#divinity dimension

This chapter was about our perception of divinity, which Haidt claims is an important part of human psychology whether or not God exists.

He starts with two quotes about how we need to seek nobility or divinity in order to live good lives:

Meng Tzu: We must not allow the ignoble to injure the noble, or the smaller to injure the greater.  Those who nourish the smaller parts will become small men.  Those who nourish the greater parts will become great men.

Muhammad: God created the angels from intellect without sensuality, the beasts from sensuality without intellect, and humanity from both intellect and sensuality.  So when a person's intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is worse than the beasts.

But this chapter wasn't really about how to live a good life.  It mostly just explained what the divinity dimension is, where it came from evolutionarily, and why it's important to human psychology.

According to Haidt, there are two familiar dimensions along which we relate to each other: closeness and hierarchy.  These govern our interactions with one another (we behave differently to close friends than we do to strangers, and we behave differently to our superiors than we do to our subordinates).

But there's also a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that he calls "divinity", that also affects how we relate to other people.  To put it shortly, some people (regardless of their closeness to us or their social status) are simply more spiritually pure.

This "divinity" dimension appears cross-culturally, though WEIRDerners often have trouble perceiving it.

To be honest, I don't fully understand this chapter.  This outline is an attempt to make sense of it to myself.  For that reason, I'm not going to follow Haidt's chapter organization as closely as usual.

Apparently, the divinity dimension is rooted in our instinct towards disgust.

Disgust

Disgust, as an instinct, "is largely about animals and the products of animal bodies (few plants or inorganic materials are disgusting)".  Disgusting things include blood, excrement, snot, vomit, and other bodily fluids.

Disgust spreads by contagion.  Something that touched something disgusting is also, by extension, disgusting.  For this reason we are grossed out by rats, cockroaches, and other animals that live in garbage.

Disgusting things make us want to perform purifying actions, "such as washing or, if it's too late, vomiting".

"Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat."  As humans got smarter, we also started eating more meat (including scavenged carcasses), which exposed us to more disease.  Plants can't contaminate other things by touching them ("[i]f a poisonous berry brushes up against your baked potato, it won't make the potato harmful or disgusting"), but rotting meat and excrement can.  So the feeling of disgust helps us track this contamination.  Haidt describes disgust as a "guardian of the mouth".

Disgust also protects us from disease.  We're grossed out by bodily fluids like blood, excrement, and mucus, which are likely to be carrying disease.

Disgust "guards the body more generally".  We're disgusted by unattractive, undesirable mates.  We're also disgusted by "skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body".

It makes sense that disgust would expand from guarding the mouth to guarding the rest of the body, since humans have always lived in dense groups where it's easy to spread disease.

Categories of disgust: "food, body products, animals, sex, death, body envelope violations, and hygiene".

Disgust and Morality

"But the most fascinating thing about disgust is that it is recruited to support so many of the norms, rituals, and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves."

The point seems to be that we use disgust when reasoning about morality.

Human and Animal

Humans are thought to be higher than animals along the dimension of divinity.  And we measure how "animal" an action is by how much it disgusts us (e.g. eating with our hands).  Therefore, every time we do something disgusting, it brings us closer to being animal, thereby reducing our divinity.

So in order to assert our humanness, we are careful to perform biological processes in cordoned-off, socially sanctioned ways.  We wear clothes to cover the "animal" parts of our body.  We pee and poop and have sex in private.  We enforce table manners to make eating into a less animal thing.  (My mom used to tell me to "eat like a human being".)

Disgust is the emotion that enforces these behaviors.  People who break these norms are disgusting.  If we do or see people violating these taboos, we feel degraded; we feel ourselves being lowered on the axis of divinity.

Purity and Pollution

Most cultures attach moral significance to physical pollution.

It's considered immoral to pollute the body in various ways (such as violating food taboos, or performing forbidden sexual acts).  (I guess Haidt's argument is that violating these taboos makes us more animal, and lowers us on the scale of divinity, which reaches up from animal to god?)  Haidt never mentions this, but the moral obsession with virginity seems like a good example of this.

