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Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
Ara Norenzayan
How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today--even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"--the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths--spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other. Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods--powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. In some parts of the world, such as northern Europe, secular institutions have precipitated religion's decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world--climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. So while Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions, it also helps us understand another, more recent social transition--the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
$4.59 (USD)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release date: 2013
Format: EPUB
Size: 3.04 MB
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Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict Paperback – August 25, 2015
by Ara Norenzayan (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 32 ratings
A groundbreaking account of how religion made society possible
How did human societies scale up from tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today―even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods"―the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths―spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization answer each other.
Sincere faith in watchful Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, yet at the same time it introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups. And in some parts of the world, societies with atheist majorities―some of the most cooperative and prosperous in the world―have climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away.
Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions and helps us understand the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is an impressive work; it demonstrates how and why the Big Gods are still with us, and watching.", Reference & Research Book News
"Norenzayan weaves in one convincing scientific study after another, leaving me (as a study junkie) highlighting about every page. . . . His thesis is fascinating and well worth a read (or two). Norenzayan is not prescribing a way to end religion or to suggest that one form of thinking over another is better, but to get at the underlying factors that bring a society from big gods to secularity. I'm sure any deeply held convictions about the nature of religion and disbelief will be challenged tremendously by Big Gods, and as any analytical thinker would probably say, why shouldn't they?"---Brandon G. Withrow, Discarded Image
"Once in a while, a whole field of research is pushed forward by a seminal work. Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict is one of those rare books bound to becoming a classic for a generation of colleagues and students."---Michael Blume, SciLogs
"Norenzayan's book provides the best collection and dissemination of research regarding religion as a cultural adaptation for prosociality and cooperation among groups. It sets forth an important agenda for research among psychologists, religious scholars and historians."---James A. Van Slyke, Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences
"Ranging across quantitative studies, historical cross-cultural examples, theological texts, and the practices of believers, Norenzayan convincingly argues that religions with Big Gods are successful because they generate a sense of being watched and regulated, require extravagant displays of commitment that weed out religious impostors, and encourage solidarity and trust.", Publishers Weekly
"Norenzayan analyzes religion primarily as a mechanism for enforcing social cooperation, a problem for which the evolution of increasingly more powerful gods provides a solution in increasingly large and complex societies. . . . With consistently clear organization and thorough documentation, this book combines explanations for cognitive belief in supernatural entities with social explanations of religion's function, advancing readers' understanding of how the former serves the latter.", Choice
"Ara Norenzayan's study Big Gods is an interesting study worthy to read."---Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte, Metapsychology
"The book is a breakthrough, and will undoubtedly influence scientific perspectives on religion and secularism. . . . Without a doubt, Big Gods is a seminal and outstanding book, rocketing the psychological and evolutionary understanding of faith and secularization to new heights and new questions. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in human evolution, psychology, and the scientific study of religion."---Michael Blume, Evolution: This View of Life
"Ambitious, comprehensive and well-delivered. . . . Norenzayan presents an empirically grounded, coherent and overall persuasive attempt to solve some of the great puzzles in the social sciences. Drawing from several disciplines, he skillfully describes the interplay between the origins of religion and society, toward the form we know today."---Filip Uzarevic, Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe
"I found this book insightful, well-written, and to the point."---Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
Review
"People love origin stories, and this is ours―a fascinating and accessible account of how Big Gods helped us make the leap from hunter-gatherers to gigantic and religiously diverse societies. But this book is not just about the past. Norenzayan gives us a nuanced account of secularism, and offers us some surprising tools we can use to create more ethical organizations and societies going forward."―Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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Product details
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (August 25, 2015)
Language: English
Ara Norenzayan
Ara Norenzayan is professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
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E. N. Anderson
4.0 out of 5 stars Good book with some limits
Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2015
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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.
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Ntropee
3.0 out of 5 stars Captures only HALF of the story
Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2020
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This book did an excellent job of explaining the more positive side of the question: Why is most of the civilized world a place where BIG gods are worshiped...even though only a tiny fraction of human history (the last .1%) have we expressed any interest in BIG god religions? In short, the positive explanation says: BIG moralistic gods helped people in large, complex societies treat each other more cooperatively, fairly, and "nicely" even though they had no familial/kinship/genetically based reason to trust each other enough to cooperate.
What it overlooks is the negative side of the explanation:
The priest-kings that ruled BIG god worshiping agricultural civilizations were supposedly uniquely favored by these gods. In some religions, high priests were considered demigods or even gods themselves. Sacrifice and strict, unquestioning obedience were necessary to keep this clerical caste, and the gods they represented, benevolent. The moral doctrines of agrarian religions were designed to fortify all the behaviors essential to sustaining social systems of peasant farmers ruled and exploited by theocratic elites: conformity, cooperation, sacrifice, and obedience to authority. It was dangerous to ignore or disobey the moral codes laid down by the gods and goddesses through their priest-kings, both in this life and the eternal hereafter.
