Belief in moralizing gods

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Abstract

According to Alexander's [Alexander, R. D. (1987). The biology of moral systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter] theory of morality, human social groups became large as a result of between-group competition over preferred habitats and resources, but although larger social groups are more successful in competition, they also experience more pressures to fission. Morality unites a society by limiting infringements upon the rights of other society members, so if larger societies are indeed more likely to split, then those that remain intact may be expected to have more effective inviolable moral rules, such as those imposed by moralizing gods. Cross-cultural analyses support this line of thought: more competition between societies is found in environments rich in resources and larger societies tend to occupy these environments; large societies engage in external conflicts at higher rates and are more often characterized by beliefs in moralizing gods. An additional explanation is briefly discussed, and we speculatively picture the historical chain of events giving rise to a belief in moralizing gods.

Introduction

Beliefs in gods differ across time and place (Eliade, 1949). Anthropologists have classified such beliefs. The subject of this paper is belief in moralizing gods, that is, gods who tell people what they should and should not do. As we shall see, such gods are especially frequent in relatively large societies, a pattern that we shall explain in terms of Alexander's (1987) theory of morality. We begin by summarizing relevant parts of his theory, and then test a number of hypotheses, which in our view follow from it.

Conflicts of interest are inevitable in sexually reproducing organisms and group living often exacerbates them. Those who live in close proximity compete for mates and other resources, and also transmit diseases relatively easily. In short, living in groups is costly and there must be countervailing advantages for group living to persist. Alexander argues that these advantages fall into five classes: aggregation at common resources, which may then permit information sharing, predator avoidance (selfish herds sensu; Hamilton, 1971), active defence against predators, nepotistic investments in kin, and cooperative hunting and killing of otherwise unattainable large prey.

At first sight, none of these advantages of group living seems capable of explaining the existence of large human groups. Clumped resources, protection from predators, and kin selection obviously fail to explain the large size of human societies, as well as their growth in size through history. Furthermore, Alexander (1987, p. 79) argues that, “As hunting weapons and skills improved, group sizes should have decreased.” His proposed solution is that other human groups were the “predators” who prompted people to live in ever-larger societies. This hypothesis is attractive because it can explain any size of society in terms of balance-of-power races, and it accords with the ecological dominance of humans as a species. In rich habitats, smaller, weaker groups or societies are overwhelmed by larger societies, or pushed from the habitat to ecological outskirts, like deserts or tundras. “In effect, organized in competitive groups, humans have become their own principal ‘hostile force of nature’” (Alexander, 1987, p. 79). Alexander considers this idea of human intergroup competition central to his theory of morality. We test the following hypotheses derived from this account:

  • I. Conflict and war will be relatively frequent in habitats that are relatively favorable for human living.

  • II. The frequency of conflict and war will be positively correlated with society size.

  • III. The size of societies will be relatively large in preferred habitats.

Notice that large society size is not an automatic consequence of rich habitats, because many small societies could instead occupy these habitats.

With increasing social group size, fissioning becomes more likely, but is also more dangerous because other, large, competing groups can profit from such a split. Conflicts can be quite intense even in small units like families, so a large group has to solve the problem of internal conflicts to prevent fission. Alexander suggests that moral rules keep a human group or society together, by proscribing infringements (beyond a certain point) on the rights of other group members. So if larger societies experience more pressures to split but also pay greater costs for doing so, we may expect them to manifest a greater emphasis on moral rules that prevent in-group infringements.

Moral rules imposed by humans invite the suspicion that some members of the group will profit more from these rules than others, but such concerns are alleviated if the rules are convincingly portrayed as having been imposed by impartial gods without material or reproductive interests. If obedience to a certain religious moral rule indeed serves the interests of certain people, they may be expected to deny selfishness and to maintain that the rule reflects the will of the moralizing god. Finally, gods are often considered immortal, so their rules may last for many generations. We therefore suggest that an effective way to impose moral rules on society members is to have these rules prescribed by gods. Belief in these gods signals acceptance of the rules and, for the reasons stated above, we expect more support for the rules (and thus more belief in moralizing gods) in larger societies. Thus, we hypothesize that:

  • IV. Society size is positively correlated with belief in moralizing gods.

Section snippets

Data sources and variables

In 1962, George P. Murdock initiated a systematic data base of the best early descriptions of hundreds of human societies, for the purpose of testing cross-cultural hypotheses. The earliest descriptions of societies were preferred, in an attempt to minimise the influence of western, European culture on the data. Since describers themselves often were western and, since many societies were “pacified” by the West around or shortly before the time of earliest description, the influence of western

Results

Tests of the cross-cultural associations predicted by Hypotheses I to IV are presented in Table 1. All four are supported by modest but highly significant correlations. Competition between societies (external conflict), resource-rich environments, and society size are all positively associated with one another. These results support Carneiro's (1970) theory of the origin of the state; to our knowledge, this is the first statistical test of his theory.

Table 1 and Fig. 1 also show that large

Discussion

Imagine a society confronted with a threat of disaster. The reaction of most members of that society might be to display (sincerely or otherwise) a willingness to be altruistic and cooperative. In other words, they show their willingness for collective action (Olson 1965), in order to deal with the threat. Now suppose that this imaginary society is not characterised by belief in a moralizing god. We presume that a single threat of disaster will usually not cause a switch in prevailing beliefs,

Acknowledgements

We thank an anonymous reviewer, R.D. Alexander, M. Daly, J.P. Gray, O.P. Judson, L. Petrinovich, F. Rousset, and M. Wilson for their comments on an earlier draft. Pub. ISEM 02-058.

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