Towards a new republican morality

Smyth, Jonathan

doi:10.7765/9781526103802.00008

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Even the French revolutionaries (18 th c.), who sought to weaken the Christian Church's influence on society, nonetheless recreated a prosocial religion from scratch-the "Cult of the Supreme Being"-deemed necessary to ensure citizens' compliance to Republican virtue (Desmons, 2009;Smyth, 2016;Vovelle, 2002). As Robespierre put it: "The concept of the Supreme Being and of the immortality of the soul is a continuous call to justice, which makes it both social and republican."…”

Section: People Invest More In Prosocial Religions When They Perceive...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

Fitouchi¹,

Singh²,

André³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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What explains the ubiquity and cultural success of prosocial religions? Leading accounts argue that prosocial religions evolved because they help societies grow and promote group cooperation. Yet recent evidence suggests that prosocial religious beliefs are not limited to large societies and might not have strong effects on cooperation. Here, we propose that prosocial religions, including beliefs in moralizing gods, develop because individuals shape supernatural beliefs to achieve their goals in within-group, strategic interactions. People have a fitness interest in controlling others’ cooperation—either to extort benefits from others or to gain reputational benefits for protecting the public good. Moreover, they intuitively infer that other people could be deterred from cheating if they feared supernatural punishment. Thus, people endorse supernatural punishment beliefs to manipulate others into cooperating. Prosocial religions emerge from a dynamic of mutual monitoring, in which each individual, lacking confidence in the cooperativeness of conspecifics, attempts to incentivize their cooperation by endorsing beliefs in supernatural punishment. We show how variants of this incentive structure explain the variety of cultural attractors towards which supernatural punishment converges—including extractive religions that extort benefits from exploited individuals, prosocial religions geared toward mutual benefit, and moralized forms of prosocial religion where belief in moralizing gods is itself a moral duty. We review cross- disciplinary evidence for nine predictions of this account and use it to explain the decline of prosocial religions in modern societies. Prosocial religious beliefs seem endorsed as long as people believe them necessary to ensure other people’s cooperation, regardless of their objective effectiveness in doing so.

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Section: People Invest More In Prosocial Religions When They Perceive...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

Fitouchi¹,

Singh²,

André³

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…YetRobespierre's ultimate goal was not Terror, but social regeneration-and his own martyrdom for the revolutionary cause. He was vehemently opposed to atheism, as Jonathan Smyth demonstrates in his recent work on the Festival of the Supreme Being 55. Bara and Viala's pantheonization worked in tandem with this festival to re-moralize society without restoring the primacy of the Church, and to combat dechristianization.…”

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confidence: 99%

Bara and Viala, or Virtue Rewarded: The Memorialization of Two Child Martyrs of the French Revolution

Perna¹

2021

French History

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This article explores the commemoration of republican child martyrs Joseph Bara and Joseph-Agricol Viala, in Year II (1793–4), during the French Revolution. It compares the official interpretation of their deaths with the subsequent appropriation of this narrative in wider culture. The article argues that leading revolutionaries—notably Robespierre, Barère and David—utilized the heroic deaths of children specifically for their associations with natural virtue and innocence, setting the tone for a new model of republican morality. It then demonstrates that the state’s narrative was widely circulated, yet appropriated and commodified, using popular prints and theatre as case studies. This article thus demonstrates the limits of official control over French Revolutionary culture and traces the fragmented roots of what would become a revived memory cult in the Third Republic.

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Towards a new republican morality

Cited by 2 publications

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Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing

Bara and Viala, or Virtue Rewarded: The Memorialization of Two Child Martyrs of the French Revolution

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