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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Twelve - Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?
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p275 ...[Our recent political] shift to a more righteous and tribal mentality was bad enough in the 1990s, a time of peace, prosperity, and balanced budgets. But nowadays, when the fiscal and political situations are so much worse, many Americans feel that they’re on a ship that’s sinking, and the crew is too busy fighting with each other to bother plugging the leaks.
p276 ...America’s hyperpartisanship is now a threat to the world.
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A Note About Political Diversity
...understanding the psychology of liberalism and conservatism is vital for understanding a problem that threatens the entire world.
From Genes To Moral Matrices
p277 Here’s a simple definition of ideology: “A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.” And here’s the most basic of all ideological questions: Preserve the present order, or change it? At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left. The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.
Political theorists since Marx had long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the peasants and workers want to change things (or at least they would if their consciousness could be raised and they could see their self-interest properly, said the Marxists). But even though social class may once have been a good predictor of ideology, [when? The Roman populares were as wealthy as the conservative optimates, and the British Whigs were also liberals of the wealthy class.] that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left) and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). And when political scientists looked into it, they found that self-interest does a remarkably poor job of predicting political attitudes.
So for most of the late twentieth century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents or the TV programs they watched. Some... even said that most people were so confused about political issues that they had no real ideology at all.
[A study of twins, both identical and fraternal,]
p278 ...Whether you end up on the right or the left... turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.
I love it when I accidentally run into something that supports what I've previously argued for. Remember my going on (and on) about the effects liberal migration away from Prussia and Germany most likely had on Germany in the 19th and even the 20th centuries? If these attitudes are really genetic, how could that migration not have created a German population that was more neophobic and less neophilic?
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...Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft... The draft gets revised by childhood experiences. To understand the origins of ideology you have to take a developmental perspective, starting with the genes and ending with an adult voting for a particular candidate...
Step 1: Genes Make Brains
After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear... many studies... [show] that conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise. [Think what would have happened if there was such a thing as "black" noise] Other studies have implicated genes related to receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has long been tied to sensation-seeking and openness to experience, which are among the best-established correlates of liberalism. As the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne said: “The only things I find rewarding . . . are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.”
p279 ... A major review paper by political psychologist John Jost found a few other traits, but nearly all of them are conceptually related to threat sensitivity (e.g., conservatives react more strongly to reminders of death) or openness to experience (e.g., liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure).
Step 2: Traits Guide Children Along Different Paths
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p281 Things didn’t have to work out this way. [In his imaginary example.] On the day they were born, the sister was not predestined to vote for Obama; the brother was not guaranteed to become a Republican. But their different sets of genes gave them different first drafts of their minds, which led them down different paths, through different life experiences, and into different moral subcultures. By the time they reach adulthood they have become very different people...
Step 3: People Construct Life Narratives
p281 ...These narratives are not necessarily true stories -- they are simplified and selective reconstructions of the past, often connected to an idealized vision of the future. But even though life narratives are to some degree post hoc fabrications, they still influence people’s behavior, relationships, and mental health.
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[Keith Richards tells a traumatic tale from his school days that he believes made him the rebel he became.]
The Grand Narratives of Liberalism and Conservatism
[The narratives are long and I’m skipping them. In yet another study, Haidt determines that liberals are particularly bad at understanding the narratives of the right since they are blind to three of the foundations.]
I'm going to break here and make this a short post, for a change. We are about to get into something interesting that will generate (my) tangents. I want to keep this all as close together as possible. Also, the next post should be the last for The Righteous Mind.
But, since my book club meets tomorrow, I'm going to post this entire chapter now.
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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eleven - Religion is a Team Sport
[Starts with a description of the college, specifically UVA, football experience.]
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p247 It’s a whole day of hiving and collective emotions. Collective effervescence is guaranteed, as are feelings of collective outrage at questionable calls by the referees, collective triumph if the team wins, and collective grief if the team loses. Followed by more collective drinking at postgame parties.
Why do the students sing, chant, dance, sway, chop, and stomp so enthusiastically during the game? Showing support for the football team may help to motivate the players, but is that the function of these behaviors? Are they done in order to achieve victory? No. From a Durkheimian perspective these behaviors serve a very different function, and it is the same one that Durkheim saw at work in most religious rituals: the creation of a community.
