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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Ten - The Hive Switch
The obvious place to put this observation of mine is at the end of this post, but I think it might be even better here so you will be thinking about it as you read.
It's interesting that Haidt's "hive switches" undercut Darling’s evidence for people experiencing a more profound -- true -- experience of the cosmos. What Darling sees as transcendence, Haidt sees as a device to bind people into hives. Music -- I’m thinking of Beethoven's “Ode To Joy” again -- would probably favor Darling in this little dispute, if you think of music as something that rests on the reality underlying our world of appearance. Or, music could just move us to feel more groupish. Hives of sound.
I encourage you to consider the role of music and these two interpretations as you read the following.
p221 [A personal account of military close order drill] ...when his unit began to synchronize well, he began to experience an altered state of consciousness:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.
For no good reason except that this made me think of it (and when is a James Thurber quote not a good idea) here is a passage from "University Days:"
As a soldier I was never any good at all. Most of the [Ohio State University ROTC] cadets were glumly indifferent soldiers, but I was no good at all. Once General Littlefield, who was commandant of the cadet corps, popped up in front of me during regimental drill and snapped, "You are the main trouble with this university!" I think he meant that my type was the main trouble with the university but he may have meant me individually. I was mediocre at drill, certainly -- that is, until my senior year. By that time I had drilled longer than anybody else in the Western Conference, having failed at military at the end of each preceding year so that I had to do it all over again. I was the only senior still in uniform... I had become by sheer practice little short of wonderful at squad manoeuvres.
One day General Littlefield picked our company out of the whole regiment and tried to get it mixed up by putting it through one movement after another as fast as we could execute them: squads right, squads left, squads on right into line, squads right about, squads left front into line etc. In about three minutes one hundred and nine men were marching in one direction and I was marching away from them at an angle of forty degrees, all alone. "Company, halt!" shouted General Littlefield. "That man is the only man who has it right!" I was made a corporal for my achievement.
- See more HERE
... [William McNeill, quoted above,] hypothesized that the process of “muscular bonding” -- moving together in time -- was a mechanism that evolved long before the beginning of recorded history for shutting down the self and creating a temporary superorganism. Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups...
...
p223 ...We are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by relentless competition of groups with other groups... Under the right conditions... [our ancestors] were able to enter a mind-set of “one for all, all for one” in which they were truly working for the good of the group, and not just for their own advancement within the group.
My hypothesis in this chapter is that human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I’m calling the hive switch. The hive switch, I propose, is a group-related adaptation that can only be explained “by a theory of between-group selection,” as Williams said... The hive switch is an adaptation for making groups more cohesive, and therefore more successful in competition with other groups.
If the hive hypothesis is true, then it has enormous implications for how we should design organizations, study religion, and search for meaning and joy in our lives...
Collective Emotions
p224 ...[Starting in the 15th century] European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances with disgust. The masks, body paint, and guttural shrieks made the dancers seem like animals. The rhythmically undulating bodies and occasional sexual pantomimes were, to most Europeans, degrading, grotesque, and thoroughly “savage.”
First I have to note here that I believe this is the first work by a woman cited in either of these books, so I’m happy to see what Ehrenreich has to say. But I also have my doubts about this as a general characterization of a “European” reaction to these dances. I’m sure this is what the officers and clergy and men of letters who wrote about this felt, but I’m not sure the average sailor or soldier would have felt quite the same. How far was this really from European folk dancing? I’m sure it was a little wilder than what they were used to at home -- after centuries of Church pressure -- but I suspect they would have recognized this social institution even if their officers didn’t.
(I love that Ehrenreich’s first published book was titled The Uptake, Storage, and Intracellular Hydrolysis of Carbohydrates by Macrophages. I’m imagining bodice ripping cover art with embossing and the whole bestseller nine yards. Her most recent Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything is on my short list and might even end up in this blog.)
...As Ehrenreich argues, collective and ecstatic dancing is a nearly universal “biotechnology” for binding groups together. She agrees with McNeill that it is a form of muscular bonding. It fosters love, trust, and equality. It was common in ancient Greece (think of Dionysus and his cult) [He beat me to that one] and in early Christianity (which she says was a “danced” religion until dancing in church was suppressed in the Middle Ages).
So Jesus Christ Superstar really was based on a true story...
But if ecstatic dancing is so beneficial and so widespread, then why did Europeans give it up? [I really should check out her book, but I don’t see how the sorts of aerobic folk dancing you can find all over Europe -- including in Scotland, Ireland and even England -- don’t fall into this category of dance. ] Ehrenreich’s historical explanation is too nuanced to summarize here, but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism and more refined notions of the self in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It is the same historical process that gave rise to WEIRD culture in the nineteenth century... As I said in chapter 5, the WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. The WEIRDer you are, the harder it is to understand what those “savages” were doing.
Which, again, applies to elites and upper classes but not to the peasant, folk, classes who were, and are, still dancing up a storm. Also, this chronology doesn’t make any sense since she has Europe becoming individualistic and starting to reject sociocentric ways, in the same century this appears to be an accomplished fact, according to the previous paragraphs.
