Chapter 8 The Gods of Cooperation and Competition

Chapter 8 The Gods of Cooperation and Competition
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For all its virtues in binding strangers together, religious cooperation is born out of competition and conflict between groups. It is therefore expected that religious cooperation in turn fuels the very conflicts, real or imagined, that are perceived to threaten it. (This is the topic of the next chapter.) This dynamic helps us understand and resolve the seeming paradox that it is the handmaiden both of cooperation within the group and of conflict between groups.
Note:LA RELIGIONE FA COOPERARE IL GRUPPO E LO FA CONFLIGGERE

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groups that happen to have members who acquire traits favoring self-sacrifice and subordinate self-interest for group interests—that is, groups with stronger social solidarity—will tend to win out.
Note:SACRIFICIO DI SÈ

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Religion returns to center stage, not as a theological explanation of purpose or order, but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units—at least to a degree.
Note:SLOAN WILSON... LA RELIGIONE COME PRODOTTO EVOLUTIVO

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In an ambitious cross-cultural investigation spanning 33 nation-states, Michele Gelfand and her colleagues measured something related to social solidarity. They looked at the degree to which nations are “tight”—that is, do they have strict social norms that apply to many situations? How important is conformity to these norms? How much deviation from norms is tolerated and do people get punished for violating these norms?
Note:GELFAND: ALTRUISMO E GUERRA

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they found that, all else being equal, conflict a hundred years ago increased the odds of strict norm-enforcement today. Tighter nations were also more religious—and that makes sense too if world religions are a group-mobilizing force.
Note:IL NUMERO DI GUERRE PREGRESSE PREVEDE LA RELIGIOSITÀ... LA RELIGIOSITÀ INCREMENTA CON IL PERICOLO

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as any observer of team sports fans can see, the “cooperate to compete” instinct is particularly strong among that segment of the population that likes war: young men.
Note:FANATICI E ALTRUISTI

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Richard Sosis and his colleagues looked at this issue from a different angle.
Note:SOSIS... PIÙ GUERRA PIÙ RITUALI

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they found that the greater the participation in warfare, the more likely there are costly rites for males.
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Sosis sees these painful rites as costly behaviors that signal group commitment. He points out that ritual scarification and violence create male solidarity, which keeps freeriding during warfare under control.
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As Scott Atran explains, seemingly irrational tendencies make for stronger groups that can outdo their more rational, self-interested rivals:
Note:RITI IRRAZIONALI... RITI COSTOSI IMPEGNO PIÙ GARANTITO

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Seen in this light, it is not surprising that prosocial religions have been a major force shaping human history. When intergroup rivalries are strong, prosocial religious groups, with their Big Gods and loyalty practices that promote social solidarity, could have a competitive edge over rival groups.
Note:MONOTEISMO... GRUPPI PIÙ ESTESI E POTENTI

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Building Moral Communities of Strangers
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As Jonathan Haidt shows, much of morality is rooted in social intuitions in the service of gluing individuals together to form “sacred” communities.
Note:MORALITÀ E COESIONE

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As Haidt recognizes, not all moral systems are religious, and not all religions are moral systems, but some religious systems—those that have prosocial consequences—have been moral systems throughout time.
Note:RELIGIONE E MORALE

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They found that the stronger an individual expressed religious belief and reported high levels of religious participation, the more likely he or she condemned moral transgressions.
Note:QUENTIN ATKINSON... RELIGIOSITÀ E TRASGRESSIONE MORALE

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These findings complement results by Shariff and Rhemtulla discussed earlier, who found, all else being equal, lower crime rates in nations with stronger belief in hell than heaven.
Note:CRIMINE E RELIGIOSITÀ

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Morality without God
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This does not mean, of course, that religion is necessary for morality. No doubt core human moral instincts evolved long before religions spread in human groups.
Note:LA MORALITÀ PRECEDE LA RELIGIONE

