43 pages • 1 hour read
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
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Part 3: “Morality Binds and Blinds”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Why Are We So Groupish?”
In this chapter, Haidt tries to understand what binds people together in groups and how those binds can be advantageous to both community and individual. Haidt begins with his own emotional experiences following 9/11. Though he always identified as a WEIRD universalist and thought of emphasis on the American flag as bordering on jingoism, suddenly Haidt felt a very strong desire to put an American flag sticker on his car. Ultimately, he decided that he could put a flag sticker on his car, as long as the American flag was balanced with a sticker of the UN flag. Despite reaching this internal compromise, still Haidt felt surprised, even rattled, by how intensely group-minded he felt.
Trying to make sense of this experience via cognitive science and psychology, Haidt contends with a central tenet of evolutionary thought. Haidt acknowledges that there is ample proof that survival of the fittest compels individuals to act selfishly, to be motivated by the constant desire for self-preservation and the passing on of genetic material. Human selfishness, Haidt maintains, sometimes manifests itself as groupishness. Though the idea lost popularity in the 1970s, Haidt works to revive the concept of group selection.
The theory of group selection argues that not only do individuals struggle for survival, but groups also compete with one another for rank and resources. Haidt suggests that strategic cooperation is good for both the individual and the group. Therefore, groups work to be well-coordinated, as competition favors groups composed of team players.
Haidt posits several reasons why group selection is a viable concept and how it may have served meaningful evolutionary purposes. Evolutionary trends favored the combining of cells, moving from simple single-celled organisms to multicellular organisms. These multicellular organisms, these cells that combined, gave rise to a world covered in more complex forms—plants, animals, and fungi.
Uniquely human abilities such as the use of tools and language let humans divide labor and share behavioral norms. Other primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, also use tools and can communicate via sign language, but they lack the shared intentionality seen in humans. Humans plan in concert to reach mutual goals, then decide how to fairly divide shares of their work.
Additionally, Haidt speculates that genes and cultures have coevolved. By this, he means that cultural innovations, including shared moral matrices, changed the environment in which groups lived. These changes had genetic ramifications, as group survival depended on the group’s ability to make the most of the environment. Hence groups became genetically tailored to live and work together in a particular place.
Evolution can happen fast. Modern-day humans are not necessarily just the by-products of ancient hunters and gatherers. Massive environmental changes, as well as cultural shifts, impacted how people lived and converged. These influences play a role in our current genetic makeup.
Haidt also points out that people have worked in groups for reasons other than war. Though survival may often have meant the necessity of violence, groups also existed to share something larger and nobler than the lone individual. Groups work together to express moral matrices and to improve individual longevity and quality of life.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Hive Switch”
In this chapter, Haidt further examines how people come together. He begins with an anecdote about the muscular bonding that occurs in the military, where enlisted individuals march in close formation again and again during their training. People forget themselves and function as a more cohesive unit. This enables those who fight together in combat to shift from a personal “I” to a collective “we” that is invested in the well-being of the entire group.
Haidt hypothesizes that “human beings are conditional hive creatures” (223). Under certain circumstances, individuals can temporarily and ecstatically become part of something larger than themselves. This can happen in a military setting but happens more frequently in a religious environment. Haidt cites the wild abandon at early European bonfires as an example of the collective frenzy that prompts group bonding.
Haidt searches for modern equivalents of these fire festivals that achieve this same “hive switch” that compels people to strip away some of their individuality for greater collective identity. Three experiences that many modern individuals might have taken part in offer that same potential for hive switch.
The first example of switch-flipping is awe in nature. Haidt cites the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin, both of whom recount moments of transcendence from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of the sacred while being out in nature. The experiences with nature trigger a hive switch in two ways: by featuring “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 structure so we must ‘accommodate’ the experience by changing those structures)” (228).
