{"id":147634,"date":"2019-03-21T08:30:26","date_gmt":"2019-03-21T12:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=147634"},"modified":"2019-03-22T11:45:52","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T15:45:52","slug":"big-gods-came-rise-civilizations-not-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2019\/03\/big-gods-came-rise-civilizations-not-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Gods Came After the Rise of Civilizations, Not Before, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you think of religion, you probably think of a god who rewards the good and punishes the wicked. But the idea of morally concerned gods is by no means universal. Social scientists have\u00a0long known<\/a> that small-scale traditional societies \u2013 the kind missionaries used to dismiss as \u201cpagan\u201d \u2013 envisaged a spirit world that cared little about the morality of human behavior. Their concern was less about whether humans behaved nicely towards one another and more about whether they carried out their obligations to the spirits and displayed suitable deference to them.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the world religions we know today, and their myriad variants, either demand belief in all-seeing punitive deities or at least postulate some kind of broader mechanism \u2013 such as karma \u2013 for rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. In recent years, researchers have debated how and why these moralizing religions came into being.<\/p>\n

Now, thanks to our massive new database of world history, known as\u00a0Seshat<\/a>\u00a0(named after the Egyptian goddess of record keeping), we\u2019re starting to get some answers.<\/p>\n

Eye in the sky<\/strong><\/p>\n

One\u00a0popular theory has argued<\/a> that moralizing 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 behavior without being caught and punished \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

What better than to come up with a supernatural \u201ceye in the sky\u201d \u2013 a god who can see inside people\u2019s 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. Maybe it would also increase trust among traders. If you believe that I believe in an omniscient moralizing deity, you might be more likely to do business with me, than somebody whose religiosity is unknown to you. Simply wearing insignia such as body markings or jewelry alluding to belief in such a god might have helped ambitious people prosper and garner popularity as society grew larger and more complex.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, early efforts to investigate the link between religion and morality\u00a0provided mixed results<\/a>. And while supernatural punishment appears to\u00a0have preceded<\/a>\u00a0the rise of chiefdoms among Pacific Island peoples, in\u00a0Eurasia, studies suggested<\/a> that social complexity emerged first and moralizing gods followed. These regional studies, however, were limited in scope and used quite crude measures both of moralizing religion and of social complexity.<\/p>\n

Sifting through history<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seshat is changing all that. Efforts to build the database began nearly a decade ago, attracting contributions from more than 100 scholars at a cost of millions of pounds. The database uses a sample of the world\u2019s historical societies, going back in a continuous time series up to 10,000 years before the present, to analyse hundreds of variables relating to social complexity, religion, warfare, agriculture, and other features of human culture and society that vary over time and space. Now that the database is finally ready for analysis, we are poised to test a long list of theories about global history.<\/p>\n

One of the earliest questions we\u2019re testing is whether morally concerned deities drove the rise of complex societies. 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\u2019ve just\u00a0published in the journal Nature<\/em><\/a> reveals that moralizing 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 civilizations \u2013 but came later.<\/p>\n

As part of our research we created a map of where big gods appeared around the world. In the map below, the size of the circle represents the size of the society: bigger circles represent larger and more complex societies. The numbers in the circle represent the number of thousand years ago we find the first evidence of belief in moralizing gods. For example, Emperor Ashoka adopted Buddhism 2,300 years ago, after he had already established a large and complex South Asian empire known as the Mauryan Empire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/div>
The global distribution and timing of beliefs in moralizing gods shows that big gods appear in big societies.<\/span> (Whitehouse, Francois Savage et al. Nature.<\/span>,\u00a0Author provided)<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 exceeds about a million individuals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/div>
Social complexity tends to increase more rapidly before the appearance of moralizing gods, not after.<\/span> (Whitehouse, Francois Savage et al. Nature.<\/span>,\u00a0Author provided)<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We are now looking to other factors that may have driven the rise of the first large civilization. For example, Seshat data suggests that daily or weekly collective rituals \u2013 the equivalent of today\u2019s Sunday services or Friday prayers \u2013 appear early in the rise of social complexity, and we\u2019re looking further at their impact.<\/p>\n

If the original function of moralizing gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, what might declining belief in such deities mean for the future of societies today? Could modern secularization, for example, contribute to the unraveling of efforts to cooperate regionally \u2013 such as the European Union? If beliefs in big gods decline, what will that mean for cooperation across ethnic groups in the face of migration, warfare, or the spread of xenophobia? Can the functions of moralizing gods simply be replaced by other forms of surveillance?<\/p>\n

Even if Seshat cannot provide easy answers to all these questions, it could provide a more reliable way of estimating the probabilities of different futures.<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The original function of moralizing gods in world history was to hold together fragile, ethnically diverse coalitions, write researchers at UConn, University of Oxford, and Keio University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":147663,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2076,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[175],"class_list":["post-147634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-research","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 07:16:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147634"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":147669,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147634\/revisions\/147669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/147663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147634"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=147634"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=147634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}