Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

How did human societies manage to provide themselves with effective punishment mechanisms before the emergence of effective modern institutions such as the police and the courts?

Practically all human beings –more than 99.9%– belong today to communities made up of very large groups of people who do not know each other; for all intents and purposes, the vast majority are anonymous to everyone else. The exceptions are the small groups of hunter-gatherers that still survive in the world. Life in societies the size of today's would not be possible without effective cooperative mechanisms. Without cooperation, these societies would not be viable.

Cooperation, altruism or, in general, what we call prosocial behavior, are not exclusive to contemporary societies. Those of the past also cooperated, of course, but in the past, during the Pleistocene, human groups were much smaller, probably similar in size or, if anything, somewhat larger than the hunter-gatherers of the present.

The two most widely accepted biological mechanisms proposed to explain altruism and cooperation are kinship and reciprocity. According to Hamilton's rule, genetically related individuals cooperate with each other and thus favor the expansion of their own genes, because part of their genes are shared. The level of fitness lost by helping a relative is more than compensated by the gain produced by the expansion of the genes shared with that relative.

Reciprocity explains the cooperation between individuals who are part of the same group or are otherwise related, but aren’t relatives. Helping others is based on the expectation of being recipients of help from others. Reciprocity can be direct, between related individuals, or indirect, between individuals who have not been and will not be related directly, but who, by virtue of belonging to the same group or other circumstances, are part of a community of mutual help.

In the case of direct reciprocity, the prestige –as cooperators– of individuals and the mechanisms for detecting uncooperative individuals and, if necessary, punishing them play a very important role. However, the detection and punishment of non-cooperators are costly, which introduces a difficulty, although in small groups it is of relatively minor importance.

The anthropologist Christopher Boehm has explained how individuals in small hunter-gatherer groups act when a member of the group does not cooperate or even becomes a danger to others. In such a case, these individuals are punished, usually by one individual on behalf of all or, also, acting collectively. In serious cases, the sanction may consist of banishment or even execution. The problem arises in very large groups of individuals, where the costs of free-riders detection and punishment may be difficult to bear.

And yet, as I pointed out at the beginning, these costs have not prevented most human beings today from forming part of large collectivities in which we hardly know a few hundred people.

Today's societies have police and judicial institutions to solve the problem of cooperation in large groups. But how did these institutions arise? In the past, how did human societies manage to provide themselves with effective (though far from secure) punishment mechanisms before the emergence of effective modern institutions such as the police and the courts?

What Ara Norenzayan proposes in this book is that belief in supernatural surveillance was one of the first social tools that provided a solution to this difficulty.

This is not to say that gods and other supernatural agents arose in the minds of our ancestors in response to the need to cooperate on a large scale. Such entities already existed in the minds of hunter-gatherer peoples, surely as by-products of the human cognitive system. According to Paul Bloom, our ability to 'mentalize'[1] –to put ourselves mentally in the place of others– is at the basis of the belief in mind-body duality (dualism) and, therefore, the belief in nonmaterial entities. And the mind would have opened the way that led to the belief in other nonmaterial entities, such as spirits or gods.

But these entities were not prosocial, they were not concerned with the goodness or badness of human acts. And yet, throughout the Holocene, gods arose that did care about the behavior of the individuals who believed in them. Not only did they emerge, but the corresponding beliefs spread, so that today most of the world's believers worship such supernatural agents.

Norenzayan, in his book, develops an argument that simultaneously explains the origin and expansion of prosocial religions and large-scale cooperation. Prosocial religions, with their great gods who observe, intervene and demand displays of loyalty that are difficult to feign (i. e., sincere displays of loyalty), facilitated the rise of cooperation in large groups of anonymous strangers. In turn, these groups, as they expanded, took their prosocial religious beliefs and practices with them, extending them, and thus further intensifying large-scale cooperation in a runaway process of cultural evolution.

