Religion is strange thing; some people claim it is the true source of morality, while others vehemently oppose this and believe it has been a source of violence and evil throughout history. Christians admit that there has been violence committed in the name of their religion, but say that it was perverted, while Muslims scoff at the very idea of Jihadist’s or ISIS members being called Muslims, even though they worship the same text. The same people, of course, claim that these books and faiths guide every believer to be moral and just human beings. Without God, they believe, everything would be permitted, as Ivan Karamazov darkly claimed in Dostoyevsky’s famous novel. But has religion really guided the morality of human beings throughout history?
A major dilemma with the religious moral argument comes with the history of violence. In Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, he documents how violence has rapidly decreased in modern times, and provides different theories on why this is so. One important contribution is the Hobbesian concept of the “leviathan,” or the rise of powerful states and the “monopoly on the legitimate use of force.” Data show that war deaths in pre-historic and tribal societies were much more prevalent than in modern states, even when massive wars like WW2 are taken into account. This is also true for homicide rates, which have steadily decreased around the developed world over the past few centuries. Another major contributor to this decline, Pinker claims, is the economic advancements since the industrial revolution. As material conditions improved, violence declined, and commerce bettered international relationships.
But one of the most important years in the development of morality has to be 1452, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. The importance of this invention cannot be overstated -- it set off the printing revolution, and in the two centuries after its invention, the productivity of printing and paper making “grew more than twentyfold,” faster than the British economies growth during the Industrial Revolution. With the massive increase in publishing came the rise of literacy throughout populations. Pinker wrote, “The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. The pokey little world of village and clan, accessible through the five senses and informed by a single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of people, places, cultures, and ideas.”
Before reading and literature became widespread, individuals had only one perspective of the world; inside their own head. Reading brings someone else's thoughts into your mind, confirming you are not the only thinking being while providing different vantage points to ones own perspective. This most certainly helped manifest the innate possibilities for empathy and identifying with other humans. Increased empathy, as a result, lead to increased sympathy.
After reading Rousseau’s novel, Julie, a retired military officer wrote to him: “You have driven me crazy about her. Imagine then the tears that her death must have wrung from me...Never have I wept such delicious tears. That reading created such a powerful effect on me that I believe I would have gladly died during that supreme moment.” Stepping into another’s shoes is second nature to us today; growing up with literature and films that stir up emotions. But before the printing revolution, there was only one perspective that humans developed. The Church, of course, was the main provider of moral sentiments then also.
Not only did increased publishing help develop empathy, but also that of reasoning and thinking for oneself. While empathy is an important trait, it does not necessarily increase morality on its own. Without developing logical reasons as to why certain practices are immoral and unjustifiable, many of the movements against cruel practices we have seen throughout history would not have materialized.
Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 book, On Crimes and Punishments, exemplifies this influence. In this book, which Voltaire provided commentary for, Beccaria argued against torture and the death penalty, among other things. “Every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. A proposition which may be made more general thus: every act of authority of one man over another, for which there is not an absolute necessity, is tyrannical,” he wrote, in describing the uselessness and futility of torture as punishment. The book had widespread influence on thinkers and politicians, including the like of Jefferson and Adams, and no doubt inspired the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment in America.
The influence of thinkers like Beccaria, Hume, Locke, Voltaire, Mill, Kant, among others, and the ability to spread their ideas through publishing, should be recognized as a major contributing factor to the decline of violence and the increase in civil rights. Religion has been around throughout civilization, and the Christian church had much more influence in the days when violence was high and civil rights were non-existent.
This is not to say that certain aspects of religion cannot influence moral behavior; Jesus was great exemplar of morality, until that book of revelation came along. But to make the claim, as certain religious figures do, that without God and faith, humans would behave wickedly, is just silly. Indeed, a recent study showed that religious and nonreligious people “commit similar numbers of moral acts.” If anything, religions can make good people do bad things, when interpreted literally. For example, if someone reads the following from Leviticus literally, they may commit an immoral act in the name of their religion: “If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
Morality is a difficult topic; there is no way to put it under a microscope and examine it like physical or biological material, but it is a feeling that we seem to innately possess when exposed to certain environments. Literacy, education, reason, and the innate capability of empathy seem to be primary causes for humanities moral development.
One basic truth is that as societies have become more secular, violence has declined, making the argument that godlessness creates wickedness completely untrue and cynical. It turns out that Ivan Karamazov was mistaken, everything is not permitted without a faith in the supernatural. Human beings are complex, as is morality; and as we learn more about ourselves through reason and science, we can learn more about why we have come to be the moral primates we are.