Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

This is a very rare book: a popular book about religion that actually builds on Durkheim's and Weber's demonstrations that religion is about society, morality, and solidarity--not a failed attempt to explain the universe, not the result of eating funny mushrooms. Norenzayan (a psychologist) builds on his and others' studies of religion to show how it creates and maintains social solidarity and morality. Big societies create big gods (universal, powerful, omniscient ones) not only because the societies are big but also, more to the point, because they have to integrate vast numbers of people who don't know each other. People in such societies need a big god to unite them, watch them, and scare them with divine sanctions--the studies show all these things are important.
However, Norenzayan is serious wrong in maintaining that moral gods did not exist before big societies (civilized, state-level ones) arose. He draws on a very thin anthropology, mostly the San and Hadza who are all too familiar to anthropologists working on social evolution. The San and Hadza are very simple groups without moralizing gods. They are, however, not some arrested dawn-age people. They are relict societies--tiny groups pushed into the rocks by agricultural people. The San, at least, had far more extensive and complex societies earlier, as we know from their extensive rock art (some of which I have examined in Botswana). Of groups less relictive--notably the Australian Aboriginals and the North American Native peoples--many or most have highly moralistic religions in which spirits enforce the rules by divine punishment. Norenzayan's only real evidence on the subject is Christopher Boehm's survey of 18 "foraging" societies (see p. 126) that showed little moralizing in their religion. Several of these are part-societies or refugee societies. Others were just plain badly described; ethnographers are strangely uninterested in morals and ethics, and rarely bother to investigate these. (The only really good, thorough account I know of that describes a small-scale society's ethics was done by an ethical philosopher: HOPI ETHICS by Richard Brandt.) Today we are getting more and more accounts by Native American and Aboriginal Australian anthropologists, and they invariably emphasize the ethical and moral side of their cultures, including their religions. (See e.g. the works of Richard Atleo, a Nuuchahnulth anthropologist.) Earlier autobiographical accounts such as those of the Sioux thinkers Black Elk and Lame Deer do the same.
Norenzayan's anthropology gets him in trouble in regard to world religions too. Like almost all writers on world religion, he knows the Abrahamic ones and not the others. There are two pages (fortunately very accurate, thanks to a helpful colleague) on China, a few odd bits about "Hinduism" (a religion invented by British colonialism), and essentially nothing about Buddhism--a polytheistic religion which elevates an enlightened human (the Buddha) over all the gods. Having spent many years in polytheistic societies, I find this a serious lack. A final bit of oddness is Norenzayan's idea (p. 191) that "science" is strictly from the ancient Greeks through the medieval Muslims to the modern west. This is so hopeless it defies comment. Suffice it to say that China not only kept up with the west, but was influenced by it, up until the late middle ages (if not later). Greece was not isolated or alone. And of course the Maya developed highly sophisticated math, astronomy, and agriculture and architecture without the Greeks.
All this does not really devastate the main message of the book, though. I wish Norenzayan had done his anthropological homework, but he's still basically correct, with the qualification that it's only the morals for large-scale, complex societies that had to be watched over and enforced by large, complex gods. Durkheim pointed out that the pantheon of a society usually replicates the authority structure of that society pretty faithfully, and enforces its morality in about the same way the real-world pantheon does--but with more supernatural power. As Norenzayan correctly and insightfully points out, it can do this by engaging people's intuitions, emotions, and needs for solace, security, support, and a sense of control. The very real congregation does this more than the imagined gods do; what matters is that it gets done. Norenzayan also correctly points out (again on the basis of many scholarly studies) that religion both unites and divides, and that as an expression of the total society it is pretty well bound to have the same mix of love, help, cruelty, and harm that society does. (Incidentally, I wonder why all the people who dump on religion for starting fights don't dump on sex, money, and other much commoner reasons for fights. The early Christians did indeed dump on sex for exactly that reason. And of course G. W. Bush's "crusade" in Iraq was really over oil, not faith--just as the original Crusades were over loot more than over religion.).
Norenzayan asks, finally, whether we can live without religion. I doubt it. Something has to link solace, support, and respite with social morality. Communism and fascism, the modern substitutes for religion, do the opposite. Labor unions and similar secular societies did the job--copying religion quite consciously--but are not flourishing today.

Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, by Ara Norenzayan, is likely to offend anyone who has fairly deeply held religious beliefs because it suggests religions, all religions, can be reduced to adaptive evolutionary behaviors unconsciously amplified by the arguably most effective socially cooperative animal on the planet.

It’s a fascinating look at how cognitive adaptions may have (probably) led to religiosity in humans. The basic thrust of his argument is twofold:

1) The feeling of being monitored, even by made up gods, ensures beneficial and socially constructive behavior within groups. The bigger the group, the bigger the god (in terms of omniscient and omnipotency) until at some point, secular laws can replace divine monitoring.

2) Easily identifiable religious affiliation ensures better collaboration (and trade, and cooperation, and reproduction) between individuals in the same group. The more costly the display, the more readily apparent in-group status becomes.

Big Gods is short but powerful, jam-packed with psychological experiments, cognitive studies and deep insights backing up the many ways humans, often unknowingly, manifest and are influenced by behaviors within those two sets of theories.

Norenzayan is a strong, no-nonsense writer that makes his points with simple, effective prose.

“…Big Gods are a solution to the problem of large-scale cooperation in big groups…”

“… greater numbers of true believers are able to trust each other in ever larger social networks, even when no one is capable of monitoring social interactions.”

“Prosocial religious groups therefore are in constant vigilance to identify and weed out imposters who masquerade under a cloak of devoutness to reap benefits from the group.”

This last bit gets to the heart of the concern many people have with those who claim to be religious, but don’t adhere to the core beliefs and behaviors (like, not being greedy or not supporting war) — being part of the in group, and not adhering to the actual tenets of faith, is the true advantage against a world of outsiders competing for resources and reproductive success.

There’s an especially interesting vein, well-explored, about how religions — given how important they have been for social development — ostracizes atheists who, because they can’t signal in group status and clearly don’t submit to constant deistic monitoring, are considered untrustworthy. And worse, it’s instinctive — experiments show that atheists are quickly categorized without so much as a second thought.

“If sincere belief in a morally concerned deity serves as a reliable cooperative signal, it follows that those who explicitly deny the existence of god are inadvertently sending the wrong single: they are being perceived as subversive noncooperators by the religious.”

And even worse, atheists (though Norenzayan highlights many successful secular societies with waning religiosity) are likely doomed to be outdone by by other groups because religious people out reproduce atheists, who don’t have enough children to sustain their numbers, and secular couples with less fervent religious beliefs. That’s because religious folks — again, regardless of which religion — have an internal prerogative to expand their group through reproduction, and, because of the adaptive advantage religion confers to reproduction, it means their numbers will grow more quickly.

This is a great book that I highly recommend, although it is somewhat disheartening. I agree with the author that the lack of understanding about the many ways we otherize outsiders, including through religion, contribute to the current state of affairs in which distrust, anger, violence, greed, racism and xenophobia are dooming the planet to perpetual war, wealth inequality, resource scarcity and environmental degradation. Taking the time to understand how the brain works, and how the shortcuts that once helped our ancestors thrive might be dooming us in the modern day, is imperative.

As Norenzayan says, “that which we cannot explain in ourselves might be our downfall.” This book is an excellent starting point to reverse that trend.

This is an exceptional book that brings together and analyzes a large amount of research on the topic of religion. It is well written even if sometimes redundant, and a surprisingly easy read for such a complex topic. I am recommending it to all my friends interested in the ways that religion and religious people have and are influencing our world...a condition of real mystery to many of us!

I loved this book. I'm a believer in God and this book made me realize why we need a god and actually made me want to believe a little more. A wonderfully done book that I think everyone should read. It'll help strengthen a weak fabric of trust into one that is genuine and sound.

This is the first time I encountered a scientific investigation of religion based not on interpretation of religious texts, but rather on contemporary studies of human behavior and interpretation of well-documented historical evidence. The book is neither "for" or "against" religion -- just a fascinating account of how religion (probably) evolved and its good and bad effects on human behavior and societies.

Profoundly new. Profoundly smart. Profoundly subversive. This book should be read by everyone. Astonishing that anyone could take such a fresh approach to a discussion of the phenomenon of religion - and arrive at such shattering conclusions. Brilliant.

My entire religion from the scientific perspective class in one easy to read book. You will be unable to stop seeing these ideas in your everyday life. I only wish the concluding pages were as strong as the introductory ones.