Big Gods and the Origin of Human Cooperation
Did the watchful gaze of moralizing gods produce the rise of complex civilizations?
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. If you’d like to support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, for just $4/month. Or, buy my new book—FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.
Visiting Hell
A year ago, I went to Hell.
Specifically, I visited the Hell Museum in Singapore, at the Haw Par Villa, a bizarre theme park of 1,000 statues and 150 ornate dioramas depicting moralizing lessons from Chinese folklore and mythology. (The site is named after its founders, Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, the creators of Tiger Balm).
The museum’s Ten Circles of Hell present a series of gruesome, grotesque warnings to avoid sin. In one scene, a minion of the underworld is busy impaling people on a hill of bloody knives (a placard makes clear that they deserved the punishment because they had been either “plotting the death of someone to steal his property” OR “charging exorbitant interest rates as a moneylender”).
In the next scene, two underworld demons are sawing a man in half, the long, curved blade slicing through his torso. (The placard helpfully explains that the man’s sin would have been “misusing books”; “possessing pornography”; “breaking rules”; or “wasting food”).
For decades, parents would take their children to these terrifying displays to warn them: behave badly and this will be your fate. Consider the saw blade or the hill of knives before you contemplate breaking the rules. The messages likely resonated. One of the final displays makes clear that the punishment for “cheating during examinations” is “to have one’s intestines and organs pulled out.”
Here, as in much of the world—past and present—there is a clear message: every sin will be punished; every transgression will haunt you in the afterlife. Similar messages have affected human behavior for thousands of years, but they’ve also shaped the way our civilizations have developed.
For most of human history, our species lived in small bands, often groups of fewer than a hundred people. Then, suddenly, around 12,000 years ago, complex civilizations began to pepper the landscape, as cooperation and coordination surged. This presents a puzzle: why the sudden shift in our behavior?
Some have argued that “Big Gods”—complete with their watchful eyes gazing down on us from above and threatening to punish us for sin—were the key component in social cooperation and the rise of civilization, moving us from our simple hunter-gatherer roots to sophisticated, sprawling empires. But is that true?
In this edition, I’ll address two questions, each with fascinating answers:
How has the threat of divine punishment shaped human civilization and the evolution of society?
How have secular societies replaced God’s moralizing gaze to deter civil sins?
The Big Gods Hypothesis and Civilizations of Karma
Intellectual historians often point to two major divergent explanations for the emergence of religion. The great philosopher David Hume argued that religion is the natural, but arbitrary, byproduct of human cognitive architecture.
Since the beginning, Homo sapiens experienced disordered events, seemingly without explanation. To order a disordered world, our ancestors began to ascribe agency to supernatural beings, to which they could offer gifts, sacrifices, and prayers to sway them to their personal whims. The uncontrollable world became controllable. The unexplainable was explained—a comforting outcome for the pattern detection machines housed in our skulls.
By contrast, thinkers like Émile Durkheim argued that religion emerged as a social glue. Rituals bond people across space and time. Religion was instrumental, not intrinsic. It emerged to serve our societies, not comfort our minds. As Voltaire put it: “If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.”
In the last two decades, a vibrant strand of scholarship has sought to reconcile these contrasting viewpoints, notably through the work of Ara Norenzayan, author of Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict.
Norenzayan’s “Big Gods” refer to deities that are omniscient, moralizing beings, careful to note our sins and punish us accordingly. Currently, roughly 77 percent of the world’s population identifies with one of just four religions (31% Christian; 24% Muslim; 15% Hindu; 7% Buddhist). In all four, moral transgressions produce consequences, some immediate, others punished in the afterlife.
Norenzayan aptly notes that the omniscience of Big Gods assumes total knowledge of everything in the universe, but that the divine is always depicted as being particularly interested in our moral behavior. If God exists, He surely could know which socks you wore yesterday, but deities focus their attentions not on such amoral trifles, but rather on whether you lie, covet, cheat, steal, or kill.
However, Norenzayan draws on anthropology evidence to argue that early supernatural beings had none of these traits and were disinterested in human affairs. They were fickle demons, tricksters and spirits, not omniscient gods who worried about whether any random human had wronged his neighbor.
“Anthropologists tell us that in small bands resembling ancestral human groups, the gods may want to be appeased with sacrifices and rituals, although they are typically unconcerned about moral transgressions such as theft and exploitation…Religion’s early roots did not have a wide moral scope…”
These deities may have fulfilled the conditions outlined by Hume—they explained the unexplainable as machinations of supernatural forces—but they didn’t serve much of a social deterrence function, because you wouldn’t need to fear being struck down by a lightning bolt from above if you wronged a rival.
