How I stopped hating religion
Here’s a short essay I wrote for CNN on how I went from being an angry young atheist to being a psychologist who thinks that religion was a crucial part of our biological and cultural evolution for morality.
CNN also shows this short video interview with me, done at TED 2012, on tribalism in our political lives:
Read More
On Bloggingheads with Robert Wright
Robert Wright (author of Nonzero, and The Evolution of God), interviews me about the book. We largely agree about the evolution of religion, and about the New Atheists being fundamentalists. Bob is dubious about group selection. He acknowledges it could exist, but tries to come up with individual-level explanations for human groupishness. Bob and I co-taught a class at Princeton. We are on very friendly terms, and this allows our disagreements to be vocal without any risk of it descending into anger. Relationships help open-minded thinking and civil disagreement.
Read MoreFollow the Sacredness
Politics is so weird in part because voters are not pursuing their self-interest, they’re pursuing their group interest. And even for group interest, it’s often not about the group’s material interests, it’s about protecting their sacred totems. Circling around sacred objects helps a group cohere. So if you want to understand why we’re suddenly all talking about birth control and abortion at a time when economic matters are so much more important, follow the sacredness. I explain this in more detail in a NYT Review essay, here,
and also in a 2 minute NYT video, below:
If you want to learn more about sacred values in action, read the work of Scott Atran, e.g., here on war, and read chapters 11 and 12 of The Righteous Mind.
Why we can’t resolve to be more civil
Here’s a riotously funny clip from The Daily Show in which a journalist who heads “The Civility Project” is asked about a column she wrote calling the Tea Partiers “economic terrorists.” Isn’t that just a little bit uncivil, asks John Oliver? No, she says, as her inner press secretary (the rider) kicks into action to find justifications for the moral judgment made by her automatic intuitions (the elephant). She doesn’t realize her own flagrant hypocrisy.
The clip illustrates two of the three main principles of The Righteous Mind:
1) “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Harrop’s reasoning is so clearly devoted to justification, not truth-seeking. She even recommends just telling the Tea Partiers directly that their “name calling is not making them sound intelligent,” but doesn’t grasp the irony when Oliver says that to her directly. You can’t change people’s minds with reasons if their intuitions point the other way.
2) “Morality binds and blinds.” Harrop is such a partisan liberal that she can’t think clearly. She can’t see what’s happening, either with the Tea Partiers or during her own interview with Oliver.
This is why we at CivilPolitics.org do not endorse civility pledges. Pledges are made by riders, and they have no effect on behavior. We endorse more indirect methods and institutional changes to change the “path” that the elephant is traveling.
TED 2012 talk on Religion, Evolution and Self-Transcendence
I spoke at TED 2012, on the reason why people have so many ways of achieving self-transcendence. My goal in the talk was to illustrate visually some of the most complex ideas in my book — chapters 9 and 10 on multi-level selection and hive psychology. If you read those chapters, the video will make even more sense. If you watch this first, those chapters will make even more sense.
The basic idea is that our ability to lose ourselves and become “simply a part of a whole” (as Durkheim put it) is an adaptation, not just a fluke of crossed neural wiring, and the New Atheists would have it. It’s a mental ability that is of little use for helping individuals beat their neighbors in competition, but boy is it useful for helping teams bond together to out-compete other teams.
In other words, I’m siding with Charles Darwin, E. O. Wilson, and David Sloan Wilson on this issue, and against the dominant (but fading) view in evolutionary biology that group selection never happened.
[Be sure to watch this video full-screen, for the video effects]
Moral Narratives
I was a guest on BeastTV (Daily Beast), with John Avlon (author of Wingnuts). We talked about the dueling narratives of left and right that make it easy for each side to believe weird stuff.
Read More