Reader Ant called my attention to an article in the May 9 Independent, “Religion could die out as world’s population gets richer, evolutionary scientists claim.” Well of course that got my attention. I’ve long argued—and the claim comes not from me, but from sociologists—that religion, as Marx argued, is an artifact of low “well being”. When you don’t have society to take care of you, or your life is uncertain, or you feel that you’re not as well off as most others, then you may turn to faith as a form of solace or a communal source of welfare. There’s a fair amount of evidence for this claim, and to start you can check out the newly-published second edition of Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.
So when I saw the Independent‘s title, I thought, “Aha, more evidence, and from ‘evolutionary scientists’, too!”
Well, the claim from the article goes back to a paper from January of last year in Current Biology by Nicholas Baumard et al. (reference below, download free; the last author is Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained). And that paper doesn’t really support the Independent headline. Baumard et al. give data showing that several moralizing religions originated between 500 and 300 BC, and in three different places, the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys, the Ganges Valley, and the Eastern Mediterranean. Those religions, said to have eventually given rise to Abrahamic religions like Islam and Christianity, were Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, and “Second Temple” Judaism, and are said to differ from earlier faiths in their increased emphasis on transcendence, meaning, a divine morality, and the promotion of abnegation and renunciation—as opposed to earlier faiths that were more materialistic.
Using a series of regressions, Baumard et al. found that material variables, in particular economic well being as measured by energy usage (the threshold was 20,000 kcal/head/day), explained the rise of these religious civilizations much better than did political variables. This confirmed their hypothesis that these self-sacrificing “axial religions” emerged based on changes in economics rather than politics. The authors speculate why this is so, but come to no definitive conclusions, although, they give three possibilities:
One possibility, originally proposed by Jaspers , is that axial religions resulted from the emergence of a new class of scholars or priests who had the resource and the time to elaborate more abstract religions. Additionally, economic prosperity could have changed religions through the development of literacy and schooling, giving rise to more educated believers.
Although this hypothesis explains the clear increase in cognitive sophistication in religious doctrines during the Axial Age, it does not account for their specific content (rising importance of morality and spirituality) and the practice they are associated with (generosity, asceticism). In particular, it does not account for why the new upper class would have been particularly attracted by the condemnation of earthly pleasures, food, luxury, or social status.
Another possibility is that affluence may have promoted a new way of life through the emergence of more cosmopolitan, open, and diverse societies in which generosity, universality, and self-control became more attractive. This alternative fits very well with the importance of main city population in our model, a proxy for the development of urban life, and with the social recruitment of the axial movement among the better off.
Finally, the effect of affluence on religion could be understood in terms of life history theory, specifically focusing on the contrast between a “fast” strategy, with short-term investment of resources (e.g., early reproduction, more offspring, and less nurturing), and a “slow” strategy, with opposite characteristics. Shifts of strategies are known to be triggered by environmental cues, such as the harshness or unpredictability of environments; they result in lower or higher degree of cooperation and in investment in the self, a phenomenon originally described by Maslow in his “pyramid of needs” model.
What happened, when author Baumard talked to the Independent, is that somehow the first two explanations disappeared, and the last explanation took over. (By the way, I wouldn’t characterize any of the authors as “evolutionary scientists,” but that’s not relevant here.) Baumard presents explanation 3, the “fast” versus “slow” strategies, as THE explanation:
Evolutionary psychologist Dr Nicolas Baumard said affluence and wealth caused humans to have a “slower” lifestyle, suggesting the wealthy elite 2,500 years ago would have been less sexually active, less aggressive and overall lead more laid-back lives.
“Absolute affluence has predictable effects on human motivation and reward systems,” Dr Baumard et al wrote in a study, “moving individuals away from ‘fast life’ strategies (resource acquisition and coercive interactions) and toward ‘slow life’ strategies (self-control techniques and cooperative interactions.”
The study says living a ‘slow life’ put the elite at an evolutionary disadvantage, as they may have had fewer children, had less to eat (since they were less aggressive about acquiring food) and have reproduced later in life.
In order to offset this disadvantage, Dr Baumard believes the wealthy introduced moralising religions to the poor as a way to introduce them to ‘slow-life’ strategies, therefore offsetting the evolutionary disadvantages the elite faced in being less motivated by acquisition, greed and procreation.
That’s a bit of a stretch, for it posits a prescience of the “elite” that I can’t credit (“if we don’t give them this religion, they’ll outbreed us and we’ll go extinct”). And what is the evidence anyway that back then the “elite” had fewer children than did the rest of society? If anything, I’d say the opposite, but the fact is we don’t know the answer. Further, wouldn’t it be easier for the elite to simply live the “fast life,” at least in terms of breeding? Why did they have to practice self-control? Why couldn’t they just tell the lower classes to do that as a religious obligation, and—if they were really so concerned about going extinct—they could have bred merrily away? The whole emphasis on evolution, and concern for perpetuating your class, has led author Baumard to propose a dubious hypothesis. (Remember, the paper on which this is based doesn’t mention this “evolutionary” theory at all!)
Finally, Baumard proposes that the slow life/fast life theory predicts that religion is on its way out. Why?