Every social species that thrives, from wasps to humans, requires a mechanism of stopping individual members from working against the group’s interests. In complex hives, specialized “police wasps” serve as enforcers, seeking out and destroying any wasps producing larvae that may lead to an excess number of queens in the colony. When detected, any rogues are “beheaded or torn apart by the workers soon after they emerge from their cells in the brood comb,” explain Professors Francis Ratnieks and Tom Wenseleers.
Unlike wasps, early human societies didn’t have police forces. Without an enforcement mechanism, social complexity and large civilizations came with enormous risks of predatory, anti-social behavior that could undermine survival.
Over time, Norenzayan argues, divine forces shifted within these administratively weak human groupings. Thus emerged what Norenzayan calls “supernatural monitoring,” a belief in an omniscient presence that never averts His gaze from sin. Everything is tracked, monitored, then punished.
“Belief in certain kinds of supernatural watchers—Big Gods—is an essential ingredient that, along with rituals and other interlocking sets of social commitment devices, glued together total strangers into ever-larger moral communities.”
It is now a nearly universal feature of religious belief systems that a divine presence prohibits certain behaviors—and rewards others. And that presence is always watching. In addition to the omniscient sky gods of today’s major religions, ancient Egypt was home to Horus of Two Eyes. The Incans were watched by Viracocha. Today, in modern Tibet and Nepal, Buddhist depictions of eyes are dotted across villages, reminding everyone that nothing can ever be truly hidden.
The “Big Gods” hypothesis argues that divine gazes provided a far more effective form of deterring anti-social behavior than any mortal police force. Believers would self-regulate their behavior out of self-interest (who wants to end up suffering in hell for an eternity or reincarnated as a lowly flea?). Karma may have provided a similar, possibly even more potent mechanism, since it’s believed that consequences for anti-social transgressions are not delayed, but more immediate.
Shared belief in supernatural forces also created a social glue, solidified through communal rituals, that amplified social trust. As one Kazakh proverb taught people: “Fear him who does not fear God, but do not fear him who fears God.”
A mutual conception of divine punishment thus served as an enforcement mechanism. According to proponents of the Big Gods theory, that mechanism was the essential trigger for complex human societies to emerge, linking people together beyond immediate, personal bonds such as family and friends.1
In other words: perhaps the omniscient divine gaze paved the way for civilization to rise.
“Survival of the Holiest”
It’s blasphemous, perhaps, to suggest that belief systems rise and fall based on human factors aligned with cultural evolution. But it’s also quite clearly true.
Consider the Shakers, a Christian sect founded in 1747, so-named because these offshoots of the Quakers engaged in ecstatic body movements during worship. They had a sophisticated belief system, but their most important belief for the sect’s prospects was its prohibition on procreation.
Shakers believed it was immoral to produce children. In a predictable turn of events, their numbers inevitably dwindled. Today, there is just one living Shaker community, in the US state of Maine. As of 2020, there were two members. (In 2021, a third person joined, drastically swelling the ranks of Shakers, at least in percentage terms).
Belief in the value of procreation helps religions survive, but so too does a religion that can’t be disproven. As one scholar put it, a belief system that “specifies that the criminal’s left arm will fall off at noon on the third day following the crime cannot be maintained for long.” When noon comes and goes—but the arm remains stubbornly attached to the body—people will ask questions.
By contrast, if punishments are invisible, meted out in the otherworldly afterlife, or are tied to karma, which is infinitely flexible and can easily be fitted to explain just about any event—good or bad—then it’s impossible to question the veracity of that belief system. Unfalsifiability strengthens religious durability.
Most religious experimentation fails. The anthropologist Richard Sosis studied 200 religious communes that emerged during the 19th century. The average commune lasted for just 25 years. (Secular communes were even less successful at creating social bonds; the average one lasted just 6.4 years). By contrast, the largest religions, with billions of believers, have persisted for thousands of years.
Why? Norenzayan suggests the answer: because the Big Gods—the supernatural watchers—provided the strongest social glue.
This argument, which is sometimes characterized as “Survival of the Holiest,” suggests that shared religious belief paves the way for social trust, which paves the way for cooperation, which paves the way for better survival prospects.
Religion can therefore be a powerful engine for human teamwork, eliminating free-riding and abuse. Norenzayan highlights the modern day phenomenon of India’s Maa Tarini Coconut Courier Service. To please the temple’s goddess, one must bring her coconuts. So, the coconuts come in droves—up to 15,000 per day.
But there’s no UPS or postman; instead, anyone can deposit their coconuts on any bus or transport vehicle heading in the right direction, and the drivers will ferry them as far along the route toward the temple as they go. They’ll then transfer the coconuts to anyone else headed toward the temple, until they arrive, intact for the goddess. Nobody steals them, because doing so would ensure terrible misfortune.
