Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“People bind together subjectively against external forces of evil… The dance draws everyone together. Whatever their relationship… they become a unit, singing, clapping, moving together in an extraordinary unison of stamping feet and clapping hands, swept along by the music. No words divide them; they act in concert for their spiritual and physical good and do something together that enlivens them…”

“In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper. He shows how John Calvin developed a strict and demanding form of Christianity that suppressed free riding and facilitated trust and commerce in sixteenth-century Geneva. He shows how medieval Judaism created "cultural fortresses that kept outsiders out and insiders in."”

“If Durkheim is right that religions create cohesive groups that can function like organisms, then it supports Darwin's hypothesis: tribal morality can emerge by group selection. And if Darwin is right that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, then it supports Durkheim's hypothesis: we are Homo duplex, designed…to move back and forth between the lower…and higher…levels of existence.”

“In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally…”

“Why doesn't sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: "To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity." But when secular organizations demand sacrifice…many refuse to do things that don't make logical sense. ”

“What was the secret ingredient that gave the religious communes a longer shelf life? Sosis quantified everything he could find about life in each commune. He then used those numbers to see if any of them could explain why some stood the test of time while others crumbled. He found one master variable: the number of costly sacrifices that each commune demanded from its members. ”

“For many nineteenth-century communes, the principles were religious; for others they were secular, mostly socialist. Which kind of commune survived longer? Sosis found that the difference was stark: just 6 percent of the secular communes were still functioning twenty years after their founding, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.”

“Communes are natural experiments in cooperation without kinship. 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."

“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…such as murder, adultery, false witness, and the breaking of oaths”

“Atran and Henrich suggest that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. Atran and Henrich argue that the cultural evolution of religion has been driven largely by competition among groups. Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas…spread.”