The Righteous Mind by Haidt
Ref: Jonathon Haidt (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Vintage.
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Summary
This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.
An obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.
My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these (geopolitical) topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity.
Principles of Moral Psychology
Part I: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Part II: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
Part III: Morality binds and blinds; human beings are 90% chimp and 10% bee.
Throughout this book I argue that large-scale human societies are nearly miraculous achievements. I try to show how our complicated moral psychology coevolved with our religions and our other cultural inventions (such as tribes and agriculture) to get us where we are today. I argue that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, and that our “parochial altruism” is part of what makes us such great team players. We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital.
The take-home message of the book is the realization that we are all self-righteous hypocrites.
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Morality
Morality: Treating other Individuals well, primarily in regards harm and fairness.
Origins of Morality?
Nature (Nativism): Moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes preloaded, perhaps in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (Darwin).
Nurture (Empiricism): Children are more or less blank slates at birth and moral knowledge is discovered. Children self-construct morality as they play with other kids (Piaget).
Moral Rules: Rules related to justice, rights, and welfare in regards how people should relate to each other. Rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable, and universal. And this realization is the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong (Turiel).
Absolute Moral Truth: Harm is Wrong.
Turiel’s Rationalism: Reasoning about harm is the basis of moral judgment.
Levels of Moral Development (Kohlberg):
Pre-Conventional (Pre-K): Young children judge right and wrong by very superficial features, such as whether a person was punished for an action. (If an adult punished the act, then the act must have been wrong.)
Conventional (Elementary School): Children become adept at understanding and even manipulating rules and social conventions. This is the age of petty legalism that most of us who grew up with siblings remember well (“I’m not hitting you. I’m using your hand to hit you. Stop hitting yourself!”). Kids at this stage generally care a lot about conformity, and they have great respect for authority—in word, if not always in deed. They rarely question the legitimacy of authority, even as they learn to maneuver within and around the constraints that adults impose on them.
Post-Conventional (Adolescents): Value honesty and respect rules and laws, but now they sometimes justify dishonesty or law-breaking in pursuit of still higher goods, particularly justice.
Kohlberg’s most influential finding was that the most morally advanced kids (according to his scoring technique) were those who had frequent opportunities for role taking—for putting themselves into another person’s shoes and looking at a problem from that person’s perspective. Egalitarian relationships (such as with peers) invite role taking, but hierarchical relationships (such as with teachers and parents) do not.
Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.
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---I: Intuition, then Reasoning---
Part I of this book is about the first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. To explain this principle, I use the metaphor of the mind as a rider (reasoning) on an elephant (intuition); the rider’s function is to serve the elephant.
Reason (the rider) is a servant of the intuitions (the elephant).
Seeing-that and Reasoning-why: Human beings produce rationales they believe account for their judgments. But the rationales are only ex post rationalizations. “Reasoning-why,” is the process “by which we describe how we think we reached a judgment, or how we think another person could reach that judgment.”
People work hard at reasoning. But not in search of truth; it is reasoning in support of their emotional reactions.
Moral judgment is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgment. The crucial distinction is really between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. Intuition is the main cause of moral judgment and then reasoning typically follows that judgment to construct post hoc justifications. Reason is the servant of the intuitions.
Intuition: Rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day.
Social Intuition: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
Cognition: Information processing, which includes higher cognition (conscious reasoning) as well as lower cognition (visual perception and memory retrieval).
Moral Reasoning: A skill humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to.
Moral psychology: The development of reasoning and information processing. The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality. The most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences (Glaucon).
The brain’s answer to the fundamental question of animal life: Approach or avoid?
Conscious reasoning is carried out largely for the purpose of persuasion, rather than discovery (Tetlock).
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
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Reason
Rationalist: People who believes reasoning is the most important and reliable way to obtain moral knowledge.
Reasoning evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people…Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask “Can I believe it?” when we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. The answer is almost always yes to the first question and no to the second.
Reasoning (and Google) can take you wherever you want to go.
We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).
Plato said that reason ought to be the master, even if philosophers are the only ones who can reach a high level of mastery. Hume said that reason is and ought to be the servant of the passions. And Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers.
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---II: Moral Matrices---
The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.
Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
Moral Monism: The attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle.
