10. Religion is like Football

Almost done with Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. I've blogged on:

1. Introduction
2. Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails
3. Elephants Rule
4. Three Domains of Morality
5. Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
6. The Moral Foundations of Politics
7. The Conservative Advantage
8. Morality an Evolutionary Advantage
9. The "Chimp to Bee" Switch

The second to last chapter, chapter 11 is titled, "Religion is a Team Sport."

1. Haidt's basic claim in this chapter is that religion has played and continues to play a positive role in human society. He connects it to the "hive switch" that helps us to "suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible" (314). Particularly enjoyable in the chapter was his roasting of the New Atheists (Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens).

2. A good bit of the chapter, as many of the chapters, is evolutionary debate. So Dawkins and others basically see religion as an evolutionary accident and misfire. They see it as a parasite of evolution, a "time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking" waste of human energy. To him it's "anti-factual, counterproductive" and full of fantasies. So Dawkins, tell us what you really think.

The problem with the four horseman of new atheism is that their analysis focuses on lone believers and it does so from an almost purely cognitive perspective. Unlike Durkheim, these thinkers have failed to see the reality of "social facts." Here are some of Haidt's responses:

• "Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball. You've got to broaden the inquiry" (290).
• "The function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community. Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we've just done, or to support the groups we belong to."

Let me just say how completely obvious this is and has long been to me. Christians who think it's all about getting our ideas straight so our lives can follow suit are so far off it's embarrassing, and the atheists who have tried to dismiss religion on this basis look just as stupid.

In Haidt's language, it is not believing that leads to doing, but belonging that leads to both believing and doing. This is sometimes just as true of scholarship, unfortunately, as it is of other thinking. Much of the stuff in New Testament studies right now is little more than intelligent, sentimental self-justification.

3.  In the middle of this chapter, Haidt presents three evolutionary models. The first is that of Dawkins and the new atheists. They see morality as having evolved in a two step process: a) hypersensitive agency detective devices helped animals detect the presence of potentially dangerous "agents" in their midst, like predators wanting to eat them. So we see faces in clouds but we don't see clouds in faces. Accordingly, we see gods in the thunder.

The second step for Dawkins is then b) cultural evolution. The most interesting god stories win. Dawkins and others see these stories as parasitic. Religions for him are like viruses.

A second evolutionary perspective recognizes that religion helped homo sapiens survive but denies any genetic component to it. Atran and Henrich found that communities with a religious component survived better than "secular" communes in the nineteenth century, and irrational requirements only helped them survive longer (like prohibitions on dancing and drinking). This is because religion makes groups more cohesive and cooperative.

"Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice" (299). "Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups."

Haidt goes one step further. He suggests that our genes may actually contribute to our religiousness as a species, even with genetic developments that have taken place in the last 10,000 years. Accordingly, "we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily" as the new atheists may think (307).

4. He goes on to make other claims on the basis of research as the chapter ends. "Putnam and Campbell found that the more frequently people attend religious services, the more generous and charitable they become across the board" (310). "Religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans." How about this quote: "The highest levels of wealth, therefore, would be created when religious people get to play a trust game with other religious people" (309).

"It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing" (311).

Haidt suggests that it remains to be seen whether a secular world will economically prosper. Atheistic societies "are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources... into offspring" (313). "Gods were helpful in creating moral matrices within which Glauconian creatures have strong incentives to conform." He has an aside on terrorism, arguing that religion is only a handmaiden to nationalism as a cause in such cases. Group fervor is the primary force, which religion only reinforcing it. In this claim, again, he seems to be stating the bloody obvious.

5. He finally gets to a definition of a moral system: "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" (314). He is being descriptive here. Virtue ethics, he argues, fits human nature best as an ethical approach in terms of how we are hard wired (versus utilitarianism or deontology).

However, if this is a descriptive definition, he suggests Durkheimian utilitarianism as the best system for a society, a sort of "rule" utilitarianism that seeks the greatest benefit for a society as a whole, including its minorities. Meanwhile, any effort to define morality only by isolating a few (Western) issues like "justice, rights, and welfare" is bound to go parochial (315).