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Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom have found that moral-like judgments can be found even in preverbal babies: by six months of age, they show a preference for an individual who helps and an aversion to an individual who obstructs someone else’s goal.
Note:BAMBINI

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Even our primate cousins have vestiges of moral instincts. A long line of research by primatologist Frans de Waal and his colleagues shows capacities for emotional contagion, consolation, and grief in chimpanzees.
Note:MORALITÀ E SCIMMIE

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We do not need religion to be moral beings. But moral communities of strangers may not have evolved as readily without religions with Big Gods.
Note:IL PROBLEMA DELLO STRANIERO... COME LO AFRONTA LA RELIGIONE

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Intergroup Competition and Warfare
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There is no shortage of evidence in the historical and ethnographic record showing that violent and nonviolent conflict has been endemic to human existence.18 In fact, one driver of large group size in cultural evolution is the intensity of between-group competition for resources and habitats. For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods.
Note:CONFLITTI GRANDI GRUPPI E BIG GOD SONO CORRELATI

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one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war.
Note:TILLIS SULLA GUERRA COME ORIGINE DELLO STATO...

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Peter Turchin, who has pioneered the scientific study of historical dynamics, emphasizes that the scaling up of social groups happened predominantly in frontiers of states and empires. He calculated that over 90 percent of preindustrial age mega-empires—defined as unified states covering greater than 1 million square kilometers (or 386,100 square miles)—arose in frontier regions, such as the Eurasian steppes.
Note:TURCHIN E LE FRONTIERE CONFLITUALI COME ORIGINE DELLE RELIGIONI

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this is the old adage that the best way to compete with rivals is to cooperate with allies. Medieval Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldûn, who was a keen observer of the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties in fourteenth-century North Africa, saw social solidarity, which he called asabiya,
Note:VECCHI ADAGI CONFERMATI

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How Prosocial Religions Won in the Game of Intergroup Cultural Competition
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This observation brings us to the idea that prosocial religions, with their group-beneficial norms that suppress selfishness and increase social cohesion, outcompeted their rivals. There are good reasons to think that this process has been driven by cultural—rather than genetic—evolution.
Note:L ALTRUISMO DELLE RELIGIONI È VINCENTE

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Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich summarize the idea this way: Religious beliefs and practices, like group beneficial norms, can spread by competition among social groups in several ways, including warfare, economic production, and demographic expansion. Such cultural representations can also spread through more benign interactions, as when members of one group preferentially acquire behaviors, beliefs, and values from more successful groups. Over historical time, demographic and cultural patterns have favored prosocial religious groups.
Note:ESPANSIONISMO CULTURALE

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Cultural Group Stability
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when all is said and done, what matters, in cultural terms, is how well a group weathers storms that might lead to its collapse. World history is littered with the corpses of vast, but short-lived, empires, such as the Assyrian and Mongol conquests that unified large parts of the Middle East and Eurasia, respectively.
Note:IMPORTANZA DELLA STABILITÀ... ESEMPIO DI IMPERI BREVI

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Returning to this study of the group longevity of religious and secular communes in nineteenth-century America, Richard Sosis looked at an ideal case study because these communes operated under difficult conditions, facing various internal and external threats to group stability. Communes that were unable to solve “collective action problems”—overcoming internal disputes, preventing members from defecting to rival groups, surviving droughts, and so on, could not prosper. Indeed, some communes were dissolved soon after they were founded, whereas others flourished. For every year considered in a 110-year span, religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average factor of four.
Note:UNA ROBUSTA RELIGIONE STABILIZZA

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The evidence just discussed leads to two key conclusions: (1) differential rates of group survival favor prosocial religious groups; and (2) the combination of belief in supernatural watchers, extravagant displays, and other commitment devices explains the cultural survival advantage of these groups—precisely what would be expected if prosocial religions were “packaged” by cultural evolutionary processes.
Note:CONCLUSIONI

