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Cohesion Quotes

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Cohesion Quotes

“We tend to trust others with whom we share similar values or worldviews. The shared belief in the supernatural world accesible through trance, where one interacts with watchful ancestors and spirits might be a basis upon which trust could be built. If while ritually interacting with beloved ancestors, members of both groups pledge their mutual allegiance, then rivals might become friends and trading partners. Once again, a psychological resource, trust, gives access to the material resources of trade.”

ReligionSocietyTrustEvolutionCivilizationRitualEvolutionary PsychologyCohesion
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“In all countries ethnic diversity reduces trust. In Peruvian credit-sharing cooperatives, members default more often on loans when there is ethnic diversity among co-op members. Likewise, in Kenyan school districts, fundraising is easier in tribally homogenous areas. Dutch researchers found that immigrants to Holland were more likely to develop schizophrenia if they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Dutch people than if they lived in purely immigrant areas. Surinamese and Turks had twice the chance of getting schizophrenia if they had to deal with Dutch neighbors; for Moroccans, the likelihood quadrupled. Dora Costa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Matthew Kahn of Tufts University analyzed 15 recent studies of the impact of diversity on social cohesion. They found that every study had “the same punch line: heterogeneity reduces civic engagement.” James Poterba of MIT has found that public spending on education falls as the percentage of elderly people without children rises. He notes, however, that the effect “is particularly large when the elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.” This unwillingness of taxpayers to fund public projects if the beneficiaries are from a different group is so consistent it has its own name—“the Florida effect”—from the fact that old, white Floridians are reluctant to pay taxes or vote for bond issues to support schools attended by blacks and Hispanics. Maine, Vermont, and West Virginia are the most racially homogeneous states, and spend the highest proportion of gross state product on public education. Most people believe charity begins with their own people. A study of begging in Moscow, for example, found that Russians are more likely to give money to fellow Russians than to Central Asians or others who do not look like them. Researchers in Australia have found that immigrants from countries racially and culturally similar to Australia—Britain, the United States, New Zealand, and South Africa—fit in and become involved in volunteer work at the same level as native-born Australians. Immigrants from non white countries volunteer at just over half that rate. At the same time, the more racially diverse the neighborhood in which immigrants live, the less likely native Australians themselves are to do volunteer work. Sydney has the most diversity of any Australian city—and also the lowest level of volunteerism. People want their efforts to benefit people like themselves. It has long been theorized that welfare programs are more generous in Europe because European countries have traditionally been more homogeneous than the United States, and that people are less resistant to paying for welfare if the beneficiaries are of the same race. Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser have used statistical regression techniques to conclude that about half the difference in welfare levels is explained by greater American diversity, and the other half by weaker leftist political parties. Americans are not stingy—they give more to charity than Europeans do—but they prefer to give to specific groups. Many Jews and blacks give largely or even exclusively to ethnic charities. There are no specifically white charities, but much church giving is essentially ethnic. Church congregations are usually homogeneous, which means that offerings for aid within the congregation stay within the ethnic group.”

CommunityRaceTrustDiversityImmigrationCohesion
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”

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Book:War in Human Civilization
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“It is hard to overstate the biological significance of obsessions, compulsions and the psychological mechanisms that produce them. On the one hand, compulsions bear striking similarities to various repetitive, ritualized behaviors observed in other animals --including self-grooming, food inspection and washing, and checking for predators. On the other hand, cultural rituals --which also share several features with OCD symptoms-- perform a range of important functions in human societies, from group coordination in social and religious ceremonies to the transmission of knowledge between generations.”

MindReligionSocietyEvolutionary PsychologyCohesionOcdEvolutionary Psychopathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“Beliefs about overimportance of thoughts and thought control are more frequent in highly religious people and mediate the observed association between religiosity and OCD. Thought-action fusion overlaps with magical thinking and is associated with religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and positive schizotypy. most likely, thought-action fusion plays a significant role in the etiology of autogenous obsessions.”

MindReligionSocietyCohesionOcdEvolutionary PsychopathologyEvolutionary Psychology Change
Book:Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach
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“The scaling up of human social organization into mega-groups comprising millions (even hundreds of millions in modern nation states) would not have been possible without the human facility for culture acquisition and transmission on a massive scale.”

ReligionHealthEvolutionIllnessDisorderMentalCohesionEvolutionary Psychiatry
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teen who play team sports are happier than those who don’t. humans are embodied; a phone-based life is not. Screens lead us to forget that our physical bodies matter.”

ReligionCommunitySocietyRitualEvolutionary PsychologyBondCohesionCollective Effervescence
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“The simple act of eating together, especially from the same plate or serving dish, strengthens that bond and reduces the likelihood of conflict. This is one deficiency the virtual world can never overcome, no matter how good VR gets.”

ReligionCommunitySocietyRitualEvolutionary PsychologyBondCohesionCollective Effervescence
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“In short, there is no consensual structuring of time, space, or objects around which people can use their ancient programming for sacredness to create religious or quasi-religious communities. Everything is available to every individual, all the time, with little or no effort. There is no Sabbath and there are no holy days. Everything is profane. Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.”

CommunitySocietyRitualEvolutionary PsychologyBondCohesionSmartphonesGen ZVirtual Life
Book:The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
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“Religion is complicated- the emphasis here being on the verb -is-. Religion as we see it today is the product of many millennia of evolutionary history. Neither the Olympian pantheon nor the Roman magisterium was part of religion in our ancestral world. To understand religion as a cultural adaptation, we must understand what it was when it first emerged, and what kind of world it was born into.”

LifeReligionSocietyEvolutionEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCognitionCohesion
Book:Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
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“All contemporary world religions impose a moral framework upon their adherents, thereby enabling terrorists to present their conflicts in morally absolute dichotomies, such as good versus bad or righteous versus evil. While legitimizing one's own cause, religions are particularly effective at demonizing those with opposing views. The history of religion is replete with examples in which in-group passions are aroused and out-group hatreds are dangerously ingnited.”

WarReligionViolenceGroupsSocietyEvolutionConflictHomo SapiensCohesionTribe
Book:Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
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“The ability of ritual to evoke both positive and negative affect is, of course, not specific to religion. Secular dances, concerts, and -raves- induce feelings of happiness and joy, and military boot camp elicits pain, shock, and awe. Such secular experiences have strong emotional impacts on participants also, particularly during adolescence.”

ReligionViolenceGroupsSocietyEvolutionHomo SapiensCohesionTribe
Book:Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence
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“Ritual is as old as humanity. The first humans ritually raised hands and voices in both desperation and exaltation, just as we do today. That protracted continuity is no historical accident. Ritual has been as critical to our success as fire and tools.”

ReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“Social rituals enhance social bonding between commune members and encourage togetherness, which increase members’ perceived value of the inside option and thus alleviate brain drain. Rituals also mitigate adverse selection by demanding a hard-to-fake, costly signal of commitment to the commune.”

CommunityRitualBondingCohesion
Book:The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World
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“Las cazas de brujas, en general, tienen cuatro atributos: parecen surgir de la nada; incluyen acusaciones de delitos contra el colectivo; las ofensas que dieron lugar a esas acusaciones son a menudo triviales o fabricadas; y las personas que saben que los acusados son inocentes guardan silencio, o en casos extremos, se suman a la multitud.”

CohesionTribalCazaGruposCaceria
Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
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“Long ago, our ancestors realized that the natural world was not the only wellspring of resources essential to our survival. The mind was just as rich. Humans possess a wealth of psychological resources necessary for survival: empathy, loyalty, commitment, and goodwill. Just as material resources must be processed and managed, so too with psychological resources.”

ReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“The fragmentation of our awareness may trigger dizzying vertigo in the chaos of our living. As such, an overwhelming flurry of connectivity and images generate thereby an oversaturation in our brain and the overabundance makes us anxious, fractured and insecure. This might, in turn, actuate us to cut the wire with the world and stumble into an estranging and contentious cocoon of self-absorption, while off-loading the lush supply of social interaction. Life becomes, then, an intricate maneuvering ground for walking a fine line between sound connectedness and crumbling consciousness, between unflinching cohesion and atomizing fragmentation. ("Give me more images")”

ConsciousnessAwarenessCohesionSelf AbsorptionFragmentationConnectivityCocoonManeuvring GroundOversaturationWalk A Fine Line
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“So confident are we in ritual's power that we dare brandish it against the might of Nature herself. Nature will have its way with us, but we have always used ritual to rob it of the last word. It is nature that determines when a baby is born. But it has always been ritual that decides when a child's body has taken adult form. But it has always been ritual that decides when the boy is recognized as a man or the girl has become a woman. Nature directs our lusts and desires, but it has always been ritual that decides who our legitimate partner is. And in the end, nature snuffs the life from the body. But it has always been ritual that determines when our beloved is dismissed from our care. Humans are the only species that take offense at Nature's indifference to our plight. Ritual is a defiant gesture expressing that offence. If we abandon ritual do we give up something of our humanity? No. It is much simpler than that. If we abandon ritual, we give up being human.”

LifeDeathReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“The ubiquitous singing, chanting, and dancing of traditional societies laid the requisite groundwork from which civilization and modernity sprouted. Take that away and Homo Sapiens are thoroughly ordinary primates - upright chimpanzees, nothing more.”

ReligionEvolutionSingingDancingSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychologiacl resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”

LifeReligionStruggleEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“Despite the many material comforts of modern life, anyone who has lived long enough knows that life's joys are at minimum balanced by its sorrows. Loved ones die, jobs are lost, houses flood, fields burn, hearts and bones get broken, able bodies grow old and ill. None of this is new. Humans have been struggling - and rejoicing- since time immemorial. To keep their footing while shouldering their burdens, our ancestors always turned to ritual. Ritual mobilized the psychological resources necessary to withstand whatever life threw at us.”

ReligionEvolutionSpeciesRitualEvolutionary PsychologyHomo SapiensCohesionUltrasociality
Book:Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion: Psychological and Ritual Resources
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“If a religious community lacks cohesion, it will lose members. But other problems—from isolation to aggression—arise when a religious community is too cohesive, when it is so tightly bound there is no space for adhesive forces to form ties with the wider culture and members of other communities. When inward-looking groups face outward with fear or fury, they can become, to coin a term, dehisive, a bond-breaking social force. The history of religion provides myriad examples of volatile religious movements that overemphasized in-group solidarity and escalated tensions with outsiders.”

CohesionReligious Community
Book:Religion: A Very Short Introduction
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“If personal identity resides in the telling, then so does social identity. Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state.”

ReligionCivilizationAttachmentCohesionSocial CohesionSociality
Book:Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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“Samuel Gregg: Smith underscores, however, that the Scots also focused on another form of rationality: the reasonableness that is embodied and conveyed through time by un-designed habits, customs, and rules. We often do not fully understand the importance of such traditions, as Edmund Burke noted, until we dispose of them. A hallmark of Smith’s work is his study of how such knowledge helps to mold political and economic outcomes. One Means by which such knowledge has been conveyed through time, Smith states, is religion. In a long footnote to his Nobel lecture, Smith stressed religion’s role in shaping the morality needed for cohesive social behavior.”

ReligionTraditionRationalityCohesionAdam SmithEdmund BurkeVernon Smith
Book:The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics
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