Here is a summary of Chapter 9, 10, and the conclusion, Chapter 11.
Following is a summary of Chapter 9, Divinity With or Without God written by Karl Sch..... He conducted a discussion of this chapter, that Todd also attends. I believe Mr. Sch.... is a reverend. Anything in parentheses is added by me and was reflected in our discussion at SprintMindBody, led by Gary S.
The author begins this chapter saying “the metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland by Edward Abbot. This is a fascinating and wonderful little book that has to do with the effort to explain the concept of three dimensions to those who can only understand two dimensions.
Our author’s point is that we all live in this way encountering things we don’t understand until we capture a glimpse of another dimension.
He makes the statement on 183 that in all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status; which he illustrates as X and Y on page 184. what concerns him in this chapter is the vertical movement between these two where the human mind perceives a third dimension, a moral dimension which he calls “divinity;” which he quickly reminds us that by choosing this title he does not want us to think that he believes God exists because he is a Jewish atheist. He does acknowledge that humans are impoverished when they lose sight of this dimension.
On page 185 in a section entitled “Are We Not Animals” he informs us that he first found divinity in disgust born of his study of cultures where morality has to do with food, sex, menstruation, and the handling of corpses. He began to see what he calls an underlying logic: disgust is largely about animals and the products of animal bodies where disgusting things are contagious by touch. In other words, disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat. Disgust makes us careful about contact and as such supports many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves. (Also the author comments that "the effort to create a three-dimensional society and impose it on all residents is the hallmark of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christians, Jews, Hindu, or Muslim want to live in nations whose laws are in harmony with a certain holy book and doctrine. Mr Haidt feels there are many reasons for democratic Western societies to oppose such fundamentalism, but he wants this chapter to promote an honest and respectful understanding fundamentalism's moral motives.)
He talks about freak shows on 187 As with all freak shows you emerge degraded. My feeling after killing a pregnant rabbit.
If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
The Ethic of Divinity if we go back to the diagram XYZ he discusses the work of a cultural scientist in an Indian city on the Bay of Bengal where he found that the moral concepts of these people clustered around three things: autonomy which revolves around granting people safety from harm while allowing they the greatest freedom to reach their own goals; community which protects the integrity of the group through virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership; and the ethic of divinity which attempts to protect from that which would degrade the spiritual worth of each individual.
On 189 he has an interesting observation with regard to a Hindu temple where non-Hindus were excluded from the most holy place; not as a matter of secrecy but as a matter of contamination by those who had not followed the proper procedures of bathing, diet, hygiene, prayer. On pg. 190 he says, Purity is not just about the body, it is about the soul. If you know that you have divinity in you, you will act accordingly.
Sacred Intrusions: when he returned to the US having learned to see in three dimensions he discovered that the ethic of divinity had been central to public discourse until the time of WWI. In the Victorian Age he said, the vertical dimension of divinity was so obvious to people; but as science, technology and the industrial age progressed, the Western world became “desacralized” because the borders between the sacred and the profane had been compromised.
He grants that all religions regardless of their differences, have places-temples, times-holy days, activities that allow for contact or communication with something otherworldly and pure. As a result on 193 he says that sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of “crypto-religious” behavior. Even atheists have intimations of sacredness…love of nature.
Elevation and agape. In India the author admits to having had a passing experience of being “uplifted” and while it was not something he could explain it did seem to be something worth studying.
Finding himself at the University of Virginia he became familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s collection of writing in which he found a full and perfect description of this emotion he had begun thinking about. (Page 195) he considered calling this the “Jefferson emotion,” but instead stayed with the word elevation.
He then conducted experiments to try to understand this emotion and became concerned when he discovered that the experience of this emotion which he connects to the dimension of divinity does not always results in behaviors that are more altruistic. Pg. 197 recent studies suggest that love could be the answer.
This whole experiment of lactating women which drew a correlation between oxytocin being released during moments of elevation which causes bonding not action, love trust, openness making them receptive to new relationships yet leading to feelings of relaxation and passivity.
Read page 199 (On page 199, Dr. Haidt proposes that daily life for most people offers only a profane existence, and only occasional opportunities for movement on the third dimension, ie for sacred experiences. But people come together "with a community of like-hearted people who also want to feel a lift from stories about Christ, virtuous people in the Bible, or saints, or exemplary members of their own community." Then people find themselves overflowing with love. This kind of love is agape. It has no specific object but feels generalized to all humankind. These religious experiences seem to prove that God resides within each person. We tend to attribute this feeling to the love of Christ, or the holy Spirit in the case of Christianity, to something similar in other religions. Then the idea of divinity becomes self-evident. The drawback is that some people in these communities come to believe that they can best honor God by working to change society and its laws to conform to the ethic of divinity, even if that means imposing religious laws on people of other faiths.)
Awe and Transcendence (Awe is the emotion of self-transcendency.)
New England transcendentalist movement. Ralph Waldo Emerson
People often refer to viewing art, hearing a symphony, listening to an inspiring sermon as crypto religious experiences.
Drugs that create an altered mental state have an obvious(he says) usefulness in marking off sacred experiences from profane. His support of this is expressed at the bottom of 201
Nine features of mystical experience listed on pg.202
He spends time talking about the meaning of “awe” and an interesting comparison between the use of the word in former days and its use today.