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Neither could genetic group selection easily explain these effects, given the very short time frames (just over a 110 year span) and the fact that variation in nineteenth-century American commune membership is unlikely to be of genetic origin.
Note:I TEMPI DELLA GENETICA NN SPIEGANO ALCUNI FENOMENI... SI RICORRA ALLA SELEZIONE CULTURALE

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Attracting Religious Converts
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In her study of the spread of Islam into Africa, Ensminger argues that Islamic beliefs, supported by powerful displays of faith such as abstaining from alcohol, avoiding pre- and extramarital sex, not consuming pork, and ritual fasting—permitted greater trust, shared rules of exchange, and the use of credit institutions among converted Muslims.26 The spread of Islam in turn facilitated more trade and greater economic success.
Note:ISLAM: FORZA E COMPETIZIONE

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This might come as a surprise to many, but Americans have not been as religious as they are today. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark emphasize the role of religious competition in the dramatic expansion of religiosity in America since 1776.27 Those familiar with American religious movements today know that competition among religious institutions for membership has been a long-time feature of American life.
Note:AMERICA E COMPETIZIONE RELIGIOSA

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Religious Fertility
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To survive and prosper, religious groups attract followers, induce adherents to reproduce at rates greater than replacement levels, or, as the demographic expansion of the Mormon Church shows, ideally, do both.
Note:LA PROSPERITÀ DEMOGRAFICA APPORTATA DALLARELIGIONE

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The Mormon Church grew, in a time span of just 170 years, from a small group of a few hundred to 15 million followers worldwide. Likewise, Christianity itself grew by leaps and bounds in the Roman Empire, and a once obscure offshoot of Judaism became the state religion of the empire in less than 300 years.
Note:MORMONI ED EBREI

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The cultural success of prosocial religious groups is therefore aided in no small part by their reproductive success,
Note:FERTILITÀ

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Sociologist Eric Kauffman remarks with irony that, in the culture wars between the religious and secular, arguments fly back and forth, yet neither side seems to have noticed the most important trend that may really settle the dispute. He notes: Religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world through demography. We have embarked on a particular phase of history in which the frailty of secular liberalism will become even more apparent. In contrast to the situation today, the upsurge of fundamentalism will be felt more keenly in the secular West than in developing regions. This is because we are witnessing the historic conjunction of religious fundamentalism and demographic revolution.
Note:KAUFFMAN: L'ARGOMENTO RELIGIOSO È ESSENZIALMENTE DEMOGRAFICO

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A study comparing the fertility rates of European Jews found that the atheists had the lowest birthrate, averaging around 1.5 children per woman (again, below replacement), whereas the religious Jews averaged nearly three, with the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel averaging six to eight children per woman.
Note:EBREI

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Michael Blume explains: Although we looked hard at all available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.
Note:ATEI SENZA FIGLI DA SEMPRE

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It is no accident that religious conservative attitudes on women’s rights, contraception, abortion, and sexual orientation are conducive to maintaining high fertility levels.
Note:RELIGIONE E DIRITTI DELLA DONNA

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it is possible that religious fertility is shaped by a process called gene-culture coevolution.35 Just as the lactose-tolerance allele spread in less than 10,000 years in groups that adopted milk-producing cows, goats, and camels, it is conceivable that prosocial religious beliefs and practices adopted by some groups but not others might have exerted selection pressures on the human gene pool of these groups. This provocative idea is just starting to receive attention.
COEVOLUZIONE CULTURA E GENETICA... IL MIGNOLO DI HENRICH

La violenza della religione ch9

La violenza della religione

From Religious Cooperation to Religious Conflict – Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict by Ara Norenzayan

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Domanda: cosa rende una religione fonte di violenza? Tesi: spesso proprio cio’ che la rende edificatrice di civiltà.

