On the Relationship Between Highly Organized Culture and Moralizing Gods.

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history (Savage et al, Nature, Published On Line March 20, 2019)

A few weeks back, I came across a commentary in my files that I never actually read, this one: Birth of the moralizing gods (Lizzie Wade, Science, Vol. 349, Issue 6251, pp. 918-922 (2015)).

I took a brief look through it - wondering a little bit about what had caused me to download it some years back - to find a discussion of the interesting thesis that in order for a highly organized culture to arise, it was necessary to have an organized religion in which a God (or Gods) punish or reward one for one's behavior, if in no other way than in a putative afterlife, where one is judged on the (defined) morality of one's earthly behavior. This idea of punishment and reward of course is an outline of what one might call "justice."

Religion in these times is a huge force, of course, and not always for good; one wonders about our fundamentalists in this country and their worship of Donald Trump, of all beasts, without contemplating whether, by appeal to their Bible, if this awful tiny handed gnome might or might not be worshiped as described in Revelations 13, 1-18, a rather psychotic passage that reads like an acid trip, but warns of worshiping a perverted god who is, not, in fact, a god.

That's their business, not mine, except inasmuch they do ill and unethical things.

Dr. Wade's subtitle for her commentary was this: "A new theory aims to explain the success of world religions—but testing it remains a challenge."

The Nature paper linked at the outset, claims to have tested this theory using certain kinds of scales, tests, and historical (often archaeological) evidence.

From the introductory text:

Supernatural agents that punish direct affronts to themselves (for example, failure to perform sacrifices or observe taboos) are commonly represented in global history, but rarely are such deities believed to punish moral violations in interactions between humans2. Recent millennia, however, have seen the rise and spread of several ‘prosocial religions’, which include either powerful ‘moralizing high gods’ (MHG; for example, the Abrahamic God) or more general ‘broad supernatural punishment’ (BSP) of moral transgressions (for example, karma in Buddhism)9,12,16,17,18. Such moralizing gods may have provided a crucial mechanism for overcoming the classic free-rider problem in large-scale societies11. The association between moralizing gods and complex societies has been supported by two forms of evidence: psychological experiments3,6,27,28 and cross-cultural comparative analyses7,11,14,15,16,17,18,20.

The contributions of theistic beliefs to cooperation, as well as the historical question of whether moralizing gods precede or follow the establishment of large-scale cooperation, have been much debated9,10,12,23,24. Three recent studies that explicitly model temporal causality have come to contrasting conclusions. One study, which applied phylogenetic comparative methods to infer historical changes in Austronesian religions, reported that moralizing gods (BSP but not MHG) preceded the evolution of complex societies16. The same conclusion was reached in an analysis of historical and archaeological data from Viking-age Scandinavia18. By contrast, another study of Eurasian empires has reported that moralizing gods followed—rather than preceded—the rise of complex, affluent societies20. However, all of these studies are restricted in geographical scope...

The authors claim to take a broader approach as described later in the paper:

To overcome these limitations, we used ‘Seshat: Global History Databank’29, a repository of standardized data on social structure, religion and other domains for hundreds of societies throughout world history. In contrast to other databases that attempt to model history using contemporary ethnographic data, Seshat directly samples over time as well as space. Seshat also includes estimates of expert disagreement and uncertainty, and uses more-detailed variables than many databases.

To test the moralizing gods hypothesis, we coded data on 55 variables from 414 polities (independent political units) that occupied 30 geographical regions from the beginning of the Neolithic period to the beginning of Industrial and/or colonial periods (Fig. 1 and Supplementary Data). We used a recently developed and validated measure of social complexity that condenses 51 social complexity variables (Extended Data Table 5) into a single principal component that captures three quarters of the observed variation, which we call ‘social complexity’8. The remaining four variables were selected to test the MHG and BSP subtypes of the moralizing gods hypothesis. The MHG variable was coded following the MHG variable used as standard in the literature on this topic11,14,15,16,17,30, which requires that a high god who created and/or governs the cosmos actively enforces human morality. Because the concept of morality is complex, multidimensional and in some respects culturally relative—and because not all moralizing gods are ‘high gods’—we also coded three different variables related to BSP that are specifically relevant to prosocial cooperation: reciprocity, fairness and in-group loyalty.

