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posted by chromas on Monday March 25 2019, @07:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-handing-out-infinite-punishment-for-finite-crime,-spread-the-word-and-take-donations dept.

Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around: study

"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.

One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.

When ancient societies hit a million people, vengeful gods appeared

The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.

[...] But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?

The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.

"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."

All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."


Original Submission 1 | Original Submission 2

 
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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:52PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:52PM (#820085) Journal
    Notice that in both your cases, we have actual weather to blame? Meanwhile for the Holodomor, one immediately has to go to Soviet agricultural policy to find the causes of the famine.

    Let's not pretend the Czarist regime was anything but brutal and incompetent.

    Brutal and incompetent is relative.

    They couldn't beat the Bolsheviks even with France, Britain and the US sending troops to help.

    Which is irrelevant for two reasons. The Czars were already dead and gone by the second year of the civil war. The Czarist advocates were only a part of a greater opposition, including a democratic component. Second, not winning a war doesn't indicate incompetence in agricultural policy.