Dick
Pountain//Political Quarterly 18/02/2014
"The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and
Religion" by Jonathan Haidt
Penguin Books 2013
The
protracted war of attrition between those who would defend and those
who would demolish the Welfare State is being fought on the terrain
of Economics, a great pity because that offers the aggressors far too
many advantages. The state's defenders might be well advised to break
out toward the more favourable ground of Social Psychology, because
in democracies comprised of atomised, vote-wielding individuals the
mind is often capable of overruling the wallet. Debates over the role
of the state invariably turn moralistic, for example pitting the
virtue of "standing on one's own two feet" against the
virtue of "caring for others". Could it be that the
opposing sides don't merely have opposing views
about "human nature", but that they actually possess
different natures?
That's
a crude summary of the conclusion of Jonathan Haidt's book "The
Righteous Mind", a conclusion that depends upon a relatively new
experimental approach to the constituents of human nature. The author
researches social and cultural psychology at the University of
Virginia, where he's spent a couple of decades studying the mechanism
of moral decision-making from an "intuitionist"
perspective. That's to say he believes that moral decisions are
fundamentally non-rational, that we all possess unconscious,
emotionally-based moral heuristics that guide our moral decisions,
for which we can only supply rationalisations after
we've already made them. This intuitionism draws on a tradition
stretching right back to Hume's Treatise, and if true it has profound
implications for politics. He believes that people are intrinsically
self-righteous and barely amenable to arguments that don't support
their existing beliefs.
His
experiments depend upon a series of strong moral dilemmas ingeniously
devised to preclude all reasoned analysis (often by exploiting major
taboos like incest or bestiality). In "The Righteous Mind"
he combines these results with others from neuroscience, social
psychology, genetics and evolutionary modelling to describe a
plausible set of these subconscious moral heuristics which seem
innate to human minds of all cultures. Indeed he claims that
different cultures, religions and political stances differ precisely
in the weight they place on these various heuristics. Clashes between
different parties or religions are profound clashes between different
unconscious assumptions that distort communication and sometimes
render it impossible.
The
book begins with this declaration:
""I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to 'do' morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music [...] But I chose the title 'The Righteous Mind' to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental."The book's three main sections correspond to Haidt's three basic principles of intuitionist moral psychology:
1) Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
2)
Morality is about more than harm and fairness (the main concerns of
liberal utilitarians).
3)
Morality may both bind a community and
set it against other communities.
Haidt studied in Chicago under the anthropologist Richard Shweder from whom he gleaned a suspicion of rationalism and a distinction between "sociocentric" and "individualistic" societies. A sociocentric society puts the needs of groups and institutions first and subordinates the needs of individuals to them: examples range from traditional tribal societies, through theocracies to secular totalitarian regimes. Individualistic societies place the individual first. This is a distinction that runs deep because it nurtures different kinds of self. The industrial West has become increasingly individualistic over the last two centuries, and even our ostensibly collectivist welfare states mainly protect individuals against the vicissitudes of life. Almost all social and political science starts from individualist assumptions, while many of the world's peoples still live sociocentric lives, hence that incomprehension which, for example, dogs our relations with the Islamic world.
Shweder's
influence, and some fieldwork carried out in Brazil, encouraged Haidt
to create a repertory of sophisticated questionaires for identifying
peoples' moral assumptions, which he used to uncover what he calls
his six basic "Moral Foundations", atomic components of
actually existing moralities. These foundations are he proposes
universal, having a biological basis in brain structure. They evolved
by a combination of individual and group selection to make us into
social animals, but highly competitive ones. Since group selection is
still controversial Haidt devotes a whole chapter to reviewing the
latest evidence: "Natural
selection favored increasing levels of ... “group-mindedness” -
the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share
group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social
institutions, including religion."