On the other hand, referring to my handy Chronology (always available at the top with the Introduction) the Protestant Reformation -- spur to individualism -- did start at the beginning of the 16th century, and Puritanism was at it’s peak around the middle of the 17th century. Since England went from Shakespeare to Cromwell (theaters all closed) in only about 30 years, these changes can happen really fast.
p225 Ehrenreich was surprised to discover how little help she could get from psychology in her quest to understand collective joy... She notes that “if homosexual attraction is the love that ‘dares not speak its name,’ the love that binds people to the collective has no name at all to speak.”
Among the few useful scholars she found in her quest was Emile Durkheim. Durkheim insisted that there were “social facts” that were not reducible to facts about individuals. Social facts -- such as the suicide rate or norms about patriotism -- emerge as people interact. They are just as real and worthy of study (by sociology). as are people and their mental states (studied by psychology). Durkheim didn’t know about multilevel selection and major transitions theory, but his sociology fits uncannily well with both ideas.
...Durkheim argued... that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he concluded that people have two distinct sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level. The first set of sentiments “bind{s} each individual to the person of his fellow-citizens: these are manifest within the community, in the day-to-day relationships of life. These include the sentiments of honour, respect, affection and fear which we may feel towards one another.” These sentiments are easily explained by natural selection operating at the level of the individual: just as Darwin said, people avoid partners who lack these sentiments.
But Durkheim noted that people also had the capacity to experience another set of emotions:
The second are those which bind me to the social entity as a whole; these manifest themselves primarily in the relationships of the society with other societies, and could be called “inter-social.” The first {set of emotions} leave{s} my autonomy and personality almost intact. No doubt they tie me to others, but without taking too much of my independence from me. When I act under the influence of the second, by contrast, I am simply a part of a whole, whose actions I follow, and whose influence I am subject to.
p226 ...These second-level sentiments flip the hive switch, shut down the self, activate the groupish overlay, and allow the person to become “simply a part of a whole.”
The most important of these Durkheimian higher-level sentiments is “collective effervescence,” which describes the passion and ecstasy that group rituals can generate. As Durkheim put it:
The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.
...Durkheim believed that these collective emotions pull humans fully but temporarily into the higher of our two realms, the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. The realm of the profane, in contrast, is the ordinary day-to-day world where we live most of our lives, concerned about wealth, health, and reputation, but nagged by the sense that there is, somewhere, something higher and nobler.
Since this is what I never really “got” at rock concerts and the like, perhaps I also wouldn’t have been swept up in the ecstasy of the Nazi volk.
Durkheim believed that our movements back and forth between these two realms gave rise to our ideas about gods, spirits, heavens, and the very notion of an objective moral order. These are social facts that cannot be understood by psychologists studying individuals (or pairs) any more than the structure of a beehive could be deduced by entomologists examining lone bees...
So Many Ways to Flip the Switch
p227 ...One of the most intriguing facts about the hive switch is that there are many ways to turn it on... Here are three examples of switch flipping that you might have experienced yourself.
Awe in Nature
In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a set of lectures on nature that formed the foundation of American Transcendentalism, a movement that rejected the analytic hyperintellectualism of America’s top universities. Emerson argued that the deepest truths must be known by intuition, not reason, and that experiences of awe in nature were among the best ways to trigger such intuitions. He described the rejuvenation and joy he gained from looking at the stars, or at a vista of rolling farmland, or from a simple walk in the woods:
Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; [ewww] I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
I’m reminded here of the student hiking club in Doctor Faustus. They combined small (same sex) group activity with rigorous hiking and nature appreciation. Of course they also, in this context, ruined it all with all that intellectualizing.
...
p228 Emerson and Darwin [I’m skipping his similar reverie] each found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred. Even if the hive switch was originally a group-related adaptation, it can be flipped when you’re alone by feelings of awe in nature, as mystics and ascetics have known for millennia.
This is probably even more effective for me as I find mankind more appealing in concept than upon closer acquaintance.
The emotion of awe is most often triggered when we face situations with two features: vastness (something overwhelms us and makes us feel small) [the Grand Canyon] and a need for accommodation (that is, our experience is not easily assimilated into our existing mental structures; we must “accommodate” the experience by changing those structures). [I’ve got nothing.] Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life. Awe is one of the emotions most closely linked to the hive switch, along with collective love and collective joy. People describe nature in spiritual terms -- as both Emerson and Darwin did -- precisely because nature can trigger the hive switch and shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole.
I have some problems with this. Isn’t a reverence for nature more likely to have preceded our hivish phase? Besides the Grand Canyon (that first thought that popped into my head) I associate natural awe with high mountains and deep forests. And large bodies of water. All of these things would have been a source of danger to our primitive ancestors. A sense of awe could just as easily have been a way of making us think twice before venturing someplace where we would be at risk. This even works with empty deserts or vast grasslands (or moors or downs) where we would have been more at risk from any passing predator.
And something that creates a need to accommodate would also seem to encourage thought -- as with our young German students -- not hivish virtue.
Just now, my Chromebook was acting flaky so I shut it down for the first time in a week or so. I noticed when re-booting that my wallpaper (which I rarely see since I’m always in the browser) is a lovely, vast grassland with high peaks in the background. It does give me a good feeling.
I'm running out of time until my book club meets to discus this book, so I will be publishing two posts a day for the next three days, including today. This chapter really does work better if read at one time, but it is longer than I would prefer.
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