***

how much of a role does religion play in violent conflicts? Critics of religion think that it is a major cause, and there is of course no shortage of examples, historical and contemporary: the Crusades, the early Islamic conquests, the sixteenth-century Catholic-Protestant religious wars, violent Jihadi campaigns of today, Hindu-Muslim violence, Lebanon of the 1970s and 1980s, Bosnia in the early 1990s, Northern Ireland. With these examples in mind, Richard Dawkins argues: Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

Note:LA POSIZIONE CRITICA: RELIGIONE PRIMA CAUSA DI GUERRA

they offer counterexamples of violent conflicts motivated by secular ideologies that lack a religious dimension: the two World Wars in the twentieth century (including the carnage caused by Fascism and the Nazis), Stalin’s and Mao’s purges, and the genocidal Pol Pot regime, to name a few. Earlier, starting in 1915, the Committee for Union and Progress, known as the Young Turk Regime, Westernizers who wanted to reform and secularize the ailing (religiously organized) Ottoman Empire, carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century by annihilating most of the Armenian population as well as depopulating the rest of the Ottoman Christians from their ancestral lands.

Note:PRIMA RISPOSTA DEGLI APOLOGETI

Moreover, defenders of religion point out that some of the sins attributed to religion are in fact caused by something else that gets entangled with religion. William James, one of the great founders of modern psychology who took a great interest in religion, put it this way: The baseness so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable to religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion.

Note:SECONDA RISPOSTA

If we take all the violent conflicts we know of in a given historical period, and assess the degree to which religious divisions were a factor, what would we find? Such studies are rare, but in the Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod attempted one such comprehensive analysis. They surveyed nearly 1,800 violent conflicts throughout history. They measured, based on historical records, whether or not religion was a factor, and if so, to what degree. They found that less than 10 percent involved religion at all.

Note:10%

In a related “God and War” audit commissioned by the BBC, researchers again scrutinized 3,500 years of violent… In the end, religion was a factor in 40 percent of all rated violent conflicts, but rarely as the key motivator of the conflict. Religion is an important player, but rarely the primary cause of wars and violent conflicts….

Note:SECONDO ESAME

Sharpening the Question: Three Clarifications about Religion and Conflict

In the popular imagination, there are the tolerant religions (Buddhism gets a lot of votes, and of course, the pacifist Quakers!) and there are intolerant religions (the fundamentalist strains of the Abrahamic faiths)… Today, many people, with more seriousness than Franken, think that radical Islam is the “problem religion” of the twenty-first century, but ten centuries earlier, it was Christianity (mainly Catholicism), and Islamic Spain was a cosmopolitan center of many faiths, a far more tolerant society than medieval Christendom. If some religions are inherently more violent than others, how do we explain these changes within a religious tradition?…

Note:RELIGIONE DI PACE

Religion and Its “Wicked Partners”

We wanted to know: do people who are more religiously devoted scapegoat other religious groups more? Or less? The answer, it turned out, depends on teasing apart “religious devotion” from its “wicked partners.”… We also considered what James called religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the “spirit of dogmatic dominion.” We got a measure of religious exclusivity: “My God (beliefs) is the only true God (beliefs).”… Hansen and I found that, after matching people on age, gender, occupational status, and other factors, exclusivity increased the odds of scapegoating. No surprise there—more dogmatic people are more scapegoating of other religions. But what was more interesting, holding constant exclusivity, was that prayer frequency reduced the odds of scapegoating….

Note:DISCERNERE NELLE RELIGIONI: ESCLUSIVITÀ DOGMATISMO PREGHIERA

Religion inevitably contains, reflects, and reveals all that is within the realm of humanity: the good and the bad. It is like any other facet of human civilization: some of it is noble and inspirational, much of it is nonsensical and even dangerous.

Note:ALLPORT

Religious tendencies contribute to intolerance and violence in at least three ways. The first one involves the workings of supernatural monitoring as a group-building social device. This leads to a sliding scale of distrust toward those who fall outside of one’s own supernatural jurisdiction. Second is the social bonding power of religious participation and ritual that could exacerbate conflict between groups. Third, religion fosters sacred values, making them immune to trade-off,

Note:LE TRE VIE DA CUI S’INSINUA L’INTOLLERANZA: SUPERERWATCHER (COESIONE), AFFILIAZIONE, SACRALITA’.

