As noted the other day, I've been reading The Righteous Mind by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In the book, Haidt challenges us to consider two separate visions of society.
First, imagine society as a social contract developed for the mutual benefit of all within. Each individual in that society is equal, and all are left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The only purpose to which power is ever exercised against the will of an individual is to prevent harm to others.
At its best, such a society would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other's rights and voluntarily band together when needed to help those in need or to change laws for the common good. This is basically an idealized version of the liberal-progressive vision of society.
By contrast, Haidt then asks us to imagine another society created not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerges organically over time as people find ways of living together and binding themselves to each other. This other society would suppress selfishness and punish those deviants and freeloaders who threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit in such a society is not the individual but the hierarchically structured family.
At its best, such a society would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, left to their own devices, would otherwise pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. Such a society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one's groups over concern for out-groups. This is basically the conservative ideal of an America that prioritizes family, church, and country over individual whims.
According to Haidt, the failure of the American left is they cannot see the latter society in terms other than hierarchical, punitive, and religious. To a liberal, since the latter vision places limits of people's autonomy and endorses traditions, often including traditional gender roles, it must be combatted, not respected.
However, the patron saint of the latter vision of society is the late 19th century sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim acknowledges that the first vision of society, the liberal-progressive vision, leaves autonomy and personality intact and takes very little independence away from the individual. However, in the second vision, one can transcend the limits of the individual and becomes part of a larger whole, whose actions one follows and whose influence one is subject to.
And here (finally!) is my point - in the latter vision, Haidt notes that the dropping away of the individual ego to participate as a part of something larger can be liberating in its own way. As Durkheim observed, "The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation."
In other words, Haidt maintains that liberals fail to realize the emotional experience of identification with a larger whole. That experience can allow one to fully but temporarily transcend from the realm of the mundane, the ordinary day-to-day world where we live most of our lives, concerned about health, wealth, and reputation, into the higher realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate.
As Haidt puts it, humans seem to be neurologically wired to respond positively to forming groups and acting in the interests of well-defined social units, be they families, churches, and nations, or less-well-defined units like clubs, gangs, bands, flash mobs, and audiences. Haidt calls this the human hive mentality and notes that psychologically, we're 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. We not only seek identification with larger social groups, but in that involvement we can experience a transformation from the mundane to the divine.
In a future post, we'll talk about how this relates to crowd surfing.
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