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Ideas may matter in the aggregate, but not on the individual scale

Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion convinced me of many things. One of the things it convinced me is that aggregate espoused beliefs had a marginal consequence on the individual level. There were several reasons for this. Some of the elements of “higher religion” which were asserted by some beliefs, e.g., the rejection of free will in Calvinism and Sunni Islam, seem to have not been internalized in their actions by believers themselves (even if espousing those beliefs). In other cases, such as the Trinity, most believers had a very tenuous grasp on the details of what that belief entailed (e.g., the term “essence” is no longer as resonant in the modern age, even among intellectuals).

On a particular level, Jared Rubin’s Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not makes a reasonable argument for why ideology matters when it comes to religion and society. I’m not entirely convinced by Rubin’s argument, but it’s a legitimate one.

More broadly, the field of “cultural evolution” has convinced me that norms, values, and practices, can bind groups together to produce cohesion, and result in inter-group differences in characteristics which redound to their success in competition.

Where does this leave me? In David Abulafia’s The Great Sea the author mentions Amalfi’s repeated alliances with Muslim polities and corsairs. Similarly, Hungarian Protestants marched with Turks, Lithuanian Tatars with Catholics, and the Hindu generals of Muslim Mughals ruled the subcontinent for their potentate. Practicality and reality make strange bedfellows. But, on the whole, there are systematic trends and biases. It seems possible that though ideology has a weak to nearly zero individual impact, there are subtle differences on the margins in the aggregate which compound to produce large differences on the macro scale.

4 thoughts on “Ideas may matter in the aggregate, but not on the individual scale

  1. I think this all works through the very small % of ideologues who really believe the stuff, and the structures put in place by them/under their influence, which can then affect the behavior of greater society.

    i.e. every generation has its ibn Taymiyyahs who go around smashing wine jars and telling people (with good scriptural support) that wine is haram and will send them to hell. And even if most people ignore them, that will have an effect on cultural norms and actual levels of alcohol consumption relative to places like Christian Europe, where the hardcore ideologues are worried about completely different things.

  2. It would be interesting to hear your take on Kuran’s notion of preference falsification. It seems to me, his critique of the revealed preference approach can produce a state of affairs such as the one you describe: a non-additive aggregation of privately held beliefs. Beliefs may matter in the aggregate if they are not just revealed private beliefs. In that way, it also does not appear central to the argument that the individual’s beliefs are well-founded according to any consistency or rationality criteria.

  3. “In other cases, such as the Trinity, most believers had a very tenuous grasp on the details of what that belief entailed (e.g., the term “essence” is no longer as resonant in the modern age, even among intellectuals).”

    My read on the historical impact the doctrinal fights over the nature of Christ is that nothing intrinsic about the doctrine itself had any impact, but that this became a convenient litmus test for distinguishing Christian religious sects whose truly relevant distinctions were in culture and in issues of practice and morality that weren’t strongly logically tied to theology. The way that these litmus tests ended up being paired with more fundamental cultural divides was mostly, but not entirely, a question of historical accident.

    Thus, for example, if the religious movement and organization that became associated with Trinitarian doctrine had instead adopted an Arian doctrine (Christ was fully human and not divine), and the religious movement and organization that became associated with Arian doctrine had adopted a Trinitarian doctrine instead, the course of history would have been almost completely unchanged. But, Trinitarians represented one group of people embraced their culture and came with a worldview about how to establish religious authority than the Arian differed with them upon.

    This isn’t 100% true. Trinitarianism is a more sophisticated and academic theological stance than Arianism, so this doctrine may have been offsetting for Arian sect religious figures who were trying to appeal among others to ethnically non-Roman barbarians, while Trinitarianism was basically a political compromise hammered out by Roman elites with the urging of Emperor Constantine with an eye towards preventing a schism over immaterial issues between entrenched factions, rather than whether it made sense of ordinary adherents to the faith or could be communicated by missionaries to the unwashed masses.

    Similarly, Gnosticism (to oversimplify, that Christ was fully divine) was to a significant extent an effort to put the old wine of Greek Platonic philosophy into the new skins of Christian doctrine in a manner too esoteric culturally for the comparative down to earth Romans, even at the elite level, but other practices (like having secret knowledge limited to inner circle members, and day to day practices that would come to define the Eastern Orthodox Churches) were what actually set it apart, rather than the logical consequences of the doctrine itself.

    To give a modern example, one of the major litmus test differences between American Christian denominations is between those that baptize as adults, and those that baptize as infants and have a confirmation sacrament when children reach that age at which they would be baptized in adult baptism churches. But, while, by historical accident, these practices correspond to very different ideologies and a whole cluster of practices, nothing would be different if the doctrines were reversed.

    Put in genetics terminology, theological distinctions are ancestry informative markers that are selective fitness neutral in the world of cultural evolution. But, ancestry informative markers may be correlated strongly with other markers that enhance or reduce selective fitness.

    For example, in genetics, Northern European ancestry is correlated strongly with lactose tolerance but it is the LP genes and not the ancestry that confers selective fitness.

  4. About the Arianism, I am thinking that, in some ways, Arianism has some similarities to Islamism (Christ was a kind of prophet, but not God) – and both were adopted by nomadic or semi-nomadic “barbarian” tribes (Germans and Arabs); coincidence? A possible counter-argument is that Nestorianism is very different and also had sucess with the nomadic tribes of Mongolia.

    About the baptism – the baptism as adults has an implication that the “true faith” has to be individual and a deliberate decision and not something that you are by tradition and routine; perhaps this make the denominations-that-baptize-adults naturally more prone to radicalism and to the preacher-in-soapbox model, and pedobatist Churchs more institutional, moderate and small-c conservative (note that this can perfectly be conciliated with political and social liberalism, if liberalism is the Establishment)?

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