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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eleven - Religion Is a Team Sport - Continued
The Durkheimian Story: By-Products, Then Maypoles
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p259 [David Sloan] Wilson’s great achievement was to merge the ideas of the two most important thinkers in the history of the social sciences: Darwin and Durkheim. Wilson showed how they complement each other. He begins with Darwin’s hypothesis about the evolution of morality by group selection, and he notes Darwin’s concern about the free rider problem. He then gives Durkheim’s definition of religion as a “unified system of beliefs and practices” that unites members into “one single moral community.” If Durkheim is right that religions create cohesive groups that can function as organisms, then it supports Darwin’s hypothesis: tribal morality can emerge by group selection. And if Darwin is right that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, then it supports Durkheim’s hypothesis: we are Homo duplex, designed (by natural selection) to move back and forth between the lower (individual) and higher (collective) levels of existence.
In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, Wilson catalogs the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper. He shows how John Calvin developed a strict and demanding form of Christianity that suppressed free riding and facilitated trust and commerce in sixteenth-century Geneva. He shows how medieval Judaism created “cultural fortresses that kept outsiders out and insiders in.” But his most revealing example (based on research by the anthropologist Stephen Lansing) is the case of water temples among Balinese rice farmers in the centuries before Dutch colonization.
[An elaborate irrigation scheme on Bali is organized around temples (with gods) at all key points where the various water users have to come together to negotiate the use of the water under the guidance of their gods]
p260 ...The system made it possible for thousands of farmers, spread over hundreds of square kilometers, to cooperate without the need for central government, inspectors, and courts...
[And an account of maypole dancing] p262 ...Whatever its origin, it’s a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson’s account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community... Once bound together... these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: “Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”
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p263 If human groups have been doing this sort of thing since before the exodus from Africa, and if doing it in some ways rather than others improved the survival of the group, then it’s hard to believe that there was no gene-culture coevolution, no reciprocal fitting of mental modules to social practices during the last 50,000 years... [Reprise of claim that genetic change was reaching a crescendo during the Holocene.]
In The Faith Instinct the science writer Nicholas Wade... summarizes the logic of group selection lucidly:
People belonging to such a {religiously cohesive} society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the more united ones thrive.
The exclusiveness of Judaism, compared with Christianity, certainly had an effect on limiting it’s spread as well as the spread of the genes of individual Jews. Christianity had many of the advantages of Rome, in this respect. It was easy to expand the group and the bigger the group the better. The intolerance of Islam -- to the extent that it is or has become intolerant -- both brings in more people and strengthens the group bonds.
p264 Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust. Like maypoles and beehives, they are created by the members of the group, and they then organize the activity of the group... 50,000 years is more than plenty of time for genes, brains, groups, and religions to have coevolved into a very tight embrace.
...if this is true, then we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course people can and do forsake organized religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology... doing linked to believing linked to belonging. Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.
And depending on the design of the colonies, sunlight.
Is God A Force For Good Or Evil
...The New Atheists assert that religion is the root of most evil. They say it is a primary cause of war, genocide, terrorism, and the oppression of women. Religious believers, for their part, often say that atheists are immoral, and that they can’t be trusted. Even John Locke, one of the leading lights of the Enlightenment, wrote that “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.”...
... p265 ... if religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism. It should make people exceedingly generous and helpful toward members of their own moral communities, particularly when their reputations will be enhanced...
p266 [Another clever trust game study] ...The highest levels of wealth... would be created when religious people get to play a trust game with other religious people...
Many scholars have talked about this interaction of God, trust, and trade. In the ancient world, temples often served an important commercial function: oaths were sworn and contracts signed before the deity, with explicit threats of supernatural punishment for abrogation. In the medieval world, Jews and Muslims excelled in long-distance trade in part because their religions helped them create trustworthy relationships and enforceable contracts.
From reading Fernand Braudel, I was under the impression that Jews being able to give credit was the key factor. And I thought it was Greeks and Armenians who conducted most of the trade for the Ottomans. Maybe he’s talking about earlier...
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So religions do what they are supposed to do. As Wilson put it, they help people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.” But that job description applies equally well to the Mafia...
In their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, political scientists... Robert Putnam and David Campbell put their findings bluntly:
p267 By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans -- they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.
...Whether you believe in hell, whether you pray daily, whether you are a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Mormon . . . none of these things correlated with generosity. The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.
