Moral emotions alone could not have scaled human cooperation to mass societies

Evidence

To be clear, just as religion is not the only source of prosociality, supernatural monitoring is not the only source of prosociality in religion. No doubt, the moral emotions such as deep feelings of empathy and compassion are at play in religions for at least some believers some of the time. These moral emotions are found among exceptional spiritual exemplars, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, in the universal compassion of the Buddha, the ecstatic union with the divine found among Christian saints, Sufi mystics, or Hindu sages. But they are also found in secular societies and nonreligious examplars as well (such as in secular humanism). Moreover, prosocial religions could not have assembled together vast communities of cooperators just by exploiting the moral emotions. The gazing eyes of divine watchers, fear of being judged by the gods, eternal damnation, hell, karma, fate—in short, a variety of beliefs that hinge on supernatural monitoring and policing—are a powerful set of mechanisms harnessed by prosocial religions that mobilize believers. It was these forces of supernatural monitoring and related processes that pushed human groups to rapidly scale up, from hunter-gatherer origins to the vast societies of millions today. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s core thesis connecting Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism to the novel — while also qualifying it: moral emotions (Gandhi, Buddha) coexist and matter, so the analytical bridge needs to acknowledge their subsidiary role. — connects to: Gratitude alone is insufficient; humans must rebuild cultures of reciprocity. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 686
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the supernatural-monitoring mechanism from moral emotions as separate prosociality sources, framing the fumi-e trampling as targeted at the monitoring mechanism rather than at compassion.