Which came first – moralizing gods or civilization?


Reader Jason alerted me to this article that says that the emergence of all-powerful gods came after the rise of civilizations.

The idea that an all-knowing god was necessary for large societies to function and hence must have come earlier has a plausible argument.

One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. Small societies, so the argument goes, were like fish bowls. It was almost impossible to engage in antisocial behaviour without being caught and punished – whether by acts of collective violence, retaliation or long-term reputational damage and risk of ostracism. But as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.

What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions.

But a consortium of scholars constructed a database going back 10,000 years and the results argue that it actually went the opposite way.

We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter. New research we’ve just published in the journal Nature reveals that moralising gods come later than many people thought, well after the sharpest rises in social complexity in world history. In other words, gods who care about whether we are good or bad did not drive the initial rise of civilisations – but came later.

Our statistical analysis showed that beliefs in supernatural punishment tend to appear only when societies make the transition from simple to complex, around the time when the overall population exceed about a million individuals.

The paper that was published in Nature can be read here.

While interesting as a piece of social anthropology, what relevance might this have today? The authors speculate what the increasing secularization of society might portend for complex modern societies that may have depended upon religion as one of the glues that held them together.

Comments

  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    Even “classical” civilizations illustrate this point.

    The original Greek gods represented natural forces and human proclivities, and many of the stories about them were not just unedifying and raunchy, but downright gross.

    When the Romans commandeered the Greek pantheon, they cleaned up a lot of the stories to re-make their renamed gods into respectable role models -- at least to a degree (e.g., they kept a lot of the incest).

    Or so I’ve read -- no doubt cartomancer &/or other cognoscenti will show up to set me straight soon enough.

  2. Rob Grigjanis says

    What I’ve read about ancient civilizations doesn’t have much in the way of “gods who care about whether we are good or bad”. The gods (Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Greek, etc) were capricious, jealous, murderous, you name it. They demanded worship and obedience, and woe betide those who defy them.

    I’ve long thought that the link with civilization is simply one of authority. As people settle in larger numbers, hierarchies develop, and those at the top legitimize their authority by appealing to an even higher one.

  3. John Morales says

    … a plausible argument.

    Plausible to some, perhaps. Particularly to goddists.

    I find it purely speculative, and am not surprised the research has so indicated.

  4. lanir says

    If you want to know what to worry about as religion slowly performs it’s last and only miracle and disappears from the Earth, I’d worry more about moralists. It doesn’t take a religion to fuel that garbage just a smug sense of superiority. And a willingness to belittle and disrupt the lives of your fellow humans.

    We’ll also be quite a long time healing the damage religion has inflicted upon our societies. Kicking religion to the curb is one thing. Doing the same with all the harmful ideas and ideals it’s been used to promote will be something else altogether. For depressing examples see just about any atheist more famous than the people who blog here. We’re already seeing some of what that looks like but I think it will become more common and get more attention later on.

    I feel like they really nailed it with the focus on moralizing in the paper. It’s one of the foundations of religion and also one of the key means used to justify oppressing and violating others. It starts with labeling some really bad ideas as bad but then it always seems to shift to labeling things that annoy the moralizers as bad. And then things that help the moralizers control other people get added to the list of bad things. Soon the focus shifts away from avoiding clearly bad things to these other categories and you have rampant hypocrisy again. All disguised as helping society be more moral. Bleh.

  5. mailliw says

    Your majesty, the people are in open revolt against you.

    Tell them they will be killed!

    They say they are not afraid to die.

    Tell them they will be punished after they die!

    They’ll never fall for that your majesty.

    Just try it, trusted courtier, just try it…

  6. lumipuna says

    AFAIK in historical Finnish culture, household spirits (tonttu) were considered to be important guardians of everyday morality. Now I wonder if this tradition actually goes back to pre-Christian times, or if it’s rather Christian influnce on leftover pagan traditions. In any case, these spirits were seen as family members rather than some distant rulers. I think the actual pagan deities weren’t much concerned with human behavior, beyond the offerings and general respect.

  7. Holms says

    One popular theory has argued that moralising gods were necessary for the rise of large-scale societies. […] as societies grew larger and interactions between relative strangers became more commonplace, would-be transgressors could hope to evade detection under the cloak of anonymity. For cooperation to be possible under such conditions, some system of surveillance was required.

    What better than to come up with a supernatural “eye in the sky” – a god who can see inside people’s minds and issue punishments and rewards accordingly. Believing in such a god might make people think twice about stealing or reneging on deals, even in relatively anonymous interactions.

    The reasoning would seem to suggest the exact opposite of that ‘popular theory’. By positing that the emergence of moralising deities was made necessary by the increasing scale of societies, it admits that societal growth predated the emergence of such deities.

  8. lumipuna says

    I suspect that, when people were hunter-gatherers and lived in small independent groups, the concept of a ruler would have been incomprehensible, and the concept of a distant invisible ruler doubly so.

  9. friedfish2718 says

    That “moralizing gods” came after civilizations are set is inevitable.
    .
    The goal of morality is the survival of society.
    .
    What weakens society is immoral; what strengthens society is moral.
    .
    Morality and social rules are based on pragmatism.
    .
    Some societies are short-lived; their moralities were not good.
    .
    Some societies (call it civilizations) are long-lived; their moralities are better.
    .
    The better moralities are enshrined in narratives of Spirit/God.
    .
    Mind you, Spirit/God narratives are present in all stages of society.
    .
    Societies/Civilizations follow the Life Cycle: Birth, Childhood, Adulthood, Senility, Death.
    .
    As Societies go along the Life Cycle, the morality will change; the morality change indicates the Life Stage of society.
    .
    The Atheist Morality is a (not the only) Senility/Death Marker of Society.

  10. KG says

    Societies/Civilizations follow the Life Cycle: Birth, Childhood, Adulthood, Senility, Death. -- friedfish2718@9

    Drivel. There speaks someone who hasn’t read -- or at any rate, understood -- any significant historians more recent than Spengler or Toynbee, after whom this kind of pseudo-biological tosh was rightly abandoned.

    The Atheist Morality is a (not the only) Senility/Death Marker of Society.

    So, give me a list of those societies with an “atheist morality”* which have “died”. But you’ll first need to say what the term “atheist morality” means, and what it means for a society to “die”.

    *Neither word requires an initial upper-case letter.

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