Moral Systems: 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.
Why the concept of the ‘self’ differs so much across cultures: all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups. There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual. The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment (Shweder).
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Autonomy
Autonomy: Societies based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other’s projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies.
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD): The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships. If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just a social convention.
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures.-Anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
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2. Community
Community: Societies based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends.
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3. Divinity
Divinity: Societies in which people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. Many societies develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation.
A moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy are not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties are more important.
People from WEIRD (Autonomy based) countries see men in divinity based societies as sexist oppressors and pity the women, children, and servants as helpless victims.
Our souls reincarnate into higher or lower creatures in the next life, based on the virtue of our conduct during this life (Hinduism).
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Nations as Moral Societies
The hierarchically structured family serves as a model for other institutions.
“Pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.”
American Civil Religion: The president invokes the name of God (though not Jesus), glorifies America’s heroes and history, quotes its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and performs the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum.
Anomie (‘Normlessness’): What happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order (Durkheim). When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide.
Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
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---Moral Foundations Theory---
Moral Foundations Theory says that there are (at least) six psychological systems that comprise the universal foundations of the world’s many moral matrices.
Five challenges (for early humans) stood out most clearly: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin to reap the benefits of reciprocity, forming coalitions to compete with other coalitions, negotiating status hierarchies, and keeping oneself and one’s kin free from parasites and pathogens.
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Care/Harm Foundation
The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.
Harm Principle: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others (Mills, 1859).”
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more. Across many scales, surveys, and political controversies, liberals turn out to be more disturbed by signs of violence and suffering, compared to conservatives and especially to libertarians.
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2. Fairness/Cheating Foundation
The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve. Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more, and they rely on the Fairness foundation more heavily—once fairness is restricted to proportionality.
On the left, concerns about equality and social justice are based in part on the Fairness foundation—wealthy and powerful groups are accused of gaining by exploiting those at the bottom while not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden.
On the right, the Tea Party movement is also very concerned about fairness. They see Democrats as “socialists” who take money from hardworking Americans and give it to lazy people (including those who receive welfare or unemployment benefits) and to illegal immigrants (in the form of free health care and education).
Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality—people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.
Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.
The Fairness foundation supports righteous anger when anyone cheats you directly (for example, a car dealer who knowingly sells you a lemon). But it also supports a more generalized concern with cheaters, leeches, and anyone else who “drinks the water” rather than carries it for the group.
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3. Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation
The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
The Code of Hammurabi (18c BCE): The very first sentence includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.”
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4. Authority/Subversion Foundation
The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.
Triggers of the Authority/subversion foundation include anything that is construed as an act of obedience, disobedience, respect, disrespect, submission, or rebellion, with regard to authorities perceived to be legitimate. Triggers also include acts that are seen to subvert the traditions, institutions, or values that are perceived to provide stability. As with the Loyalty foundation, it is much easier for the political right to build on this foundation than it is for the left, which often defines itself in part by its opposition to hierarchy, inequality, and power.
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5. Sanctity/Degradation Foundation
The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.
“In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”-The Wisdom of Repugnance by Kass.
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6. Liberty/oppression Foundation
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Liberty/oppression, but each political faction cares in a different way. In the contemporary US, liberals are most concerned about the rights of certain vulnerable groups (e.g., racial minorities, children, animals), and they look to government to defend the weak against oppression by the strong. Conservatives, in contrast, hold more traditional ideas of liberty as the right to be left alone, and they often resent liberal programs that use government to infringe on their liberties in order to protect the groups that liberals care most about.
Libertarians care about liberty almost to the exclusion of all other concerns.
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---III: Morality Binds and Blinds---
Morality binds and blinds. We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
Homo duplex: Humans are 90% Chimp and 10% bee (hive mind), which means that we humans need access to healthy hives in order to flourish.
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
This leads liberals to make two points that are profoundly important for the health of a society: (1) governments can and should restrain corporate superorganisms, and (2) some big problems really can be solved by regulation.
Rationalist Delusion: When a group of people make something sacred, members lose the ability to think clearly about it. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point, somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal.
Beware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times, and places—particularly if that morality is founded upon a single moral foundation; this is fundamentalism.