...”It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”
Chimps And Bees And God
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p268 Religion is... well suited to be the handmaiden of groupishness, tribalism, and nationalism... religion does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing. According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power... It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland...
...Anything [religion or Marxism] that binds people together into a moral matrix that glorifies the in-group while at the same time demonizing another group can lead to moralistic killing, and many religions are well suited for that task. Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.
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p269 Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. [This is where Haidt’s elephant and Persig’s software OS metaphors are distinguished. Religion, I think, works on a higher level than the OS. But since this is a case of natural selection, I still may be wrong about that.] But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral compass, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie -- Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order... We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, [when “everything is lawful?”] the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.
While anomie may be an adequate term for the personal aspect of what happens when a society loses its cohesion, I’m not sure it really captures what I see in the streets everyday. I’m pretty sure this explains why Alcoholics Anonymous works, but I suspect it also explains why people like Anne Lamott and Dr. Sweet’s bad boys at Laguna Honda needed AA in the first place.
It’s always hard to tell to what extent the feral people living on the streets are just taking advantage of every inch society will give them, or if they’ve been actually driven mad by that society. I suspect it’s a combination of the two. In either case, they are taking advantage of the breakdown in the cohesiveness of the tribe to act as “outlaws” within the city. As I said, “anomie” hardly does justice to this nasty reality.
Societies that forego the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).
I have to pause here to reflect on that last warning. It seems to me that Haidt here is guilty of precisely what he’s been trying to show the New Atheists have been guilty of... thinking that evolution suddenly stopped and we are now in a purely cultural age. Luther and Calvin, even Adam Smith and Marx, can be seen as just the latest evolutionary adaptation to benefit human groups. In fact, how else would all this have come about? In a world where population is growing dangerously close to the limits of support for mankind, isn’t inefficiency in turning resources into offspring more of a virtue than a vice?
Also, the attitudes and reproductive rates of the Roman elite were fairly similar to today's secular societies. Our "inefficiency" is not unprecedented.
The Definition of Morality (At Last).
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p270 Not surprisingly, my approach starts with Durkheim, who said: “What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to . . . regulate his actions by something other than . . . his own egoism.” As a sociologist, Durkheim focused on social facts -- things that exist outside of any individual mind -- which constrain the egoism of individuals. Examples of such social facts include religion, families, laws, and the shared networks of meaning that I have called moral matrices. Because I’m a psychologist, I’m going to insist that we include inside-the-mind stuff too, such as the moral emotions, the inner lawyer (or press secretary), the six moral foundations, the hive switch, and all the other evolved psychological mechanisms I’ve described in this book.
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Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.
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... this is a functionalist definition. I define morality by what it does, rather than by specifying what content counts as moral...
p271 ...Philosophers typically distinguish between descriptive definitions of morality (which simply describe what people happen to think is moral) and normative definitions (which specify what is really and truly right, regardless of what anyone thinks). So far in this book I have been entirely descriptive...
But philosophers are rarely interested in what people happen to think. [Ha!] The field of normative ethics is concerned with figuring out which actions are truly right or wrong. The best-known systems of normative ethics are the one-receptor systems I described in chapter 6: utilitarianism (which tells us to maximize overall welfare) and deontology (which in its Kantian form tells us to make the rights and autonomy of others paramount). When you have a single clear principle, you can begin making judgments across cultures. Some cultures get a higher score than others, which means that they are morally superior.
My definition... cannot stand alone as a normative definition. (As a normative definition, it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order.) But I think my definition works well as an adjunct to other normative theories, particularly those that have often had difficulty seeing groups and social facts. Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility that the binding functions -- Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity -- have a crucial role to play in a good society.
