Transcendent Beliefs and the Scale of Human Cooperation: A Framework

Human societies cooperate at scales far beyond the cognitive ceiling that constrains other primates. This paper proposes a framework that explains how, and why the cultural mechanisms that make such cooperation possible change over time. Three claims organize the framework. First, societies are organized around transcendent beliefs — collective convictions that something outlasts individual death — which function as third-party enforcement in the cooperation games that otherwise cap human groups at roughly 150 individuals. Second, belief systems are layered rather than sequential: new systems absorb rather than eliminate their predecessors, and societies revert to older layers when larger structures fail. Third, transitions between belief systems are forced by disruption, and the source of disruption has changed once in human history: climatic for roughly a hundred millennia, communicational since the sixteenth century, because beliefs are built of language and are therefore renegotiated whenever communication technology transforms. The framework spans and connects three families of theories of civilizational change — ideological-political, material-social, and cognitive-coalitional — and several of its component claims have found independent support in recent agent-based simulation work. I state the framework's assumptions, derive its historical predictions, indicate what evidence would count against it, and identify the points where formal modeling could test it further.