- Email: [email protected]
Religion: More Money, More Morals
Dispatch R37
Dispatches
Religion: More Money, More Morals Between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, religions worldwide underwent a dramatic shift, emphasizing morality and asceticism for the first time. A new study suggests that the emergence of this new type of religion can be explained by increases in prosperity. Konika Banerjee* and Paul Bloom For many people, religion is synonymous with morality. Recent surveys find that people in a majority of cultures see belief in God as essential for being a moral person and for having good values [1]. Many would agree with the famous quote from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: without God, ‘‘all things are permitted’’ [2]. But an intriguing new article by Baumard et al. [3], published in this issue of Current Biology, presents a very different perspective. Baumard et al. [3] note that the connection between religion and morality is a fairly recent one. In stark contrast to the moralizing gods of modern world religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the deities of ancient human societies were largely unconcerned with human morality — they simply didn’t care whether people were adulterers, gluttons, liars, or cheats [4,5]. Indeed, the gods of classical antiquity (e.g., Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures) were themselves highly fallible beings — prone to fits of jealousy and rage, more concerned with whether humans obeyed them and made appropriate ritual sacrifices to them than whether people treated others with kindness and respect [5–7]. The gods of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were even worse: in The Evolution of God [8], Robert Wright describes how they were often yelled at by their people, and had weird obsessions, such as getting angry if people combed their hair during a thunderstorm. Then, between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, during a period of time known as the ‘Axial Age’, the world changed. Doctrines emerged that, for the first time, were deeply concerned with many of the spiritual ideals that we think of today as being the natural purview of religion [9]. These included the notion that human life has a purpose beyond
our material existence, that we ought to curb material excess and exercise self-discipline, and that asceticism, moderation and compassion are the keys to achieving spiritual salvation following our bodily deaths (Figure 1). The birth of new religious traditions espousing these philosophies — including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism — occurred simultaneously in multiple distinct civilizations around the world, including in the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley [3]. What caused this change? Baumard et al. [3] point out that just prior to the emergence of these new religions, another trend had already begun fundamentally altering human civilization. Specifically, many human societies underwent a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, resulting in dramatic increases in food consumption, survival rates, and population size [10]. On the surface, it may seem that these two trends — the rise of moralizing, ascetic religions on one hand and increases in economic prosperity on the other hand — have nothing to do with one another. But Baumard and colleagues posit that these developments were intimately linked, that economic growth and rising affluence was the critical factor that paved the way for the emergence of Axial Age religions. In their study, Baumard and colleagues set out to formally test this possibility. They used statistical modeling to determine which variables could account for the appearance of Axial Age religions in eight advanced societies of antiquity: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Anatolia, India, China, Mesoamerica and the Andes. Relying on historical data, Baumard et al. [3] identified several measures of economic development to serve as
proxies for overall societal affluence, such as energy capture, population density, and the population of a society’s main city. They also tested the alternative possibility that, distinct from rising affluence, broad changes in social structure may have contributed to the development of new moral, ascetic religious doctrines; to explore this, they identified proxy measures of political complexity that reflect large-scale cultural changes, such as state population and state size for the main state in each society examined. Baumard et al. [3] then modeled the extent to which these various measures, and their growth rates over time, coincided with the timing of the first appearance of Axial Age religions. These analyses revealed a strikingly consistent pattern of results. Five out of six statistical models that tested the predictive power of the societal affluence measures did significantly better at explaining the emergence of Axial Age religions than a model that did not consider affluence. Main city population and energy capture, in particular, were found to be the most likely predictors of the emergence of these new religions. Further analyses revealed that political complexity was not associated with the imminent emergence of Axial Age religions. Why would wealth lead to this new sort of religion? The authors consider several explanations. One possibility is that increased economic prosperity freed up resources for a new class of priests and scholars to develop novel religious elements — but this theory does little to explain why new religions took on the particular features of morality and asceticism that they did. Another hypothesis is that societal affluence paved the way for more diverse, cosmopolitan societies that increasingly valued generosity, universality and self-control — and religious doctrines evolved in conjunction with these social changes to embody this new set of values. Baumard and colleagues also propose a third alternative, based on life history theory [5]. This theory contends that increases in absolute affluence have predictable effects on human
Current Biology Vol 25 No 1 R38
References
Figure 1. Moral judgment. Tympanum of the Last Judgment, at the central portal of Notre-Dame de Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Philippe Ale`s.