p272 I don’t know what the best normative ethical theory is for individuals in their private lives. But when we talk about making laws and implementing public policy in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism. [I'm going with a different color for Notes here because they are quite long. Deal with it.] (Note 69. I agree with Harris 2010 in his choice of utilitarianism, but with two big differences: (1) I endorse it only for public policy, as I do not think individuals are obligated to produce the greatest total benefit, and (2) Harris claims to be a monist. He says that what is right is whatever maximizes the happiness of conscious creatures, and he believes that happiness can be measured with objective techniques, such as an fMRI scanner. I disagree. I am a pluralist, not a monist. I follow Shweder (1991; Shweder and Haidt 1993) and Berlin 2001 in believing that there are multiple and sometimes conflicting goods and values, and there is no simple arithmetical way of ranking societies along a single dimension. There is no way to eliminate the need for philosophical reflection about what makes a good society. [This surprises me. I would have expected him to want a descriptive standard -- to look for clear cut and measurable sociological standards of happiness like low suicide rates and evidence that people are thriving in their various hives.]) I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws... should aim... to produce the greatest total good. (Note 70. I am endorsing here a version of utilitarianism known as “rule utilitarianism,” which says that we should aim to create the system and rules that will, in the long run, produce the greatest total good. This is in contrast to “act utilitarianism,” which says that we should aim to maximize utility in each case, with each act. [Bentham’s “felicific calculus” notwithstanding, I have to say I prefer Kant’s categorical imperative as a practical moral standard simply because it’s easier (maybe) to apply. I say this while aware of the irony that my, I believe unusually morally based “lifestyle” probably violates both of these ethical standards -- if everyone rejected car ownership, chose to live in the smallest possible dwelling, rejected leisure travel (especially by airplane), and became a vegetarian it would be a disaster for the world economy and for the continued existence of many domesticated animal species.]) I just want Bentham to read Durkheim and recognize that we are Homo duplex before he tells any of us, or our legislators, how to go about maximizing that total good. (Note 71. I grant that utilitarianism, defined abstractly, already includes Durkheim. If it could be proven that Durkheim was correct about how to make people flourish, then many utilitarians would agree that we should implement Durkheimian policies. [This was my point in Note 69.] But in practice, utilitarians tend to be high systemizers who focus on individuals and have difficulty seeing groups. They also tend to be politically liberal, and are therefore likely to resist drawing on the Loyalty, Authority, or Sanctity foundations. Therefore I think the term Durkheimean utilitarianism is useful as a constant reminder that humans are Homo duplex, and that both levels of human nature must be included in utilitarian thinking. [It’s a pity Haidt hasn’t been with us on our blogging journey. We have seen any number of WEIRDOs lunge or slide to a hivish/sociocentric place over the course of these books. I’m thinking of Heidegger and his flirtation with National Socialism; all the mid-century intellectuals who drank the Communist Kool-aid. All those 19th and 20th century utopian socialists/communalists as well as the actual Communists were actually seeking a much more Durkheimean society. Isn’t a great deal of the hostility against the bourgeois world order really a reaction against WEIRD society and a longing for a more supportive, hive like past?])
If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents you’re bound to misunderstand it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit. But if you take a Durkheimian approach... You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. That binding usually involves some blinding -- once any person, book, or principle is declared sacred, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.
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p273 We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle those things with other people and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That’s what religion is all about. And with a few adjustments, it’s what politics is about too...
The irony here is that by this standard religious morality is arbitrary. A religion that endorsed ritual rape and murder, if it held the group together, would be as good as any other. He’s arguing for ethical relativism at the group level but not within it. And this, I would have to agree, is entirely natural. But Dostoyevsky, and perhaps Naphtha, would be appalled at their moral community being defended in this way. I mentioned Alyosha before, but since then I’ve been reading this with Alyosha on one shoulder and Ivan on the other... there was considerable excitement from one or the other for a time, but they’ve both grown very quiet. I think they may have both run off to find a train to throw themselves under.
Religion is as arbitrary, in a semiotic sense, as language. In fact, language and religion play very similar roles in the identification and preservation of groups. The most cohesive group would only have one religion and one language. Any dilution in uniformity in either realm only serves to weaken the group. Haidt is defending both the religious community here and people who fight to preserve the uniqueness of French or Gaelic or any other language. From this perspective, Vatican II was probably a mistake.
For a long time I’ve said that if I had to choose a church to belong to I would go with the Mormons simply because they are such a socially supportive community. What they happen to believe is irrelevant to this. If you are a Mormon you are going to get help with most any problem you have. It isn’t you vs the world but you and your church community vs the world. This would be very useful to anyone but especially to people planning on raising children. Exactly what Haidt has argued here.
With one chapter to go, it seems like Haidt still needs to explain why people like Luther and Calvin arise to divide coherent groups. Is this just random mutation? Protestantism would seem to have been an adaptation that divided a previous community into many smaller ones that were more competitive. Natural selection would seem to be the logic behind the rise of WEIRD society.
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