The Religion Advantage
How religion helped homo sapiens take over the world
Hello readers,
We live in times when you can’t pass a day without coming across some religious controversy. Someone loses their shit over an offensive statement. Another starts a Twitter war over whether a certain leader was a bigot.
It seems like people endlessly bicker over religion and beliefs. Over how my religion is the best and yours is based on lies and all that sort of bull.
The purpose of today’s piece is not to take sides or to make an attempt to explain which of these warring parties deserves a medal of honor for spitting raw truth. In fact, I already touched upon the incredibly important idea of religious conflict and why one should try to have a small identity in my 2022 mental models article.
Today, we’re going to take a look not at this religion or that, but at the very idea of religion itself.
The fact that we spend countless hours kicking each others’ gonads does indicate that it has a deep hold on our minds, and, therefore, quite a legacy.
So how did it evolve and why are we still so attracted to the idea? Clearly, it must’ve had (and still does have) some adaptive value for human societies- or it’d have been busted out of relevance just like floppy disks and Tusshar Kapoor movies.
What happened 70,000 years ago
This story begins way back in the jungle.
That was a time when we still looked a bit like apes and had many other cousins like Homo Erectus and the Neanderthals. We (homo sapiens) tried venturing out of our tiny, ecological niche in Africa around 100,000 YBP (years before present). A combination of harsh climactic conditions and competing Neanderthals pushed us back to where we started.
Time passed, and things changed. Around 70,000 YBP, the world experienced a deadly ecological crisis that destroyed habitats, depleted resources, and pushed humanity to the brink. Getting out of this situation was harder than boarding a local at Kurla station.
Turns out we humans had some wicked tricks up our collective sleeves. To cope with the intense resource shortage and scarcity, we came up with large inter and intra-group trading networks so we could cooperate effectively and tide through the crisis. This helped manage the ecology and resources effectively and led to cooperation with people beyond our tiny groups.
But as anyone who has done business with serial absconders knows, it’s difficult to cooperate and make things happen. You need to know whom to trust when every other dude is trying to pull a fast one on you. How did we manage this tricky situation? By being nice to others.
Being nice to others
We’re all selfish animals. But we also have the capacity to be nice to others and make landmark sacrifices like sharing one-sixteenth of our Vada Pav. If life is a race, as Viru Sahasrabuddhe in 3 Idiots remarked, how is it that we developed the capacity to be nice to others and act in their interest?
There are a few reasons we do that. One is when we support people of our kin because they carry some of our genes too. Secondly, we do it with the expectation that we’ll get a favor in return. Biologists call this reciprocal altruism, but nobody’s going to punish you if you simply remember this idea as tit-for-tat. Another reason we do this is to enhance our reputation and be known as the fair-play guy so we may benefit from this the next time we need a favor.
To be able to do any of these, we need to have some sorta guarantee that we will indeed get the help we need when times are rough. This means that people around us should be motivated to play by the rules and not default when it’s time for them to help you out. Biologists call this concept ‘cheap altruism’, where being nice to others isn’t expensive like Mumbai real estate.
But still, why do I have to be nice at all? There are advantages, yes, but why can’t we have a society where people do whatever the hell they want and not be forced to demonstrate any of that nice-guy crap? One possible explanation is the idea of group selection.
You see, this time was marked by fierce competition among different groups of humans. As we’ve seen numerous times in historical episodes, groups that are able to better coordinate are able to fight and defend themselves better, and eventually even take over other groups. But for a group to be able to cooperate, we precisely need the aforementioned behaviors and norms so people learn to work with and help each other out.
In such a society, people readily cooperate with others, trade flourishes and the entire group becomes one cohesive lot that has a big advantage when it competes with other groups. Cultural group selection, therefore, exerts pressure on us and kinda forces us to be nice to each other so our group can cooperate and flourish.
So where does religion come into all of this?
The Role of Religion
Long story short- religion was the trick that helped us enforce those norms of niceness.
Let’s understand this through the idea of the cost of punishment.
Say we’re in a group and I help you dig a hole. When I need help later, you just refuse and say you’ve got some work (but are actually just lazing around naked under the banana tree). That’s a clear lie and a major default. You’re not following the group norm of helping those who’ve helped you- and I want revenge for this shit.
So I may come to you and try to beat you up but you might be a gym bro and smack my ass like those people recently did with a passenger on the Spicejet flight to Kolkata. Or I may need to assemble a crew of 3-4 other people so we can properly break your bones- but even assembling that gang is a costly affair (who knows, they might just want a deadly bribe of a dozen luscious mangoes to do your dirty job).
You see, inflicting punishment on someone for wrongdoing is a very costly affair. And if you need a group where people cooperate, you need to drastically reduce the cost of punishment- and also increase people’s conformity to group norms.
Ingenious (and violent) as we are, we invented shit like arrows and spears so we no longer had to walk up to our foes and engage in a tricky brawl. We could simply aim at them and seek revenge from afar with these cool, new weapons. This was punishment at a distance- and was an effective tool in bringing down the cost one incurs in inflicting damages for a misdeed.
But what if you’re being watched by a God all the time? What if that supernatural entity is the authority on morality and will punish you in hell if you commit any such misdeeds? It would work wonders. People would be much more particular about following norms and not defaulting on their promises, even when nobody’s watching.
Thus, the omnipresence of an observant God further brought down bad behaviors, encouraged virtuous ones, and helped increase cooperation among societies. Think of it as punishment at a supernatural distance, which was the critical idea in enforcing cooperation.
Religion was therefore the glue that, in many ways, allowed homo sapiens to become a tightly knit machine that was now ready to take on the world. As the story goes, we ventured out of Africa once again- and this time nobody was able to push us back.
Of course, we eliminated all our cousins and that’s not a heroic tale that we must celebrate. But the point is- thanks to the religious glue, humans were able to venture out of their tiny niche and then quickly take over the entire planet.
That, my friends, was the advantage that we got. Religion is what got us here.
Thanks for tuning in! This is barely the tip of the iceberg and there’s so much more to this story. So tell me:
Did you enjoy today’s piece or did it put you to sleep?
Would you want me to dive deeper into this topic or should we just move the hell on?
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