Hi Dwill. I agree with you that Haidt is non partisan and argues against Dawkins,for instance, on his explanation of religious memes.DWill wrote:Hey Flann, I'm not familiar with the statement of Haidt's you cite. It makes him sound quite reductive about religion, which I don't find him to be. When he talks about the sense of elevation as a need of all humans, and identifies this sense as perhaps the foundation of all religion, he is not saying that it was built into us to foster the survival of individuals or groups. It's just the way we're made up. There is no difference here between his POV and saying that God made us this way. I think Haidt has shown himself to be, like David Sloan Wilson, a nonpartisan atheist. I say bravo to that.
You could look into the last few chapters of The Happiness Hypothesis for more info.
I was going on a talk Haidt gave which seems to be distilled from his book,"The Righteous mind." I'll provide a link and for convenience if you start 38 minutes in he takes about ten minutes from there to give his explanation for religions.
In this talk it does seem reductionist.He starts with shared intentionality and goes on to develop the idea of "a moral matrix" which is required to deal with "free riders and slackers."
Co-operative groups are favoured by natural selection and among competing groups a "tribal mind" develops distinguishing them from others.
He extrapolates from the centrality of the ancient campfire to religious manifestations of this as exemplified in circling by Muslims and pagan circling of maypoles to modern more secular circling such as joined hands around America.
What's curious is that he seems to regard morality as a "consensual hallucination." Everything is driven by Darwinian imperatives of survival and reproduction.
He may be saying that we are made this way but it looks like he is saying that's it's an inevitable development from evolutionary requirements.
It may be as you say Dwill ,that he expands his ideas in other books as you suggest.
Here's the link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5_WdU5aGkA
One of the more difficult questions is the origin of language in humans. Noam Chomsky the linguistics expert accepts the standard evolutionary account. He considers language to have emerged "suddenly" in evolutionary terms. Language is innate to human nature in his view and not really something that is gradually learned. Rather we are wired for language.
He thinks there may be laws such as natural laws which account for it's design. Here's a brief excerpt from Chomsky on Language design.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLk47AMBdTA
Chomsky of course would doubtless take issue with Jonathan Haidt on the benefits of capitalism and would read history rather differently.
The recent global economic crash and the collateral human damage from it would appear to advise caution on the "benefits"of capitalism.
Another question for the standard view of human development is the business of "out of place artifacts." This is a strange world with postulates of aliens creating advanced civilizations and a conspiracy in archaeology to suppress contrary evidence.
I'm sceptical about such hypotheses about aliens but there does seem to be some explanation required for these artifacts.
The ubiquitous existence of pyramids in the ancient world is a commonly cited one.
P.S. Just looking into this,it seems that a lot of speculation is based on the technology thought to be required to build these ancient monuments.
This seems false and these people did have the tools and methods to build these.
No need for aliens to do this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=phZUl9zulqg