Here’s something you don’t see every day, even if you follow the law reviews. On SSRN, the Social Science Research Network, George Mason University economist Peter Leeson has posted an abstract for a new paper that explains human sacrifice in terms of property rights (Human Sacrifice). Although economists typically dismiss the practice as irrational, he argues, human sacrifice is actually a rational social strategy that allows a group to signal to outsiders that it’s poor and therefore not worth plundering. Religious commandments are useful in creating incentives—to get people comfortable with the idea of ritual immolation—but really are only secondary. You can find the paper on Professor Leeson’s website. Here’s the abstract from SSRN:
This paper develops a theory of rational human sacrifice: the purchase and ritual slaughter of innocent persons to appease divinities. I argue that human sacrifice is a technology for protecting property rights. It improves property protection by destroying part of sacrificing communities’ wealth, which depresses the expected payoff of plundering them. Human sacrifice is a highly effective vehicle for destroying wealth to protect property rights because it’s an excellent public meter of wealth destruction. Human sacrifice is spectacular, publicly communicating a sacrificer’s destruction far and wide. And immolating a live person is nearly impossible to fake, verifying the amount of wealth a sacrificer has destroyed. To incentivize community members to contribute wealth for destruction, human sacrifice is presented as a religious obligation. To test my theory I investigate human sacrifice as practiced by the most significant and well-known society of ritual immolators in the modern era: the Konds of Orissa, India. Evidence from the Konds supports my theory’s predictions.
I don’t know enough about the Konds or economics to evaluate Professor Leeson’s paper, but it does suggest a strategy for religious communities that seek to influence public debate. Don’t make sectarian arguments that might be inaccessible and off-putting to non-believers. Find an economist.
Mark Movsesian is Director of the Center for Law and Religion at St. John’s University.
December 4th, 2012 | 8:59 am
The Aztecs were in fact VERY rich, as were the early Sumerians, Predynastic Egyptians, and Carthaginians. Maybe the Konds were poor, but most of better-known civilizations that did so were the leaders of their region. Isn’t it more likely that sacrificing people sends the same signal as a prison tattoo or large gun rack — the possessor is a tough guy who should be respected by his tough neighbors. Civilization is the process by which we render tough guy signaling unnecessary.
December 4th, 2012 | 11:14 am
“Civilization is the process by which we render tough guy signaling unnecessary.”
But the vestiges of barbarism are ubiquitous. Take faculty meetings, for example.
December 4th, 2012 | 11:15 am
Mark, there IS an “economic” aspect to human sacrifice, in the sense that all appeasement religions are transactional. The society says to the god, “We’ll give you this, and in return you’ll give us that, or [more likely] you won’t do that.” It’s the logic of the protection rackett.
For the god to truly be appeased, and not insulted, by the sacrifice, the victim often had to be considered impressive in some way–or uniquely valuable. In deep antiquity the sacrifice would usually be a royal personage–a king–who would live a privileged life until such a time as a general crisis demanded he hand himself over as a divine sacrifice to heal the greater community. This is the background of the Oedipus story, as well as (perhaps) Saul’s suicide. The practice went through mutations over time, whereby substitutes were found for the royal sacrifice; but these were still seen as being a proxy for something or someone of “value.” I suppose with the Aztecs, the sheer scale of slaughter was meant to signal to the god that the price of appeasement was a high one.
All of this may or may not have had more mundane sociological effects on ancient societies; but to see it as a rational (i.e. in some measure intentional) way of protecting property rights (an idea which would be truly foreign to most pagan cultures), seems to me very unlikely. What is telling to me, and more than a little provocative, is the fact that someone is trying to “rehabilitate” human sacrifice as an instrumental good. I guess it’s next on the list of behaviors receiving opprobrium in Biblical morality that we now need to re-think and approach wthout our moldy old biases.
And we must be ready for it, since we already practice it vicariously in so many ways today: from the scapegoats we find for a poor economy, to the glee with which we regard the endless rise-and-fall cycles of celebrity “heroes.”
Back to the subject at hand: It occurs to me that Nathan’s rebuke of King David on the matter of Uriah and Bathsheba might show how the idea of “property rights” was used early on to curtail and abolish human sacrifice.
December 4th, 2012 | 1:46 pm
Is it really the case that “sacrificed humans must be purchased from outsiders?” It seems implausible to apply this standard to all societies that engage in human sacrifice, and I think Karen’s observations are sufficiently important to be inexcusably absent from the paper. What thesis fails to address the most obvious objections to its validity?
Furthermore, his description of the Kond society says that every community engaged in sacrifices at about the same time, yet his theory does not allow for that. Based on his theory, it would be irrational for all communities to perform sacrifices, since those communities with the most incentive to use war to increase their wealth would instead preemptively reduce their wealth when they are already, rationally speaking, an unattractive and dangerous target that will refuse to pay extortion and fight instead. It is also the case that these communities were warring with each other, in spite of this supposedly powerful, war-preventing institution of human sacrifice, so it’s not entirely clear that even his example, presumably the best he could locate, sufficiently supports his thesis.
He may be troubled by the existence of “puzzling human behaviors and practices are beyond the power of economics to illuminate,” but I am not. Economics doesn’t have to be a metanarrative.
December 4th, 2012 | 3:48 pm
The paper explicitly deals with the Aztecs and why their form of human sacrifice isn’t what the author is studying:
“In contrast, human sacri ce as, for instance, the Aztecs famously practiced it is neither surprising nor mysterious. The Aztecs sacri cial victims were overwhelming one of two sorts: captured enemy soldiers and criminals. Here human sacri ce was little more than capital punishment. This paper exclusively considers the puzzling practice of immolating innocent persons purchased only for that purpose.”
December 4th, 2012 | 9:39 pm
That doesn’t really get the Aztecs right, though. The POWs were not already there, with sacrifice as a means of disposal. The Aztecs frequently (though not exclusively) provoked war for the express purpose of acquiring victims. They avoided killing enemies wherever possible so as to amass sacrificial fodder.
December 5th, 2012 | 12:33 pm
Fralupo,
Yes, it’s much easier to get the outcome you want when you exclude the data that doesn’t fit. It’s especially convenient when you are creating a more-or-less-universal theory on the basis of a single observation.
Aztec sacrifice included children (their own, not prisoners of war), which at least from a biological standpoint is highly inefficient. Furthermore, while he claims the victims where “overwhelming [sic]… captured enemy soldiers and criminals,” the very statement indicates that exceptions exist, and those exceptions do in fact bear on the correctness of his hypothesis, yet he dismisses them. Claiming the practice to be “little more than capital punishment” again fails to address the economic inefficiencies involved — feeding an army that does little more than capture victims, sacrificing slaves who perform valuable labor, etc. Many human sacrifices have been taken from otherwise ordinary members of the society engaging in the practice, as his own citations suggest, yet he completely ignores this fact in developing his theory.
In other words, it is quite unclear that Leeson’s citations regarding human sacrifice show that human sacrifices outside the narrow (one might even say exceptional) circumstances he has chosen to address are economically irrelevant or else economically efficient and thus able to be ignored. His claim, remember, hinges upon his (possibly irrational) belief that all human behavior can be explained by economically rational choices, and yet he clearly appears to be dismissing any contrary evidence.
December 11th, 2012 | 12:07 am
The Kondh tribes of south eastern India used to sacrifice humans till the 19th century. The blood and parts, sprinkled over their fields were supposed to symbolically return to Earth, what the Earth had nourished by its own sacrifice. So it was some kind of a cycle of taking and giving between the Earth and Man.
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