The Ritual Animal: Imitation and Cohesion in the Evolution of Social Complexity by Harvey Whitehouse

Author:Harvey Whitehouse
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Anthropology, Social Science, Spirituality, Science, Religion & Science, General, Comparative Religion, Religion, Cognitive Science, Cultural & Social, Political Science, Behaviorism, Movements, Psychology
ISBN: 9780192520975
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-11-24T19:00:00+00:00

Doctrinal Religions, Credibility Enhancing or Undermining Displays, and Normative Tightness

Prior to the Neolithic revolution, imagistic practices provided a common method of generating social glue in human societies, but the doctrinal mode was unheard of. Nowadays, however, the dominance of the two modes has been more or less reversed worldwide, and the doctrinal mode reigns supreme in all but the most isolated of human societies, indeed has done so for many centuries in the Old World, and in some case for millennia. In the process, cultural evolution has wrought a diversity of changes to the dynamics of doctrinal systems in different regions and at different times. In this section, I consider how moralizing gods (Norenzayan, 2013) and credibility enhancing or undermining displays (Henrich, 2009; Turpin, Andersen, & Lanman, 2018) may have strengthened or weakened beliefs in doctrinal orthodoxies and thus their ability to facilitate trust and cooperation in changing social ecologies. I also consider how factors influencing the tightness and looseness of group norms (Gelfand, 2018) have come to impact the maintenance of orthodoxy and the standardization of ideology more generally.

In the previous section, I discussed the possibility that moralizing gods might have been necessary to sustain cooperation in large-scale societies, especially multiethnic empires where common overarching identities were lacking. But for moralizing gods to motivate prosocial action, they would have had to be believable. The idea of an ‘eye in the sky’ watching over everyone, punishing the wicked and rewarding the pious, may have some intuitive appeal (Boyer, 2001), but religions of that kind have always had their sceptics too, not least because such beliefs often seem to be rather convenient for power holders (Kertzer, 1988). Seeing evidence that others truly believe, however, might help to quell doubts and scepticism. It has been suggested that ‘credibility enhancing displays’ (CREDs) constitute culturally evolved mechanisms providing that kind of evidence (Henrich, 2009).

When a person acts in a way that would be costly and therefore inexplicable if they did not really believe what they claim, it makes their claims more believable to others. Thus, if I claim that a potentially poisonous mushroom is safe to eat, that claim appears far more believable if I proceed to eat the mushroom myself. And in the same way, it has been argued that performing costly (e.g. time-consuming) rituals make the beliefs associated with them more believable (Henrich, 2009). Such rituals, in other words, serve as CREDs, increasing the believability of doctrinal beliefs, for example, in a moralizing god. If correct, the CREDs theory would also help explain why some doctrinal traditions spread more rapidly or efficiently than others (see Figure 4.2). Conversely, traditions that fail to sustain adequate CREDs would struggle to retain their members, especially where other religions or secular ideologies are eager to recruit defectors. Worse still, religious traditions whose leaders are seen to be hypocritical, such as Catholic clergy who sought to cover up child abuse scandals in the church, may be seen as engaging in ‘credibility undermining displays’ (CRUDs) that contribute to

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