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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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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Ten - The hive Switch - Continued
2. Durkheimogens
[Haidt points out that the Aztecs used psilocybin mushrooms] called teonanacatl -- literally “God’s flesh” in the local language... Teonanacatl took people directly from the profane to the sacred in about thirty minutes... Religious practices north of the Aztecs focused on consumption of peyote, harvested from a cactus containing mescaline. Religious practices south of the Aztecs focused on consumption of ayahuasca... a brew made from vines and leaves containing DMT (dimethyltriptamine).
p229 These three drugs are classed together as hallucinogens (along with LSD and other synthetic compounds) because the class of chemically similar alkaloids in such drugs induce a range of visual and auditory hallucinations. But I think these drugs could just as well be called Durkheimogens, given their unique (though unreliable) ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as “religious” or “transformative.”
Most traditional societies have some sort of ritual for transforming boys into men and girls into women. It’s usually far more grueling than a bar mitzvah; it frequently involves fear, pain, symbolism of death and rebirth, and a revelation of knowledge by gods or elders. Many societies used hallucinogenic drugs to catalyze this transformation. The drugs flip the hive switch and help the selfish child disappear. The person who returns from the other world is then treated as a morally responsible adult. One anthropological review of such rites concludes: “These states were induced to heighten learning and to create a bonding among members of the cohort group, when appropriate, so that individual psychic needs would be subsumed to the needs of the social group.”
p230 When Westerners take these drugs, shorn of all the rites and rituals... they often have experiences that are hard to distinguish from the “peak experiences” described by the humanistic psychologist Abe Maslow...
May I just say how annoying it is when Haidt uses nicknames like “Abe” instead of “Abraham?” Wiki search can find Maslow using “Abe” but in many other cases I’ve had to figure the name before I could find the link, and on occasion the actual name was not my first guess.
[Results of a study giving psilocybin to divinity students (And Giving Psilocybin to Divinity Students would be yet another great book title)] ...They found that psilocybin had produced statistically significant effects on nine kinds of experience: (1) unity, including loss of sense of self, and a feeling of underlying oneness, (2) transcendence of time and space, (3) deeply felt positive mood, (4) a sense of sacredness, (5) a sense of gaining intuitive knowledge that felt deeply and authoritatively true, (6) paradoxicality, (7) difficulty describing what had happened, (8) transiency, with all returning to normal within a few hours, and (9) persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior.
Would divinity students really be the best subjects for a study like this? I would think you might learn more from studying delinquents or just average students.
[25 years later] ... One of the psilocybin subjects recalled his experience like this:
All of a sudden I felt sort of drawn out into infinity, and all of a sudden I had lost touch with my mind. I felt that I was caught up in the vastness of Creation. . . . Sometimes you would look up and see the light on the altar [in the chapel] and it would just be a blinding sort of light and radiations. . . . We took such an infinitesimal amount of psilocybin, and yet it connected me to infinity.
(Note 24. Only one of the control subjects [in the study, they were only given vitamin B,] said that the experiment had resulted in beneficial growth, and that, ironically, was because it convinced the subject to try psychedelic drugs as soon as possible...)
3. Raves
p231 ... in the 1980s... advances in pharmacology made a host of new drugs available to the dancing class, particularly MDMA, [ecstasy] a variant of amphetamine that gives people long-lasting energy, along with heightened feelings of love and openness...
... Here is... [Tony Hsieh’s] description [of a San Francisco rave]:
...As someone who is usually known as being the most logical and rational person in a group, I was surprised to find myself swept with an overwhelming sense of spirituality -- not in the religious sense, but a sense of deep connection with everyone who was there as well as the rest of the universe. There was a feeling of no judgement. . . . Here there was no sense of self-consiousness or feeling that anyone was dancing to be seen dancing... It was as if the existence of individual consciousness had disappeared and been replaced by a single unifying group consciousness.
p233 [Haidt about his students] ...I have a new appreciation for the zeal with which they throw themselves into extracurricular activities, most of which turn them into team players... I see them searching for a calling, which they can only find as part of a larger group. I now see them striving and searching on two levels simultaneously, for we are all Homo duplex.
Did you notice how I didn’t bold “striving” there? I can quit whenever I want.
The Biology of the Hive Switch
If the hive switch is real -- if it’s a group-level adaptation designed by group-level selection for group binding -- then it must be made out of neurons, neurotransmitters, and hormones. It’s not going to be a spot in the brain -- a clump of neurons that humans have and chimpanzees lack. Rather, it will be a functional system cobbled together from preexisting circuits and substances reused in slightly novel ways to produce a radically novel ability...
(Note 26. There are two other candidates [for a cause of the hive switch besides the ones mentioned below] that I won’t cover because there is far less research on them. V. S. Ramachandran has identified a spot in the left temporal lobe that, when stimulated electrically, sometimes gives people religious experiences... And Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause 2001 studied the brains of people who achieved altered states of consciousness via meditation. The researchers found a reduction in activity in two areas of the parietal cortex that the brain uses to maintain a mental map of the body in space. When those areas are quieter, the person experiences a pleasurable loss of self.)
[Talk about Oxytocin and “the mirror neuron system” -- the way our brains react to things we see happening to others as though they were actually happening to us.]
p235 ...People feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates. Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile...
p236 [Another study] ... people don’t just blindly empathize; they don’t sync up with everyone they see. We are conditional hive creatures. We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.
Hives At Work
p237 [Some background on corporations] This legal fiction, recognizing “a collection of many individuals” as a new kind of individual, turned out to be a winning formula. It let people place themselves into a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential for gigantic rewards.
