The idea of a relational social policy that responds to a powerful civil society, one comprising relationships between people, is built from my own research and experiments, learning from Ratio’s partners, and a lot of reading. At the core of the reading are a dozen or so seminal texts. Robin Dunbar is on that list. Over the last eight years, I keep coming back to his work.
Robin’s research explains why we build social networks, the limits of those networks and their function. His recent book How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures shows how religion built out from ancient rituals designed to manage conflict and maintain strong social networks, and the benefits they bring to our health and wealth.
Today’s episode barely scratches the surface of Robin’s work. But it provides the foundation for the rest of this series on religion, and hopefully will encourage listeners to read his work. (It is relevant not just for understanding religion, but also for thinking about work on place, building community power, and recovering trust in democracy).
Here are 10 lessons I take from Robin’s work into the rest of the series.
* Relating is difficult for all animals, including humans. Once we get beyond groups of 50, we are predisposed to violence.
* This has been a problem for our evolution, and we have been trying to solve it in many ways, two of which, first the political and judicial institutions of the state and second religion have proved highly influential.
* (Religion has evolved from communal religions bound by trance like experiences; doctrinal religions that rely on merciless gods, sacrifice, and shared moral codes, and eventually into monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam that now dominate and are characterised by a single god, formal places of worship, priesthoods and rituals.
* All religions fire up the endorphins, and make us feel good. They also increase our sense of bondedness and proliferate the numbers of -to use Robin’s words- ‘shoulders we can cry on’ in times of difficulty.
* Societies are more religious when their members are under threat. When there is a war, religious observance rises, as we see in present day Ukraine. Under peaceful conditions, religious observance declines. The enduring peace in Europe after centuries of war may explain the decline in religious observance.
* Religion is an emotional response, not a cognitive response. But the emotional response, the sense of shared moral order, the sense of collective agency, the idea that together we can, the sense that we have a common language, these perceptions are real in their consequences. At scale, the shared emotional response boosts health and wealth.
* Religions are most effective when they reflect behaviours that participants value, certainly more so than when they use a policeman in the sky type god to impose order.
* Religions scale by building up from the bottom, building on local rituals, local places of worship, existing shared moral codes. They then add on the top a shared discipline, things that we all do at the same time, and at least weekly, and also by offering shared vision.
* At the same time, religion has a tendency to colonise civil society and undermine natural social order, hence the potential for religion to be a force for ill as well as a force for good.
* The active ingredients in religion -the routine endorphin inducing activities- mean that religious groups endure longer than secular groups, irrespective of the truth of the religion’s doctrine.
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