People who are already polluted are forbidden from taking part in holy activities.  For instance, "women in many cultures [are] forbidden to enter temples or touch religious artifcats while they are menstruating, or for a few weeks after giving birth".  The Laws of Manu tells Brahmins that they shouldn't even think of reciting holy scripture while pooping or peeing, or "when food is still left on [their] mouth or hands", or when "in a cremation ground", or "while wearing a garment that [they have] worn in sexual union", etc.

Haidt tells of the temples in Bhubaneswar, which are sacred spaces in the Mircea Eliade sense.  At most temples, Haidt was allowed into the courtyards, and he could enter the antechambers as long as he removed his shoes and any leather items.  But because he is not a Hindu, he was not allowed into the inner sanctum.  They weren't trying to keep it a secret, they were just trying to keep it from being polluted by "people such as [Haidt] who had not followed the proper procedures of bathing, diet, hygiene, and prayer for maintaining religious purity".

Everything in Bhubaneswar is suffused with this sacredness dimension. Places can be more or less sacred (the inner sancta of temples being the most sacred), and so can parts of the body (the head and right hand are more pure, the feet and left hand are polluted).

Other

Immoral acts evoke a disgust reaction, and make us feel less pure, even when they have nothing to do with the physical body or the distinction between humand and animal.

"When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred."

Physical pollution is thought of as akin to moral pollution.

Physical purity is thought of as akin to moral purity.

Sacred Intrusions

The dimension of divinity is prominent in Bhubaneswar where Haidt did fieldwork.

But it was also prominent in America in Victorian times.

According to Mircea Eliade, all cultures have an idea of sacred and profane space, time, and activities.  Purity / pollution marks the boundary between the sacred and the profane.

WEIRD culture is the first culture to ignore sacredness, and to live in a world that is fully profane.

But even in modern America, we perceive sacredness in certain personally significant places ("a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth").

But these are discovered by the individual, not specified by the culture.

Disgust and degradation are the emotions we feel when we see something low on the scale of divinity.  But elevation and awe are the emotions we feel when we see something high on that dimension.

Elevation

Elevation is the feeling we experience when we see someone do a really good deed.

We tend to feel it in the heart, or as a "dilation" of the chest.

It sometimes involves feelings of chills, or of choking up.

When people experience elevation, they feel motivated to good deeds also, or to become a better person.

Haidt and his students have studied elevation in the lab.

They evoke it using "clips from documentaries about heroes and altruists, and selections from the Oprah Winfrey show".

Elevation is different than "admiration for nonmoral excellence".

"Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or 'psyched up.'  Witnessing extraordinarily skillfull actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions."

“Elevation, in contrast, is a calmer feeling, not associated with signs of physiological arousal."

People in the studies say they want to do good deeds, but they are no more likely than others to help a researcher who has dropped a stack of papers.

This may be because elevation influences the vagus nerve, which controls the parasympathetic nervous system, calming people down and making them less prone towards action.

This would explain why people associate elevation with the heart.  "The vagus nerve is the main nerve that controls heart rate, and it has a variety of other effects on the heart and lungs, so if people feel something in the chest, the vagus nerve is the main suspect, and it has already been implicated in research on feelings of gratitude and 'appreciation.'"

(But the vagus nerve is hard to measure, so there's no conclusive evidence of this yet.)

The vagus nerve is associated with the hormone oxytocin.  "The vagus nerve works with the hormone oxytocin to create feelings of calmness, love, and desire for contact that encourage bonding and attachment."

Haidt's student Jen Silvers wanted to see whether elevation influenced oxytocin.  oxytocin is known to increase lactation, so Haidt and Silvers brought a bunch of lactating women into the lab and showed them a video that would induce elevation.  almost half the women leaked milk, or nursed their babies after watching the video, and also played more warmly with their babies.  whereas only a couple women in the control condition, where they watched an amusing video, leaked milk or fed their babies.

If elevation is associated with oxytocin, this could explain why people feel motivated to do good deeds but aren't actually more likely to do them.  "Oxytocin causes bonding, not action.  Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust, and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passitivty, they might be less liekly to engage in active altruism toward strangers."