The Outer Limits of Supernatural Monitoring

Social cohesion inevitably involves setting up boundaries between those who can be trusted and those who cannot. After all, and despite some theological teachings about universal love and indiscriminate compassion, a religious community would not be a cooperative community if there were no social boundaries.

Note:I CONFINI DELLA FIDUCIA. CREDERE CHE DIO CI GUARDI E’ ESSENZIALE

Azim Shariff and I tested this idea in the well-known Dictator Game… If Christian folk were good theologians, they would follow Christian doctrine and be “Good Samaritans,” being generous equally with everyone. But they were not. Christian participants primed with thoughts of God were most generous toward the Christian receiver, less generous toward a stranger with unknown religious affiliation, and least generous toward the Muslim receiver… While this result is not exactly an indication of intense hostility toward religious outgroups, it does show that making supernatural monitoring salient does lead to a discriminant form of generosity that is sensitive to group boundaries….

Note:TESTARE L’IPOTESI DEL DIO ONNISCIENTE

Religious Participation, Social Solidarity, and Conflict

There is a common belief that social ties are inherently good, and indeed there is a great deal of evidence showing that people with strong community ties are healthier, happier, and more prosocial.

Note:IL LATO POSITIVO DELLE RELAZIONI FORTI

The same processes that build community also open the door for exclusion to those who are seen as not belonging, and often, violent opposition to those who are seen as threatening. This could be called the social solidarity hypothesis of intergroup violence.

Note:IL LATO OSCURO

In a series of experiments, psychologists Adam Waytz and Nicholas Epley illustrate how this seeming paradox enables a particularly toxic form of an intergroup attitude: dehumanization of socially distant others… Who dehumanizes more: people who feel socially disengaged or socially connected? Their results were counterintuitive but decisive: feelings of stronger social connection to close others led to more dehumanization and harsher moral judgment of socially distant others….

Note:DEUMANIZZAZIONE

Suicide attacks come in waves, with one act of self-sacrifice inspiring others, creating cultural cycles of violent martyrdom. What better way to inspire and mobilize one’s community than to lay down one’s life for a cause? As an extreme form of parochial altruism

Note:KAMIKAZE

We found that those who attended mosque often, compared to those who attended rarely or never, were twice to three-and-a-half times more likely to support suicide attacks against the perceived enemy (Israelis). This clearly supports the social solidarity hypothesis.

Note:IL SUICIDA È SOCIALMENTE ATTIVO

No doubt, then, religious practices and rituals can add fuel to conflict. But it is important to emphasize that religious participation can also be coopted to work for greater inclusiveness.

Note:MA… CI SONO FORME DI PARTECIPAZIONE CHE CI RENDONO PIU’ TOLLERANTI

In a pioneering study, a team of economists led by David Clingingsmith wanted to know what effects, if any, participation in the hajj—the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca—has on social attitudes toward various groups. Are people transformed by this powerful experience? This annual pilgrimage brings together millions of practicing Muslims from all over the world and all walks of life into the holy city of Mecca to devote themselves to prayer, fasting, and other ascetic practices… Clingingsmith’s findings were complex and wide ranging, but they told a consistent story: hajj participation led to more tolerance toward Muslims and nonMuslims alike. It increased endorsement of equality, harmony, and peace among different ethnic and religious groups. Participation also encouraged more favorable attitudes toward women and their right to education and jobs….

Note:COME TI TRASFORMA ANDARE ALLA MECCA?

It is only in political contexts where there is asymmetric conflict and there are strong feelings that one’s group is under threat that altruism turns violent. In less conflict-prone contexts, when there is no target to attack or adversary to scapegoat, religious attendance would be more about sacrificing and less about attacking.

