Scarce resources in the Middle East favored religious traditions that enforce group coordination

Evidence

The major religious traditions (e.g., Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam) could be considered macrodemes, or a gathering of tribes, while individual congregations or communities represent demes, or tribes. Function is another factor that distinguishes groups from one another. Demes’ function is to create a shared reality or worldview, while marcodemes primarily work to standardize and coordinate language, which fosters a shared reality. The main reason why both a shared reality and language are essential to groups is that each increases the ability of the group to coordinate behavior in order to efficiently utilize the surrounding environment (Caporael, 1997). From this perspective, it is not just coincidence that three of the world’s major religious traditions (i.e., Judaism, Islam, Christianity) developed in the Middle East, where both water and arable land are scarce; such scarcity requires the suppression of self-interested motives and group coordination to maximize these resources. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 896

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: Article angle: ‘The ecology of religion’ — how environmental scarcity selected for coordinating worldviews across the three Abrahamic faiths, and what this predicts for religions that emerge in resource-abundant settings.
• XREF: Connects to Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel-style ecological determinism, and to the ADDENDUM ‘On Sacrifice’ themes of how scarcity regimes stabilize social stratification.
• QUESTION: Why were Buddhism and Hinduism (also listed as macrodemes) left out of the scarcity explanation? Do they falsify the resource-scarcity theory or complicate it?

Related

• Religious traditions arose where scarce resources forced group coordination (similarity 0.94)