We started by looking at how the brain evolved to help us survive and procreate. For successful people this meant maintain a good reputation within the group. The brain did not evolve to find truth. Reason, therefore, developed to justify and rationalize actions, sentiments, and feelings. Our actions, sentiments, emotions, and feelings are prewired pattern detection modules in our brain that have evolved over millions of years to be extremely accurate in determining survival behaviour. Six of these modules are the core “tastebuds” of our moral sentiments. these six moral matrices are: Care-Harm, Liberty-Oppression, Fairness-Cheating, Loyalty-Betrayal, Authority-Subversion, and Sanctity-Degradation.
In this last section we will look more closely at the balance of multilevel tensions between selfishness and altruism and its application to modern politics. The key to understanding this balance of multilevel tensions is morality. Four unique qualities that make us human for which morality is critical are 1) the cultural extension of the biological division of labour. Humanity qualifies as a superorganism due our extensive division of labour facilitated by culture learnings. Naturally if culture is involved in large groups it must be shared, developed, and maintained with morality. 2) shared intentionality – the ability to share a mental representation of tasks that two or more people do over time and space. Pack animals like wolves and some monkeys can appear to have intentionality when they hunt or go to war but it is very limited – “it is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.” Language came after we developed shared intentionality and the emergent quality “‘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.” 3) Self-domestication as a result of gene-culture coevolution. “[E]arly humans domesticated themselves when they began to select friends and partners based on their ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix.” Timing and proximity were the determining factors of reproduction in biology, culture added morality. We choose life partners from people who are nearby and willing but who also fit within our moral matrix. 4) Fast evolution and the near extinction of humanity 74000 years ago. We have been living in the Holocene epoch, a relatively calm climatic time but in the time prior to the Holocene rapid changes in climate wiped out the all the other hominid lines and almost wiped us out too. Every few centuries for about 900 000 of years, hominid lines went through major population bottlenecks due to food becoming very scarce. How did our ancestors survive? Haidt speculates that under these kinds of selections pressures it would “be the people who managed to work together in groups to monopolize, hide, and share the remaining food supplies among themselves”. This suggest that group selection is not only about war. “Whatever traits make a group more efficient at procuring food and turning it into children makes that group more fit than its neighbors….Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders (as in warfare). But in general, groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.”
Haidt next introduces us to the notion of “the Hive Switch” to explain phenomena of selective events or situations that seems to hypercharge our tribal behaviour instinct. He points out testimony of soldiers who feel a “muscular bonding” after spending sometime marching and their subsequent willingness to “risk their lives not so much for their country or their ideals as for their comrades-in-arms.” A similar phenomenon in which the individual loses their individuality in favour of a group identity can occur in the presence of nature, under the influence of some hallucinogens, in raves, singing in a choir, preforming in choreographed pieces, and in mass protests, political, or religious rallies. In each case participants can often detect in themselves the second the Hive Switch turns on. “[H]uman 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.” A corporation can activate the hive switch too and “can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm.” On a low level we can also call it social capital. For sports fans and for religious minded people sports and religion are the paragon group bonding activities in the modern world. While not proven yet, Haidt speculates that the hive switch probably includes the mirror neuron system which mirrors the actions and feelings of other in the parts of the brain that they would have been done or felt in oneself and a simultaneous triggering of Oxytocin release. “Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists.”
Religion is the cultural innovation that has been the primary vehicle for cohesion in the largest groups and for the transmission of moral education. The biggest religions have been the most successful in multi-level group selection. The three basic tasks that religions had to achieve are 1) larger than kin group cohesion, 2) suppress self-interest within the group to a degree that facilitates survival against other groups without losing the creative innovation needed to advance the group, and 3) solve the free rider problem. The religious innovation of a jealous and all-seeing God proved very helpful. The innovation of a universal God was crucial for achieving cohesion in huge populations. The notion of the sacred is important because it is hard to sacralize normal or profane things without an all-seeing God. “To invest social convention with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity…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. Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.” The characteristics of the Gods do really help some groups out compete other groups. It is the Gods of a religion that make it possible for people “to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.” Religion really binds and blinds us. it is a glue of society. It provides a set of norms and values for your behaviour and for the society’s institutions’ behaviour. These norms work on the intuitions, feelings, and emotions (on your elephant). “[I]f 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 [your reason]…it is a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.”
People develop different political and religious beliefs and identities from a combination of two forces. The first is biological. “People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals.” Conservatives have the reverse biological characteristics. The second force is cultural. We tell stories and produce narratives that touch on some or all of our moral matrices. Since all moral matrices are threat detectors and since the left are biologically less sensitive to detecting some moral threats, left wing predisposed people will gravitate to stories and narratives that touch fewer moral matrices. The right wing will gravitate to stories and narratives which activate more moral matrices. Culturally this is reinforced every day depending on which newspapers you read and the people you associate with. A person who joins a group that continually disregard one or more of their moral matrices will eventually leave to find a better moral fit. This is a polarizing self-selection that can lead to the demonization of the other side while bonding with one’s tribe.
In the hopes of helping people see each other as genuinely interested in making a better world Haidt gives a functional (based on what it does) and descriptive (based on the widest examples) definition of a moral system as: the “interlocking set of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanism that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” A moral system can therefore be measured and rated as to how strong or weak it is. Moral Capital (which is analogous to economic capital and social capital and includes them) is “the resources that sustain a moral community”. It is the notion of how well the moral system is working in the society to hold the society together. Intuitively its increase or decrease is felt when people react to proposed changes in the social order. The right has always had a better chance of understanding the left – but the left due to its more limited relevant moral matrices has a harder time understanding the right. Moral capital is Haidt’s attempt to educate the left and to explain the conservative political advantage.
To answer the question of the book “Why good people are divided by politics and religion” Haidt claims it is due to the right wing’s fear (often an inarticulate sense) of losing moral capital. Due to the right’s more diverse moral sensitivity they perceive a wider range of societal threats based on all 6 moral matrices. And on the left it is the complete lack of understanding of anything like moral capital, that is the inability to see relationships between objects other than in one or two moral matrices. 1) The right views people as inherently imperfect. Without law and order in the broadest moral capital sense people will behave badly. The left views people as inherently good but some are made bad due to society. Law and order is part of moral capital for the right and part of the problem for the left. 2) the right sees human reason as flawed and is distrustful of untested theories. The left sees parts of the status quo as the problem and wants to change it. The way things are is the moral system of a society. To change it risks reducing the moral capital of the society. 3) the right believes social institutions arose organically to fit the needs of society. They persist because they work therefore changing what works is a very risky proposition that should only be done under the greatest threat or with the greatest thought and planning. The left believes social institutions arose to cement the power of the people in charge and need to become more equitable and just. Again the moral capital of a society is at stake.