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Evolution of Morality
Evolution of Shared Intentionality between groups of 2-3 people who were actively hunting or foraging together.
(After several hundred thousand years) More collaborative groups began to get larger and larger, perhaps in response to the threat of other groups. Victory went to the most cohesive groups- the ones that could scale up their ability to share intentions from 3 people to 300 or 3000 people.
Tribal instincts Hypothesis: Human groups have always been in competition to some degree with neighboring groups. The groups that figured out (or stumbled upon) cultural innovations that helped them cooperate and cohere in groups larger than the family tended to win these competitions.
Hive Switch: A hypothetical human genetic adaptation for making groups more cohesive, and therefore more successful in competition with other groups (Haidt).
Parochial Altruism: Altruism favoring the members of one’s ethnic, racial or language group; a signature feature of group selection.
Natural selection favored increasing levels of group-mindedness- the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social institutions, including religion.
Genes began to coevolve with their cultural innovations.
Ultrasocial: Animals that live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor. Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies.
One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest.
Ultrasociality (‘eusociality’) is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites.
We are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of groups with other groups. We are descended from earlier humans whose groupish minds helped them cohere, cooperate, and outcompete other groups.
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Developmental Morality
Genes contribute, somehow, to just about every aspect of our personalities. We’re not just talking about IQ, mental illness, and basic personality traits such as shyness. We’re talking about the degree to which you like jazz, spicy foods, and abstract art; your likelihood of getting a divorce or dying in a car crash; your degree of religiosity, and your political orientation as an adult. The genes guide the construction of the brain in the uterus, but that’s only the first draft, so to speak. 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 or joining a political protest. There are three major steps in the process.
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.
Traits Guide Children Along Different Paths
The most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” is the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.”
“Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.”-Darwin on our Moral Evolution.
People Construct Life Narratives
Each narrative identifies a beginning (“once upon a time”), a middle (in which a threat or challenge arises), and an end (in which a resolution is achieved). Each narrative is designed to orient listeners morally—to draw their attention to a set of virtues and vices, or good and evil forces—and to impart lessons about what must be done now to protect, recover, or attain the sacred core of the vision.
Liberal Progressive Narrative: Organizes much of the moral matrix of the American academic left. It goes like this: Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism.… But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.
It’s a heroic liberation narrative. Authority, hierarchy, power, and tradition are the chains that must be broken to free the “noble aspirations” of the victims.
Reagan Narrative: Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way.… Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals.… Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle … and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles.… Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism.… Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.
Liberals and conservatives were given moral foundation theory tests and told to answer for the other side; who was best able to pretend to be the other? The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or “Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.
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Hive Mind
Hive Hypothesis: Humans beings are conditional hive creatures; we have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves (the hive switch). We live most of our lives in the ordinary (profane) world, but we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world, in which we become “simply a part of a whole” (Homo duplex).
Three common ways in which people flip the hive switch: awe in nature, Durkheimian drugs, and raves.
An organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees. This approach generates more social capital—the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms.
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…There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.
Intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.
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.
Oxytocin bonds people to their groups, not to all of humanity. Mirror neurons help people empathize with others.
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Hive Leadership
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 subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).
Transactional leadership appeals to followers’ self-interest, but transformational leadership changes the way followers see themselves—from isolated individuals to members of a larger group. Transformational leaders do this by modeling collective commitment (e.g., through self-sacrifice and the use of “we” rather than “I”), emphasizing the similarity of group members, and reinforcing collective goals, shared values, and common interests.
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Religion
Religion: An evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity.
Gods and religions are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness, cooperation, and trust.
“The nymphs, fairies, 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 (Dennett).”
Religion played a crucial role in our evolutionary history—our religious minds coevolved with our religious practices to create ever-larger moral communities, particularly after the advent of agriculture.
The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, 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. If the gods evolve (culturally) to condemn selfish and divisive behaviors, they can then be used to promote cooperation and trust within the group. Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.
Gods were helpful in creating moral matrices within which Glauconian creatures have strong incentives to conform. And gods were an essential part of the evolution of our hivish overlay; sometimes we really do transcend self-interest and devote ourselves to helping others, or our groups. 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. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider.
There is 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.
We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around 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.
Is Religion Misunderstood?
