Big Gods by Norenzayan Ara

Author:Norenzayan, Ara [Norenzayan, Ara]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

We’re among Friends and Family (and Sometimes a Few Strangers)

Why are interventionist and moralizing Big Gods rare in the supernatural worlds of the Hadza, the San, and most other foraging and hunting groups? The answer can be found in the evolutionary logic of cooperation that is constrained by group size. In these relatively transparent societies where face-to-face interaction is the norm, it is hard to escape the social spotlight. The bonds of family and friendship, combined with a set of cultural practices, go a along way in fostering cooperation and cementing the social matrix.

Of course, kin altruism and reciprocity are by no means the only way to maintain social bonds in these groups—a sophisticated repertoire of cultural norms for cooperation and coordination that sometimes involves strangers.12 Hunting and foraging societies must tackle a wide range of collective action problems including big-game hunting, leveling risk through extended networks, coordinated defense against predators and rival groups, warfare, and extended child care. Moreover, preagricultural groups differ in the degree of social complexity, reflecting varying levels of population size and density, technology, and sedentary lifestyle. The technological record in the Upper Paleolithic (40,000–10,000 years ago) shows that social complexity waxed and waned over time—it was not a straightforward, linear progression from simpler to more complex.13

Keeping in mind these important complexities, it is nevertheless true that individuals in these groups do not face the recurrent problem of extensive and regular dependence on anonymous strangers in the way that modern, anonymous societies do. The idea is that smaller-scale societies are able to build local solidarity without appealing to moralizing, powerful supernatural agents. But matters are different for larger groups. In Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume recognized that this type of large-scale cooperation doesn’t come easily:

Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because it is easy for them to know each other’s mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is, the abandoning the whole project. But it is very difficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and would lay the whole burden on others.14

Mutual cooperation has tremendous fitness benefits to individuals, but does not come for free. A considerable amount of brainpower is required to get along with one another, and the larger the number of social interactions one must track, the more cortical tissue one needs to navigate the ensuing complexity of the social world. Based on these considerations, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar conducted cross-species comparisons of brain size, and found that, among primates, the best predictor of neocortex volume relative to body size is group size.15 A wide range of intensely cooperative human behaviors begins to break down as groups get too large—unless additional cultural solutions are injected into the group dynamics.

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