Proponents of the Big Gods hypothesis highlight these dynamics to suggest that religion made large-scale human cooperation possible, unleashing the powers of civilization in the process.2 Empires were only feasible when the subjects shared gods, which acted as mechanisms of coordination, fostering trust well beyond family and friends. We became long-distance cooperators.
“War and Peas” and the Cynicism of “Shoort”
However, as with all sweeping theories, cracks emerge when you look closely. The emergence of supernatural belief wasn’t always about pro-social cooperation. Sometimes, it just furthered the self-interest of specific factions within society—functioning as a more banal, familiar form of coercion—the powerful over the weak.
One group of scholars, for example, points to the Selk’nam hunter-gatherers in Tierra del Fuego. Wives are told that if they disobey their husbands, they will be visited—and punished—by Shoort, a spirit. To reinforce that belief and increase compliance, men would dress up as Shoort and attack women, “by shaking her hut violently…But he may also stab her with a stick, or even beat her and tear down her dwelling.” This was just cynical, brutal, misogyny to ensure control.
Scholars such as Harvey Whitehouse, Rosalind Purcell, and Peter Turchin have also pushed back on the core claim that Big Gods made complex societies possible. They used a vast array of long-term data to suggest that the Big Gods thesis is wrong. The pattern, they argue, shows that complex societies predate the emergence of the watchful deities. Complex civilizations invented Big Gods, rather than Big Gods creating complex civilization.
Instead, they found significant evidence that complex civilizations emerged due to a combination of the rise of agriculture and more sophisticated warfare. Agriculture allowed groups to expand with a stable supply of food—and sophisticated warfare allowed powerful armies to conquer and subsume rivals.3 (I’ve termed this the war and peas hypothesis).
Harvey Whitehouse, author of the excellent forthcoming book Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, explains why large-scale moralizing religions may have emerged after the rise of complex societies, to allow millions of people to work together toward a shared goal, or for a shared empire.
Whitehouse—an unassuming academic wildman who has risked his life studying militias in Libya and driven motorcycles with off-road tires to remote jungles mostly untouched by outsiders—spent two years living in Papua New Guinea. There, he underwent a ritualistic initiation into the Baining tribe, complete with a bark-cloth face covering and clothing made of foliage.
Thankfully for Whitehouse, that ritual has become tamer in recent decades; in the past, he would have been forced to paint headdresses crimson with blood from his tongue and endure the agonizing pain of a sharpened bone being embedded in the base of his spine, then left there for hours.
These kinds of rituals are what Whitehouse calls “imagistic,” which is academic-speak for extremely intense, but rare experiences that create a strong, enduring bond between a small number of people. Such rituals can create the phenomenon of identity “fusion,” in which those who have undergone the ritual see little distinction between their own identity and the group’s identity. You can’t endure a bone stabbed into your spine every week, but once is enough to create a lasting impression.
These intense rituals that produce identity fusion are extremely effective at fostering self-sacrifice—whether it’s in battle, or in more modern times, with behavior such as suicide terrorism. (To this day, Whitehouse points out, Taiwan’s elite special forces are forced to crawl half-naked over razor-sharp coral, their bloody wounds doused with saltwater thereafter, to make them bond together as a ritual with a function).
Through the forces of cultural evolution, then, groups of humans that bond tightly are more likely to defeat and dominate groups of humans with weaker bonds and less fear of punishment. If you’re facing near-certain death in a battle, warriors who have a shared identity with their fellow soldiers—and believe that their brave death will be rewarded in the afterlife—are more likely to defeat armies of people who think only about their personal, rational, short-term self-interest. If there’s no afterlife, and the other soldiers are just random strangers, why not run away and defect?
But once complex societies emerged, it became impossible to do such intense rituals on a widespread basis. Instead, Whitehouse argues, successful, enduring religions began to focus more on “doctrinal” rituals, which are routine, frequent, and lower intensity. Instead of having a bone stabbed into your spine, you go to church once a week or respond to the call to prayer several times a day. These less intense experiences are scalable in a way that their more intense counterparts were not—and therefore they’re better suited for societies with millions of people, not just a hundred.
Routine, lower stakes rituals were also less likely to be resisted by new believers, lowering the barriers to entry for fresh converts. However, because the rituals were less intense, they created less fusion, and more “identification.” Christians might identify with the group, for example, but it just becomes part of your identity; it didn’t subsume the entirety of your sense of self.
Moreover, centralized societies became easier to convert, because you just needed to get a king or chieftain to agree to convert the whole group. Decentralized, flat societies require more painstaking work of capturing souls one at a time.
This new social glue—and its ability to get sprawling civilizations to stick together—coincided with a new era of social complexity defined by humans living in large groups.
