Cathedrals of trust. Religion, cooperation and civilisation

Monks, merchants and emperors

Emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC) ruled the Maurya Empire, which encompassed much of the Indian subcontinent. After wars of conquest, he embraced Buddhism and promoted an ethical vision of power based on compassion, non-violence and public morality. His personal transformation translated into a political project that used religion as an instrument of legitimisation and social control. His edicts, engraved in stone and scattered throughout the territory, represent a form of widespread 'moral monitoring', in which the ruler acts as a guarantor of ethical norms inspired by religious principles. Ashoka thus contributed to the spread of a pro-social religion that linked morality to divine oversight and public reputation, fostering the cohesion of the empire.

The role of monks in prosocial religions is central in the transmission of faith and the building of moral communities. Ritual practices such as celibacy, fasting and community life represent CREDs (Credibility Enhancing Displays), i.e. costly signs that strengthen the credibility of faith and mutual trust. Monasteries, with their hierarchical organisation and shared rules of life, become laboratories of cooperation, where religious discipline translates into social capital. In times of intergroup conflict, these monastic communities have often acted as centres of resilience and cultural transmission, contributing to the survival and expansion of prosocial religions.

Another crucial example is that of the 'religious merchants', such as the Armenians of New Julfa or the Muslim merchants in Africa and Asia. In the absence of reliable state institutions, religion provided a system of supernatural sanctions that made cooperation between strangers possible. Belief in moralising deities reduced transaction costs and consolidated trust, enabling the creation of global trade networks. Religion, in these cases, functioned as a kind of 'moral contract' that guaranteed the trustworthiness of trading partners, fostering economic and cultural expansion.

The Twilight of the Gods and the Responsibility of Men.

But then something happens. In cities where the state becomes more powerful and secular law begins to function, the gods begin to withdraw. The Nordic countries, now among the most secular in the world, are also among the most cooperative. For Norenzayan, this is no accident. It is proof that secular institutions can, under certain conditions, replace the sacred. "These majority-atheist societies - some of the most cooperative, peaceful and prosperous in the world," Norenzayan writes - "have used religion to climb the ladder of success, and then thrown it away" (p. 22). Today, we see the 'Great God' in the policeman's uniform, in the judge's robe, in the algorithm of digital reputation.

That of the Great Gods is an ambitious and complex theory and, naturally, it has attracted quite a bit of criticism in recent years. Not everyone agrees with the religious centrality proposed by Norenzayan. Quantitative historian Peter Turchin, in his La Scimmia Armata (UTET, 2022), proposes an alternative theory: it was not the gods, but war that forged cooperation on a large scale. 'It was violence, i.e. war between societies', he writes, 'that drove the evolution of ultrasociality, and it was ultrasociality that caused the decline of violence'. According to Turchin, therefore, competitive pressure between human groups helped select those societies that were more cohesive, disciplined and capable of collective sacrifice. Large-scale human cooperation is not as 'natural' as that based on kinship, but is the result of environmental and historical pressures, especially war. Religion, if anything, came later, as the symbolic cement of power already conquered.

Another prominent critic is Oxford anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse. In his recent Inheritance: the evolutionary origins of the modern world (Harvard University Press, 2024) Whitehouse challenges the idea that cultural evolution follows a linear and inevitable trajectory towards modernity and shows how our ability to cooperate has many origins, not just one. Unlike Norenzayan, who attributes the key role in the emergence of mass cooperation to religion, or Turchin himself, who identifies war as the driving factor, Whitehouse proposes a more nuanced model. Social cohesion can arise in different ways, depending on the context: sometimes from intense and shared rituals, other times from doctrinal and hierarchical institutions. A particularly critical point in the book concerns the problem of causality. Whitehouse shows, through the comparative data of the 'Seshat' a huge database of world history, that moralising deities generally appear after the emergence of states and bureaucratic structures and not before. This overturns Norenzayan's thesis: it is not religion that creates civilisation, but civilisation that adopts certain religious forms to legitimise power and consolidate the social order. Faith, therefore, functions more as a symbolic and political tool than as an original cause of cooperation.

These are robust criticisms, but not destructive ones. Norenzayan himself acknowledges that there is no single evolutionary path to the development of trust among outsiders. "Of course the Great Gods," he writes, "were an important cause, but not the only one that led to the expansion of certain groups. Certainly there are additional solutions to explain the emergence of large-scale cooperation. Moreover, differential cultural success does not imply a moral hierarchy. But these groups must have been larger and more cooperative' (p. 23).

Great Gods is not just an essay on the cultural evolution of religion. It is a profound meditation on the fragile balance between cooperation and anonymity, between trust and surveillance, between the human need to belong and the vertigo of freedom. But the book does not stop at the nostalgia of the gods. It questions us about the present, about that secular world that has climbed the mountain of religion and then abandoned it, relying on institutions, contracts and civil codes. And it asks us, with discreet disquiet, whether that bridge built by the moralising gods between tribal intimacy and global civilisation can still hold, now that faith is faltering and surveillance has become algorithmic, now that the gods are silent and only markets and weapons speak.

Today, justice is measured in degrees of judgement, contractual clauses, public policies and judgments generated by predictive algorithms. Courts are secular, rights negotiable and rules reversible. But the idea that someone, or something, is still watching us from a higher vantage point has not entirely abandoned our symbolic imagination. That is why, even now that the gods have eclipsed public life and it is the deus mortalis, the Leviathan that watches over us, the great question that once resounded among the stones of temples and the vaults of cathedrals remains unchanged: can justice exist where trust is lacking? If justice was once born in the shadow of the divine, today it can only survive as a bet on our humanity. And perhaps, as Norenzayan suggests, it is not a question of choosing between God or nothingness, but between indifference and responsibility, between disenchantment and a new commitment, between sacred eyes and visible hands. Strong hands capable of holding up the fragile edifice of justice every day.