Does Religion Still Contribute to the Development of Human Societies?

As we have seen, since ancient times nature was our source of food, and we therefore fought one another over its limited resources. With the emergence of settled life, although the amount of food available increased, food production was still constrained by the limited capacity of fertile land, and the scarcity of such land continued to cause wars. With the rise of kingdoms, empires, and military alliances, wars became less frequent than they had been in the early stages of settled life. Nevertheless, economic expansion still depended directly on how much land a society controlled, and each hectare of land could produce only a limited and relatively fixed amount of food. Consequently, whenever a people, ethnic group, or nation calculated that it could seize the lands of another, it had an incentive to do so, because there was no better path to expansion, prosperity, growth, and greater wealth.

The rise of cities, however, created a new potential for growth and development. Before the transition to settled life, individuals had to make almost everything they needed for themselves. In village life as well, nearly all the goods and necessities required by an individual were produced within the same village. In cities, labor became divided and increasingly specialized. If someone wanted to build a house, for example, different parts of it might be produced in different workshops, and several specialized individuals and groups had to work together to complete the building. Each specialist could improve the techniques and technologies of their trade and could even add new components or stages to the process, thereby creating a need for still more specialists. In return, they could offer products that were better, more refined, more beautiful, more efficient, and more desirable, attracting either more customers or wealthier customers interested in the distinctive goods they produced. Yet until only a century or two ago, despite the increasing specialization of labor, virtually all the basic needs of a kingdom or country were still met within its own territory by its own specialists. Thus, acquiring more land and conquering neighboring territories remained among the best paths to development, while warfare against neighboring peoples and states did not seriously disrupt the production of an expansionist kingdom.

Over the past century or two, and especially in recent decades, however, specialization has advanced to such an extent that producing almost any complex product requires not only the cooperation of dozens or hundreds of specialists, but also specialized work carried out in different parts of the world. No country can now produce by itself everything it needs. How large a country is or how much land it controls is therefore far less important than it once was. First, much of modern production has little to do with land or cultivated acreage and is instead the product of technology. Second, each country has a comparative advantage in producing only a limited range of goods, and it is not economically efficient for it to attempt to produce many others. The limited availability of land therefore no longer places the same constraints on production, and technology often makes it possible to produce goods on a limited area of land for a potentially vast number of customers around the world. Producers today search less for land and more for customers across the globe.

An Airbus A380 consists of about four million parts. These parts are produced by around 1,500 companies located in 30 different countries and are brought together for final assembly in France. In such a world, development is no longer based primarily on “acquiring land,” but on “trade.”

For all these highly specialized forms of production to prosper, producers need to be able to sell their products “throughout the world,” and for all these goods to be sold, there must be “trade with the entire world.” Trade requires two things: first, peace; and second, trust. Peace provides the environment in which trade can take place, while trust makes trade easier.

What does trust mean, and what role does it play in trade?

Trust means that “one person makes themselves vulnerable to another.” Suppose Person A asks Person B for a loan and promises to repay it within a week. If Person B refuses and lends nothing, there is no problem and no possibility of being harmed. But if B lends the money, A may fail to repay it as promised. From the moment B trusts A to keep their word, B makes themselves vulnerable to A, because A may break that promise. Even if B obtains sufficient checks, promissory notes, and guarantees, A may still fail to pay on time, causing B anxiety and distress and perhaps forcing B to turn to the courts to recover the money, spending time and energy in the process. All of these are forms of harm. The point is that if B knows that A does not keep their promises and cannot be trusted, B may refuse to lend the money even when checks, promissory notes, and guarantees are provided. In other words, even where there is a strong and impartial judiciary and effective mechanisms of enforcement, some degree of trust is still necessary for a financial or commercial relationship to develop.

The same applies to the products we buy: we tend to prefer those whose quality has already been established and that have earned our trust. Trust also plays an important role in establishing and maintaining commercial relationships between businesses. Extensive political, cultural, and economic relations between two countries can make businesspeople in those countries feel that they can work together more easily and that, should a problem arise, the broad and well-established relationship between the two countries will make resolving it easier. Political, cultural, and economic interaction can therefore create a degree of trust between two nations, providing a more favorable environment for trade to expand.

In today’s model of development, which is based on trade, portraying others as alien or less than human, together with theoretically justified, ideological, and perpetual hostilities, has not only lost its usefulness but can be actively harmful. Such attitudes can seriously obstruct the formation of trust and, consequently, commercial relationships. They can prevent a country from achieving maximum growth and production, waste its productive potential, and effectively surrender economic opportunities to companies and producers in other countries.

Today, creating pretexts for war, portraying other countries, nations, and ethnic groups as inherently evil, and presenting one’s own nation, religious community, or race as uniquely chosen or superior—all of which can foster tension and war—no longer creates the conditions for development, growth, and progress. On the contrary, it undermines them.