Strategies of Successful Religions
When we take religion at face value, we can describe it as a simple set of cultural beliefs to abide by. However, this basic definition is quickly transforming to encompass the tangible, animated, and human-like aspects of religion as well. In “The Darwinian Evolution of Religion,” Princeton University professor and author Michael Graziano compares the evolutionary path of religion to that of everyday species as described by Darwinism. Graziano claims that religions, like animals and humans, are constantly in a competition of survival of the fittest; all religions preach propagating themselves, keep their doctrines sacred and untouched, and promote community, solely in order to prevent themselves from dying out. If the mutated variations of religion that are produced from people’s unique understandings stay contained, they are eventually phased out. Only widespread beliefs reign, and these generalized “rules” of a particular religion usually emphasize strong devotion and depreciate the needs of the actual devotees.
This issue of satisfying the needs of the people devoted to a particular religion and satisfying the needs of the religion itself is referred to in Graziano’s article as an example of a Nash equilibrium and can be viewed from the perspective of game theory. In this game (with the aim of propagating religion), two players (religion and its people) each have a goal in mind and want the best for themselves: religion wants to be spread and loved by the people and the people want to love the religion and spread it. This is representative of a mutual best response, but there are some exceptions. Although religion wants to be loved and spread by the people, the reason for this is selfish- “religion can never be truly 100 percent in the service of the people because the evolutionary pressure on religion is to promote itself.”
This mutual best response can be achieved through two Nash equilibrium solutions to this game mentioned by Graziano, conservatism and liberalism. Both solutions achieve the ending goal of spreading religion, but they utilize mixed Nash equilibrium probabilities to get there. Conservatism emphasizes the strategy of punishment towards deviance from core beliefs, which in turn has a positive payoff of promoting accepted beliefs well but a negative payoff of deterring new recruits. On the other hand, liberalism places its large probability on the strategy of being relatively lenient and accepting, which has a positive payoff of attracting new recruits and a
negative payoff of not emphasizing devotion and structure enough to promote itself widely. Both conservatism and liberalism have different “p and q values,” if you will, which are assigned so that the amount religion spreads remains at equilibrium. It is interesting to see how economic
theory, which we usually associate with quantitative situations, can be applied to even something as subjective as theology and philosophy. It is wondrous that analogies like this can be made to even non-mathematical situations in order to effectively visualize the pros and cons of different strategies.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-graziano/the-darwinian-evolution-of-religion_b_846635.html