But Dr Baumard said that, as affluence becomes more widespread, moralising religion could be on its way out.
He said living a ‘slow’ lifestyle was becoming more common among the general population, with people motivated to cooperate with each other and focus on fulfilment in areas of life that are not just physical – which means there is less need for moralising religions to control the behaviour of a large poor population.
Writing in the New Scientist, Dr Baumard said: “As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify doing so.
“If this is true, and our environment continues to improve, then like the Greco-Roman religions before them, Christianity and other moralising religions could eventually vanish.”
If that is the case, why are many Abrahamic moralizing faiths, like Orthodox Judaism and Islam, still urging their adherents to reproduce? And let’s put Catholics into that pot, too.
There’s a simpler hypothesis than all this stuff: that as people become more affluent, their need for religion simply decreases (see above). That predicts that all religions offering some kind of social comity, or that promise rewards in the afterlife, will decrease with greater affluence and well-being. This explains the decline of religion in affluent societies, for which there’s much evidence, as well as the perpetuation of Abrahamic religions in societies with less well being.
And here’s a prediction, which is mine: the religions that don’t do that stuff, like Confucianism and many strains of Buddhism, won’t disappear as fast as the others when affluence increases (and equity, for remember that income inequality, regardless of income, erodes your feeling of well being). Such religions are perpetuated not as a form of solace for those in need, but as forms of philosophy.
Anyway, what struck me about the Independent piece were two things: how a tentative suggestion in a scientific paper got converted into a full-blown explanation in a newspaper (with other hypotheses conveniently discarded), and the weakness of that explanation. Once again, journalists fail to work through the consequences of what they write, and simply print what comes out of an academic’s mouth.
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Baumard, N., A. Hyafil, I. Morris, and P. Boyer. 2015. Increased affluence explains the emergence of ascetic wisdoms and moralizing religions. Current Biology, Volume 25, Issue 1, 5 January 2015, Pages R37-R38
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Very briefly, an alternative explanation:
Compassion evolved thanks to the higher fitness of creatures (not just human) who were concerned about the wants of others, particularly offspring, other kin and those with whom cooperation was beneficial.
The increase in energy availability increased the ability of humans to feel and express compassion toward not just kin/cooperators but, due to the indiscriminate form of compassion that evolved, toward any living thing.
Compassion is, however, counterintuitive from many logical survival/reproductive perspectives, particularly among the rabble who had less energy at their disposal. The axial’s energy-rich thinkers, who were naturally inclined to compassion, could not logically explain what they felt to the rabble, so they attributed the Golden Rule and other principles of compassion to deity.
Compassion is now generally accepted and admired in the energy-rich modern world, and religion is so often a violator of compassion that its promotion of compassion has been compromised at the same time that secular systems are demonstrating a much more effective capacity for compassion.
Religion is fading in part, then, and might at some point vanish altogether because one of its most important functions, the promotion of compassion, is being performed better by secular systems.
I suspect a fourth possibility – conservatism.
If conditions were rougher before the rise of those religions – then the people in those times likely trended more towards being ascetic because that’s all they could be.
I mean if they got any more ascetic, they died.
However with increased wealth, ascetism wasn’t the only game in town, and thus could stand apart with a sense of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’.
The Axial age could thus be basically compared to the rise of the Romantics, or to some extent the rise of evangelical movements.
Bingo. “that as people become more affluent [and/or educated], their need for religion simply decreases”
My children ask me, “Why is religion bad?” I tell them: “It’s a waste of time.” The kids down the street hate how my kids get to play all Sunday. 😊
You don’t make them do extra evolutionary homework?! he said, shocked! 🙂
Two boys. Naturally, survival of the fittest is something that needs no embellishment.
Reader dom called your attention to the New Scientist Baumgard article t’other week! And reminded you 😉 I am only teasing you – I love you really… 🙂
Are not elite people more likely to maximize the number of offspring they have?
Baumard is at the University of Pennsylvania –
https://sites.google.com/site/nicolasbaumard/Publications
and has a book recently translated into English
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-fairness-9780190210229?cc=fr&lang=en&
“Are not elite people more likely to maximize the number of offspring they have?”
Possibly not as it causes generational ructions if there are too many kids after the loot. Just go for primogeniture and the ‘heir and a spare’ principle.
“Such religions are perpetuated not as a form of solace for those in need, but as forms of philosophy.”
I wouldn’t say that. Buddhism was supposedly founded on the need to escape the suffering of existence and the rat race of reincarnation. Popular Buddhism has often emphasized the compassion of Buddhist incarnations and saints. There is a side of Buddhism that appeals to those fascinated by the idea of esoteric knowledge, but I’m not sure that is much more than in many other religions. (And I’m not sure that appeal itself isn’t rooted in desires to control an uncertain and dangerous material world.)
This journalist has completely screwed up what the paper suggests. It’s good that new academic work is being written about in popular venues, but I wish they’d get it right. It makes you wonder how accurate the rest of their reporting is too.
P.S. Typo alert: the calorie threshold is probably 2,000 kcals/person/day.
