Religions and the Evolution of Societies, Cultures

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Religions and the Evolution of Societies, Cultures

1margd
Nov 10, 2019, 7:59 am

In Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, David Sloan Wilson discussed religions' role in facilitating ancients' great works (like irrigation systems). Tidbits, as I recall: ritual (like wearing prayer shawl) makes one more trusting of a stranger who also observes/participates. Major religions like Islam increased likelihood of being honest in the marketplace, an important attribute in a post-barter economy.

A new study suggests that the early medieval Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism through its focus on marriage and family, in particular its war on incest--including marriages between distant cousins, step-relatives and in-laws. (Somewhere in my bookcase is a history of marriage, which documents the early church's increasing interest in formalizing marriages, which was often unceremonial except where land was involved, and then the woman had little say. I'll cite when I find it.)

Interesting to think that in addition to disapproval today of divorce and same-sex marriage, early Church focus on marriage and family may have sparked Western individualism. I wonder if ultimately, it engendered secularism and atheism, setting up a tension with traditionalists, which is still playing out? Clash of Civilizations discusses dual rise of fundamentalism and secularism. According to The Reformation, change is still playing out, particularly in the US.

The medieval Catholic Church may have helped spark Western individualism
Early religious decrees transformed families and, in turn, whole societies, a new study says
Sujata Gupta | November 7, 2019 at 2:59 pm

During the Middles Ages, decrees from the early Catholic Church triggered a massive transformation in family structure. That shift explains, at least in part, why Western societies today tend to be more individualistic, nonconformist and trusting of strangers compared with other societies....

...roughly 1,500 years...a branch of Christianity that later evolved into the Roman Catholic Church swept across Europe and beyond...

Leaders of that branch became obsessed with what they saw as incest, the researchers say, and launched a “marriage and family program” that eventually banned marriages between even distant cousins, step-relatives and in-laws. Church policies also encouraged marriage by choice instead of arranged marriages, and small, nuclear households, with couples living separately from extended family members.

Using historical, anthropological and psychological data, Henrich and his colleagues show that the Church’s policies helped unravel the tight, cohesive kin networks that had existed. In places under the Church’s influence, a Western-style mind-set has come to dominate, the team says.

...A look at countries categorized by their church experience...suggests that the early Catholic Church’s dissolution of traditional family structures during the Middle Ages reduced marriages between cousins...That correlates with intensified individualism, nonconformity and trust of strangers...known as WEIRD traits, or those prevalent in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries. That behavioral shift is weaker in regions exposed to the Eastern Church...where taboos against cousins marrying weren’t as strong...

This interplay between history, family structure and psychology affects modern times, the authors say. In Italy, for example, the Western Church’s influence was limited to the northern and central portions of the country until well into the Middle Ages. Data based on Vatican records show that, consequently, marriages between first cousins were almost nonexistent in the north, but accounted for 3.5 to just over 5 percent, on average, of all unions in the far south from 1910 to 1964... (mard: Rudy Giuliani was second cousins with his first wife, so I checked--his paternal ancestors hail from central Italy.)

...trust of strangers (declined with)...the rate of first cousin marriages in a given region...blood donations...banking...

Citations

J.F. Schulz et al. The church, intensive kinship, and global psychological variation. Science. Vol. 366, November 8, 2019, p. 707. doi: 10.1126/science.aau5141.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/eaau5141

J. Henrich, S.J. Heine and A. Norenzayan. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Vol. 33, June 2010, p. 61. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/we...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/medieval-catholic-church-may-have-helped-spa...

2margd
Nov 24, 2020, 10:10 am

Harvey Whitehouse et al. 2019. Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Nature | Vol 568 | 11 April 2019. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4.epdf

Author access:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4.epdf?author_access_token=ziGhO...

...In summary, although our analyses are consistent with previous studies that show an association between moralizing gods and complex societies..., 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 societies—suggests that such beliefs were not widespread before the invention of writing. The few small-scale societies that did display precolonial evidence of moralizing gods came from regions that had previously been used to support the claim that moralizing gods contributed to the rise of social complexity (Austronesia16 and Iceland18), whichsuggests that such regions are the exception rather than the rule.

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Big gods came after the rise of civilisations, not before, finds study using huge historical database
Harvey Whitehouse
Chair professor, University of Oxford

Patrick E. Savage
Associate Professor in Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

Peter Turchin
Professor of Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Mathematics, University of Connecticut

Pieter Francois
Associate Professor in Cultural Evolution, University of Oxford

March 20, 2019

https://theconversation.com/big-gods-came-after-the-rise-of-civilisations-not-be...

3mikevail
Nov 24, 2020, 11:01 am

Long story short; there's always someone to come around and spoil the fun

4LolaWalser
Nov 24, 2020, 11:40 am

Religion is never not toxic garbage.

5margd
Modificato: Nov 24, 2020, 12:02 pm

Religion is powerful. It is too often co-opted for bad ends, but also has directed us toward common good e.g., survival in times of plague, early irrigation projects. Or so I've always thought...