Note:IL CONTESTO

there is the nature of the religious participation itself. In the case of the former, religious participation was local—it reflected how often Palestinians attended mosque or Jewish settlers remembered attending synagogue in their local neighborhoods. In the hajj, in contrast, participation is global by its very nature. It’s an opportunity for Muslims to meet and interact with other Muslims of all stripes from all over the world… Religious ritual is typically enacted in a local context and cements ties with one’s immediate neighbors….

Note:ESPERIENZA GLOBALE

Religion and the Sacred: Negotiating the Non-Negotiable

Finally, a third path from religion to conflict is something that religions are particularly good at: the creation of sacred values.

Note:IL SACRO-VALORI NONNEGOZIABILI

Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges explain: Ample historical and cross-cultural evidence shows that when conflict is framed by competing religious and sacred values, intergroup violence may persist for decades, even centuries. Disputes over otherwise mundane phenomena (people, places, objects, events) then become existential struggles, as when land becomes “holy land.” Secular issues become sacralized and nonnegotiable.

Note:GUERRA SANTA

All of this tells us that parts of the religious bundle can create and intensify conflict, but somewhere in the same bundle there lie seeds that can be coopted to soften and overcome conflict.

AMBIVALENZA

Il fanatismo altruista

Il fanatismo altruista

The Gods of Cooperation and Competition – Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict BY Ara Norenzayan

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Argomenti: religione, morale, coesione sociale, competizione tra gruppi, conflitti.

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For all its virtues in binding strangers together, religious cooperation is born out of competition and conflict between groups. It is therefore expected that religious cooperation in turn fuels the very conflicts, real or imagined, that are perceived to threaten it. (This is the topic of the next chapter.) This dynamic helps us understand and resolve the seeming paradox that it is the handmaiden both of cooperation within the group and of conflict between groups.

Note:CIÒ CHE CI FA COMPETERE E CI FA CONFLIGGERE

groups that happen to have members who acquire traits favoring self-sacrifice and subordinate self-interest for group interests—that is, groups with stronger social solidarity—will tend to win out.

Note:SACRIFICIO DI SÈ

Religion returns to center stage, not as a theological explanation of purpose or order, but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units—at least to a degree.

Note:SLOAN WILSON

In an ambitious cross-cultural investigation spanning 33 nation-states, Michele Gelfand and her colleagues measured something related to social solidarity. They looked at the degree to which nations are “tight”—that is, do they have strict social norms that apply to many situations? How important is conformity to these norms? How much deviation from norms is tolerated and do people get punished for violating these norms?

Note:GELFAND: ALTRUISMO E GUERRA

they found that, all else being equal, conflict a hundred years ago increased the odds of strict norm-enforcement today. Tighter nations were also more religious—and that makes sense too if world religions are a group-mobilizing force.

Note:IL NUMERO DI GUERRE PREGRESSE PREVEDE LA RELIGIOSITÀ

as any observer of team sports fans can see, the “cooperate to compete” instinct is particularly strong among that segment of the population that likes war: young men.

Note:FANATICI E ALTRUISTI

Richard Sosis and his colleagues looked at this issue from a different angle..,. they found that the greater the participation in warfare, the more likely there are costly rites for males…. Sosis sees these painful rites as costly behaviors that signal group commitment. He points out that ritual scarification and violence create male solidarity, which keeps freeriding during warfare under control….

Note:SOSIS

Atran explains, seemingly irrational tendencies make for stronger groups that can outdo their more rational, self-interested rivals:

Note:RITI IRRAZIONALI

Seen in this light, it is not surprising that prosocial religions have been a major force shaping human history. When intergroup rivalries are strong, prosocial religious groups, with their Big Gods and loyalty practices that promote social solidarity, could have a competitive edge over rival groups.

Note:MONOTEISMO E STORIA

Building Moral Communities of Strangers

As Jonathan Haidt shows, much of morality is rooted in social intuitions in the service of gluing individuals together to form “sacred” communities.

