Quotes About Community

European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Barbara Ehrenreich describes how European explorers reacted to these dances: with disgust.

It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together."52 I was stunned. Chimps are arguably the second-smartest species on the planet, able to make tools, learn sign language, predict the intentions of other chimps, and deceive each other to get what they want. As individuals, they're brilliant. So why can't they work together? What are they missing?

a modern version of the muscular bonding that Ehrenreich and McNeill had described. The scene and the experience awed him, shut down his "I," and merged him into a giant "we.

Gods really do help groups cohere, succeed, and outcompete other groups.

In his book Darwin's Cathedral, Wilson catalogues the ways that religions have helped groups cohere, divide labor, work together, and prosper.

Whatever its origins, it's a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson's account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.

Putnam and Campbell put their findings bluntly: By many different measures religiously observant Americans are better neighbors and better citizens than secular Americans—they are more generous with their time and money, especially in helping the needy, and they are more active in community life.60

Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: "It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing."61

my approach starts with 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

We have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. I called this ability the hive switch.

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow.

A college football game is a superb analogy for religion.

Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.

The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e. moral concerns about individuals harming, oppressing, or cheating other individuals). It is broader — including the ethics of community and divinity— in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he

The Penn students spoke almost exclusively in the language of the ethic of autonomy, whereas the other groups (particularly the working-class groups) made much more use of the ethic of community, and a bit more use of the ethic of divinity.14

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.

There seem to be just two primary ways of answering this question. Most societies have chosen the sociocentric answer, placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the needs of individuals. In contrast, the individualistic answer places individuals at the center and makes society a servant of the individual.

No man, woman or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can't be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.

moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society