I have used Geetha to illustrate this point. only because i have some familiarity with it, but you can pretty much replace Geetha with Bible or Quran (with some slight changes to the story below and it will all work the same way).
In my view all religions of the world teach the similar things and their teachings have a salutary effect of achieving coordination among followers which would have been otherwise very difficult to achieve. I explain this further below.
Picture this. You are living in the ancient society some 5000 years ago. For simplicity lets assume that there is only 2 of us in a village which is in its most primitive form imaginable to modern man (well , this is not exactly true..but thats besides the point). Now lets say this period was before we had houses and we all lived precariously in the open..we now collectively imagine the idea of a hut and want to build one. both of us dont have any tools or any other help. Now lets say we had to go to forest and collect some wood (remember this is a lot of hardwork without proper tools and with wild animals chasing us). What will i be thinking ?. "Hey this is bloody hard job and i dont know if i will return home, so i better not go, let this other guy go and do the work for me and i will just share whatever he collects..i will somehow convince him to go. "
Now i can bet your reasoning will be very similar to mine as well. As a result, both of us wont be going to the forest !!! eventhough it is clearly beneficial for both of us to go and get some wood !!!
This is what the economists call a coordination problem. Even though if both of us coordinate, we could have ended up doing better for both of us, we still dont do so for our own selfish reasons !!. We end up in a situation (or equilibrium as economists call it) that is strictly inferior to both of us.
Now a god man comes along to our village and tells us about this new book called "Baghawat geetha". He tells us that the main message is "The only way to achieve happiness is to commit yourself to selfless sacrifice for others." But then why should you and me believe the book (rather we doubt its credibility). But then, he adds that this is from god directly !!
Now both of us believe in god and hence we begin to take the preachings seriously..but even then we are not quite ready to go to forest. each of us reason to ourselves, "I should commit to selfless service and should probably go with the other guy to the forest to be happy (in our case, building a hut is a cause for great happiness). But wait..in the process, i might actually die..whats the use in achieving happiness, if i am going to actually die in the process"
Both of us end up in similar line of reasoning and hence both of us are still not ready to go to forest.
Now comes the next lesson from Geetha.."Selfless service is the only way to salvation..if you dont, you have to be born again in this world and go through all the suffering that you are going through now"..now we begin to think....we realize that in our cost-benefit analysis we considered our payoffs till the end of our current lives, but were not aware that we may have to be born again if we are selfish...so we now have to take into account pay offs(negative) from the sunsequent lives as well....
Godman has effectively changed our "Pay offs" and our game has changed from what the economists call a "One shot" game to a "repeated game"
Now with this new "enlightenment" we think about our problem again.. Should i go with him to the forest? well if i go i might die, but atleast i will reach salvation and reach god directly, as i acted selflessly in going with him. If i dont die, the situation is better for both of us in this life as we get to build the hut and be happy (and we will reach salvation due to our deed as well !!).. if i dont go, i am condemned to be born again in this world and go through all the sufferings that i am going through. Plus , we live an inferior life in this world as well (without the hut)..With this new set of incentives, i now reason that i should go to forest with you..you go through a similar reasoning and you reach similar conclusion as well.
voila, we now go to forest, return with wood(most of our fears were imagined anyway !!) and we build a hut !!! we live happy for ever, with a now strengthened belief that selfless acts will indeed lead to more happiness.
This was achieved, without the need for coercion from either of us (remember we didnt even talk to each other while deciding this). we thought independently of each other, guided only by our beliefs . The only assumption that i make is that both of us believe in the concept of God (if both of us dont believe this wouldnt work). Further this probably also illustrate the benefits of believing, but thats besides the point (i dont believe in imposing beliefs !!).
the above story is a very stylysed one. The idea is not to dispute the teachings of Geetha or impute motives to it..As i had said this would work equally well with other religious preachings if intrepreted correctly.
The idea is to provide an economic rationale grounded on modern game theory as to why some of the teachings may have actually worked.
I feel that modern economics hasnt changed anything fundamentally - if anything it has only deepened our understanding of how things worked..We all work with a set of incentives and make decisions based on them. and religion is nothing more than another instrument to nudge us towards making the right choices that maximises the welfare of the whole society and not just ours. Ofcourse along the way, some twisted and turned these original rationale to suit their needs and thus began all the problems that we see with some of the teachings today..
So we dont have to "blindly" believe in the spiritual teachings, we can actually understand the economic principles that underpin them and appreciate the rich solutions that they offer.
