Did Human Sacrifice Help People Form Complex Societies?

[Chris]

In another thread, there's a brief debate was it politics or economics that allowed human societies to grow so large and complex.

Here's another, no, two other theories.

Did Human Sacrifice Help People Form Complex Societies?

In 1598, a European miner working in the Bolivian highlands stumbled across a 10-year-old Andean girl who was still alive, despite having been walled up inside a funerary tower three days earlier. Several decades had passed since the Inca Empire—the most sophisticated in the world at that time—had fallen, but its practices lived on among the Incas’ descendants in the region, including human sacrifice. The practice held on a little longer after this incident. Around 20 years later, a boy, who had escaped from local chiefs attempting to bury him alive, took refuge in a Spanish community in the Peruvian Sierra. But the tradition was incompatible with the moral outlook of the new Catholic regime, and die it did, eventually.

The question scientists are debating now is: Did our modern world spring from the beliefs of those who buried the girl alive, or from those of the miner who freed her?

To put that question another way, were human societies able to grow so large and complex because cruel practices like human sacrifice shored them up, or because human sacrifice was abandoned in favor of other forms of social glue—notably, major religions like Christianity?

...Over time, as societies became larger, they also tended to become less egalitarian and more hierarchical. In 2016, the Jena group reported that Pulotu data support the so-called social control theory, according to which human sacrifice stabilized societies as they became more stratified, by legitimating class distinctions and political authority. It is probably no coincidence, Watts says, that the victims were often people who posed a threat to the elites, or who had fallen out of favor with them.

The results coming out of Seshat—which have yet to be published—suggest that social control may not be the whole story, however. No society in Pulotu comprises more than a million people, while Seshat includes “mega-empires” whose subjects numbered in the tens of millions. Seshat’s founders therefore argue that it tracks social complexity closer to modern levels, and they find that, beyond around 100,000 people, human sacrifice becomes a destabilizing force. “Our suggestion is that this particularly pernicious form of inequality isn’t sustainable as societies get more complex,” says Whitehouse. “It disappears once they pass certain thresholds, because they cannot survive with that level of injustice.”

...

Read on, please.

But Christianity, while seen as hierarchical by some, is one of the roots of Enlightened individualism that undermined social hierarchy.

[Captdon]

I think the 100,000 mark is significant. When you reach that level people are able to revolt. It's a "don't kill one of mine or else" things. The larger the population the less able the rulers can control it. I know people think we're under more control now than when we were smaller but it's only on the surface.

The ruling class of larger societies have power but less use of it. 200 years ago people knew more about me than they do today for all our social media and information gathered. I can still remove myself from society today as easily as I ever could.

Human sacrifice was both religious ritual and instilling fear. Both Hitler and Stalin used it successfully. They did the unusual of doing it in a large population but neither lasted very long in history. That both tried to remove Christianity is evidence of distrust of their methods.

For me, it was the miner's world that allowed modern society to grow.

[Mister D]

No, I would say that human sacrifice played a central role in Pre-Columbian religion and spirituality. It's a region where human sacrifice was incredibly common. It appears here and there in the Old World but no where near to the extent it surfaced in Mesoamerica and the Andes.

[Mister D]

Now did religion and a sense of the sacred foster city life? That is one of the leading theories.

[Chris]

I think the 100,000 mark is significant. When you reach that level people are able to revolt. It's a "don't kill one of mine or else" things. The larger the population the less able the rulers can control it. I know people think we're under more control now than when we were smaller but it's only on the surface.

The ruling class of larger societies have power but less use of it. 200 years ago people knew more about me than they do today for all our social media and information gathered. I can still remove myself from society today as easily as I ever could.

Human sacrifice was both religious ritual and instilling fear. Both Hitler and Stalin used it successfully. They did the unusual of doing it in a large population but neither lasted very long in history. That both tried to remove Christianity is evidence of distrust of their methods.

For me, it was the miner's world that allowed modern society to grow.

Or both.

The problem with Hitler and Stalin is they are men of modernism that undermined(s) religion among other things.

[Chris]

Now did religion and a sense of the sacred foster city life? That is one of the leading theories.

Inasmuch as religion organizes society hierarchically and establishes itself as an authority, yes, I think so.

[Mister D]

Inasmuch as religion organizes society hierarchically and establishes itself as an authority, yes, I think so.

It also brought people together in the concrete physical sense around temples, shrines and so forth. Some anthropologists theorize that urban life developed from that.

[Captdon]

Or both.

The problem with Hitler and Stalin is they are men of modernism that undermined(s) religion among other things.

Yes, they did. What they did was try to return to the past. It really didn't work for long but it served their purposes. It's a little like reverse engineering. It didn't work is more proof that modern man isn't cowed any longer.

[Chris]

Yes, they did. What they did was try to return to the past. It really didn't work for long but it served their purposes. It's a little like reverse engineering. It didn't work is more proof that modern man isn't cowed any longer.

Much of the counter-Enlightenment, from Kant and Hume on, was an attempt to restore religion and faith and the rest of the pre-modern social order. Following Rousseau, however, others, like Hegel, argued their way into undermining the past and rebuild society, perfect man and create heaven on earth. It didn't work out too well.

[nathanbforrest45]

If human sacrifice brought about complex societies we should be one of the most complex societies in the history of the world considering all the human sacrifices Planned Parenthood has been responsible for.