Big Gods
How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
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Big Gods
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Narrated by:
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Paul Nixon
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By:
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Ara Norenzayan
About this listen
How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.
Once human minds could conceive of supernatural beings, Norenzayan argues, the stage was set for rapid cultural and historical changes that eventually led to large societies with Big Gods - powerful, omniscient, interventionist deities concerned with regulating the moral behavior of humans. How? As the saying goes, "watched people are nice people." It follows that people play nice when they think Big Gods are watching them, even when no one else is. Yet at the same time that sincere faith in Big Gods unleashed unprecedented cooperation within ever-expanding groups, it also introduced a new source of potential conflict between competing groups.
In some parts of the world, such as northern Europe, secular institutions have precipitated religion's decline by usurping its community-building functions. These societies with atheist majorities--some of the most cooperative, peaceful, and prosperous in the world - climbed religion's ladder, and then kicked it away. So while Big Gods answers fundamental questions about the origins and spread of world religions, it also helps us understand another, more recent social transition--the rise of cooperative societies without belief in gods.
©2013 Princeton University Press (P)2014 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Big Gods
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Lara Reusch
- 16-10-20
Utterly fascinating!
Norenzayan makes a compelling case for thinking that the historical puzzles presented by the rise of large-scale cooperative societies and by the spread of religions with "Big Gods" help to solve each other—that religions with supernatural monitors helped early civilizations manage problems of cooperation in increasingly anonymous societies. Along the way, he offers a remarkably insightful exploration of the psychology of religion, including the psychology of atheism. His focus is on the cultural evolution of religion, and he employs a model of cultural evolution that is based on biological evolution. But he avoids pushing the parallels between the two too far; his focus is always on the psychological propensities which lead us to favour certain cultural concepts and practices over others. The model of cultural evolution at work here thus avoids lapsing into the dubious sort of "group selectionism" to be found in many Darwinian accounts of religion. "Big Gods" reports relatively new work from the social sciences on religion. It will be exciting to see what direction work in this area goes in the future.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- adam
- 21-12-16
Clever, fresh and enlightening,
Any additional comments?
A great book, however certain ideas are over explained and don't quite need the depth. If your looking for a thorough explanation of some interesting ideas around social development and the role of religion in this process then this is the book for you, I loved it
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