motivation and reward systems. Specifically, increased affluence generally prompts a shift away from ‘fast life’ strategies focused on resource acquisition and competition and instead encourages a move toward ‘slow life’ strategies, such as self-control techniques and cooperation. Thus, as societal security and standards of living improved just prior the Axial Age, short-term materialistic goals (such as resource attainment and coercive interactions) may have been systematically de-prioritized in favor of long term-goals (such as self-development and cooperation). In turn, this motivational shift may have favored the spread of new religious doctrines consistent with these long-term strategies — for instance, philosophies that touted the importance of self-discipline and compassion for others. The findings of Baumard et al. [3] and their explanation will prove controversial. Their theory differs sharply from other accounts of the rise of moralizing religions, including the view that such religions evolved and spread because they help promote large-scale cooperation in large societies — individuals are nicer to one another if they believe in moralizing deities [4,11,12]. And their findings are not easy to reconcile with those of other large-scale empirical studies. A paper just published by Botero et al. [13] finds, based on analyses of 583 societies, that ‘‘belief[s] in moralizing high gods . are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are prone to ecological duress.’’ While not directly incompatible with the findings
of Baumard et al. [3], the results of Botero and colleagues seem to push in the opposite theoretical direction, as they suggest that moralizing religions emerge as a response to stress, not security. Furthermore, in the world we live in now, the most affluent countries are the least religious, not the most [1,14]. Perhaps the relationship between money and moralizing religions takes the shape of an inverted-U: some threshold of affluence has to be passed for moralizing religions to emerge, but further affluence leads to secularization, at least in the 21st century. These issues, and many others, remain open. But the theoretical ingenuity and methodological richness of studies such as those reported by Baumard and his colleagues nicely illustrate how science can make progress in the study of the origin of religion.
1. Pew Research Center. (2014). Worldwide, many see belief in god as essential to morality, March, 2014. Retrieved from http://www. pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-manysee-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/2/. 2. Dostoevsky, F. (1970). The Brothers Karamazov, First Bantam Edition (New York: Bantam Books), (Original work published 1880). 3. Baumard, N., Hyafil, A., Morris, I., and Boyer, P. (2015). Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions. Curr. Biol. 25, 10–15. 4. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 5. Baumard, N., and Boyer, P. (2013). Explaining moral religions. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 272–280. 6. Burkert, W.R.J. (1985). Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.). 7. Kramer, S.N. (1961). Mythologies of the Ancient World, First Edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). 8. Wright, R. (2009). The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown and Company). 9. Jaspers, K. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, translated into English) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). 10. Morris, I. (2013). The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 11. Norenzayan, A., and Shariff, A.F. (2008). The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science 322, 58–62. 12. Shariff, A., Norenzayan, A., and Henrich, J. (2010). The birth of high gods. In Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind, M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S.J. Heine, T. Yamagishi, and T. Kameda, eds. (New York: Psychology PressTaylor & Francis Group), pp. 119–136. 13. Botero, C.A., Gardner, B., Kirby, K.R., Bulbulia, J., Gavin, M.C., and Gray, R.D. (2014). The ecology of religious beliefs. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111, 16784–16789. 14. Pew Research Center. (2008). The Pew global attitudes project: Unfavorable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe, September 2008. Retrieved from http://www. pewglobal.org/2008/09/17/unfavorable-viewsof-jews-and-muslims-on-the-increase-ineurope/.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. *E-mail: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.042
Neurobiology: All Synapses Are Created Equal There are two main modalities of communication between neurons, known as electrical and chemical synaptic transmission. Despite striking differences in their underlying mechanisms, new evidence suggests that the formation of electrically and chemically mediated synapses is under common regulatory processes. Alberto E. Pereda Brain cells communicate through macromolecular complexes that make possible the exchange of information
between neighboring neurons. These anatomical and functional specializations are called ‘synapses’ (the Greek word used by Foster and Sherrington, which means an active,
Dispatches