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 as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit. But if you take a Durkheimian approach to religion (focusing on belonging) and a Darwinian approach to morality (involving multilevel selection), you get a very different picture. 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.
Many scientists misunderstand religion because 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 while leaving a long trail of victims.
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. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.
Religion and Generosity
Studies of charitable giving in the US show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5% of their money to charity. People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7% of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations. It’s the same story for volunteer work: religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.
Beliefs and practices turned out to matter very little. 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.”
Communes: A group of families or individuals living together and sharing possessions and responsibilities.
Communes can survive only to the extent that they can bind a group together, suppress self-interest, and solve the free rider problem. Communes are usually founded by a group of committed believers who reject the moral matrix of the broader society and want to organize themselves along different principles.
Sosis found that just 6% of the secular communes were still functioning 20y after their founding, compared to 39% of the religious communes.
For religious communes, Sosis found that the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members, 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 was directly correlated with the commune longevity. The more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted.
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Capital
Capital: Resources that allow a person or firm to produce goods or services. When everything else is equal, a firm with more of any kind of capital will outcompete a firm with less.
Financial Capital: Money in the bank.
Physical Capital: Factories, computers, wrenches.
Human Capital: Employees.
Social Capital: The social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties; a type of capital that economists largely overlook. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors. 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.
Bridging Capital: Trust between different groups, between people who have different values and identities.
Bonding Capital: Trust within groups.
Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish. In an earlier study, Putnam found that ethnic diversity had the opposite effect. In a paper revealingly titled “E Pluribus Unum,” Putnam examined the level of social capital in hundreds of American communities and discovered that high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital.
Diversity reduces both kinds of social capital. Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down”—that is, to pull in like a turtle (Putnam).
Moral Capital: The degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.
When we think about very large communities such as nations, the threat of moral entropy is intense.
If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently.
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---Political Parties---
“(Liberals and conservatives are like this), a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”-John Stuart Mill.
When asked to account for the development of their own religious faith and moral beliefs, conservatives underscored deep feelings about respect for authority, allegiance to one’s group, and purity of the self, whereas liberals emphasized their deep feelings regarding human suffering and social fairness.
Self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.
Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules. To get your vote, your money, or your time, they must activate at least one of your moral foundations.
Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.
Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation—show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them. (Libertarians have little use for them, which is why they tend to support liberal positions on social issues such as gay marriage, drug use, and laws to “protect” the American flag.)
“In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ” Political opinions function as “badges of social membership.”
“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 policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism. I think Jeremy Bentham was right that laws and public policies should aim, as a first approximation, to produce the greatest total good.”
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Conservatives
Conservatism: Values free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed. Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience. Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder.
Conservatives believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. People who hold this “constrained” view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay.
Conservatives do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.
As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science.
The Durkheimian vision of society, favored by social conservatives, in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued.
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Liberal
Liberal: Values liberty above all else, including in economic activities (when Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian). Liberals are often suspicious of appeals to loyalty, authority, and sanctity, although they don’t reject these intuitions in all cases.
For American liberals since the 1960s, the most sacred value is caring for victims of oppression. Anyone who blames such victims for their own problems or who displays or merely excuses prejudice against sacralized victim groups can expect a vehement tribal response.
Liberalism emphasizes care for the vulnerable, opposition to hierarchy and oppression, and an interest in changing laws, traditions, and institutions to solve social problems.
Liberals low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to welfare programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.
On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.
Liberals rest most strongly on the Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression foundations. These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society. Social justice movements emphasize solidarity—they call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying, domineering elites. (This is why there is no separate equality foundation. People don’t crave equality for its own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated, as during the American and French revolutions, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.)
The liberal Millian vision, which is more open and individualistic. Millian societies have difficulty binding pluribus into unum. Democrats often pursue policies that promote pluribus at the expense of unum, policies that leave them open to charges of treason, subversion, and sacrilege.
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Libertarian
Libertarians: Value free markets and individual freedom in private matters such as sex and drug use. Libertarians are the direct descendants of the 18 and 19c Enlightenment reformers who fought to free people and markets from the control of kings and clergy. Libertarians love liberty; that is their sacred value.