A reader wrote Haidt a letter, saying he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first was tears of compassion, which felt like "'being pricked in the soul,' after which 'love pours out' for those who are suffering".  But the other was tears of elevation or celebration, which "'is also like being pricked, only now the love pours in'".

This could explain what Christians mean by "referenes to Christ's love and love through Christ".  Going to church could cause people to experience elevation, where they feel the goodness of Christ and feel his love pouring into them.  "[B]ut it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships.  That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone.  This love has no specific object; it is agape.  It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one's heart."

Awe

Awe is the other emotion that moves us up on the dimension of divinity.

Awe is evoked by the vastness and beauty of nature, or by "viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker".

Haidt says: "In chapter 1, I wrote about the divided self -- the many ways in which people feel as though they have multiple selves or intelligences that sometimes conflict.  This division is often explained by positing a soul -- a higher, noble, spiritual self, which is tied down to a body -- a lower, base, carnal self.  The soul escapes the body only at death; but before then, spiritual practices, great sermons, and awe at nature can give the soul a taste of the freedom to come."

Awe can also be evoked by psychedelic drugs, which make people feel like they are experiencing the presence of God.

Awe is "link[ed] to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self".

"The emotion of awe happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or social vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures"

Awe opens people up, shows them how little they understand, and thereby makes them more receptive to change.

Awe is frequently a catalyst in stories of religious conversion (examples: the Bhagavad Gita, and the square in Flatland).

William James studied these stories of religious conversion and found that they contained many similarities, including a sense that the smaller self had been washed away in a moment of profound awe, leaving the larger self to flourish.

These experiences exist for secular people too; Maslow studied them, calling them "peak experiences", and found that they contain many common elements: "The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude."

Maslow said that religions were founded on these peak experiences, though they could lose their vitality over time as they were taken over by bureaucrats.

Science, too, has lost its vitality and its ability to evoke wonder as scientists have emphasized the cold, objective study of facts over the experience of amazement at them.

The Satanic Self

The self is an important part of cognition: it helps us think about long-term goals, and create a narrative of who we are, and maintain internal consistency and self-control.  It also helps us see from other people's perspectives, since we can model their selves.

But it also causes lots of problems.

Haidt associates the self with the internal chatter that often causes us a great deal of stress.  This keeps us "locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity".

Also, "spiritual transformation is essential the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back -- in some sense, killing it -- and often the self objects".  The self partially exists to maintain internal consistency, so it objects to efforts to change.  Also, Haidt associates the self with the part that cares about prestige and status, so it objects to spiritual growth that tries to overcome these things.

According to Haidt, the self is also the part of us that has desires and needs, and the self doesn't like these desires to be denied.  The self is the part that wants to give in to temptation.  So it creates an obstacle to spiritual and moral growth that wants to overcome these selfish desires.  This is why the self is often opposed to the ethic of divinity, and societies who value the ethic of divinity try to deemphasize the self and its needs.

The Culture War

The ethic of divinity can help us to understand the culture war.

Liberals primarily value the ethic of autonomy, and they see the ethic of divinity as reducing people's freedom, and making it hard for them to pursue the lives they choose.

Christian conservatives value the ethic of divinity, and think that a life of pure self-fulfillment is hollow, since it neglects higher spiritual pursuits.  They are willing to reduce autonomy in order to preserve divinity.

"On issue after issue, liberals wnat to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers, and restrictions.  The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social, and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane.  For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves."

Liberalism is good because it prevents people from being mistreated.  "An unfortunate tendency of [societies that value divinity] is that they often include one or more groups that get pushed down on the [divinity] dimension and then treated badly, or worse.  Look at the conditions of 'untouchables' in India until recently, or the plight of Jews in medieval Europe and in purity-obsessed Nazi Germany, or at the humiliation of African Americans in the segregated South."

But divinity adds a dimension of richness to human experience.  "If the third dimension and perception of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature -- an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language."  "If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God."