Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture

the advent of agriculture entailed more than a change in diet; it also launched a great revolution in the organization of economic life and culture as well as a transformation of the logic of violence. Farming created large-scale capital assets in land and sometimes in irrigation systems. The crops and domesticated animals farmers raised were valua

As right as he was about the importance of complexity, Pagels overlooked the most basic fact of all. When the logic of violence changes, society changes.

this violence to come will be at least partially an expression of what we call “moral anachronism,” the application of moral strictures drawn from one stage of economic life to the circumstances of another. Every stage of society requires its own moral rules to help individuals overcome incentive traps peculiar to the choices they face in that part

Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently (for we are merely guessing, or echoing Petronius, who echoed Lucretius) “it was fear that first made the gods”25 —fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, winds, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, s