Wealth May Have Driven The Rise Of Today’s Religions Today’s most popular religions all have one thing in common: a focus on morality. But the gods didn’t always care whether you are a bad person. Researchers have long puzzled over when and why religions moved away from a singular focus on ritual and began to encourage traits such as self-discipline, restraint, and asceticism. Now, a new study proposes that the key to the rise of so-called moralizing religions was, of all things, more wealth. Highlights • World religions can all trace their origins back to the Axial Age (500–300 BCE) • Historical data report an exceptional uptake in affluence during the Axial Age • Modeling shows that affluence can account for the emergence of axial religions • Several causal pathways are suggested (literacy, urban life, life history theory) Baumard N, Hyafil A, Morris I, Boyer P. Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions. Current Biology. cell/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)01372-4 Background - Between roughly 500 BCE and 300 BCE, three distinct regions, the Yangtze and Yellow River Valleys, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ganges Valley, saw the emergence of highly similar religious traditions with an unprecedented emphasis on self-discipline and asceticism and with “otherworldly,” often moralizing, doctrines, including Buddhism, Jainism, Brahmanism, Daoism, Second Temple Judaism, and Stoicism, with later offshoots, such as Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. This cultural convergence, often called the “Axial Age,” presents a puzzle: why did this emerge at the same time as distinct moralizing religions, with highly similar features in different civilizations? The puzzle may be solved by quantitative historical evidence that demonstrates an exceptional uptake in energy capture (a proxy for general prosperity) just before the Axial Age in these three regions. Results - Statistical modeling confirms that economic development, not political complexity or population size, accounts for the timing of the Axial Age. Conclusions - We discussed several possible causal pathways, including the development of literacy and urban life, and put forward the idea, inspired by life history theory, that absolute affluence would have impacted human motivation and reward systems, nudging people away from short-term strategies (resource acquisition and coercive interactions) and promoting long-term strategies (self-control techniques and cooperative interactions).
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 19:23:27 +0000