Belief in certain kinds of supernatural observers –great gods– is an essential ingredient that, along with rituals and other interlocking sets of social engagement devices, united total strangers into ever-larger moral communities as cultural evolution gained pace over the past twelve millennia. Thus, we do not have to choose between Hume (religion as a side effect of human cognition) and Durkheim (religion as a shaper of societies). On the contrary, believing (in God) and belonging (to the community of believers) come together in religion as an integrated whole.

The author gathers evidence from the evolutionary, cognitive and social sciences, and from this evidence formulates his vision of the origin of moralizing religions as a consequence of a powerful combination of genetic and cultural evolution.

This approach is based on three elements. First, it is based directly on cognitive considerations, which provide important clues as to how certain intuitions and cognitive biases push human minds toward certain recurrent patterns that support supernatural beliefs. Second, it combines cognitive tendencies with cultural mutants of these beliefs spread across populations at the expense of rival mutants; by 'cultural mutants' the author means variants of a religion that, once unbundled from the main stem, would compete with it. Third, understanding the forces of cultural competition between groups helps to explain why groups that acquired such successful mutants spread and expanded.

In closing, I will present a list of eight interrelated principles into which, according to Norenzayan, the book's argument can be summarized:

1. Observed people are good people. People's behavior is better when they know or believe themselves to be observed. Hence, a vigilant and moralistic god induces a fear that restrains bad behavior.

2. Religion is more in the situation than in the person[2]. In other words, the degree of compliance with religious precepts, including moral ones, depends on the perception we have of the situation under which a precept may or may not be broken.

3. Hell is stronger than heaven. That is, the threat of punishment exerts a greater effect than the promise of reward.

4. Trust in people who trust in God. It is assumed that people who fulfill religious precepts are people who can be trusted precisely because they fulfill them. This mechanism helps to cement religious communities.

5. Religious actions speak louder than words. Because acting costs more than speaking and, therefore, it is wiser to trust those who, by acting, incur some cost. Would you trust someone whose claims are gratuitous because there is no cost associated with them?

6. Unworshipped gods are impotent gods. If a god is worshipped, it is because there is a widespread belief that he is a powerful one.

7. Big gods for big groups. For the power of a god to spread over a large area of territory and cover with its mantle very large numbers of people, that god has to be powerful, has to be big.

8. The religious groups cooperate to compete. They cooperate within themselves so that this cooperation results in a better functioning of the group; the groups that function better compete with advantage with those that cooperate less or worse.

The book develops all these ideas and offers an attractive interpretation of the origin of big moralizing gods. That it is a well-elaborated interpretation and that it has a good number of indications in its favor, however, does not mean that it is "the interpretation".

This book is well over a decade old and, surely, there are divergent points of view. I am aware, for example, that some have objected to the main thesis that the great states began to take shape before they had great guardian divinities. Norenzayan has disputed that argument, though. In any case, it seems to me that there is a basis for holding that great gods were an important element that facilitated the configuration of great states. But that does not mean that it was "the element" that enabled it. I also believe that the success of the great religions is due, at least in large part, to the fact that their deities are vigilant and watch over the good behavior of their followers. And that along with that main feature, there is surely a bouquet of other characteristics that have allowed them to compete with advantage with other faiths that they have replaced.

I have the impression that these questions will be clarified when more information is available about the moral precepts of the ancient religions, the historical origin of the Golden Rule, and the rites and sincere signs of the fulfillment of the moral precepts.

Title: Big gods: how religion transformed cooperation and conflict

Author: Ara Norenzayan

Ed. by Princeton University Press, 2013.

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[1] That ability is a consequence of having what we call a ‘Theory of Mind’.

[2] In this statement there are echoes of an interesting psychological thesis, by virtue of which, a person's behavior is more conditioned by the situation in which they find themselves than by their personality traits. For anyone interested in knowing what this thesis consists of, I recommend the book by Lee Ros and Richard E. Nisbet, The Person and the Situation (MacGraw Hill, 1991). There are later editions.

Or you can go to Wikipedia for a brief summary of the debate on the matter.