Libertarians lost the term ‘liberal’ (in the USA, not Europe) when liberalism split into two camps in the late 19c. Some liberals began to see powerful corporations and wealthy industrialists as the chief threats to liberty. These “new liberals” (also known as “left liberals” or “progressives”) looked to government as the only force capable of protecting the public and rescuing the many victims of the brutal practices of early industrial capitalism. Liberals who continued to fear government as the chief threat to liberty became known as “classical liberals,” “right liberals” (in some countries), or libertarians (in the United States).
Where Libertarians diverge from liberals most sharply is on two measures: the Care foundation, where they score very low (even lower than conservatives), and on some new questions we added about economic liberty, where they score extremely high (a little higher than conservatives, a lot higher than liberals).
People with libertarian ideals have generally supported the Republican Party since the 1930s because libertarians and Republicans have a common enemy: the liberal welfare society that they believe is destroying America’s liberty (for libertarians) and moral fiber (for social conservatives).
Libertarians care about liberty almost to the exclusion of all other concerns.
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Economics
Externalities: The costs (or benefits) incurred by third parties who did not agree to the transaction causing the cost (or benefit).
When corporations operate in full view of the public, with a free press that is willing and able to report on the externalities being foisted on the public, they are likely to behave well, as most corporations do.
The next time you go to the supermarket, look closely at a can of peas. Think about all the work that went into it—the farmers, truckers, and supermarket employees, the miners and metalworkers who made the can—and think how miraculous it is that you can buy this can for under a dollar. At every step of the way, competition among suppliers rewarded those whose innovations shaved a penny off the cost of getting that can to you.
Suppose that one day all prices are removed from all products in the supermarket. All labels too, beyond a simple description of the contents, so you can’t compare products from different companies. You just take whatever you want, as much as you want, and you bring it up to the register. The checkout clerk scans in your food insurance card and helps you fill out your itemized claim. You pay a flat fee of $10 and go home with your groceries. A month later you get a bill informing you that your food insurance company will pay the supermarket for most of the remaining cost, but you’ll have to send in a check for an additional $15. It might sound like a bargain to get a cartload of food for $25, but you’re really paying your grocery bill every month when you fork over $2,000 for your food insurance premium. Under such a system, there is little incentive for anyone to find innovative ways to reduce the cost of food or increase its quality. The supermarkets get paid by the insurers, and the insurers get their premiums from you. The cost of food insurance begins to rise as supermarkets stock only the foods that net them the highest insurance payments, not the foods that deliver value to you. As the cost of food insurance rises, many people can no longer afford it. Liberals (motivated by Care) push for a new government program to buy food insurance for the poor and the elderly. But once the government becomes the major purchaser of food, then success in the supermarket and food insurance industries depends primarily on maximizing yield from government payouts. Before you know it, that can of peas costs the government $30, and all of us are paying 25 percent of our paychecks in taxes just to cover the cost of buying groceries for each other at hugely inflated costs.
As long as consumers are spared from taking price into account—that is, as long as someone else is always paying for your choices—things will get worse. We can’t fix the problem by convening panels of experts to set the maximum allowable price for a can of peas. Only a working market can bring supply, demand, and ingenuity together to provide health care at the lowest possible price.
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Biases
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to seek out and interpret new evidence in ways that confirm what you already think.
“People invest their IQ in buttressing their own case rather than in exploring the entire issue more fully and evenhandedly.”-Perkins.
The more education subjects had, the more reasons they came up with. But when Perkins compared fourth-year students in high school, college, or graduate school to first-year students in those same schools, he found barely any improvement within each school. Rather, the high school students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go on to college, and the college students who generate a lot of arguments are the ones who are more likely to go on to graduate school. Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Can I believe it?” Then (as Kuhn and Perkins found), we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks. In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “Must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must. The difference between a mind asking “Must I believe it?” versus “Can I believe it?” is so profound that it even influences visual perception.
For nonscientists, there is no such thing as a study you must believe. It’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers…Now that we all have access to search engines on our cell phones, we can call up a team of supportive scientists for almost any conclusion twenty-four hours a day.
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Animalia
Hover Fly: A fly that has evolved yellow and black stripes, making it look like a wasp, which triggers the wasp-avoidance module in some birds that would otherwise eat them.
Hymenoptera: An order that includes wasps, which gave rise to bees and ants.
