Guest post: From Religion, the Blessing of Civilization
A happy new year, a happy new step: Today, we may enjoy the first guest blogpost here on the Scilog "Biology of Religion" by Alan Le Fevre. Being an avid reader and commentator of this blog, I asked him to formulate his personal views about the evolution of religions for review and discussion.
Alan aka Skipjack Le Fevre: From Religion, the Blessing of Civilization
Cathedral of the Intercession of the Virgin by the Moat
(aka St. Basil's Cathedral), Red Square, Moscow
The most basic human communities available for study are hunter-gatherer bands. These are extended-family groups; nomadic, egalitarian (no formal social hierarchy), vary in size up to dozens and presumed to be the most primitive, representing human community back into the Upper Paleolithic, 50 odd thousand years ago. If the hunting and gathering were good, the band would grow and split, leaving two now smaller bands to go their separate ways. [1]
Marriages often saw a young woman join the band from another, or less often, a young man. [2]
As the number of bands grew, areas where seasonal or year-round sustenance could be found began to be ‘claimed’ by settled or semi-settled groups. It quickly became their advantage in these conditions to grow the size of the group to better hold and defend this territory. To grow yet maintain stability, however, required the instituting of social structure. As bands grew into tribes, a chief or big-man hierarchy developed. [1]
A tribe could manage a village of up to one to two hundred individuals under the direction of its chief. As the tribe grew larger, the discord and challenges of resolving disputes drove the group to division and one group would leave with their new chief, forming a new tribe. We see the beginnings of plant and animal domestication among tribal communities.
If tribal splits were adequately amicable, territory to expand into limited, the local environment and food production technology sufficient, tribal federations or chiefdoms were possible. These are now stable villages which tend to develop hereditary hierarchies and could support up to thousands of individuals. Often in chiefdoms there is a foundational village, home to the ‘first family’, and such familiar traditions as formalized ‘tribute’ become established and rudimentary bureaucracy as the chiefs’ relations get embedded in the politics of maintaining the federation.
Larger, as long as order and coordination was maintained, offered obvious advantages in holding and defending hunting and farming territories, but growing the next step to cities and states required considerable consolidation and institutionalizing of power and control. Bureaucracies and nobility became formalized and shaman evolved into priests and formalized beliefs into religion as well.
Religion emerges as the first branching of government as civilization evolves out of tribal communities. The increased complexity of government allows the complex social community, the evolutionary progression of the human community.
This process has happened possibly dozens of times on all major continents: Africa, Asia, Near and Far East, Europe, India and the Americas. Religion has been a required component of every city and state foundation known. A component of every civilization recorded. Jared Diamond reflects on this necessity in this educational and entertaining video: The Evolution of Religions -
Before watching this lecture, understand he is very critical of religion – all the trash talk that has become a standard from the ‘enlightened’ minds these days. My point of including it is that he recognizes and condescendingly accepts its necessity, including: ‘Religion exacts a high cost on society, if one could have found a way to do without it, they would have a great advantage, but none have’. The clip also shares some background on the evolution of religion and the traditional functions religion has served in states through history.
Why do we have religion? To remain competitive, human societies had to grow in size to defend themselves and their territory. To remain stable and functional, larger communities required increasingly complex structure. To achieve Civilization, to maintain order with tens of thousands (to billions) of individuals, state level government and religion were essential components of that complex structure.
References
[1] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.
[2] Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization.
Note: In both the text and video clip referenced, Diamond repeatedly brings up that tired old missive of religion causing wars. That is really the primary motive of including Keeley. While he never makes my point that civilization is synonymous with ‘has religion’, he shows with meticulous detail that ‘traditional’ human communities, those lacking religion, have three times the number of wars as found in communities with religion (once per year vs. once every three years average), and over ten times the casualty rate as state societies. Religion causes wars? Keeley shows it stopping two out of three wars, nine out of ten deaths.
Why would such be needed? We joke of ‘herding cats’. Try herding heavily armed, predatory apes!
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Hi Alan,
thanks for your thoughts and interesting post. It strongly reminded me of Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God", who is arguing from the perspective of game theory and is coming to quite similar conclusions.
http://www.evolutionofgod.net/
Do you happen to know his book? If not (yet), you sure would enjoy it!
An excellent book, well worth a read by anyone interested in the development of religion across cultures and through the ages. It is on my list – I have skimmed it, but am a slow reader and have a few other books ahead of it. My philosophy is that to best understand any phenomenon, study it from a multitude of perspectives. I have chosen here an explanation of ‘solves a problem’ (Diamond takes the same approach, making his a natural reference). I think this sheds an entirely different light on religion. Wright can help you understand why religions have come out looking like they do – rituals, mysticism and a wide range of ‘hyper-agents’. ‘The God Instinct’ by Jesse Bering, (reviewed on this blog 07 Dec. 2010) also addresses this. For most of its existence, religion has had to reside entirely in the minds of adherents. There was no writing, no scrolls nor texts of any sort. To understand why religions take the form they do, understand the minds which formed and nurtured them. Wright and Bering, among many others, address religion from this perspective. To understand why human communities with religion out perform communities without religion, understand the problems being solved. This is where I hope to contribute to the discussion. Along with myself and Michael, D. S. Wilson approaches religion from a problem-solving perspective and has many good books, articles and blogs.
Although I agree with most of your thesis, I am somewhat hesitant about this sentence: Religion emerges as the first branching of government as civilization evolves out of tribal communities.
To me, that may sound as if indigenous and shamanistic religious traditions, roles and institutions (such as Ghost societies etc.) would not constitute "real" religions. But I think they can as adaptive to their respective environments as e.g. monotheistic institutions corresponding to statehood and globalized market economies.
