The role of religion in the evolution of peace

Abstract

Glowacki's account overlooks the role of religion in the regulation of cooperation, tolerance, and peace values. We interrogate three premises of Glowacki's argument and suggest that approaching religion as an adaptive system reveals how religious commitments and practices likely had a more substantial impact on the evolution of peace and conflict than currently presumed.

We agree with Glowacki that concentrating on tolerance and cultural technologies is helpful to understand and support the conditions of peace. In our own research, we too have found that human communities struggle to create peace but are capable of strategic violence (e.g., Kiper & Sosis, 2021), leaving us with questions about the evolution of peacemaking and conflict prevention. Notably, what is the role of religion in the evolution of peace? Glowacki suggests that a crucial step in peacemaking in early human prehistory was when small-scale societies started using religion as a form of cultural knowledge – beliefs, values, and customs – to enable positive group interactions. We agree that religion likely facilitated cooperation among early human communities, but it also likely encouraged conflict (Alcorta & Sosis, 2022). Here, we take a closer look at the role of religion in the evolution of peace and assess three premises in Glowacki's argument.

Religion and intergroup interactions

According to Glowacki, early small-scale societies valued religions as sources of information and understanding. Those communities that interacted with each other to share and gain this knowledge were able to achieve higher fitness benefits from intergroup cooperation than communities that did otherwise. Although there is evidence of extant foragers intermarrying with neighboring pastoralists and agriculturalists, and thus engaging in cultural exchange and learning (Ikeya et al., 2009), the role of religion in these interactions is variable. Oftentimes, the syncretism that facilitates intergroup exchange is the outcome rather than the cause of that interaction. For instance, many foragers, such as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, have syncretized their religion with Christianity, but this is a consequence of colonization (e.g., Cox & Possamai, 2016). In these cases, shared religious understanding has facilitated peaceful interactions that we can observe today, but that peace resulted from earlier, violent encounters between colonizers and indigenous communities. On the whole, valuing other religions results from long-standing group contact, rather than functioning as an impetus for it.

Similarly, it is true that some groups use their religion to increase between group interactions and experience higher payoffs than those whose religion centers on increasing within group cooperation. However, this is often not the case. Successful religious communities usually maintain costly rituals so that outsiders cannot freeride on their within group cooperation (Shaver & Sosis, 2018). Religious communities with high intragroup cooperation tend to be closed off to others and interact with outsiders in the most neutral way possible, often without invoking religion. In short, the use of religion for positive between group exchanges may be an exception for syncretized, mystical, and modern religious systems. And most religions are used for increasing within group cooperation or positive peace for the in-group while between group interactions are religiously neutral to prevent conflict or manifest negative peace with out-groups. Recognizing these distinctions complicates claims that peace in early human communities resulted from shared religious knowledge.

Group motivations for peace

Glowacki posits that group motivations for peace likely emerged after early human communities experienced shocks to their culture brought about by intergroup violence. We agree but we disagree that these “shocks” only spurred conscientious motivations. Instead, Glowacki's observations support a systems approach, where negative feedback from raids and revenge cycles led to the cultural evolution of multiple factors contributing to peace, including changes to the religious system itself. Elsewhere we have shown that the religious system is an adaptive complex, comprised of local variants of the core building blocks of any religion, including authorities, meanings, moral obligations, myths, rituals, the sacred, taboos, and supernatural agency beliefs (e.g., Kiper & Sosis, 2020). These serve various psychological and social functions, rendering religion as an adaptive mechanism that can promote cooperation and coordination (Sosis, 2019). The critical factors that allow for adaptivity are feedback. If the population survives and experiences health and reproductive fitness, the religion remains in equilibrium. However, if the population experiences disease, lowered fitness, or death, the adherents enact changes to the religion (for a review, see Purzycki & Sosis, 2022). Therefore, intergroup violence in the form of “shocks” to the system would have initiated changes other than motivations for peace, including alterations to the core building blocks of religion, ranging from newfound roles for authorities to supernatural agency beliefs.

For instance, in communities throughout postconflict regions of the Balkans, shocks to local systems brought about by war contributed to various cultures of transitional justice (Kiper, 2019). But these shocks were not equivalent for all communities. Some reported that the wars were caused by ethnoreligious nationalism and thus rejected religion after the wars (Kiper, 2022a). Other communities with (exclusive) sacred lands experienced increased religiosity and greater willingness to renew conflicts, while others without (or with inclusive) sacred lands experienced similar rates of religiosity but less willingness to renew conflicts (Kiper, 2022b).

Modeling war and peace

Glowacki convincingly argues that initiating intergroup violence for personal gain may be individually advantageous but communally detrimental. This creates a security dilemma where individuals may be better off defecting while the entire group benefits more from cooperation. Thus, “achieving peace requires solving -an iterated cooperative problem like -the prisoner's dilemma that -each member of a group plays repeatedly in -encounters with any member of another group” (target article, sect. 2.4, para. 5).

Despite its validity, the conclusion depends on whether cooperative behaviors are predicted by self-interested agents in pairwise interactions. This is unlikely for most human communities, especially prehistorical small-scale societies. For agents would have rarely acted alone but participated in collectives. Shared behaviors would have emerged from these collectives such as religious rituals. In turn, these behaviors would have resulted in considerable diversity between groups, as they adapted to local environments and modified their behavioral strategies. The religious system would have also fostered strong in-group commitments, where individuals may have prioritized the group over individual gains, and even motivating extreme acts of altruism or self-sacrifice. Given that early human communities had religion, as Glowacki acknowledges, group-level behaviors likely transpired that did not resemble the prisoner's dilemma.