Religion and Empire in the Axial Age

Religion and Empire in the Axial Age
A review of Robert Bellah Religion in Human Revolution
Peter Turchin
http://cliodynamics.info/PDF/Bellah_RBB.pdf

‘U-shaped curve of despotism' in human evolution (p. 178) – from highly inegalitarian great apes (whose social arrangements, presumably, also characterized direct human ancestors) to egalitarian small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers, and then to large-scale hierarchical societies with their great inequities in the distribution of power, status, and wealth

equality requires active maintenance. People living in small-scale societies possess numerous norms and institutions designed to control ‘upstarts,' those individuals who attempt to dominate others in order to control an unfair share of resources.

strong pull of social solidarity, especially as expressed in ritual, that rewards renunciation of dominance with a sense of full social acceptance

the invention of agriculture c.10,000 years ago enabled evolution of large-scale societies. Once the size of cooperating group increased beyond 100–200 people, even gigantic human brains were overwhelmed by the computational demands of face-to-face sociality (Dunbar and Shultz 2007). The solution that social evolution found was hierarchical organization, with large human groups integrated by chains of command.

The group size grows by adding additional hierarchical levels; a process that has no physical limit. The great downside of hierarchical organization, however, is that it inevitably leads to inequality.

the opening wedge for a successful upstart is most often militarization. … In a situation of endemic warfare, the successful warrior emanates a sense of mana or charisma, and can use it to establish a following.

the primary selection pressure for the evolution of large-scale societies is endemic warfare itself (as the French military proverb goes, “God is on the side of big battalions”).

the state of endemic warfare selects for more effective (which means centralized) military organizations.

In order to ensure a greater degree of permanence, large-scale societies needed to make the transition from the domination by military chiefs to “a new form of authority, of legitimate hierarchy … which involves a new relation between gods and humans, a new way of organizing society, one that finds a significant place for the disposition to nurture as well as the disposition to dominate” (p. 261). In other words, the central argument in Bellah's book is that a major driver in the evolution of religion was the need to reconcile the tension between the need for hierarchy and the need for legitimacy and equity

The first, archaic phase was characterized by enormous fusion of power in the person of the ruler (p. 207). Archaic states invariably were characterized by some sort of divine kingship, and usually practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale

we also observe the appearance of ‘gods,' who are distinguished from other powerful supernatural beings in that they are worshipped

Then, something happened during the first millennium BCE, which resulted in the rise of qualitatively new forms of social organization – the larger and more durable axial empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. One aspect of this change was the first appearance of a universally egalitarian ethic, which was largely due to the emergence of “prophet-like figures who, at great peril to themselves, held the existing power structures to a moral standard that they clearly did not meet”

Bellah connects these developments to the “legitimation crisis of the early state”

It seems apparent that some degree of unease about the state of the world must have been relatively widespread

destabilizing social consequences of considerable economic growth

wide-spread use of iron was “more important in increasing the efficiency of warfare than in transforming the means of production

an even more important development, as I have argued elsewhere (Turchin 2009), was the invention of mounted warfare by Iranian pastoralists c. 1000 BCE. Putting together horse riding with sophisticated and powerful compound bows that shot iron-tipped arrows created a ‘weapon of mass destruction' that enabled the nomads to put an enormous amount of pressure on the neighboring agrarian societies.

all axial cases except China experienced Persian pressure at critical moments in their development

there is another common factor shared by all axial cases, including Persia and China, – they all experienced pressure from the mounted archers originating from the Great Eurasian Steppe

the first axial states, such as the Median-Persian Empire and later Hellenistic empires, served as conduits of steppe influences, because they used mounted warfare against their neighbors

As new forms of warfare diffused out from the Eurasian steppe, they dramatically increased the role of warfare as a force of cultural group selection. More intense selection for large size resulted in the early and recurrent pattern of imperial development in the steppe-frontier belt stretching from Anatolia to North China.

the new scale of larger empires, whose rulers had even more resources to aggrandize themselves, that precipitated the legitimation crisis of the early axial state.

a key axial innovation was the universalistic nature of religion that allowed axial empires to integrate ethnically diverse populations on a very large scale.

First, the rulers have been increasingly constrained to act in ways promoting the public good, rather than their own interests (most recently, as a result of the introduction of democratic forms of governance). Second, structural forms of human inequality have been gradually disappearing: most notably, the abolition of human sacrifice, slavery, and distinctions in the legal status (e.g., between nobles and commoners; although some would argue that our track record in reducing economic inequality has not been as impressive). Third, gods evolved from anthropomorphic to transcendental supernatural beings, and some religions/ideologies even dispensed with gods altogether.