Some
of Haidt's foundations correspond to known functions of the brain's
emotional areas (the limbic system) as recently elucidated by
affective neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp. He
names the foundations using axes of binary opposition: care/harm;
fairness/cheating; liberty/oppression; loyalty/betrayal;
authority/subversion; and sanctity/degradation. The last of these
would reflect the physiological disgust mechanism, present in all
higher animals, which evolved to avoid poisoning and infection. We
humans extend its scope far beyond the realm of food by labelling
objects, behaviours and persons as sacred or forbidden.
Haidt
then applied his framework to the analysis of political and religious
allegiance, conducting some 132,000 interviews on US voters who
self-described as liberal, conservative and libertarian. He found
they differ significantly in the degree to which various moral
foundations affect them. It seems plausible enough that, for example,
sanctity/degradation might underly totems, taboos and dietary
prohibitions in ancient and modern sociocentric cultures, but he
finds it equally important in differentiating US conservatives from
liberals. The unconscious, emotion-based nature of these moral
foundations explains the great ferocity of such differences. Liberals
appear most influenced by just three of Haidt's foundations,
care/harm, fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression, whereas
conservatives are almost equally affected by all six. The sheer venom
of the Tea Party's opposition to Obama is clearly fuelled by emotion
rather than reason: it violates their notion of loyalty (that
birth-certificate libel), authority (soft on our enemies) and
sanctity (plain old-fashioned racism). Those values mean less to
Democratic voters who are more moved by the unfairness of bankers'
bonuses and the lack of "care" of private medicine.
Several
books I've reviewed for this journal questioned why US workers
repeatedly vote against their own best economic interests, but Haidt
suggests that perhaps they don't: they simply vote for interests like
authority and sanctity that we on the Left don't share. If so, that
suggests that a radical shakeup of Left political theory is overdue.
Marx, a convinced materialist, placed the economic (that is,
material) at the helm of politics, but notoriously died before he
could elaborate a fully-fledged materialist theory of ideology. Left
intellectuals strove for much of the last century to extract such a
theory, recruiting extra tools from Nietszche and Freud. The result is
the babel of post-modern critical theories, all contending either
that "human nature" doesn't exist at all, or at the very
least is wholly socially-constructed and sufficiently malleable that
one can inscribe any desired utopian character upon it. The cost of
abandoning dogmatic Marxist-Leninist notions of class-consciousness
and economic determinism has been retreat to a thinly-disguised
version of Romantic vacant liberty (surprisingly close to neo-liberal
ideas of freedom). Haidt's work is unlikely to be well received in
these circles, where his semi-popular prose style and liking for
folksy metaphors will no doubt be regarded as naïve and less than
serious.
In
fact this book is far from naïve, presenting an intricate and
closely-argued case that draws on Plato, Hume, Kant, Mill and
Durkheim to interpret his experiments. Neither is his concept of
moral foundations necessarily
inimical to critical theory: for example his sanctity/disgust axis
has clear relevance to themes in both Foucault and Agamben. When
taken together with the cognitive studies of Kahneman and Tversky,
Haidt's work traces the outline of a new hedonic psychology, a
science of desire (or Bentham's "felicific calculus"
finally realised). We instinctively recoil because this prospect
threatens our cherished notions about free will, but the absence of
utopian goals leaves such utilitarianism as the only compass
remaining to democratic politicians. Rather than whipping up the
masses to insurrection, social democrats need to continually attract
their votes.
Deep
understanding of the electorate's desires used to be the mark of a
great politician, but like so much else in contemporary society this
skill crumbles in the face of sheer complexity. The Left needs to
absorb this new science of mind if only so that we can counteract its
use by the Right. For example, why did the 2008 financial crisis
unexpectedly boost the Right rather than the Left? Because the Right
understood how to exploit voters' guilt
over excessive debt, and to deflect their wrath
over unfair bankers' bailouts and bonuses onto welfare recipients. Or
again, current furores over paedophilia and FGM demonstrate how
popular evaluations of childhood innocence can change radically over
50 years, and across different cultures. Woe betide the politician
who fails to understand such changes.