A college football game is a superb analogy for religion... from a sociologically informed perspective, it is a religious rite that does just what it is supposed to do: it pulls people up from Durkheim’s lower level (the profane) to his higher level (the sacred). It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole.” It augments the school spirit for which UVA is renowned, which in turn attracts better students and more alumni donations...
p248 Religions are social facts. Religions cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees. Durkheim’s definition of religion makes its binding function clear:
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden -- beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
...Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore... [that “Morality binds and blinds”] and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices. They conclude that religion is an extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally [like the inebriated football fans] while leaving a long trail of victims [again like people injured by football or drinking]... if we are to render a fair judgement about religion -- and understand its relationship to morality and politics -- we must first describe it accurately.
The Lone Believer
[New Atheism is introduced in the context of 9/11]
p249 ...After decades of culture war in the United States over the teaching of evolution in public schools, some scientists saw little distinction between Islam and Christianity. All religions, they said, are delusions that prevent people from embracing science, secularism, and modernity...
...The first... [book] out was Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, followed by Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and, with the most explicit title of all, Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. These four authors are known as the four horsemen of New Atheism, but I’m going to set Hitchens aside because he is a journalist whose book made no pretense to be anything other than a polemical diatribe... These three authors claimed to speak for science and to exemplify the values of science -- particularly its open-mindedness and its insistence that claims be grounded in reason and empirical evidence, not faith and emotion.
I also group these three authors together because they offer similar definitions of religion, all focusing on belief in supernatural agents...
(Note 7. [Harris 2004] p. 12 Harris elevates belief to be the quintessence of humanity: “ The very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts” (ibid., p 50). That’s a fine definition for a rationalist, but as a social intuitionist I think the humanness of any brain consists in its ability to share intentions and enter into the consensual hallucinations (i.e., moral matrices) that create cooperative moral communities. See my discussion of Tomasello’s work in chapter 9. See also Harris et al. 2009.)
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p250 Supernatural agents do of course play a central role in religion, just as the actual football is at the center of the whirl of activity on game day at UVA. But trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passions of college football by studying the movements of the ball... You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.
Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity, according to many scholars. When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religions that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists. I’ll call this competing model the Durkheimian model, because it says that the function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the group we belong to.
p251 The New Atheist model is based on the Platonic rationalist view of the mind...
...To understand the psychology or religion, should we focus on the false beliefs and faulty reasoning of individual believers? Or should we focus on the automatic (intuitive) processes of people embedded in social groups that are striving to create a moral community?
I can’t help reading this with Alyosha in mind. He senses that Haidt is going to refute the New Atheists and is encouraged. Only to realize that Haidt is attacking them from what is an even more scientific perspective. He’s gone beyond looking at religion (god and the devil) as things man creates/invents out of his own, perhaps spiritual, nature, to looking at the religious as bees and religion as just another form of social activity. I believe he would see this as even more dehumanizing than anything Ivan said in The Brothers K.
The New Atheist Story: By-Products, Then Parasites
Here Haidt does a lovely job of using their own words against the New Atheists when viewing them from our new, hivish, sociological perspective.
To an evolutionist, religious behaviors “stand out like peacocks in a sunlit glade,” as Dennett puts it. Evolution ruthlessly eliminates costly and wasteful behaviors... yet, to quote Dawkins, “no known culture lacks some version of these time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counterproductive fantasies of religion.” ... The New Atheists... accounts all begin with the discussion of multiple evolutionary “by-products” that explain the accidental origin of God beliefs, and some then continue on to an account of how these beliefs evolved as sets of parasitic memes.
(Note 15. A meme is a bit of cultural information that can evolve in some of the same ways that a gene evolves. See Dawkins 1976.)
p252 [Haidt agrees with them about “hypersensitive agency detection”] ...we see faces in the clouds... because we have special cognitive modules for face detection. The face detector is on a hair trigger, and it makes almost all of its mistakes in one direction -- false positives (seeing a face when no real face is really present...)
[This leads to our “hypersensitive agency detection module”] ...The hypersensitive agency detection device is finely tuned to maximize survival, not accuracy.