William James analyzed the “varieties of religious experience” James “melting moods” are strikingly similar to the feelings of elevation described by Jefferson. (205)
He then talks about Abraham Maslow who collected reports on what he called “peak experiences” from which he gleamed 25 common features. It was his contention that all religions were created as methods of promoting peak experiences…all of which makes sense as a secular psychological explanation of religion.
(Some of these 25 common features are as follows: The universe is perceived as a unified whole, where everything is accepted; nothing is judged or ranked. Egocentrism and goal striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God). Perceptions of space and time are changed. The person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love and gratitude.)
The Satanic Self
The self is one of the great paradoxes of human evolution.
Mark Leary shows that the self is a problem for all major religions. It impedes spiritual advancement in three ways: trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keep people locked in a material and profane world. 2) Spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it and pruning it back. 3)following a spiritual path is invariably hard work requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self denial which the self does not like.
Flatland and the Culture War
Which quotation inspires you more: Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy or It’s not about you?” the first is Gloria Steinem and the second is Rick Warren. (Here Dr Haidt talks about the ethic of autonomy where individuals matter most. Therefore the ideal society protects all individuals from harm and respects their autonomy and freedom of choice. It allows each person to pursue the life he/she wants as long as doing that doesn't harm or interfere with others' rights. (Liberals... see below. The ethic of divinity has a core value that says each person has divinity inside, so the ideal society helps people live in a way consistent with that divinity. It stresses the importance of the group over that of the individual.)
He then informs us that liberals are those who want to maximize autonomy by removing limits, barriers and restrictions and conservatives are those who want to structure personal, social and political relationship in three dimensions where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane.
(Finally Haidt says liberalism and the ethic of autonomy serve as protectors against the injustices of three dimensional societies. It is dangerous for the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy. But Haidt also believes that life in a society that entirely ignores the ethic of divinity would be ugly and unsatisfying. We need a balance of both and understanding of each ethic. Also we need to understand that in the culture war produced by these two groups of believing peoples, each group uses the myth of pure evil to further their cause. This fact is very prominent in the partisan and divisional ranting of both modern political parties in the US.)
Chapter 10: Happiness Comes from Between
Dick Y led the discussion of this chapter. My summary (Ann) follows below.
It has become evident that modern philosophy lacks a deep understanding of human nature. That has occurred because modern philosophy began to devote itself to the study of logic and rationality and it slowly lost interest in psychology and lost touch with the passionate nature of human life. Psychology had to gradually find an answer to the ultimate question: What is the purpose of life? After much discussion throughout this chapter, Dr. Haidt staties that even he has no inspirational answer to this question. But he feels the more important question for us is "What is the purpose within life?" In other words, how ought I to live? What should I do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?
Here we can again assert the Happiness Hypothesis: H =S + C + V. Dr. Haidt believes that C primarily consists of two major parts. One is love which depends on relationships. The other part depends on the goals we set for ourselves. These goals are manifest in our work. Here he goes into the presence of "flow" as proposed by Mihalyi Czikscentmihalyi in his book by the same name. We know that flow comes from having work or hobbies that are challenging to accomplish, but that match our abilities so that we are neither bored by simple demands nor frustrated by too difficult demands that we are unable to meet. This basic need also matches what is called the "effectance motive," --the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one's environment. Having flow in work, achieving an "effectance motive." makes work its best. Work becomes about connection, engagement, and committment. It becomes clear that vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment, but rather exists in the relationship between the two.
In his section on Cross-Level Coherence, Dr. Haidt maintains that to understand ourselves fully we must consider three levels of ourselves: physical, psychological, and sociocultural. He proposes that people gain a sense of meaniing when their lives cohere across all these three levels of existence.
Religion often consists of good rituals that are often symbolic embedded within the practices of the religion. These practices often invoke bodily feelings that create appropriate associations. These associations are then endorsed in a community when practiced over time. These rituals in such a way create coherence as though they were designed for that purpose. Morality and religon both occur in some form in all human cultures and are almost always intertwined with the values, identity, and daily life of the culture. This morality creates altruism. But how does altruism occur under the law of the survival of the fittest? There are multuple theories and speculations about this question. The complex evolution of human beings and their cultures seem to have occurred simultaneously and altruism and religion evolved at the same rate and same times. Therefore we seem to be genetically programmed for the presence of religion, morality and altruism. Though there may have been some advantage to the group who acted as a group, had its own religion which served to coordinate and orient the group members' behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, and perhaps in some cases against other groups, therefore increasing the competitive advantage of the group with the religon.
What happens with the "self" under these group circumstances. Well, when these peak experiences occur, there seems to be an "off" button for the self. The thought processes inside the brain cannot find the body's boundaries and the "self" cannot be located in space either. The person having the religious experience has a loss of self combined with a paradoxical expansion of the self out into space, yet with no fixed location in the normal world of three dimensions. The person feels merged with something vast, something larger than the self.
It appears that rituals in religious practices, especially repetitive movements and chanting especially when performed in a group at the same time, produce "resonance patterns" in the brains and tend to produce these expansions ourside of self.
Dr Haidt summarizes at the end of the Chapter: "It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge."
Chapter 12: Conclusion: On Balance
We must draw on "wisdom that is balanced -- ancient and new, Eastern and Western, and even liberal and conservative." Then "we can choose directions in life that will lead to satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of meaning....By drawing on humanity's greatest ideas and best science, we can train the elephant, know our possibilities as well as our limits, and live wisely."
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