Teh Third Dimension of Human Social Life: Divinity
Our social world has been modeled as a three-dimensional space. Two of the three axes are found in all human cultures: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status. While the former is seen in the way in which languages have distinct terms to refer to close and distant acquaintances, the latter is borne out by how we designate our bosses using special prefixes or call them using their last names. Social psychologists have shown that people are experts at making distinctions along these axes, differentiating between kith and kin.NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research has led him to conclude that there is a third dimension, an exclusively moral plane, which he calls “divinity“. This vertical dimension is the human orientation towards purity and perfection. It prompts people to engage in helpful deeds, revere saints and sages, and seek out the idea of transcendence. Evolutionarily speaking, this axis could have been the byproduct of our hunter-gatherer pasts. When humans evolved to be meat-eaters, thereby exposing themselves to a galaxy of microbes, it paid to have a disgust reaction to inedible food. This disgust reaction could have eventually resulted in a cultural apparatus that coded “good” as “divine”.
This “dimension of divinity” is so critically importent to human cultures that even when societies go to extreme lengths to repel its influence (as Western society has done in the postwar period), it springs back up in certain unmistakable forms. At least that’s what the historian of religion Mitcea Elaide, who wrote the following passage in The Sacred and the Profane, implied:
Even a person committed to a godless existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others – a man’s birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth.Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the ‘holy places’ of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality othre than that in which he participates through
The Spiritual in the Secular: How Cricket Fills a void of Collective Belonging
The experience of witnessing exceptional feats in sports can evoke powerful emotions, a phenomenon explored by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his research on “elevation.” Haidt’s work suggests a connection between the vagus nerve, oxytocin release, and feelings of bonding triggered by witnessing moral beauty. In a study detailed in his work, Haidt observed that when lactating mothers watched an elevating video, nearly half experienced milk leakage or nursing urges – a physiological response linked to oxytocin, frequently enough called the “love hormone.” This demonstrated a potential biological basis for the feeling of connection and upliftment.
But elevation isn’t limited to scenarios explicitly involving human kindness. The author finds similar feelings when watching exceptional performances in cricket. The joy experienced when Steve Smith scores a century, Jasprit Bumrah maintains a stellar bowling average, or Nicholas Pooran excels in T20 cricket, mirrors the physiological and emotional responses Haidt describes. This isn’t a matter of religious fervor, the author emphasizes, but a deeply felt response to beauty and excellence.
This resonance with beauty and greatness isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout history, thinkers have linked morality, nature, and awe. Immanuel Kant famously connected genuine awe to “the starry sky above and the moral law within.” Similarly, Thomas Jefferson pondered weather the gallantry of fictional heroes could inspire moral enhancement, asking if such narratives don’t “dilate [the reader’s] breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish?”
This leads to a compelling question: could sport function as a “crypto-religious” behavior in modern society, offering a space for experiencing elevation? The author suggests that the superstitious behaviors of sports fans – like fearing to “jinx” a game – hint at a deeper, almost spiritual engagement.For the author, cricket serves as a pathway to a sense of connection and transcendence. Communal viewing transforms the experience into a collective elevation, akin to religious worship. In a society increasingly characterized by individualism and declining religious affiliation, cricket provides a rare prospect to feel “fused with something larger than myself.” It’s a door to belonging, a space where shared passion and awe create a sense of collective purpose and spiritual resonance.