Does philosophy have formal theories to explain why many secular or religious stories apparently die and others persist or live as history?

Question

Why Christianity became popular | Yuval Noah Harari and Lex Fridman:

https://youtu.be/PMeCkvtqpik

If I understand Yuval Harari he argues that humans are storytellers and our behavior seems to be dominated or influenced strongly by the internalized stories of various human groups, tribes, or nations. In this video Harari asks why people believe one story and not another? He speculates a good deal about counter-factual possibilities for the path of history.

Harari: Stories are independent forces. Now why do people believe one story and not another? That's history! There is no materialistic law ... No! History is full of accidents! How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it. ... Thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come out on top? As a historian I don't have a clear answer. You can read the sources and you see how it happened. ... But why? If you rewind history and press play ... I think Christianity would have taken over the Roman Empire and the world maybe twice in one hundred times. It is such an unlikely thing to happen. It is the same with Islam. It is the same with the Communist takeover of Russia.

Fridman: And it is perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders. And maybe it's an open question how much power charismatic leaders have to effect the trajectory of history?

Harari: You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately I mean what is your view on that?

Fridman: I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision. So I have a sense that there is an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story. So I think we just need leaders to be great storytellers. That kind of sharpen up the story. To make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively. But it could also be that the local interaction between human beings is even more important. We just don't have a good way to summarize and describe that. We like to talk about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, as central to the development of computers. You like to talk about individuals like this because it's easier to tell a sexy story that way.

Harari: Maybe it's an interaction. [Paraphrasing - If Columbus did not discover the New World then someone else soon would have.] But the thing about history is these small difference matter. Maybe if someone from England discovered the New World then South America would speak English instead of Spanish.

My take is that Fridman is expressing at least one feature of human psychology which can in part explain why some stories told and/or propagated by charismatic leaders are more compelling and persistent than others over time in human history. Harari is expressing the highly speculative yet valid concepts of counter-factual reasoning about events and the butterfly effect from scientific models where small changes in initial conditions generate widely divergent evolutionary paths of a chaotic mathematical system. But chaos and complexity theories have the concept of attractor patterns which are more likely than other non-attractor paths.

I notice that in many philosophical, political, and economic debates there is usually a counter-factual scenario compared to the facts in evidence. Or like lawyers in court we apply different narratives to the same facts. Do any philosophers propose theories to explain why there is a particular pattern of drama (dramatic attractor theory) in the path of historical events?

Answer 1

Do any philosophers propose theories to explain why there is a particular pattern of drama (dramatic attractor theory) in the path of historical events?

They do - think of Hegel for instance. Or think of Nietzsche's attempts to start a genealogy of morals. Or think of Marxism. But philosophical theories about this are usually a form of hand waving: mostly speculative, just-so stories that are not based on actual historical or anthropological data - or that are based on some data, some apparent observations and then extrapolate from that.

Why did Christianity come out on top?

It obviously did not. First of all, it was followed by Islam, which is still very much alive and kicking. Judaism, in various forms, is also still very much alive. Other forms of religion are also followed by millions of people. In our industrial societies, locally Christianity may still be "on top", but overall it's fighting a losing battle against secularism and other relgious traditions.

Why did Christianity "win" in the Roman world? You'd have to look at the social-historical circumstances. For one thing, after the initial persecutions (during which Christians were rabidly fanatical martyrs), at some point Christianity got the backing of the Empire (and the military), after Constantine had his vision of seeing the cross in the Sun. It's nonsense to proclaim that we "just cannot explain" and simultaneously babble about the butterfly effect.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church" according to Tertullianus, one of the early Church Fathers, who is also remembered for this anti-rational slogan "credo quia absurdum" ("I believe because it is absurd"). Early Christians actively sought out martyrdom - they were not afraid to die - similar to Jihadists in our world. The monks that sailed out to convert the Germanic or AngloSaxon tribes also were not afraid to die. If you have an ideology in which people are not afraid to die, then it's difficult for any political system to control them. This is not some little "butterfly effect".

Answer 2

Why Christianity per se is popular, might best be understood by philosophy that is roughly anthropological in character: Dilthey, Plessner, and some other thinkers that follow might fit that bill.

Without a doubt, you should read Wilhelm Dilthey's (REP) "The Types of Worldview and their Development in Metaphysics". (Here's a link to JSTOR but it's behind a paywall.) In it, you can find a description of the term Weltanschauung which is translated as worldview in English. It is a fundamental object of interest for anthropologists to decide how people organize and describe their experiences from culture to culture. From WP:

Anthropologically, worldviews can be expressed as the "fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives."

From a little bit later after Dilthey, you can take a look at the works of philosophical anthropology from the 1920's. Continuing with the German approach to philosophy inaugurated by Kant and developed by the post-Kantian German idealists, there are a number of thinkers who develop how we structure our phenomenological experience. The sole exposure I have to this is Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human which shows how humans and their culture transcend the biological conception of life.

As an analytical thinker, unfortunately, I don't have too much more to recommend other than Joseph Campbell's work with comparative mythology, Carl Jung's notion of the collective unconscious that Campbell references, and Donald Brown's Human Universals which is the subject of a number of criticisms. Hopefully someone much more familiar with the great Continental thinkers can help you along.