The second example of switch flipping is the use of hallucinogenic drugs common in Aztec religious worship. Drugs served psychic needs and were part of rituals and coming-of-age ceremonies. Even when drugs are not used with the ritual and ceremony, they still offer the opportunity to lift individuals out of the mundane and connect them with something spiritual or transcendent.
The third example Haidt uses is raves. Haidt compares these parties to the bonfires of older social groups. He notes the use of drugs to heighten energy and feelings of openness and love. The hypnotic genres of music played also assist in switch flipping, allowing the individual to become part of a tribe in an intense bonding experience.
In all these situations, oxytocin is enhanced in participants’ brains, leading to greater feelings of happiness and attraction. This oxytocin rush has the effect of making one more protective of the group. Haidt offers other suggestions on how to further hive switch in a group. These suggestions include “increas[ing] similarity, not diversity” (via attention to shared goals), “exploit[ing] synchrony” (dancing, performing group calisthenics, marching, singing, etc.), and “creat[ing] healthy competition between teams, not individuals” (240).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Religion Is a Team Sport”
Haidt applies these concepts of groupishness and hive switch to religion. Before delving into organized religion, he looks at the ways that participating in team sports, whether as an athlete or as a fan, creates community built on shared emotions and goals. The group feels excitement, anger, joy, disappointment, all in tandem. The hive switch experience allows individuals to move beyond their lone experience to be part of the immense emotions of the whole.
Religion, he notes, does the same thing. Believing (in a higher power) and belonging (to a group in a hive-switch way) work hand in hand. Each feeling empowers the other. Haidt takes issue with the standard reasons that rationalists explain the need for faith. Haidt agrees that humans are hardwired with a “hypersensitive agency detection device” in their own cognition that makes them look for answers and meaning when these things are not necessarily there (254). He likewise agrees that from an evolutionary standpoint those that believed and obeyed what they were told may have been more likely to survive.
However, he argues that religion is less of an adaptation and more of a cultural reflection of innate moral matrices. Gods evolve to reflect the values of a group and to enhance the cohesiveness of the group. Gods administer collective punishment and reward. Religious belief, which requires being part of a larger whole, encourages parochial altruism, one in which an individual gives more generously and is willing to sacrifice but specifically for their group. When enmeshed in a religious group, individuals become “Homo duplex—moving back and forth between the lower (individual) and higher (collective) levels of existence” (259).
Haidt then at last offers a definition of morality. His definition of morality does not specify what is moral and what isn’t. Instead, Haidt attempts to pinpoint the functionality of morals. He defines moral systems as “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” (270).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively?”
In the final chapter, Haidt works to reveal how our minds end up more aligned with one political persuasion over another. He sees this occurring in three stages. First, we are genetically given to certain ideas or experiences. This is not so much a matter of being hardwired in one direction or another but instead of having pathways that might nudge us in a particular direction.
Scientists have corroborated this supposition by noticing that glutamate and serotonin, neurotransmitters that govern fear and threat responses in the brain, seem more strongly developed in conservatives. Meanwhile, other studies reveal varying degrees of dopamine, the transmitter linked to sensation seeking and openness, in the neurochemical makeup of liberals. Haidt suggests that our genes and innate brain chemicals provide a “first draft” toward a future ideology.
This draft is later edited—either confirmed or changed—by formative experiences. Because our brain chemistry is unique, it is possible for identical twins raised in the same household to end up with differing ideologies. This, in part, is because of potential neurotransmitter differences. Unique brain chemistry encourages individuals to seek out or avoid certain experiences. These experiences themselves are also formative, making an impact on what we believe and what moral matrices become most significant for us.
Finally, after an adequate number of formative experiences augmented by innate brain chemistry have set us on a clear course toward an ideological home, we construct a life narrative that explains this. These individual grand narratives work to reinforce the moral matrices that we hold most sacred. Though each individual narrative is different, liberal narratives tend to emphasize the Care/harm foundation and the Liberty/oppression foundation most notably, whereas a conservative narrative would emphasize the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations more prominently.