Religious rulers told their subjects that "natural" disasters—like droughts, floods, crop failures, famines, pestilence, and epidemic diseases—were the gods’ punishments for their disobedience. However, such disasters were generally the result of devastating natural forces converging with a degraded energy base, a poorly maintained hydraulic infrastructure, over-taxation, elite corruption, war, and oppression—not the lack of sacrifice and obedience on the part of the peasant underclass. Of course, environmental calamity and peasant resistance could foster further social disorder and decay in the form of peasant rebellions and slave revolts. However, these were usually the final nails in the coffin of a decadent, dysfunctional social order.
Sacrificial rituals were common throughout state-centered agrarian societies. For example, Aztec priests claimed human sacrifices were essential for maintaining and renewing the entire universe. It is believed that during a four-day ceremony to dedicate the main Aztec temple in Tenochtitlán, about 20,000 prisoners of war were sacrificed to the gods. A yearly toll of about 4,000 people were sacrificially killed to placate these blood-thirsty deities. Most were prisoners of war, the rest were youths, maidens, and children.
Although the Aztecs took human sacrifice to an unusual extreme, sacrifice was a common feature of agrarian cosmologies. Most of the religions of the agrarian era stressed the need to sacrifice something of great value to the gods in order to avoid their wrath and gain their assistance in preventing personal and social catastrophe. For farming societies, ritual sacrifice was an effort to gain some measure of psychological security and "control" over an environment that was both mysterious and potentially devastating. The profound insecurity of being at the mercy of nature's unpredictable fury was reduced if the deities that controlled these forces could be placated with the proper sacrificial rites and customs.
Sacrifice was also a lever of surplus appropriation by religious elites and a way to exercise their control over the collective labor process. Priest-kings could induce humble obedience and compel great personal sacrifices from their subjects in the form of offerings, taxation, tribute, and labor if god's grace in this life and the afterlife was their promised reward. In addition to slave labor, it was this ability to induce fear, sacrifice, obedience, reverence, and subservient cooperation from the peasant underclass that generated the wealth, raised the armies, and mobilized the labor needed to dig canals; build complex networks of dikes, levees, and aqueducts; and construct roads, cities, castles, pyramids, palaces, and awe-inspiring temples to the gods who ruled this life and the eternal hereafter.
Thus, BIG gods religions didn't just promote cooperation, trade & and "niceness." They enforced fearful subservience to religious tyranny and exploitation. This book completely concealed the brutal physical and psychological power relations that Big god religions imposed on the vast majority of civilizations' peasant/slave population.
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alapper
5.0 out of 5 stars Watched people are nice people
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2013
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This book attempts to answer the questions of why the large monotheistic religions dominate societies and in what conditions theism and atheism arise. It is written by a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of British Columbia and its conclusions are backed by an impressive number of experimental studies. Although academic it is very readable although a bit repetitive in parts. Its main conclusions are summarized before the first chapter - 'watched people are nice people' is the first of these. Its main theme is that religions have been a major factor in the growth of large societies, and that religions may subsequently decline only when reliable social institutions such as the rule of law become established. It does have a problem in that the U.S.A. which seems from outside to have a fairly well established social order is nevertheless very religious. Perhaps the U.S.A.is not so well established as it appears to an outsider!
But this is a very interesting and thought provoking book that not only tries to explain why and when religions become established in societies but also the distrust of atheists (particularly in the U.S.A.) and what factors lead to either theism and atheism. These are immensely important questions and this is the first book I have read that has even tried to tackle the question or has come up with some (on the face of it) convincing answers.
On the subject of religion itself this book is not polemical (in the sense that Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc are) but I cannot help but sense that the authors stance is scientific and probably atheistic (with a small 'A').
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A R ATKINSON
5.0 out of 5 stars A major step forward in understanding the evolution of religion.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2014
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Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia interested (among other things) in the evolutionary dynamics of religious pro-sociality - came to speak at a conference I put on at the University of Bristol 'Explaining Religion' (2010). He presented many of the themes he addresses in his book at that conference - and educated us all (there was a distinguished list of speakers too) on the central role the 'Big Gods' played in effecting the honest cooperative behaviour in individuals such that the religions here in the present have won out over those of the past - and possibly why more than survive have died out. One estimate records approximately, says Norenzayan, 10,000 religions in the present yet the vast majority of humanity adhere to a (markedly) disproportionate few (this requires serious attention) - so why have these disproportionate few been so successful?
