Quotes from Jonathan Haidt

If the hive hypothesis is true, then it has enormous implications for how we should design organizations, study religion, and search for meaning and joy in our lives.

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To

Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship.

why did Europeans give it up? Ehrenreich's historical explanation is too nuanced to summarize here, but the last part of the story is the rise of individualism and more refined notions of the self in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century. These cultural changes accelerated during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. It is the same historical process that gave rise to WEIRD culture in the nineteenth century

And you'll find the Sanctity foundation underlying some of the moral passions of the environmental movement. Many environmentalists revile industrialism, capitalism, and automobiles not just for the physical pollution they create but also for a more symbolic kind of pollution—a degradation of nature, and of humanity's original nature, before it was corrupted by industrial capitalism.

Durkheim, who said: "What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to Ã¢â'¬Â¦ regulate his actions by something other than Ã¢â'¬Â¦ his own egoism."65

It is impossible to analyze "the meaning of life" in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life

Durkheim believed that these collective emotions pull humans fully but temporarily into the higher of our two realms, the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. The realm of the profane, in contrast, is the ordinary day-to-day world where we live most of our lives, concerned about wealth, health, and reputation, but nagged by the sense that there is, somewhere, something higher and nobler.

our feelings of disgust can sometimes provide us with a valuable warning that we are going too far, even when we are morally dumbfounded and can't justify those feelings by pointing to victims:

Intuition is the best word to describe the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments and decisions that we all make every day. Only a few of these intuitions come to us embedded in fullblown emotions.

When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

Emerson and Darwin each found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred. Even if the hive switch was originally a group-related adaptation, it can be flipped when you're alone by feelings of awe in nature, as mystics and ascetics have known for millennia.

We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.

Even if you have a brain predisposed to liberalism, you might end up with some conservative friends or find inspiring conservative role models who could be very influential on you, and that could send you down a different track in life.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.

Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.

Congress is full of good, decent, smart people who have devoted their lives to public service.

Anytime we're interacting with someone, we're judging them, we're sharing expectations, we think they didn't live up to those expectations.

Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.

People are voting for the kind of country they want to live in, and there are different views about what kind of country we should have.