Elephants Rule (3)

I laughed repeatedly as I read the third chapter of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, titled, "Elephant's Rule." Here are summaries of previous chapters:

1. Introduction
2. Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails

1. Of course the laugh is on me, because I too am subject to the principles of this chapter. But Haidt showed repeatedly, largely on the basis of experiments conducted, that people immensely follow their immediate intuitions rather than coming to conclusions on the basis of reason. Intuition is like an elephant that turns the rider (reasoning) in a certain direction, and then reasoning strategizes in that direction. Bottom line: "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second."

Our intuitions are like an elephant, and we have them in a fraction of a second. One study in the chapter compared the results of past elections with the flash intuitions of contemporary individuals looking at the pictures of the candidates. The question asked was, "Who looks more competent?" The results of the election highly correlated to those immediate intuitions of people who had no idea who these candidates were, what party they belonged to, or what their actual competency was.

2. One of the funnier examples in the chapter involved "fart spray." So a psychologist on a street corner asked about controversial issues near a cleaned out trash can. However, for some of those surveyed, he sprayed the can with a light "fart spray." The result was that individuals with the fart spray made harsher judgments than those without it.

In a contrary study, people asked moral questions after washing their hands or near cleaning products are more likely to become more moralistic and self-righteous in their answers.

3. Let me apply. I was at a large church recently and I noticed that the pastor had started holding a Bible at multiple points during the sermon. I smiled. There's a certain kind of complainer who always says, "That sermon didn't have enough Bible in it." Ironically, those who make these complaints are often those who understand the Bible the least.

Now, mind you, the Bible is only as helpful as it is applied, so quoting Scripture in itself is only as effective as its application. That means that a sermon that applies the principles of Scripture well is, from a logical standpoint, just as scriptural as one that quotes the Bible all over the place but is unclear in how to apply it.

But people aren't logical. I thought to myself, this pastor might not have changed the amount of Scripture in his sermon at all. But because he holds the Bible, the intuitions of this congregation are going to feel like they are getting more Bible. He's helping them getting over their faulty intuitions, thought I, by showing them a Bible. "Bible spray" makes people feel better about the sermon.

4. This chapter is a smack down to all those who think we are primarily, "thinking things," as Jamie Smith has also argued. It defies those who think our worldviews or ideologies are primary or that our actions somehow flow from what we believe with our reason. Au contraire. We overwhelmingly direct our ideologies, our theologies, our moralities, on the basis of our basic disgusts and attractions, our gut feelings.

There is actually a prejudice test that times how quickly you respond to pictures of differing social groups. If you have a basic negativity toward a certain social group, it will take you 250 milliseconds longer to respond toward the picture of a certain group because you have to undo your intuitive lean toward negativity. Again, it is the emotional processing centers of the brain that fire up when being asked to make a moral decision.

5. Psychopaths reinforce this line of thinking. They can reason just fine. "The rider is perfectly normal" (73). The problem is with the elephant, the moral intuitions. They don't have them.

Even babies already come with the capacity to evaluate individuals on the basis of their social interactions. They are attracted to helper puppets, not hinderer puppets. They have an innate preference for people who are nice rather than people who are mean. Moral intuitions develop very early.

As far as philosophy, "deontology" (duty based approaches) are not rationally driven at all, but driven by our fundamental moral intuitions. Cold utilitarianism must be learned (greater good reasoning). So deontology is our primary mode of operation, but it has little to do with logic.

6. Perhaps to keep people like me reading, he throws us a bone at the end of the chapter. Who are people like me? We are people who want to think that we are not as un-self-aware as all the other moral animals among the masses whose reasoning is a servant of their blind intuitions.

So I want to think that I am more reflective than the throngs going to hear Donald Trump. I want to think I am a better scholar than the popular scholarly books that pretend to go through a logical interpretive process only to end up telling us the orthodox theology we wanted to hear in the first place. I'm thinking of two scholarly books on Hebrews that I would consider popular because they use scholarship to say what people want to conclude anyway.

So he ends the chapter by saying that elephants are sometimes open to reason. In some cases, the rider can convince the elephant to change directions. Usually, he says, it is in social interaction, where someone else's elephant can convince my rider to steer my elephant in a different direction. "The elephant my not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants... or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants" (80).

