the Catholic Church has been happy to do so for 1400 years and allows the public free access.

ucaetano• 11 years ago

I can almost imagine a high priest of ages past:

"You must toil hard and suffer through your miserable life, because if you are a good person, after you're dead you'll experience the sublime eternity of the heavens".

Then people start killing themselves to get to heaven faster. The high priest pauses, thinks and pronounces:

"Oh, and whoever commits suicide goes straight to hell, no questions asked".

colechristensen2• 11 years ago

There doesn't even have to be intent.

Take 1000 different cultures with a random selection of moral values, unique to each. The moral values they hold dear, especially in early development, will have a very real effect on the survival of it's followers. Culture evolves right along with genetic code. The culture you're born into has very real effects to your survival fitness.

Certain traits of religions survive better.

jxramos• 11 years ago

I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.

Birth of the Moralizing Gods

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