As I wrote in Corruptible:
In a comparative blink, we went from many smaller, flatter societies to enormous, hierarchical behemoths defined by inequality and dominance. The rest, quite literally, is history.
Bentham, Foucault, the Panopticon, and Secular Gods
Whichever came first, Big Gods or complex civilizations, belief in moralizing deities surely deterred significant amounts of bad behavior in societies that otherwise had weak control and virtually no credible mechanism to enforce human laws. Without police or a bureaucratic state, an ever-watchful Big God was useful. But they weren’t a panacea.
For example, despite widespread religious belief in medieval England, the murder rate was likely more than one hundred times higher than it is today (one study from Oxford, which had good coroner records, put the homicide rate in the 1340s at around 120 per 100,000 people; today, across England, it’s about 1 per 100,000). Despite the threat of an unblinking god, there were still plenty of murderers.
This presents a puzzle for the Big Gods hypothesis, because serious moral transgressions have steadily declined even as secularism is higher than ever. So, how did the civil god of punishment—rule of law—supplant the Big Gods as a dominant force constraining our worst human impulses?
Every time I go to my office, I walk past the stuffed corpse of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. I don’t mean that in some figurative way. After Bentham died, his body was preserved, and it’s just sitting in a glass case of the University College London student center (the head on display is made of wax; his real head is in the UCL museum).
Bentham is famous for utilitarianism, but he also wrote about the panopticon, a round prison with a guard tower in the middle, in which the guards can see the prisoners, but the prisoners can’t see the guards. The asymmetry creates the possibility that the guard might be watching at any moment.
Eventually, the guards don’t really need to watch much; the prisoners start to self-enforce the rules, knowing any transgression will get caught and punished by an invisible watcher in the guard tower. (For proponents of the “Big Gods” theory, it’s a bit like we’re all in a global panopticon—and God is the guard tower).
Later, the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about the “fourth face of power,” in which humans no longer need the coercion of the torture chamber (or the hill of knives, as in the Hell Museum), because the “watchful gaze” of the state is enough to cause them to auto-regulate behavior according to the “correct” norms and standards. (When you roll up to a stop sign or a red light in the middle of nowhere and still stop—even though there’s zero risk of a car accident or being caught—that’s the fourth face of power in action). In effect, we become our own jailers.
With a somewhat brighter outlook on the role of governments, Fitouchi, Singh, et al. argue that secular institutions can do the job of Big Gods—and do it better—so long as people trust the state to enforce the rules. Sure enough, the data seem to match this relationship.
This graph, compiled by those researchers from the World Values Survey, shows a clear trend. The more that people believe they can generally trust others in their society, the less they tend to believe that “belief in gods is necessary to be moral.” Similarly, they point to the fact that people distrust atheists less in societies with stable, efficient political institutions, making the Kazakh proverb obsolete. With democracy, transparency, and rule of law, even the non-believers can be trusted.
The rise in secular institutions, nontheism, and atheism is an extremely recent modern phenomenon. We are therefore test cases for a new era in human society, in which moralizing gods play less and less of a role in the lives of more and more people. Religiosity remains widespread across the globe, but many of the richest societies in the world are also the most secular. (In Western Europe, just 11 percent of people say that religion is very important in their lives, compared to 53 percent in the United States).
Whether moralizing Big Gods sparked a surge in cooperation or simply grew out of complex civilization, our species has, for thousands of years been affected by widespread belief in a watchful presence above us.
Today, we have become part of a vast anthropological experiment, in which religious rituals are rapidly disappearing from the lives of millions of people, who are deterred not by Big Gods, but by personal morality or by the deterrence of rule of law in secular nation-states.
However, when we sit down and consider writing down the stories of our lives—sparing no sin, deleting no transgression from the memories of our flawed pasts—for many of us it is unknowable whether we are writing that accounting for our own moral compass, for the state, or for a moralizing higher power, judging us from above.
And that’s why, as with many letters, perhaps the best course of action is to address any faithful ledger of our bad behavior as follows:
“To whom it may concern.”
Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This was free for everyone, but as you might guess, I didn’t whip this article up in just a few hours. If you’d like to support my research and writing—and make my work sustainable—please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or buy my new book, FLUKE.
Some scholars point out that in tight-knit social groups, Big Gods weren’t as powerful as social ostracism, because the threat of exile or social stigma was intense if your entire community was comprised of only a few dozen individuals.
Theories about the rise of human civilization abound, including a fascinating theory from Dr. Benjamin Pennington about sea level rise in the Holocene.
Turchin writes about how ranged weapons mattered for this dynamic, too, which I explored in my book, Corruptible.
Instructive and fascinating. Thank you.
Saw you on Morning Joe and got this article at the same time. Bravo and Bravo!