Mammals
The ability to digest lactose (the sugar in milk) is lost during childhood. The gene that makes lactase (the enzyme that breaks down lactose) shuts off after a few years of service, because mammals don’t drink milk after they are weaned.
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Misc Quotes
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”-Mark Twain.
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”-David Hume, 1739.
“A man who masters his emotions will live a life of reason and justice, and will be reborn into a celestial heaven of eternal happiness. A man who is mastered by his passions, however, will be reincarnated as a woman.”-Timaeus.
“Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.”-Emile Durkheim, 1897.
“We care more about looking good than about truly being good.”-Glaucon.
“It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”-Michael Tomasello, Chimp Expert.
“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.”
“Sic semper tyrannis (thus always to tyrants).”-Brutus as he and his co-conspirators murdered Julius Caesar.
“People are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught—especially the damage to their reputations.”-Glaucon.
“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.”-Durkheim.
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”-Edmund Burke, 1790.
“Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle … has been the high point of their lives.… Their “I” passes insensibly into a “we,” “my” becomes “our,” and individual fate loses its central importance.… I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy.… I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.”
“I believe that you can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest.”
“If there is any one secret of success it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from their angle as well as your own.”-Henry Ford.
“Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”
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Resources
Civil Politics Organization: www.civilpolitics.org; Mission to educate groups and individuals who are trying to bridge moral divisions by connecting them with scientific research.
Your Morals: www.YourMorals.org; A collaboration among social psychologists and cognitive scientists who study morality and politics with the goal of fostering an understanding across cultures and political spectrums.
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People
Glaucon (4c BCE): Ancient Athenian and Plato’s older brother; primarily known as a major conversant with Socrates in the “Republic.” Glaucon argued the overriding importance of reputation and other external constraints for creating moral order.
Mani (216-274): 3c Persian prophet and founder of Manichaeism. Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil). Human beings are the frontline in the battle; we contain both good and evil, and we each must pick one side and fight for it. Mani’s preaching developed into Manichaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking.
David Hume (1711-1776): Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian best known for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hum argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience (empiricism).
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Prussian philosopher and one of the central enlightenment thinkers. Kant’s comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern W. philosophy. Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality had to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882): English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his theory of evolution, including multi-level selection.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917): French sociologist who formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly seen as one of the principal architects of modern social science (along with Karl Marx and Max Weber). Durkheim introduced Homo duplex, an aspect part of human nature forged, in part, by group-level selection.
Dmitri Belyaev (1917-1985): Soviet geneticist and academician who served as the director of Cytology and Genetics (IC&G). Belyaev moved to a Siberian research institute, where he decided to test his ideas by conducting a simple breeding experiment with foxes. Rather than selecting foxes based on the quality of their pelts, as fox breeders would normally do, he selected them for tameness. Whichever fox pups were least fearful of humans were bred to create the next generation. Within just a few generations the foxes became tamer. But more important, after nine generations, novel traits began to appear in a few of the pups, and they were largely the same ones that distinguish dogs from wolves. For example, patches of white fur appeared on the head and chest; jaws and teeth shrank; and tails formerly straight began to curl. After just thirty generations the foxes had become so tame that they could be kept as pets.
Richard Shweder (1945- Present): American cultural anthropologist and a figure in cultural psychology who broadened the understanding of the moral domain.
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Terminology
A Priori: Prior to experience.
Apostate: A Muslim who has betrayed or abandoned the faith.
Autism: A mental disorder in which people are missing the social-cognitive software that the rest of us use to guess the intentions and desires of other people. Autism is what you get when genes and prenatal factors combine to produce a brain that is exceptionally low on empathizing and exceptionally high on systemizing.
Asperger’s Syndrome: A subtype of high-functioning autism.
Awe: An emotion most often triggered when we face situations with two features: vastness (something overwhelms us and makes us feel small) 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).
Categorical (Unconditional) Imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Kant’s abstract rule from which (he claims) all other valid moral rules could be derived (Kant).
Collective Effervescence: Describes the passion and ecstasy that group rituals can generate.
Confirmatory Thought: A one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.
Consilience: The ‘jumping together’ of ideas to create a unified body of knowledge (Wilson).