Religion: More Money, More Morals Between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, religions worldwide underwent a dramatic shift, emphasizing morality and asceticism for the first time. A new study suggests that the emergence of this new type of religion can be explained by increases in prosperity. Konika Banerjee* and Paul Bloom For many people, religion is synonymous with morality. Recent surveys find that people in a majority of cultures see belief in God as essential for being a moral person and for having good values [1]. Many would agree with the famous quote from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: without God, ‘‘all things are permitted’’ [2]. But an intriguing new article by Baumard et al. [3], published in this issue of Current Biology, presents a very different perspective. Baumard et al. [3] note that the connection between religion and morality is a fairly recent one. In stark contrast to the moralizing gods of modern world religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the deities of ancient human societies were largely unconcerned with human morality — they simply didn’t care whether people were adulterers, gluttons, liars, or cheats [4,5]. Indeed, the gods of classical antiquity (e.g., Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures) were themselves highly fallible beings — prone to fits of jealousy and rage, more concerned with whether humans obeyed them and made appropriate ritual sacrifices to them than whether people treated others with kindness and respect [5–7]. The gods of our hunter-gatherer ancestors were even worse: in The Evolution of God [8], Robert Wright describes how they were often yelled at by their people, and had weird obsessions, such as getting angry if people combed their hair during a thunderstorm. Then, between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, during a period of time known as the ‘Axial Age’, the world changed. Doctrines emerged that, for the first time, were deeply concerned with many of the spiritual ideals that we think of today as being the natural purview of religion [9]. These included the notion that human life has a purpose beyond
our material existence, that we ought to curb material excess and exercise self-discipline, and that asceticism, moderation and compassion are the keys to achieving spiritual salvation following our bodily deaths (Figure 1). The birth of new religious traditions espousing these philosophies — including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism — occurred simultaneously in multiple distinct civilizations around the world, including in the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley [3]. What caused this change? Baumard et al. [3] point out that just prior to the emergence of these new religions, another trend had already begun fundamentally altering human civilization. Specifically, many human societies underwent a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity, resulting in dramatic increases in food consumption, survival rates, and population size [10]. On the surface, it may seem that these two trends — the rise of moralizing, ascetic religions on one hand and increases in economic prosperity on the other hand — have nothing to do with one another. But Baumard and colleagues posit that these developments were intimately linked, that economic growth and rising affluence was the critical factor that paved the way for the emergence of Axial Age religions. In their study, Baumard and colleagues set out to formally test this possibility. They used statistical modeling to determine which variables could account for the appearance of Axial Age religions in eight advanced societies of antiquity: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Anatolia, India, China, Mesoamerica and the Andes. Relying on historical data, Baumard et al. [3] identified several measures of economic development to serve as
proxies for overall societal affluence, such as energy capture, population density, and the population of a society’s main city. They also tested the alternative possibility that, distinct from rising affluence, broad changes in social structure may have contributed to the development of new moral, ascetic religious doctrines; to explore this, they identified proxy measures of political complexity that reflect large-scale cultural changes, such as state population and state size for the main state in each society examined. Baumard et al. [3] then modeled the extent to which these various measures, and their growth rates over time, coincided with the timing of the first appearance of Axial Age religions. These analyses revealed a strikingly consistent pattern of results. Five out of six statistical models that tested the predictive power of the societal affluence measures did significantly better at explaining the emergence of Axial Age religions than a model that did not consider affluence. Main city population and energy capture, in particular, were found to be the most likely predictors of the emergence of these new religions. Further analyses revealed that political complexity was not associated with the imminent emergence of Axial Age religions. Why would wealth lead to this new sort of religion? The authors consider several explanations. One possibility is that increased economic prosperity freed up resources for a new class of priests and scholars to develop novel religious elements — but this theory does little to explain why new religions took on the particular features of morality and asceticism that they did. Another hypothesis is that societal affluence paved the way for more diverse, cosmopolitan societies that increasingly valued generosity, universality and self-control — and religious doctrines evolved in conjunction with these social changes to embody this new set of values. Baumard and colleagues also propose a third alternative, based on life history theory [5]. This theory contends that increases in absolute affluence have predictable effects on human
Current Biology Vol 25 No 1 R38
References
Figure 1. Moral judgment. Tympanum of the Last Judgment, at the central portal of Notre-Dame de Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Philippe Ale`s.