...During the twentieth century, small businesses got pushed to the margins or to extinction as corporations dominated the most lucrative markets. Corporations are now so powerful that only national governments can restrain the largest of them (and even then it’s only some governments, and some of the time).
This is either an alternative or supplemental view of the economic world from Robert Persig’s "the Giant."
...The gains from cooperation and division of labor are so vast that large corporations can pay more than small business and then use a series of institutionalized carrots and sticks -- including expensive monitoring and enforcement mechanisms -- to motivate self-serving employees to act in ways the company desires. But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership) has its limits. Self-interested employees are Glauconians, for more interested in looking good and getting promoted than in helping the company.
In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital -- the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost... Hivish employees work harder, have more fun, and are less likely to quit or to sue the company... they are truly team players.
...
p238 ...people evolved to live in groups of up to 150 that were relatively egalitarian and wary of alpha males... (Note 46. The number 150 is sometimes called “Dunbar’s number” after Robin Dunbar noted that this very roughly seems to be the upper limit on the size of a group in which everyone can know each other, and know the relationships among the others; see Dunbar 1996. [This is also roughly the size of a modern infantry company]) A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that the subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (which I defined in chapter 7 as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).
Detroit failed spectacularly at the Liberty foundation. Unionized auto manufacturers created a situation where the corporation was divided into two subtribes, one for management and one for workers. And the two tribes identified more with their counterparts in other corporations than with their opposites in the same corporation. The result was what you would expect.
...with a few institutional changes you can create environments that will nudge everyone’s sliders a bit closer to the hive position. For example:
- Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by... ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity. A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday... You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.
- Exploit synchrony. [Moving together as with Toyota morning calisthenics, group chants and ritualized movements, singing together.]
- Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals... Intergroup competitions, such as friendly rivalries between corporate divisions, or intramural sports competitions, should have a net positive effect on hivishness and social capital. But pitting individuals against each other in a competition for scarce resources (such as bonuses) will destroy hivishness, trust, and morale. [Dragon boat racing would seem to be an ideal instance of this.]
Political Hives
... [JFK’s “Ask not.” as an example of activating the Durkheimian higher nature.]
p241 The yearning to serve something larger than the self has been the basis of so many modern political movements. Here’s another brilliantly Durkheimian appeal:
{Our movement rejects the view of man} as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country, individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which, suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest . . . can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.
Inspiring stuff, until you learn that it’s from The Doctrine of Fascism, by Benito Mussolini. Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It’s the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance...
(Note 56. Mussolini 1932. The phrase removed on the second to last line is “by death itself.” Mussolini may not have written these lines; the essay was written mostly or entirely by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, but it was published with Mussolini’s name as the author.)
Regardless of who wrote it, I recognized it as an expression of Italian Fascism. I’ve gone into this HERE. Haidt’s theories are just an elaboration of what I suggested about man’s need for purpose and meaning. Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search For Meaning was mostly trying to find non-fascist options for this same drive.
Ehrenreich... [in] a chapter of Dancing in the Streets... notes that ecstatic dancing is an evolved biotechnology for dissolving hierarchy and bonding people to each other as a community. Ecstatic dancing, festivals, and carnivals invariably erase or invert the hierarchies of everyday life. [I talk about Fasching and carnival somewhere but I can't find it at the moment.] Men dress as women, peasants pretend to be nobles, and leaders can be safely mocked. When it’s all over and people have returned to their normal social stations, those stations are a bit less rigid, and the connections among people in different stations are a bit warmer.
...
p242 Fascist dictators clearly exploited many aspects of humanity’s groupish psychology, but is that a valid reason for us to shun or fear the hive switch? Hiving comes naturally, easily, joyfully to us. Its normal function is to bond dozens or at most hundreds of people together into communities of trust, cooperation, and even love. [I’ve been unusually remiss, so far, in not mentioning “Orgy porgy Ford and Fun” from Brave New World. Aldus Huxley was also very much aware of this aspect of human psychology.] Those bonded groups may care less about outsiders than they did before their bonding -- the nature of group selection is to suppress selfishness within groups to make them more effective at competing with other groups... Might the world be a better place if we could greatly increase the care people get within their existing groups and nations while slightly decreasing the care they get from strangers in other groups and nations?
...
p243 When a single hive is scaled up to the size of a nation and is led by a dictator with an army at his disposal, the results are invariably disastrous. But that is no argument for removing or suppressing hives at lower levels. In fact, a nation that is full of healthy hives is a notion of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls... [Whoa. We just jumped to a very Faustian place there. ] ...research on social capital has demonstrated that bowling leagues, churches, and other kinds of groups, teams, and clubs are crucial for the health of individuals and of a nation. As political scientist Robert Putnam put it, the social capital that is generated by such local groups “makes us smarter, healthier, safer, richer, and better able to govern a just and stable democracy.”
A nation of individuals, in contrast, in which citizens spend all their time in Durkheim’s lower level, is likely to be hungry for meaning. If people can’t satisfy their needs for deep connection in other ways, they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking [charismatic] leader who urges them to renounce their lives of “selfish momentary pleasure” and follow him onward to “that purely spiritual existence” in which their value as human being consists.
p244 ...Happiness comes from between. [not from within] It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.
...
p245 It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love -- love within groups -- amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.
Not sure he’s right about smaller healthy hives blocking bigger more dangerous ones. Germany, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was full of little hives and they seemed to act as gateway drugs to the nasty ones. We always want stronger drugs.
Here's a great quote from Mary Catherine Bateson that Haidt could have done something with:
More and more, it has seemed to me that the idea of an individual, the idea that there is someone to be known, separate from the relationships, is simply an error.
