How did such a diversion of food come about? A dilemma results from the confluence of three self-evident facts: populous societies are likely to defeat small societies; populous societies require full-time leaders and bureaucrats, because 20 people can sit around a campfire and reach a consensus but 20,000,000 people cannot; and full-time leaders and bureaucrats must be fed. But how does the chief or king get the peasants to tolerate what is basically the theft of their food by classes of social parasites? This problem is familiar to the citizens of any democracy, who ask themselves the same question at each election: what have the incumbents done since the last election to justify the fat salaries that they pay themselves out of the public coffers?
The solution devised by every well-understood chiefdom and early state society—from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, through Polynesian Hawaii, to the Inca Empire—was to proclaim an organized religion with the following tenets: the chief or king is related to the gods, or even is a god; and he or she can intercede with the gods on behalf of the peasants, e.g., to send rain or to ensure a good harvest. The chief or king also renders valuable services by organizing the peasants to construct public works, such as roads, irrigation systems, and storehouses that benefit everybody. In return for those services, the peasants should feed the chief and his priests and tax collectors. Standardized rituals, carried out at standardized temples, serve to teach those religious tenets to the peasants so that they will obey the chief and his lackeys. Also fed by food collected from the peasants are armies obedient to the chief or king, with which the chief can conquer neighboring lands and thereby acquire more territory for the benefit of his peasants. Those armies bring two further advantages to the chief: wars against neighbors may enlist the energy of ambitious young nobles who might otherwise scheme to overthrow the chief; and the armies are ready to put down revolts by the peasants themselves. As early theocratic states evolved into the empires of ancient Babylon and Rome and commandeered more and more food and labor, the architectural trappings of state religions became more elaborate. That’s why Karl Marx viewed religion as the opium of the people (Table 9.1), and an instrument of class oppression.
Of course, within recent centuries in the Judeo-Christian world, this trend has been reversed, and religion is much less than before the handmaiden of the state. Politicians and the upper classes now rely on means other than assertions of divinity to persuade or coerce all of us peasants. But the fusion of religion and state persists in some Muslim countries, Israel, and (until recently) Japan and Italy. Even the United States government invokes God on its currency and places official chaplains in Congress and in the armed forces, and every American president (whether Democrat or Republican) intones “God bless America” at the close of speeches.
Codes of behavior towards strangers
Yet another attribute of religion that became important in state societies but that didn’t exist in the smallest societies was to dictate moral concepts of behavior towards strangers. All major world religions teach what is right, what is wrong, and how one should behave. But this link between religion and morality is weaker or absent, especially as regards behavior towards strangers, in the New Guinea societies of which I have experience. Instead, social obligations there depend heavily on relationships. Because a band or tribe contains only a few dozen or a few hundred individuals respectively, everyone knows everyone else and their relationships. One owes different obligations to different blood relatives, to relatives by marriage, to members of one’s own clan, and to fellow villagers belonging to a different clan.
Those relationships determine, for example, whether you may refer to people by their names, marry them, or demand that they share their food and house with you. If you get into a fight with another tribe member, everyone else in the tribe is related to or knows both of you and pulls you apart. The problem of behaving peacefully towards unfamiliar individuals doesn’t arise, because the only unfamiliar individuals are members of enemy tribes. Should you happen to meet an unfamiliar person in the forest, of course you try to kill him or else to run away; our modern custom of just saying hello and starting a friendly chat would be suicidal.
Thus, a new problem arose by around 7,500 years ago, when some tribal societies evolved into chiefdoms comprising thousands of individuals—a far greater number than any single person can know by name and relationship. Emergent chiefdoms and states faced big problems of potential instability, because the old tribal rules of behavior no longer sufficed. If you encountered an unfamiliar member of your chiefdom and fought with him according to tribal rules of behavior, a brawl would result as your relatives jumped in on your side and his relatives jumped in on his side. A death in such a brawl would spark efforts by the victim’s relatives to kill one of the murderer’s relatives in revenge. What’s to save the society from collapsing in an incessant orgy of brawls and revenge murders?
The solution to this dilemma of large societies is the one used in our own society, and documented in all chiefdoms and early states for which we have information. Rules of peaceful behavior apply between all members of the society, regardless of whether some individual whom you encounter is familiar to you or a stranger. The rules are enforced by the political leaders (chiefs or kings) and their agents, who justify the rules by a new function of religion. The gods or supernatural agents are presumed to be the authors of the rules, codified in formal codes of morality. People are taught from childhood onward to obey the rules, and to expect severe punishment for breaking them (because now an attack on another person is also an offense against the gods). Prime examples familiar to Jews and Christians are the Ten Commandments.
In recent secularized societies, such rules of moral behavior within society have moved beyond their religious origins. The reasons why atheists, as well as many believers, now don’t kill their enemies derive from values instilled by society, and from fear of the potent hand of the law rather than fear of the wrath of God. But from the rise of chiefdoms until the recent rise of secular states, religion justified codes of behavior and thereby enabled people to live harmoniously in large societies where one encounters strangers frequently. Religion’s function in permitting strangers to live peacefully together, and its function in teaching the masses to obey their political leaders, constitute the twin aspects of the often-discussed roles of religion in maintaining social order. As Voltaire remarked cynically, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” Depending on one’s perspective, these roles of religion have been regarded as either positive (promoting social harmony) or negative (promoting exploitation of the masses by oppressive elites).
Justifying war
Another new problem faced by emergent chiefdoms and states, but not by the bands and tribes of previous history, involved wars. Because tribes primarily use relationship by blood or marriage, not religion, to justify rules of conduct, tribesmen face no moral dilemmas in killing members of other tribes with whom they have no relationship. But once a state invokes religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens with whom one has no relationship, how can a state convince its citizens to ignore those same precepts during wartime? States permit, indeed they command, their citizens to steal from and kill citizens of other states against which war has been declared. After a state has spent 18 years teaching a boy “Thou shalt not kill,” how can the state turn around and say “Thou must kill, under the following circumstances,” without getting its soldiers hopelessly confused and prone to kill the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens)?