I wondered about that kcal threshold too, Heather, but an old article in Scientific American, which maybe they’re thinking of, put hunter-gatherer consumption at 2,000 calories per day, a figure that remains roughly our daily consumption of food calories, while overall caloric consumption, in the form of fire, animal labor, water power, electricity etc. has us at present I think around 200,000 calories per day. While 20,000 calories/day is well short of the modern standard, its still 10 times subsistence and arguably enough to allow people to ponder ultimate questions and come up with, for lack of a better term, enlightened stuff.
Thanks Kevin. I hadn’t thought it might be including all the other inputs. That makes sense now.
Yes, the original definitely says 20,000 kc/day energy capture, implying all forms of energy.
I consider the rise of Abrahamic monotheism to be a historical aberration, not a necessary consequence of rising affluence. After all, one does not need to be rich to get on board with Epicurus’s philosophy, which coalesced around the same time as these others, but which obviously hasn’t fared as well down the ages.
One crucial difference between Christianity/Islam and the religions that preceded them was their preachment of a blissful afterlife, an idea derived from Jewish myths about the apocalypse and the resurrection of the dead. One can see how this might have appealed to people who believed they were destined for Hades.
The other crucial difference, as inherent to monotheism as apocalyptic thinking, is its intolerance of competing faiths. Polytheists might recognize each others’ gods and interact from a generally ecumenical stance, but monotheists must see idolatry and heresy everywhere they turn and, if they are in power, attempt to stamp it out. This is precisely what happened in the West. Christians think older religions faded because they were inherently inferior. But I’ve read (some of) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, including the chapter titled “The Destruction of Paganism,” so I know better.
“In particular, it does not account for why the new upper class would have been particularly attracted by the condemnation of earthly pleasures, food, luxury, or social status.”
Show me where the elite ever gave up earthly reward and pleasure, except in form and ritual.
How about.., once the priests, like the rulers, watched wealth start flowing up towards them by simple command (taxes and tithes) in relatively astonishing proportions, they needed to explain their increasingly opulent and decadent lifestyle? Asceticism and thrift for you, luxury for me (although, the temples and treasures and viands are really for the god, if course. We are merely his earthly servants).
There are actually some religions more predominant among the wealthy classes and other more predominant among the lower classes.
In America, Jehovah’s Witnesses are skewed to the low end of the economic spectrum, and Jews in the opposite direction. Among mainline Protestants, Episcopalians are atypically wealthier.
Just skimmed the original paper, and if I’d been refereeing it I probably would have poked a lot of holes. However the basic finding, that proxies for energy capture are better predictors of the emergence of axial religion than are the other proxy measures they considered, seems OK.
However, this is only “predictor” in the statistical model sense. It really just means “is associated with”.
I suspect that energy capture is probably the best predictor of most of the changes going on in such societies.
Good point!
Though I never agreed with his pantheistic views, I recognize Paul Tillich as a brilliant thinker and an exemplary scholar. And I suspect he would have seen the emergence of moralizing religions in much simpler terms.
Tillich argued that human existence could be mapped onto an n-space of three variables (he didn’t put it that way–I am for convenience and clarity).
In other words we exist in three ways.
Ontologically
Morally
Spiritually
Our existences can be threatened along each of these axes and in any combination. Thus we’re always coping with some amount of anxiety and fear there.
Tillich argues that which of these concerns takes center stage in some particular culture’s religion, art, and philosophy depends upon something akin to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Generally you don’t worry about the emptiness or meaninglessness of existence (the “spiritual” axis) when the Huns are burning down your cities.
Just a thought.
You’ll find Tillich’s reasoning laid out in his magnum opus, Systematic Theology, and also in his more approachable (and most famous) work, The Courage To Be. Here’s a very nice review and summary of that latter book’s main theses:
http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/resources/review_tillich-paul_couragetobe.htm
I enjoyed your article here very much, Mr. Coyne. I’m a new reader to you blogs and also a new fan.
Thank you.
LB
A problem I have with Baumard’s wealthy vs poor group hypothesis is that it looks to be an example of group selection. (It is hard to tell, since I don’t see a quantitative model.) While Jerry’s “well being” hypothesis is a social causal mechanism.
I am no scholar of religion, but I know the history of Abrahamism. It is fun to see Baumard’s et al contortions when they present a late ‘“Second Temple” Judaism’. What can you do, when there is no evidence of a ‘First Temple’ Judaism, but you want to pretend, for obscure reasons, that its own myth is a fact?
The first religious texts that lead up to Abrahamism is indeed dated to 2.3 kyrs ago. [The Dead Sea Scrolls.] But its first historian Josephus notes that it is but one of four obscure sects 1.9 kyrs ago.
Judaism, Christianism and later Mohammedanism all arose in areas where conquests had pushed large groups into the margins. Abrahamism arose as a mishmash of the “superior” conqueror’s beliefs and the nearby areas religions, competing for allaying the fears and short comings of the margin groups.
I don’t know if there is an increase in moralism to be predicted. But if there is, it could be as simple as moral edicts supporting a revenge fantasy, that of behaving opposite to war mongers and net an eternal life as reward.
“short comings” = shortcomings.