6LolaWalser
Nov 24, 2020, 12:15 pm

Intellectually religion is pure tripe, "Not Even Wrong"; socially it's an instrument of division and oppression of the other in the name of the tribe. It fosters cohesiveness on the most primitive level, one which the human society has superseded tens, maybe hundreds of thousands years ago.

Anything good that happened in the world in the last ten thousand years was despite, not because of religion.

Show me a single country that prospered and is prospering because it got more religious.

On the contrary, increase in religiosity is everywhere accompanied by increase in misery and unrest.

7SandraArdnas
Nov 24, 2020, 1:44 pm

Religion is too vast a concept for any blanket generalizations. Making them nevertheless is what I would consider intellectual tripe. Even restricting it to just organized religion is intellectually unsound, let alone to the wider concept. Intellectually, you have to go into specifics of a specific religion to come to any worthwhile conclusions, as with any cultural phenomenon. To tackle just one of your claims: how was Buddhism an instrument of division and oppression?

8spiralsheep
Nov 24, 2020, 1:55 pm

>7 SandraArdnas: "how was Buddhism an instrument of division and oppression?"

Buddha claimed women can't achieve enlightenment. As a direct result of this Buddhist teaching women in Buddhist societies are divided from men and oppressed as a gendered class. Of course, you could have argued that Buddhism isn't technically a "religion".

9SandraArdnas
Nov 24, 2020, 2:31 pm

>8 spiralsheep: Where did you find that in Buddhist scriptures? Also, you can't arbitrarily decide something is not a religion to fit your agenda and pretend that's an intellectually rigorous debate. Just because you come from the Christian-dominated culture doesn't mean religion has to include a God or any supernatural entity whatsoever.

But we are derailing the thread, whose topic is more interesting than this debate anyway.

10spiralsheep
Nov 24, 2020, 2:40 pm

>9 SandraArdnas: "Where did you find that in Buddhist scriptures?"

I'm not google.

"Also, you can't arbitrarily decide something is not a religion to fit your agenda"

Quite, which is why I didn't do that, obviously.

"Just because you come from the Christian-dominated culture"

Do I?

"But we are derailing the thread"

I wasn't. You asked a question about Buddhism and I gave a simple factual answer. But if you're worried about derailing then you can stop posting at any time. :-)

11SandraArdnas
Nov 24, 2020, 2:50 pm

>10 spiralsheep: You're not google, but you're a demagogue. Cheers

12LolaWalser
Nov 24, 2020, 2:55 pm

>7 SandraArdnas:

Yes, I dare generalise about frikkin religion, and I say it's intellectual tripe because its validity to believers is not dependent on reason, empiricism, science. Religious tenets and statements, even those about the natural world, are typically not testable ("Not Even Wrong"). And when some are tested, such as the "efficacy" of prayer or various "miracles", negative results do not lead to corrections.

Buddhism

There's nothing special about Buddhism when it comes to religious nefariousness. >8 spiralsheep: points out one division within it (typical, of course, for religions), but there is also historical splintering and schisms as in other religions, religious intolerance (see Sri Lanka; China), superstition, and clerical criminality both petty and large (personal misconduct, sexual abuse, cultism, milking of the gullible etc.)

13SandraArdnas
Nov 24, 2020, 3:09 pm

Maybe you mistake this group for pro and con where this 'two legs good four legs bad' approach is the norm (pardon if my animal farm reference is incorrect, it's been a while). However, it's most definitely not the epitome of intellectuality, quite the opposite.

14librorumamans
Nov 25, 2020, 12:18 am

>1 margd: I wonder if ultimately, it engendered secularism and atheism, setting up a tension with traditionalists, which is still playing out?

You might be interested in the lecture series from Gresham College on "The Origins of Atheism".

After a good deal of reading and much reflection, I'm increasingly of the opinion that you can't have a stable, functioning group of humans without some form of religion, some form of organizing identity myth: We are the people who ... . I suspect that theology or doctrine often (generally?) develops somewhat later as a way of codifying and rendering more permanent that initial identifying myth.

We see all around us and all through history how identity and affiliation are so central to people that they will perpetrate horrors or fight to the death when that identity is threatened. Identity, power, and politics are often inextricable, a fact that secular and religious manipulators have exploited since human society began, I imagine.

15John5918
Modificato: Nov 25, 2020, 3:02 am

>14 librorumamans:

Interesting reflection on your part. I agree that an identity myth is useful in building a society. Perhaps the difference between healthy and toxic religion is how exclusive or inclusive the myth is, and whether it is used to build community or to divide. Sadly all too often it has been exclusive and divisive.

16margd
Modificato: Nov 25, 2020, 5:38 am

>14 librorumamans: Thanks for that. Many indigenous peoples' names for themselves translate as "The People". Next need as each group grows must be "organizing identity myth".