Cultural Psychology: A discipline that combines the anthropologist’s love of context and variability with the psychologist’s interest in mental processes.
Delusion: A false conception and persistent belief unconquerable by reason in something that has no existence in fact.
Deontology: A philosophy in which humans make the rights and autonomy of others paramount; we have duties to respect the rights of individuals, and we must not harm people in our pursuit of other goals, even moral goals such as saving lives.
Dorso-Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (dlPFC): The main area for cool reasoning tasks.
Empathizing: The drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion.
Empirical: From observation or experience.
Exploratory Thought: An evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.
Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.
Glauconians: People generally more concerned with the appearance of virtue than the reality.
Hallucinogens: A class of chemically similar alkaloids that induce a range of visual and auditory hallucinations that have the ability to shut down the self and give people experiences they later describe as ‘religious’ or ‘transformative’.
Ayahuasca (Quechua for ‘spirit vine’): A brew made from vines and leaves containing DMT (dimethyltryptamine).
Peyote: A hallucinogen harvested from a cactus containing mescaline.
Psilocybin: A hallucinogen containing teonanacatl (‘gods flesh’) mushrooms. When eaten, psilocybin produces 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.
MDMA (ecstasy): An amphetamine variant that gives people long-lasting energy, along with heightened feelings of love and openness.
Hypersensitive Agency Detector: People perceive agency where there is none.
Ideology: A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.
Innate: Organized in advance of experience.
Just-So-Stories: Fantastical accounts of how the camel got a hump and the elephant got a truck (Rudyard Kipling).
Liberal: Valuing liberty above all else, including in economic activities (when Europeans use the word liberal, they often mean something more like the American term libertarian).
Liberal Universalist: Someone who cannot be trusted to put the interests of his nation above the interests of the rest of the world.
Moral Reasoning: A skill humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to.
Muller-Lyer Illusion: An illusion in which one line continues to look longer than the other even after you know that the two lines are the same length.
Olfactory Nerve: Carries signals about odors to the insular cortex (the insula).
Orthodoxy: The view that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society. Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change.
Oxytocin: A hormone and neurotransmitter produced by the hypothalamus, widely used among vertebrates to prepare females for motherhood. In mammals it causes uterine contractions and milk letdown, as well as a powerful motivation to touch and care for one’s children. Evolution has often reused oxytocin to forge other kinds of bonds. In species in which males stick by their mates or protect their own offspring, it’s because male brains are slightly modified to be more responsive to oxytocin. Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists.
Psychological Rationalism: We grow into our rationality as caterpillars grow into butterflies.
Psychopaths: Lack compassion, guilt, shame, and even embarrassment, which it makes it easy for them to lie and to hurt family, friends, and animals; ~1% of men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths. Most are not violent, but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes, such as serial murder, serial rape, and the killing of police officers. Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.
Realm of the Profane: 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.
Realm of the Sacred: Where the self disappears and collective interests predominate.
Religion: An evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.
Reverse Dominance Hierarchies: A societal hierarchy in which the rank-and-file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males (similar to Marx’s dream of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’).
Ring of Gyges: A mythical gold ring that makes its wearer invisible at will.
Science: The systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtains. Science insists that claims be grounded in reason and empirical evidence, not faith and emotion.
Self-Righteous: Convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.
Social Conventions: Regulation of behaviors not linked directly to harm.
Harmless Taboo Violations: People who do offensive things, but in such a way that nobody is harmed.
Social Darwinism: The idea that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals are the fittest. Therefore, giving charity to the poor interferes with the natural progress of evolution: it allows the poor to breed.
Systemizing: The drive to analyze the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.
Taste Receptors: Found in each taste bud of the tongue; sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (umami).
Twins
Identical Twins: Twins who share all of their genes.
Same-sex Fraternal Twins: Twins who share half of their genes.
Tzedek (Hebrew): People who act in accordance with God’s wishes.
Utilitarianism: A philosophy in which humans should maximize overall welfare (pleasure); always aim to bring about the greatest total good, even if a few people get hurt along the way. Three principles of utilitarianism; 1) pleasure or happiness is the only thing that truly has intrinsic value, 2) actions are right insofar as they promote happiness, wrong insofar as they produce unhappiness, 3) everyone’s happiness counts equally.
