The desert didn't create monotheism: political power did

The desert didn't give birth to monotheism: power did

The thesis circulates as if it were self-evident: where there is sand, scarcity and a sun that melts stones, man ends up bowing before a single god. Robert Sapolsky defends it, and the scene has documentary appeal. The problem is that the data rebel against it everywhere. In arid 95% of Iran, no monotheism was born out of thirst: Zoroastrianism was born as a state religion, and from there it spread to neighboring empires. Geography explains less than politics.

The desert as a metaphor sells, but it doesn't add up. Spain is also a mountainous dry land across much of its map, and no one mistook the plateau for Sinai. The Berbers, the Inuit, the Australian Aborigines and the Mongols have lived for millennia in hostile environments without a single, jealous god ever emerging. At most, a chief god presiding over a pantheon and letting the others live. If climate were in charge, monotheism would have sprouted in every dry corner of the planet.

Where do one-god religions really appear?

Where there are consolidated states, capable of fixing an orthodoxy and punishing heresy. Zoroaster in Persia, Akhenaten's Aten in Egypt, the Hebrews' exclusive Yahweh: all arrive hand in hand with an elite that needs a single authority in heaven to justify its own on earth. Monotheism is political engineering before it is theology. And when that central organization watching over dogma is missing, within a few decades the prophecy business fills up with competitors, and the result looks more like a doctrine flea market than a single faith.

Some refine the technical nuance, and it's worth listening. Akhenaten did not deny the existence of other gods: he only demanded preferential worship for his own, and that is henotheism. The early Hebrews recognized other divinities and reserved exclusive worship for one, and that is monolatry. The leap to absolute monotheism comes with trauma: the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile in Babylon, when the question arises of why one's own god lost against the foreign ones. The answer —the others are nothing, they are wood and stone— is the one that founds the doctrine.

The myth of the perversos origin

There remains the story of the stable, the manger and humility as a trademark. It works wonderfully in narrative: if someone is going to be a big shot, let them start at the bottom. But one should not confuse the literary device with archaeology. The first civilizations did not flourish licking sand, but on alluvial plains next to rivers that guaranteed water and transport. The agricultural surplus paid for the temples, the scribes and the armies. Without surplus wheat there are no theologians debating the nature of the divine.

And then there is the elephant in the room: Catholicism, with its saints, its Marian devotions and its calendar of local antiestéticasts, has turned a rigorously monotheistic dogma into a de facto polytheism. The squaring of the circle, achieved through mediators. If the desert imposed divine uniqueness, someone should explain why the most successful version of the invention spends its days negotiating with intermediaries.

Is a single god really needed to survive scarcity, or is a state that knows how to collect taxes and condemn dissenters enough?