motivation and reward systems. Specifically, increased affluence generally prompts a shift away from ‘fast life’ strategies focused on resource acquisition and competition and instead encourages a move toward ‘slow life’ strategies, such as self-control techniques and cooperation. Thus, as societal security and standards of living improved just prior the Axial Age, short-term materialistic goals (such as resource attainment and coercive interactions) may have been systematically de-prioritized in favor of long term-goals (such as self-development and cooperation). In turn, this motivational shift may have favored the spread of new religious doctrines consistent with these long-term strategies — for instance, philosophies that touted the importance of self-discipline and compassion for others. The findings of Baumard et al. [3] and their explanation will prove controversial. Their theory differs sharply from other accounts of the rise of moralizing religions, including the view that such religions evolved and spread because they help promote large-scale cooperation in large societies — individuals are nicer to one another if they believe in moralizing deities [4,11,12]. And their findings are not easy to reconcile with those of other large-scale empirical studies. A paper just published by Botero et al. [13] finds, based on analyses of 583 societies, that ‘‘belief[s] in moralizing high gods . are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are prone to ecological duress.’’ While not directly incompatible with the findings
of Baumard et al. [3], the results of Botero and colleagues seem to push in the opposite theoretical direction, as they suggest that moralizing religions emerge as a response to stress, not security. Furthermore, in the world we live in now, the most affluent countries are the least religious, not the most [1,14]. Perhaps the relationship between money and moralizing religions takes the shape of an inverted-U: some threshold of affluence has to be passed for moralizing religions to emerge, but further affluence leads to secularization, at least in the 21st century. These issues, and many others, remain open. But the theoretical ingenuity and methodological richness of studies such as those reported by Baumard and his colleagues nicely illustrate how science can make progress in the study of the origin of religion.
1. Pew Research Center. (2014). Worldwide, many see belief in god as essential to morality, March, 2014. Retrieved from http://www. pewglobal.org/2014/03/13/worldwide-manysee-belief-in-god-as-essential-to-morality/2/. 2. Dostoevsky, F. (1970). The Brothers Karamazov, First Bantam Edition (New York: Bantam Books), (Original work published 1880). 3. Baumard, N., Hyafil, A., Morris, I., and Boyer, P. (2015). Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions. Curr. Biol. 25, 10–15. 4. Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 5. Baumard, N., and Boyer, P. (2013). Explaining moral religions. Trends Cogn. Sci. 17, 272–280. 6. Burkert, W.R.J. (1985). Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.). 7. Kramer, S.N. (1961). Mythologies of the Ancient World, First Edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday). 8. Wright, R. (2009). The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown and Company). 9. Jaspers, K. (1953). The Origin and Goal of History (Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, translated into English) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). 10. Morris, I. (2013). The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 11. Norenzayan, A., and Shariff, A.F. (2008). The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science 322, 58–62. 12. Shariff, A., Norenzayan, A., and Henrich, J. (2010). The birth of high gods. In Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind, M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S.J. Heine, T. Yamagishi, and T. Kameda, eds. (New York: Psychology PressTaylor & Francis Group), pp. 119–136. 13. Botero, C.A., Gardner, B., Kirby, K.R., Bulbulia, J., Gavin, M.C., and Gray, R.D. (2014). The ecology of religious beliefs. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 111, 16784–16789. 14. Pew Research Center. (2008). The Pew global attitudes project: Unfavorable views of Jews and Muslims on the increase in Europe, September 2008. Retrieved from http://www. pewglobal.org/2008/09/17/unfavorable-viewsof-jews-and-muslims-on-the-increase-ineurope/.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA. *E-mail: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.042
Neurobiology: All Synapses Are Created Equal There are two main modalities of communication between neurons, known as electrical and chemical synaptic transmission. Despite striking differences in their underlying mechanisms, new evidence suggests that the formation of electrically and chemically mediated synapses is under common regulatory processes. Alberto E. Pereda Brain cells communicate through macromolecular complexes that make possible the exchange of information
between neighboring neurons. These anatomical and functional specializations are called ‘synapses’ (the Greek word used by Foster and Sherrington, which means an active,