
Birth of the Moralizing Gods - reptation
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.summary
======
jdmichal
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](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
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.

------
xlm1717
"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
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.

~~~
xlm1717
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.

~~~
qzcx
I would agree that social media works for shaming large corporations (brands),
but not so much on the micro scale of individual people out of the public
spotlight.

~~~
pharrington
Slut-Shaming happens on the internet too.

------
joe_the_user
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#Europe)

------
mdturnerphys
" . . . 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.

------
rntz
full article link:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/918.full)

------
Animats
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
> (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.

------
riemannzeta
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?

------
ucaetano
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".

~~~
colechristensen
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
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.

~~~
colechristensen
The word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an
analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a
gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are
equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through
the same processes of evolution.

You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many
of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made
much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.

------
orand
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??

~~~
danharaj
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.

~~~
qzcx
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?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Absolutely. Worked twice at companies that lost their CEOs for months. Things
ticked along very nicely, thank you.

There are many forms of governance, and the autocracy is only one form.

~~~
sliverstorm
To my knowledge the temporary absence of the CEO is absorbable in the short
term because the CEO is primarily concerned with things like strategy & the
future, not the immediate day-to-day operations.

You can keep ticking for a long time without direction or strategy. All the
parts will seem to be moving. But you won't be getting anywhere.

------
crimsonalucard
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.

~~~
riemannzeta
what do you mean by "more successful"?

~~~
pharrington
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"

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

------
kafkaesque
(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.

------
louithethrid
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.

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

A. E. Housman

------
rdtsc
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...

~~~
fweespeech
> 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.

~~~
rdtsc
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.