Knowing that each group has a general narrative it adheres to, guided by life experiences and brain chemistry, Haidt argues that the liberal side fails to make good use of moral capital. The left undermines its own moral community—which shares a general narrative and common moral matrices—by emphasizing tolerance over loyalty and self-expression over conformity. Because the left tends to value change and progress, liberals overreach and change too many things too quickly. This reduces moral capital, which in turn reduces the overall effectiveness of the group.
Finally, after presenting conservatives and liberals as yin and yang, two parts of a whole that need each other, Haidt notes ideas from each side that he finds valid and worth exploring and defending. From the liberal side, in which the most sacred moral value is care for victims of oppression, Haidt appreciates the call for governmental control over corporate superorganisms. He also seconds the liberal idea that some problems can be solved by regulation. From the libertarian side, which holds individual liberty most sacred, comes belief in the power of the free market. He also notes, from the conservative side, that the preservation of institutions and traditions offers boundaries and borders that can protect us. As Haidt states: “You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive” (306).
He ends with a call to hold more civil discussion in matters of politics. Understanding moral foundations can help one side more clearly understand what matrices are most vital to an individual. “Morality binds and blinds,” Haidt states, and what we sacralize defines how we see ideology (313). By understanding what each group holds sacred (which of the six moral foundations), we can get better insight into how to talk productively with one another.
Part 3 Analysis
Haidt spends the final section of the book explaining why we look for membership in groups and what that group membership yields for us as individuals. He argues for a different way to understand religion, and he cautions against allowing group affiliation to prevent individuals from understanding other moral matrices. A throughline connecting all this advice is The Tension Between Social Cohesion and Individual Freedom. Haidt’s argument is that humans are both fundamentally community-oriented and fundamentally individualistic. The challenge is to belong to a community without sacrificing the ability to make independent moral judgments.
Haidt aligns himself with recent developments in evolutionary theory by arguing in favor of group selection—an evolutionary concept holding that individuals did not evolve simply in constant competition for survival and resources and that many evolutionary adaptations developed to ensure the survival of the group rather than that of the individual. When individuals work in groups, their chances for survival increase. For Haidt, The Cultural Foundations of Moral Judgment are built on this evolutionary reality: Early humans had to form stable groups to survive, and these groups then created foundational morals to enhance their cohesiveness.
Group bonding is enhanced by what Haidt calls “hive switch,” a phenomenon in which the individual temporarily merges with the group, often in an ecstatic or transcendental state. Dancing or marching can elicit this merging. It can occur in nature or via the use of drugs. Hive switch helps the individual connect to a higher plane of existence, one that moves a person from the profane (the everyday) to the sacred (something connected to spirituality). Neurotransmitters such as oxytocin are secreted in greater amounts when we achieve this hive switch and connect on a higher plane. This phenomenon is further evidence of The Primacy of Intuition and Emotion in Moral Judgment. Actions that bring about this “hive switch” are judged to be moral—at least within the context of the group—because of the positive emotions they evoke. To outsiders, meanwhile, they may appear immoral in that they can obscure or disable independent judgment.
This discussion of group bonding naturally brings Haidt to the topic of religion. Haidt does not wish to dissuade individuals from religious belief. He argues instead that many modern critics of religion have constructed a straw-man argument—caricaturing religion as a form of mind control. This, in his view, is a simplistic and fundamentally unfair way to view faith. He instead presents faith as a shared set of moral matrices. Different faith groups focus on different moral matrices, but they achieve a sense of the spiritual plane through their hive switch and a sense of right and wrong via agreed-upon values.
Haidt concludes by pleading for more civil conversations about values. He points out key concepts that he finds useful from liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. He sees each group as having valid moral matrices but believes that their individual morals render them unaware of one another’s moral foundations. He believes people could disagree more constructively by “talking to the elephant” and trying to understand people’s moral matrices before arguing with them.
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