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Chronology
Summer, 2011: America’s credit rating is downgraded after the USG fails to agree on a routine bill to raise the debt ceiling. Stock markets plummet around the globe.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
19 Feb, 2009: Emergence of the Tea Party when Rick Santelli, a correspondent for a business news network, launches a tirade against a new $75B program to help homeowners who had borrowed more money than they could now repay. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? President Obama, are you listening?” Santelli then announced that he was thinking of hosting a “Chicago Tea Party” in July.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1993: OK City Bombing; Timothy McVeigh detonates a VBIED at the federal office building in OKC, killing 168 people. He is arrested hours later while wearing a “Sic semper tyrannis” T-shirt.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
29 Apr- 4 May, 1992: The Los Angeles Riots occur following the acquittal of four LA Police officers who had been charged with excessive force after beating Rodney King nearly to death. The riots result in 53 deaths and >7K buildings destroyed.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
“Can We all get along?” is made on appeal by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by 4 LA police officers a year earlier.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1984: Publication of “Neuromancer” by Science Fiction writer William Gibson, in which he first coins the term ‘cyberspace,’ describing it as a ‘matrix’ that emerges when a billion computers are connected and people get enmeshed in “a consensual hallucination.”-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1978: Ted Bundy is arrested after raping, mutilating, and murdering at least 30 women.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1971: Robert Trivers publishes his theory of reciprocal altruism, noting that evolution could create altruists in a species where individuals could remember their prior interactions with other individuals and then limit their current niceness to those who were likely to repay the favor.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1964: The USG under POTUS LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act. The conservative southern states, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War (because Lincoln was a Republican) began to leave the Democratic Party, and by the 1990s the South was solidly Republican.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1830s: Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers a set of lectures on nature that form the foundation of American Transcendentalism, a movement that rejects the analytic hyperintellectualism of America’s top universities. Emerson argues 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.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1789: At the French Assembly, 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.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
1780: Publication of “Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’ by Jeremy Bentham in England. In it Bentham proposes that the principle of ‘utility’ should govern all reforms, all laws, and even all human actions. “Each law should aim to maximize the utility of the community, which is defined as the simple arithmetic sum of the expected utilities of each member. Bentham then systematized the parameters needed to calculate utility, including the intensity, duration, and certainty of “hedons” (pleasures) and “dolors” (pains). He offered an algorithm, the “felicific calculus,” for summing the hedons and dolors to reach a moral verdict on any action, for any person, in any country.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
40 Ka: The rate at which genes change in response to selection pressures begins rising in early humans. The rate increases after 20 Ka, with genetic change reaching a crescendo during the Holocene era, in Africa as well as in Eurasia.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
50 Ka: Hominids spread out from Africa and the Middle East.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
74 Ka: The Eruption of Toba Volcano in Indonesia dramatically alters Earth’s climate, killing nearly all living humans.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
~700-600 Ka: Evolution of Homo heidelbergensis, the ancestors of Neanderthals and us. The first hominids with brains as large as ours begin appearing in Africa and then Europe. At their campsites we find the first clear evidence of hearths and spears. The oldest known spears were just sharpened sticks, but later they became sharp stone points attached to wooden shafts and balanced for accurate throwing.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
~1.8 Ma: Hominids in East Africa began making new and more finely crafted tools, known as the Acheulean tool kit, the main tool was a teardrop-shaped hand axe.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
2.4 Ma: Evolution of Homo habilis (handy men), hominids with larger brains that used a simple stone tool known as the Oldowan tool kit.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
7-5 Ma: Ancestral humans first diverge from Chimpanzees and Bonobos.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
~1.8-1.5 Ga: Evolution of multicellular organisms after some eukaryotes develop a novel adaptation- remaining together after cell division in which every cell had exactly the same genes.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
~2 Ga: Evolution of eukaryotes when two bacteria somehow join together inside a single membrane, which explains why mitochondria have their own DNA, unrelated to the DNA in the nucleus. Single-celled eukaryotes are wildly successful and spread throughout the oceans.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
~3-2 Ga: The only organisms on Earth are prokaryotic cells (such as bacteria). Each was a solo operation, competing with others and reproducing copies of itself.-Righteous Mind by Haidt.
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