An ethologist friend (studies animal behavior) recommended a new book by Carl Safina, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. (A NYT notable book, well-reviewed, if anyone needs gift idea.) I haven't read it yet, but one reviewer's description of our nearest relatives (chimpanzees) reinforces the idea that our species needs some kind of organizing myth to sustain ever-larger groups: "Becoming Wild takes the reader deep into the shared lives within three animal societies: sperm whales, macaws and chimpanzees. You will be awestruck by the sperm whales' almost mystical abilities and the lovely, connected, compassionate lives they live. You will be surprised, amused and enlightened by the complex and successful nature of macaw culture and society. And you will perhaps be frustrated and irked by the often pettily competitive and highly political lives lived by chimpanzees."

But if we need such myths to sustain ever-larger groups, Robert Wright's two books, albeit pop sci, which I read some 35 years ago, were memorable in that the atheist-author became consumed by the question of how society could survive without religion, which he saw as a diminishing influence: The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. In fact, his books drove a lawyer colleague back to school for his PhD to further explore the question!

I wonder what organizing identity myths work best for various societies. My Canadian dad used to say, almost wistfully, that America had the stronger identity myth. Today, I wonder if America's myth is up to unifying our splintering society with its religious / secular divides, as well as those of national origins, and that maybe Canada's less insistent mythology might make for a somewhat more resilient society?

No matter how much we humans need organizing myths, it is true that they too often are used to direct us to the worst kinds of behaviors... per the short post-WW2 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer, a convincing cautionary tale that President Eisenhower gifted to each of his staff.

17LolaWalser
Nov 26, 2020, 1:33 pm

>13 SandraArdnas:

Do you have anything other than ad hominem to contribute here? I think you'd fit in Pro & Con rather better than you think, going by the absence of argument combined with the sniffy 'tude.

>14 librorumamans:

some form of religion, some form of organizing identity myth:

These are not equivalent, nor is identity dependent on myth.

And, it's only the religious who deduce the "necessity" of religion. Not exactly an objective view.

>15 John5918:

My Canadian dad used to say, almost wistfully, that America had the stronger identity myth.

It is to shudder. American national mythology is not only a pack of lies (as, of course, most such mythologies are) but one that has proven enormously deleterious for people outside and within its borders--to this day. There's absolutely nothing in it Canadians (whose colonial burden is bad enough) or anyone else should seek to emulate.

Did you somehow miss the import of Black Lives Matter, of Native American environmentalists protesting corporate assault on their land, of the gender and ethnic transformation of the Democratic Party, of the imminent demographic transformation of the US as a whole? White male genocidal enslavers' myths won't do for that USA.

18librorumamans
Modificato: Nov 27, 2020, 3:31 pm

>17 LolaWalser:

Your response to >15 John5918: is actually a response to >16 margd:

I said in #14: I'm increasingly of the opinion that you can't have a stable, functioning group of humans without some form of religion, some form of organizing identity myth

and >17 LolaWalser: replied: These are not equivalent, nor is identity dependent on myth.

I know that this is a point that we disagree on. By condensing my ideas into four sentences, of course I left out a lot of context and also loaded a lot of meaning onto the words I did use. And writing a paper on this would only result in TLDR.

We disagree in part on the scope of the term 'religion'. At present I understand the term broadly and consider organized religion to be only a small and often pernicious expression of something much more fundamental to human interactions. As I understand it, the contemporary application of the word is a recent and Western concept. Nonetheless it captures what I think must underlie all sustained human groupings by encompassing questions like: What identifies this group of (generally unrelated) people in distinction to that other group of people over there? How does my group sustain itself and support us in a hostile world? What meaning is there to life beyond feeding and begetting? How do we physically and emotionally survive in and understand a world that is (I suspect, ultimately) incomprehensible?

There are large groupings and smaller groupings that, overlapping, address some of these questions, and others as well, in various ways. And from the various proffered answers come identities and affiliations, and from them what I broadly term an originating story or myth. A person without affiliation or identity is either a beast or a god, as Aristotle famously remarked.

That's enough for now, condensed as it is. Of course, I'm not expecting you to agree but rather trying to explain a bit more where I'm coming from.

Cheers!

19southernbooklady
Nov 26, 2020, 4:02 pm

>18 librorumamans: I'm increasingly of the opinion that you can't have a stable, functioning group of humans without some form of religion, some form of organizing identity myth

I just happened to be reading Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, in which the author, Daniel Everett gives an account of his work with the Piraha people of the Amazon. He makes a case that they live by what he calls "the immediacy of experience principle" -- meaning that things that are not directly witnessed/experienced by themselves or indeed anyone, have no real hold on them. They live, for all intents and purposes in a bubble of time that only includes their own lifetime. As such, they do not have creation myths, which was a big problem for him when he first arrived as a Christian missionary to live among them with the express directive to translate the Bible into their language.

20librorumamans
Nov 26, 2020, 4:38 pm

>19 southernbooklady:

Oh, great! Yet another fascinating-sounding book that I want to read; and, worse, the public library has eight copies!

Woe is me! ;-)