He allows the possibility that in some rare cases, people may reason their way to a different moral conclusion that contradicts their initial intuitive judgment. He ends the chapter with an experiment where, after being told not to make a moral decision for 2 minutes, the subjects did change their mind from an "initial disgust" position to a more reasoned one.

This week emphasized, "intuitions first." The next chapter will emphasize, "strategic reasoning second."

Intuitive Dogs and Rational Tails (2)

The second chapter of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind is titled, "The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail." Last week I gave a quick review of the first chapter that the old Monday reading group is going through. Yesterday we met to traverse chapter 2.

1. The bottom line of this chapter is that people's "moral" sensibilities (including their sense of politics and religion) are primarily intuitive. People just know what is right or wrong and then they find reasons after the fact to justify their sensibilities.

So, most of the time, our intuitions (the dog) lead to moral judgments which lead to reasoning (the tail). We then influence other people's intuitions with our reasonings. This is the social dimension of the moral/political/religious process.

In another part of the chapter, he likens our situation to a rider on an elephant. The elephant is our intuition, and the rider is our reasoning about our intuitions. Really, Haidt claims, the elephant is in control, and the rider is merely serving the elephant.

2. He begins with the story of the debate among moral psychologists. Plato thought that reason ruled the person (or at least should). Hume thought that our passions ruled our reason. Jefferson thought it was a both/and, that we sometimes relied on reason and sometimes relied on our emotions.

As it turns out, our emotions are not separate from our cognition. "Emotions" are intrinsic to human decision making and those whose brains are "disconnected" here have trouble making any decisions. "Emotions" are intrinsic to cognition--they are part of our reasoning, not something different as Jefferson pictured.

These are apparently fighting words, although to look at American politics and religion, it seems pretty obvious to me. People know what they believe, then they go find reasons to justify it. As a Bible teacher, I have often found that if I can find another way to get people to the theological or practical conclusion they want to believe, then I can get them to be more objective about the original meaning of biblical passages or about some item of theology.

3. Haidt does not deny that a person can change his or her moral intuitions by way of private reflection or reasoned judgment together. He simply claims that those instances are much rarer (especially the private reflection one) than the knee-jerk intuition. Contrary to stalwart names like Lawrence Kohlberg and John Rawls, Haidt and others have suggested that most people use reason to generate clever justifications for moral intuitions they already have.

It was fun to see Haidt reference Dale Carnegie, who was so influential on my Dad. You influence people, Carnegie suggested, not by confronting them with the truth and reason but by understanding the other person's point of view. Empathy is the best way to help change someone else who is taking a "righteous" point of view, not confrontation. My Dad used to quote, "A man convinced against his will is of the same mind still."

4. So Haidt calls this model a "social intuitionist" model. He has done a good job of reeling us in and as much as admits that he is plying his trade on people like me as readers. No doubt at some point he will cross a line and I will start to disagree. He jokingly suggests at the end of this chapter that if he hasn't managed to appeal to the reader's intuitions, perhaps that reader should stop reading. But of course, he is simply manipulating the rationally oriented reader to want then to read more so as to prove him wrong rationally.

There are hints already that I will not completely buy him. I did not think well of E. O. Wilson twenty years ago, but Haidt has appealed to my intuitions in such a way that I barely caught that I was feeling sorry for someone that I mocked in ethics class in the late 90s. We readers are being played or shall I say that my intuitions are being played. :-)

5. Keith Drury isn't back in town, but let me suggest some ways he might mock the field of biblical studies if he were at lunch with us. A great deal of biblical studies is simply scholars playing out their moral intuitions on the playing field of the biblical texts. N. T. Wright is a great case in point to me. He has these interpretive intuitions that he then applies his considerable reasoning skills to justify post hoc, IMO.

The whole theological interpretation enterprise strikes me as little else but a high falutin' way of reading our already existing theology into the biblical text while going through the motions of historical exegesis. In my opinion, half of the Hebrews scholarship of the last ten years is little more than sentimental manipulation of texts and history to say things we want to think.

There are exceptions, IMO. There are people who truly are willing to come to any interpretive conclusion. They are the scientist types who approach interpretation from a less predetermined direction. They are not popular right now. Postmodernism opened up the door to a theological Mardi Gras that has yet to simmer down.

But Haidt would tell me it has always been this way. I'm simply pointing out the current dominant intuition.