the social technology of godparents

epistemic status: contains just-so stories. researching and writing this to signal that I know the function of a godparent and would therefore make a good one, hopefully

Religion can be understood as a social technology to unify and coordinate large groups of people into a coherent and working society. Back in the good old days of 3000 BC or so it was hard to control people as cities and communities got larger. Aligning the people in a community through social means has a hard cap at around Dunbars number of 150, anything larger than that needs institutions and other means to set incentives and rules in the right way to facilitate cooperation and enforce those rules. But those still tend to fail when we think larger: cooperation inside a whole nation, cooperation between generations easily falls apart, especially without the communication technology that we have today. So the big religions started spawning, memetic viruses that infect their hosts and install new software on humans brains. Software that comes with new incentives that help a society cooperate and prosper (spend your whole life building part of this cathedral and you end up in heaven, defect against society and you end up in hell). ¹

Religions come with a lot of practices that are still in use today. When first being implemented, a lot of them probably served an important function, aside from the symbolic. The classic example being the pork prohibition that may have served either to stop parasites spreading from undercooked pork or to disincentivize using pigs because they compete with humans for food and water. Another example would be Ramadan, which maybe helped formalize behaviour during seasons where there was not a lot of food. Arguably, these are just-so stories. We cannot know what the real reason was these rules were getting implemented. But we sure can see that the initial pragmatic reason for the rule disappeared, the practice staying intact as a form of spiritual practice nonetheless.

Let us take a closer look at one specific tradition, the one of assigning and having/being godparents to a child. This practice from Christianity (with similar traditions in other religions) is about choosing someone, usually a close friend to the family, to take special interest in the development of the child and to offer mentorship. This served different crucial roles. The nominal reason was to have someone that takes care and guarantees the religious education of a child. At the same time, it had the social role of building a formal alliance between godparents and family, with the godparents being the fallback to raise the child, should the parents die. In a time where the probability of this happening was relatively high, this was a crucial safety function to ensure the safety of the child. By making this contract sacred and public instead of a private one, we ensure that the godparent follows through with that responsibility instead of bailing out, which would cost him a lot in reputation. ²

The focus and function of the godparent has shifted over time, from spiritual mentorship and enabling social upward mobility to a more secular role of supporting the child more materially than anything else and the bond being chosen because of (and to increase) personal bonds with friends, instead of strategic considerations to get the most out for the kid. Over the time, the practice degraded, but with visible differences in how this is played out nowadays, depending on the culture you’re in. Northern Europe probably has the most stripped down version of it, just leaving a sentimental and symbolic practice without most of the mechanisms that were once in place. On the other extreme, there are still cultures e.g. in southern/eastern europe, latin america, west africa, where people are full-stack godparents with all of the original functions.

Even when you’re not going for the full medieval type of godparenting but instead opting for the smaller modern version, the practice can still give you some or many positive effects, depending on how much of it you are going to implement.

At the very least, by giving the connection a formal name and role, it serves as a comittment device for the godparent to actually stay in close connection with the family and to give support to the kid. By making some vague intuition into something concrete, it also makes us more unlikely to renege on it. This alone has positive effect enough to be worth it. It makes it more likely to have a continued and closer connection amongst the involved than in the counterfactual world.

In a more pronounced version, it gives the kid another source of attachment, another person that they can rely on and reach out if needed, automatically extending the kids social and cultural capital. In most cases, there is at least some sort of increased investment into the kid, supporting it in different ways. Depending on how serious (or earnest?) you are taking this, you might be assuming the originally intended role of a mentor, albeit maybe a more secular one. Or you might even end up in a type of alloparenting situation, basically helping with raising the kid. And at the far end, the modern practice ends up reinstatiating the original purpose, with people formalizing the guardianship in case the parents die in an accident or something similar.

All this to say that no matter which degree of implementation you are going for, creating a godparenting type of situation seems to be generally net-positive. And all this to say that I would obviously be down to be part of it.