Magic and Empiricism in Early Chinese Rainmaking

Abstract

7 Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across 8 societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely 9 ineffective, why did such they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia even in 10 populations with writing and record keeping? To address this puzzle, many scholars have argued 11 that these protocols were not instrumental at all, and that their practitioners were not really 12 endeavoring to employ them in order to bring about rain. Here, taking advantage of the wealth of 13 historical records available in China, we argue to the contrary: that rainmaking is best viewed as 14 an instrumental, means-end activity, and that people have always placed strong emphasis on the 15 outcomes of such activities. To account for persistence of rainmaking, we then present a set of 16 cultural evolutionary explanations, rooted in human psychology, that can explain why people’s 17 adaptive learning processes did not result in the elimination of ineffective rainmaking methods. 18 We suggest that a commitment to a supernatural worldview provides theoretical support for the 19 plausibility of various rainmaking methods, and people often over-estimate the efficacy of 20 rainmaking technologies because of statistical artefacts (some methods appear effective simply 21 by chance) and under-reporting of disconfirmatory evidence (failures of rainmaking not 22 reported/transmitted). The inclination to “do something” when a drought hits versus “do 23 nothing” likely also plays a role and persists in the world today. 24