'Big Gods' shows quite clearly how the role of omniscient - and I mean properly omniscient - Gods effect cooperative human interactions. He goes into great detail - using experimental evidence, anthropological research, the cognitive science of religious thinking itself, and embraces the collective enterprise very much needed to take on something as pervasive is religion. It's not enough, as Dawkins would have us believe in The God Delusion (2006) that religion is simply the 'mass' delusion of those host to the cultural equivalent of a harmful, divisive, mental virus - that fails to recognise the functionality of such delusion.
The themes Norenzayan explores, are familiar to some extent, largely due to the sensationalism caused by David Sloan Wilson's book Darwin's Cathedral (2002) which ascribes group level function to religions with zeal.
Norenzayan , however, succeeds where Wilson (2002) fails - because he really takes on board Wilson something can't explain by group selection - namely - the cognitive origins (and function) of belief in Big - morally concerned - Gods that might mirror the ways our own minds think about agents similar to ourselves - "we" know what, and why we're up to what we're up to - so a God that does too, is really going to play on our apprehensions to commit moral transgressions toward kin, kith, fellow citizens, those who share our religious proclivities - and - even display a level of distrust towards atheists (that much is a travesty and certainly not pro-social).
This book does nothing to attack the theologically minded - it is not its aim. It does not seek to disprove the factual claims of religion (how all the species of animal "the big giraffe and the kangaroo" all got on one boat, for example [where Noah got Kangaroo from is certainly a Sunday school non-truth]). The scholar of religion would do well to take on board Norenzayan's claims in Big Gods - as would they do other books such as Wilson's (2002) and Jesse Bering's God Instinct (2011). There is a science of religion - but not a scientific proof/or disproof of religious ontology - only an understanding of religion that might be deepened, and tempered by it.
For the concerned atheist - Norenzayan concludes with the following encouraging observation - and I wholeheartedly endorse it:
`The recent spread of secular institutions since the Industrial Revolution - courts, policing authorities, and effective contract in enforcing mechanisms in modern societies-has raised the spectre of large-scale cooperation without God. In the secular societies, the gods were replaced by big governments. Quo Modo Deum, or "the way of God" represented as a big eye in the sky, did not disappear it [has] merely changed shape.
Worth the read indeed.
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MR MICHAEL G EVERETT
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2014
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An excellent book, providing explanations that are important for everyone.
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M W.
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2014
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A convincing explanation for the spread of monotheistic religions
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nadia
5.0 out of 5 stars Explaining the role of Big Gods to WEIRDs
Reviewed in Canada on November 3, 2013
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As a fully paid up human services' professional member of WEIRD (defined by Dr. Norenzayan as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) I am constantly searching for academic publications that may help me understand my clients' behaviours and decision making processes. In the many decades of my professional life I have come to categorize my professional readings into two broad groups: dense academic and popular. The challenge that I have faced has been that the 'dense academic' writers have usually burdened me with their own jargon which may be easily understood in their own circles but which takes a great deal of patience for an interested WEIRD to wade through and decipher. Sometimes what I discover in such 'dense academic' writings is rewarding enough to justify my time and intellectual effort in reading them; however, most of the time I find that my efforts were wasted and that the dense writing that I worked through imparted little or no new information. I have generally no grand expectation of writings that I assign to the 'popular' category and so I am immune to being disappointed by this category.
'Big Gods: how religion transformed cooperation and conflict' has been that exceedingly rare gem of reading for me: an exceptionally well written, coherent and accessible academic book. Through diligently documented reviews and analyses of current research in a wide range of academic disciplines, Dr. Norenzayan argues that belief in a powerful god who is assumed to be aware of believers' behaviours has played an important and necessary role in policing human beings' ability to transact and cooperate with each other. The Big Gods have been essentially a powerful and necessary protective factor for humanity's evolution. Dr. Norenzayan then moves on to examine how in the more advanced societies of our time social institutions such as the police and the judicial system have replaced the power of the omnipotent god: pro-social secular people may not believe in the wrath of god but as atheists they generally do believe in the rules of law of their societies. Dr. Norenzayan concludes that humanity has now reached a point of tension between atheists (especially in the advanced societies) and the numerous religious groups (predominantly in emerging societies) that will continue into the future. The very same tensions, of course, may co-exist in the same society as evidenced by the power and political persuasion of groups that are referred to as the Religious Right in USA and Canada.
The Big Gods has now raised a new question for this WEIRD: how to motivate and rehabilitate those who have rejected the Big Gods and secular laws? I shall continue to read about new research in the hope that Dr. Norenzayan represents a new trend among academic writers.
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