What seems to have escaped attention is WHY this basic organizational method was universally adopted planet-wide from Mexico to Mesopotamia. This is because the universal worship of a common religious pantheon enhanced organization and cooperation, and integrated these communities into much more closely coupled, more intricately arranged political-economic systems. This integration had the effect of allowing these communities to manifest emergent properties. The net capabilities and production of the whole was significantly greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
This seemingly miraculous emergence of wealth and capabilities, seemingly from nowhere was attributed to the intervention of the god. In a real sense, these gods actually existed. They were the emergent properties of the human political economies organized around their worship. They were the “value added” due to emergence.
Thus in times of war, famine, or other challenges to the society, its members would pray ever more fervently to their gods for deliverance. The effect of this would be to cause their political-economic system to become even more tightly integrated. This increased integration would, in turn, enhance the emergent properties of their system. This consequent enhancement of ability greatly increased the likelihood of their successfully dealing with challenges. Thus societies which were organized around these self-created gods were more likely to prosper over time than those that were not so organized, or those that were not so adept at this type of organization. Some gods thus proved to be more “powerful” (reflecting better social organization) than did others.
As societies changed over time, their overall capabilities changed commensurately. Thus the relative power of the gods waxed and waned across long periods of time. This waxing and waning of the power of gods mirrored more or less exactly the waxing and waning of the human states and empires associated with these gods.
This basic polytheistic organizational paradigm was challenged by the emergence of belief in a single God. Montheism seems initially to have been a belief that for a given people there was only one god, although a variety of other gods might still exist for other peoples. The Hebrews of the later 2nd millennium BCE appear to have adopted a belief in a single god for their tribes. This god replaced various gods of war, rain, thunder and so on. Possibly this was derived from the heretical Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton’s worship of the sun god, Aten, as the sole god of Egypt.
The advantage of one god over a multiplicity of gods is better organization of the people. Worshipping multiple gods prevents the total mobilization of all people in furtherance of a common agenda, as they are focused on worshipping different gods—some worshipping a rain god, others a fertility god, still others a war god and so forth. Combining all of these gods together into a single all-powerful god eliminated this distraction from the focused efforts of the entire group. With all members of the community worshipping the same god at all times for all needs during all occasions, a community can generate a more highly organized political economy with greater emergent properties than could an equivalent community with a pantheon of gods.
Initially this development was resisted. Social inertia is a powerful force. However, across centuries, the new organizational method proved to be effective in amplifying the power of a small group of monotheists beyond what would otherwise be possible for such a group under a polytheistic organization.
Jewish organized guerilla resistance drove the polytheistic Romans out of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the 120’s CE. Upon assuming power Emperor Hadrian was eager to redraw the eastern border of the Empire to acknowledge this reality.
Encouraged by that success, the Israelites fought two subsequent wars against polytheistic Rome. The second of these wars, fought in Judea between 132-135 CE, required Roman Emperor Hadrian to deploy seventeen legions—nearly the entire deployable Roman army for the whole vast empire—to prevail against the rebellious Israelites.
The Jewish concept of god was not a practical organizing principle for the multinational Roman Empire, due to its tribal origins as well as the requirement for male circumcision—something that only the most zealous adult males would contemplate. However, an offshoot of Judaism—Christianity—as interpreted by Paul, had all of the ingredients necessary to become a new imperial religion. Beginning in the 2nd century CE the orthodox or “Catholic” faction of this religion organized itself empire-wide. Besides consolidating the new religion, this organization was used to drive all other forms of the religion, such as Gnosticism, towards extinction.
In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE—betweens the reigns of Commodus and Aurelian (180 CE—275 CE)—the Empire nearly collapsed. Beset by political and economic chaos within, and barbarian incursions from without, the Empire very nearly imploded during this chaotic century. During these dark decades, Roman citizens were frequently left destitute and defenseless. Praying to the old gods was perceived to accomplish nothing. During these decades Christianity increased its following from perhaps 5% of the Empire’s population, to over 50%. After the failure of the Roman imperial bureaucracy to crush the rival empire-wide organization of the Church during the reign of Diocletian (284-305 CE) Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 313 CE simply recognized established reality in establishing Christianity as the de facto religion of the Empire.
The enhanced systemic efficiencies arising from possessing a common, unified God, allowed the declining empire to resist its impending decay for a further century and a half in the west. In the east the Empire would endure into the late Middle Ages.
The meteoric rise of Islam in the 7th century CE was centered on an even more simplified vision of Deity than Christianity with its Trinity: “There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is His prophet.” God was One—period. With such a clear central organizing principle, Islam organized Arabian pastoralists so efficiently that the new system surged across half the world within a single century.
In the centuries that followed, the clear superiority of a single god as the organizing principle of human political economies allowed for Christian and Islamic empires to cover most of the planet. Polytheism became a minor relic of past ages. Even Hinduism now increasingly stressed that all of its gods were but manifestations of a single Supreme God.
Based on Christianity and augmented by the power of Reason and the technological amplification of power unleashed by science and technology, European Empires have swept all other human systems before them in the past five centuries. Protestant Christianity proved best able to harness Reason to the agenda of maximizing power and wealth. As a consequence, the Catholic Empires of Spain and Portugal faded before the rising Protestant Empires of the Dutch, and most powerfully, the British.
Quietly, God faded away as the primary organizing principle of these societies, while a belief that human Reason was all, and was capable of achieving any goal, supplanted it. A global economy based upon unending growth was inaugurated. For five centuries continued growth was possible as new, as yet unexploited lands and resources were discovered, colonized and exploited. Increasingly powerful technologies coupled with the growing use of hydrocarbon energy—coal, then petroleum, and natural gas—fueled this growth. Nationalism became the secular organizing principle of these new industrial societies.
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