The sampling region are shown in a map:



The caption:

The area of each circle is proportional to social complexity of the earliest polity with moralizing gods to occupy the region or the latest precolonial polity for regions without precolonial moralizing gods. For regions with precolonial moralizing gods, the date of earliest evidence of such beliefs is displayed in thousands of years ago (ka), coloured by type of moralizing gods. The three transnational religious systems that represent the first appearance of moralizing gods in more than one region—Zoroastrianism, Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity) and Buddhism—are coloured red, orange and blue, respectively, whereas other local religious systems with beliefs in MHG or BSP are coloured yellow and purple, respectively. See Extended Data Table 1 for further details.

A graphic describes their findings from this approach to define the "chicken and egg" argument about the whether the concept of a moralizing god is necessary for the rise of complex societies, or whether complex societies develop these faiths in order to sustain themselves.



The caption:

a, Time series showing mean social complexity over time for 2,000 years before and after the appearance of moralizing gods. n = 12 regions with social complexity data for before and after moralizing gods. Social complexity has been scaled so that the society with the highest social complexity (Qing Dynasty, China, around AD 1900) has a value of 1 and the society with the lowest social complexity (Early Woodland, Illinois, USA, around 400 BC) has a value of 0. Vertical bands represent the period in which moralizing gods and doctrinal rituals first appeared. All errors represent 95% confidence intervals, with the exception of the vertical bar for moralizing gods, which represents the mean duration of the polity in which moralizing gods appeared (because times are normalized to the time of first evidence of moralizing gods, and there is thus no variance in this parameter). b, Histogram of the differences in rates of change in social complexity (SC) after minus before the appearance of moralizing gods. n = 200 time windows from the 12 regions. kyr, thousand years. The y axis represents the number of time windows out of 200. See Extended Data Fig. 1 for data for each of the 12 regions and Extended Data Fig. 2 for a version extending beyond 2,000 years before and after moralizing gods. The analyses in this figure treat the presence of either MHG or BSP as ‘moralizing gods’—see Extended Data Fig. 3 for an alternative analysis restricted only to the presence of MHG.

They write further:

In summary, although our analyses are consistent with previous studies that show an association between moralizing gods and complex societies7,11,14,15,16,17,18,30, we find that moralizing gods usually follow—rather than precede—the rise of social complexity. Notably, most societies that exceeded a certain social complexity threshold developed a conception of moralizing gods. Specifically, in 10 out of the 12 regions analysed, the transition to moralizing gods came within 100 years of exceeding a social complexity value of 0.6 (which we call a megasociety, as it corresponds roughly to a population in the order of one million; Extended Data Fig. 1). This megasociety threshold does not seem to correspond to the point at which societies develop writing, which might have suggested that moralizing gods were present earlier but were not preserved archaeologically. Although we cannot rule out this possibility, the fact that written records preceded the development of moralizing gods in 9 out of the 12 regions analysed (by an average period of 400 years; Supplementary Table 2)—combined with the fact that evidence for moralizing gods is lacking in the majority of non-literate societies2—suggests that such beliefs were not widespread before the invention of writing...

...Although our results do not support the view that moralizing gods were necessary for the rise of complex societies, they also do not support a leading alternative hypothesis that moralizing gods only emerged as a byproduct of a sudden increase in affluence during a first millennium BC ‘Axial Age’19,20,21,22. Instead, in three of our regions (Egypt, Mesopotamia and Anatolia), moralizing gods appeared before 1500 BC. We propose that the standardization of beliefs and practices via high-frequency repetition and enforcement by religious authorities enabled the unification of large populations for the first time, establishing common identities across states and empires25,26. Our data show that doctrinal rituals standardized by routinization (that is, those performed weekly or daily) or institutionalized policing (religions with multiple hierarchical levels) significantly predate moralizing gods, by an average of 1,100 years (t = 2.8, d.f. = 11, P = 0.018; Fig. 2a).

I'm not all that much into social science, but the role of religion in culture, for good and for bad, has always lingered in my consciousness, if only because religion was a very important part of my childhood, possibly the most important part of my childhood.

I personally know people who are highly ethical clearly because of their religion; and of course, we are all aware of - and I know several personal examples - people who excuse their lack of ethics by appeal to their religion.

I'm sure any sensible person would prefer the former, a type described both my mother and my step mother and some people with whom I work closely, and the latter by my own brother from whom I am estranged.

I'm not sure what all this may or may not mean, but in the time of awful people like Michael Pence and his ilk, the paper does inspire some interesting questions, as it is clear that under some circumstances, aggressive religious faith can serve to destabilize complex societies.

I wish you a pleasant Sunday.