Note:MORALITÀ E COESIONE

As Haidt recognizes, not all moral systems are religious, and not all religions are moral systems, but some religious systems—those that have prosocial consequences—have been moral systems throughout time.

Note:RELIGIONE E MORALE

They found that the stronger an individual expressed religious belief and reported high levels of religious participation, the more likely he or she condemned moral transgressions.

Note:QUENTIN ATKINSON

These findings complement results by Shariff and Rhemtulla discussed earlier, who found, all else being equal, lower crime rates in nations with stronger belief in hell than heaven.

Note:CRIMINE E RELIGIOSITÀ

Morality without God

This does not mean, of course, that religion is necessary for morality. No doubt core human moral instincts evolved long before religions spread in human groups.

Note:MORALITÁ E RELIGIONE

Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom have found that moral-like judgments can be found even in preverbal babies: by six months of age, they show a preference for an individual who helps and an aversion to an individual who obstructs someone else’s goal.

Note:BAMBINI

Even our primate cousins have vestiges of moral instincts. A long line of research by primatologist Frans de Waal and his colleagues shows capacities for emotional contagion, consolation, and grief in chimpanzees.

Note:MORALITÀ E SCIMMIE

We do not need religion to be moral beings. But moral communities of strangers may not have evolved as readily without religions with Big Gods.

Note:IL PROBLEMA DELLO STRANIERO

Intergroup Competition and Warfare

There is no shortage of evidence in the historical and ethnographic record showing that violent and nonviolent conflict has been endemic to human existence.18 In fact, one driver of large group size in cultural evolution is the intensity of between-group competition for resources and habitats. For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods.

Note:CON COSA SI CORRELA LA VIOLENZA UMANA

one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war.

Note:STATO E GUERRA

Peter Turchin, who has pioneered the scientific study of historical dynamics, emphasizes that the scaling up of social groups happened predominantly in frontiers of states and empires. He calculated that over 90 percent of preindustrial age mega-empires—defined as unified states covering greater than 1 million square kilometers (or 386,100 square miles)—arose in frontier regions, such as the Eurasian steppes.

Note:TURCHIN E LE FRONTIERE

this is the old adage that the best way to compete with rivals is to cooperate with allies. Medieval Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldûn, who was a keen observer of the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties in fourteenth-century North Africa, saw social solidarity, which he called asabiya,

Note:VECCHI ADAGI CONFERMATI

How Prosocial Religions Won in the Game of Intergroup Cultural Competition

This observation brings us to the idea that prosocial religions, with their group-beneficial norms that suppress selfishness and increase social cohesion, outcompeted their rivals. There are good reasons to think that this process has been driven by cultural—rather than genetic—evolution.

Note:LA VITTORIA CULTURALE DELLE RELIGIONI

Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich summarize the idea this way: Religious beliefs and practices, like group beneficial norms, can spread by competition among social groups in several ways, including warfare, economic production, and demographic expansion. Such cultural representations can also spread through more benign interactions, as when members of one group preferentially acquire behaviors, beliefs, and values from more successful groups. Over historical time, demographic and cultural patterns have favored prosocial religious groups.

Note:SELEZIONE CULTURALE

Cultural Group Stability

when all is said and done, what matters, in cultural terms, is how well a group weathers storms that might lead to its collapse. World history is littered with the corpses of vast, but short-lived, empires, such as the Assyrian and Mongol conquests that unified large parts of the Middle East and Eurasia, respectively.

Note:RELIGIONE => MAGGIORE STABILITÀ

Returning to this study of the group longevity of religious and secular communes in nineteenth-century America, Richard Sosis looked at an ideal case study because these communes operated under difficult conditions, facing various internal and external threats to group stability. Communes that were unable to solve “collective action problems”—overcoming internal disputes, preventing members from defecting to rival groups, surviving droughts, and so on, could not prosper. Indeed, some communes were dissolved soon after they were founded, whereas others flourished. For every year considered in a 110-year span, religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average factor of four.