As an example of an adaptive reaction, I just wrote about the Native American Ghost Dance movements:
http://www.scilogs.eu/...heir-evolutionary-success
In "The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior", colleagues such as Lahti, Palmer et al., Rossano and Schiefenhövel are addressing these very questions.
http://www.scilogs.eu/...ligious-mind-and-behavior
I would be very interested in your thoughts on the matter.
An interesting and believable theory of the evolution of religion however the subject is far too vast and the history far too obscure to reach any testable conclusions. Any theory worthy of serious consideration must have testable results to be more than mere speculation
One rather obvious place to start is the rise and fall of previous world wide civilizations. The Sumerians for example seemed to embrace diversity of religion and manage to control everything from western India to the eastern Mediterranean.The Romans did likewise except for the difficulty of embracing monotheism which when they did arguably led to their downfall. Too little is known about these ancient regimes. "Forecasting" the past is hard enough and it would be a little presumptuous to try to figure out how religion will evolve from the present.
Throughout history as far as we have any records, atheism or at least skepticism has always been around even when seriously repressed but so has superstition. Trying to figure out whether religion starts of stops wars seems like a feckless pursuit. I doubt whether those interested in the subject could even agree on some of the basic premises for a rational debate. For example would the Pax Romana be considered a triumph of peace under the Roman religion. Some Jews and Catholic martyrs might disagree
Michael – Your question calls for its own post, but the short answer is that (as I use the words) Religion and Spirituality (both encompass religious beliefs) are different degrees of solution to different stages of the human socialization problem. Simpler (in structure) vs. more complex, not real vs. unreal. I need to get a hold of Rossano’s paper. I think we are thinking on the same lines at the Spiritual end of the spectrum. I sent you a paper weeks ago that I think is consistent with Rossano – I’m guessing you never saw it.
Thanks for reading and responding – insightful as ever. We do not get to run arbitrary experiments in anthropology, but we can measure against all we do know (and learn). I think I am consistent with what we know – of all civilizations dug up or made reference to in history. Going forward, I doubt any new civilizations will form, but will develop out of existing ones. My theory must expand to address changes emerging from the Bronze Age, as you point out.
Apologies to all of your martyrs, but statistics are sadistic. The body counts go down, but that is no consolation to the friends and families of the victims. Improvements are incremental, but we are getting kinder and gentler – I think GWH Bush was right on that score. Michael, on many of his posts to this blog addresses some of the modern significance of belief, religious vs. secular. We really only have visibility back to about the Iron Age for skepticism.
Thanks for your post. In fact, evolutionary studies on religion are flourishing and using the same methods and standards which are employed for example in evolutionary studies of music or language. There are lots of experiments and fresh monographies available, e.g.:
http://www.scilogs.eu/...-instinct-by-jesse-bering
as well as scientific conferences and respective anthologies, e.g.:
http://www.scilogs.eu/...ligious-mind-and-behavior
Although evolutionary studies will probably never reach a point of final conclusion, they are very worthwile and a main point of this blog ist to present the scientific discourse and to invite people to join therein.
Ah, so you assume that spirituality would be a kind of an earlier stage of religiosity?
I would assume that these are different traits. Spirituality may be defined as the ability to have experiences of transcendence (dissolving boundaries) and religiosity as the ability to beliebe in superempirical agents. Although they may have surely interacted in human evolution, there are still very spiritual - but non-religious - people around, while others are devout believers without never having had any specific spiritual experience.
I once did a German post about that topic:
http://www.chronologs.de/...ge-nach-hirngespinsten
Looking forward to more of your thoughts, best wishes!
I'm happy to see -- and by happy, I mean "extremely bemused and discomfited" -- that this kind of muddily argued religious apologetics is now published under the brand SciLogs internationally as well as nationally.
But you published this post for "review and discussion", so let's review and discuss the science in it -- oh, wait, there is no science in it.
For the formation of suns, look to cosmology and physics. For the formation of community, archeology, anthropology, sociology and psychology would be of more service. Choose your science to suite your question.
The scenario described in the ‘Ghost Dancers’ report I think is fairly typical of the tribe to chiefdom transition. I do not believe that many of these societal transitions are ‘voluntary’, but are forced by circumstances. The desire of the natives described would be to move away with your tribe to its own territory, but there is no open territory (nor conquerable territory, the neighbors are more powerful in this case), so they suffer the stresses of being forced together. The spiritual leaders recognize this unrest and endeavor to bring peace by engaging everyone with the stories and rituals of the past, elaborated perhaps to make it feel current as well. This brings a sense of single community to the various tribes, and if a leader could be agreed upon among the tribes, a federation or chiefdom would form. There were many chiefdoms throughout eastern and central North America when the Europeans arrived. This, however, appears to be the least common social order, and the least stable. It has many of the stresses of the city-states, but has only temporary solutions. One bad leader or disinterested group of shaman, the order collapses into chaos. Every ‘solution’ I have seen to stabilizing chiefdoms involved the shaman turning ‘professional’ and an orderly cast of professional priests with standardized rituals emerging. The earlier shaman were self supporting, self anointed volunteers who may or may not have apprenticed to a more experienced shaman, priests were recruited and trained within the religious order, and the entire organization supported by surplus production among the citizenry. I think this is the tough problem to solve – to develop a professional order of religious practitioners. Once that is done, the community can stabilize as a chiefdom or develop into a city-state. This of course had the parallel requirement of increased food production to feed the priests, and a system of taxation to collect the surplus.