[By attributing agency to the weather and good or bad fortune, early man spawned] ...the birth of supernatural agents, not as adaptation for anything but as a by-product of a cognitive module that is otherwise highly adaptive...
p253 ...Dennett suggests that the circuitry for falling in love has gotten commandeered by some religions to make people fall in love with God... In all cases the logic is the same: a bit of mental machinery evolved because it conferred a real benefit, but the machinery sometimes misfires, producing accidental cognitive effects that make people prone to believing in gods. At no point was religion itself beneficial to individuals or groups. At no point were genes selected because individuals or groups who were better at “godding” outcompeted those who failed to produce, fear, or love their gods... the genes for constructing these various modules were all in place by the time modern humans left Africa, and the genes did not change in response to selection pressures either for or against religiosity during the 50,000 years since then.
p254 [Dennett,]
The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us. This mindlessly generates a vast overpopulation of agent-ideas... only a well designed few make it through the rehearsal tournament, mutating and improving as they go. The ones that get shared and remembered are the souped-up winners of billions of competitions for rehearsal time in the brains of our ancestors.
To Dennett and Dawkins, religions are sets of memes that have undergone Darwinian selection. Like biological traits, religions are heritable, they mutate, and there is selection among these mutations. The selection occurs not on the basis of the benefits religions confer upon individuals or groups, but on the basis of their ability to survive and reproduce themselves. Some religions are better than others at hijacking the human mind, burrowing in deeply, and then getting themselves transmitted to the next generation of host minds...
A Better Story: By-Products, Then Cultural Group Selection
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p255 ... As with the New Atheists, [the first hypersensitive agency detector step posited by the anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich] was followed by a second step involving cultural (not genetic) evolution. But instead of talking about religions as parasitic memes evolving for their own benefit [this too is like Persig’s "Giant" which I guess is a kind of meme], Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. Atran and Henrich argue that the cultural evolution of religion has been largely driven by competition among groups. Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas (not their genes) spread. Groups with less effective religions didn’t necessarily get wiped out; often they just adopted the more effective variations. So it’s really the religions that evolved, not the people or their genes.
Among the best things to do with a by-product God, according to Atran and Henrich, is to create a moral community... As [hunter-gatherer] groups take up agriculture and grow larger... their gods become far more moralistic. The gods of larger societies are usually quite concerned about actions that foment conflict and division within the group, such as murder, adultery, false witness, and the breaking of oaths.
p256 If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group... Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.
...When people believe that the gods might bring drought or pestilence on the whole village for the adultery of two people, you can bet that the villagers will be more vigilant for -- and gossipy about -- any hint of an extramarital liaison. Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.
...There is now a great deal of evidence that religions do in fact help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival.
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[The anthropologist Richard Socis studies 19th century American communes and discovers that the religious communes survive much better than the secular ones.]
p257 [Looking for the “secret ingredient” Sosis,] ...found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. [The usual cult tools.] For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosic was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.
...Sosic argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.” But when a secular organization demands sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. [Or even to do things that do make logical sense.] In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. [I have to add here that in history the downtrodden most often rebel not when things are the worst -- when they are making the most sacrifices -- but when things are actually getting a little better. This doesn't really apply to what he's saying here, but I think there may possibly be a connection.] Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
p258 ...Religions that do a better job of binding people together and suppressing selfishness spread at the expense of other religions, but not necessarily by killing off the losers. Religions can spread far faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. A successful religion can be adopted by neighboring people or by vanquished populations.
Atran and Henrich... doubt that there has been any genetic evolution for religiosity... [they] believe that gene-culture coevolution happened slowly during the Pleistocene... [they] join the New Atheists in claiming that our minds were not shaped, tuned, or adapted for religion.
...But how could there be no optimizing, no fine-tuning of modules to make people more prone to adaptive forms of hiving, sacralizing, or godding, and less prone to self-destructive or group-destructive forms? [in the past 50,000 years.]
I think you can sense that a third interpretation is coming up -- and you won't be surprised to hear that it is termed "Durkheimian." But I'm going to take a break here and finish this next time.
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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.”...
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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.
...
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.
Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Righteous Mind - XIII. Coevolution
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.