Note:LA RELIGIONE RENDE PIÙ STABILI

The evidence just discussed leads to two key conclusions: (1) differential rates of group survival favor prosocial religious groups; and (2) the combination of belief in supernatural watchers, extravagant displays, and other commitment devices explains the cultural survival advantage of these groups—precisely what would be expected if prosocial religions were “packaged” by cultural evolutionary processes.

Note:CONCLUSIONI

Neither could genetic group selection easily explain these effects, given the very short time frames (just over a 110 year span) and the fact that variation in nineteenth-century American commune membership is unlikely to be of genetic origin.

Note:CULTURA E GENETICA

Attracting Religious Converts

In her study of the spread of Islam into Africa, Ensminger argues that Islamic beliefs, supported by powerful displays of faith such as abstaining from alcohol, avoiding pre- and extramarital sex, not consuming pork, and ritual fasting—permitted greater trust, shared rules of exchange, and the use of credit institutions among converted Muslims.26 The spread of Islam in turn facilitated more trade and greater economic success.

Note:ISLAM: FORZA E COMPETIZIONE

This might come as a surprise to many, but Americans have not been as religious as they are today. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark emphasize the role of religious competition in the dramatic expansion of religiosity in America since 1776.27 Those familiar with American religious movements today know that competition among religious institutions for membership has been a long-time feature of American life.

Note:AMERICA LA COMPETIZIONE RELIGIOSA RAFFORZA LA RELIGIOSITA’. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ PERFORMANTI NELLA COMPETIZIONE TRA GRUPPI

Religious Fertility

To survive and prosper, religious groups attract followers, induce adherents to reproduce at rates greater than replacement levels, or, as the demographic expansion of the Mormon Church shows, ideally, do both.

Note:LA PROSPERITÀ DI UNA RELIGIONE. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ FERTILI

The Mormon Church grew, in a time span of just 170 years, from a small group of a few hundred to 15 million followers worldwide. Likewise, Christianity itself grew by leaps and bounds in the Roman Empire, and a once obscure offshoot of Judaism became the state religion of the empire in less than 300 years.

Note:MORMONI ED EBREI

The cultural success of prosocial religious groups is therefore aided in no small part by their reproductive success,

Note:FERTILITÀ

Sociologist Eric Kauffman remarks with irony that, in the culture wars between the religious and secular, arguments fly back and forth, yet neither side seems to have noticed the most important trend that may really settle the dispute. He notes: Religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world through demography. We have embarked on a particular phase of history in which the frailty of secular liberalism will become even more apparent. In contrast to the situation today, the upsurge of fundamentalism will be felt more keenly in the secular West than in developing regions. This is because we are witnessing the historic conjunction of religious fundamentalism and demographic revolution.

Note:KAUFFMAN: L’ARGOMENTO RELIGIOSO

A study comparing the fertility rates of European Jews found that the atheists had the lowest birthrate, averaging around 1.5 children per woman (again, below replacement), whereas the religious Jews averaged nearly three, with the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel averaging six to eight children per woman.

Note:EBREI

Michael Blume explains: Although we looked hard at all available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.

Note:ATEI SENZA FIGLI DA SEMPRE

It is no accident that religious conservative attitudes on women’s rights, contraception, abortion, and sexual orientation are conducive to maintaining high fertility levels.

Note:RELIGIONE E DIRITTI DELLA DONNA

it is possible that religious fertility is shaped by a process called gene-culture coevolution.35 Just as the lactose-tolerance allele spread in less than 10,000 years in groups that adopted milk-producing cows, goats, and camels, it is conceivable that prosocial religious beliefs and practices adopted by some groups but not others might have exerted selection pressures on the human gene pool of these groups. This provocative idea is just starting to receive attention.

PERCHE’ PIU’ RELIGIOSI=>PIU’ FERTTYILI? BOH. L’IPOTESI DELLA COEVOLUZIONE