I have just finished reading the rather lovely and charming "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt and thought I would capture some of my reflections on the book (and the associated research which underpins the work). First all the positives - it is clearly written and engaging, and represents a kind of progressivist optimism which is always very appealing to me. Just like Hobbes (which shockingly, doesn't get a single mention in the whole book, not even a name check in the detailed bibliography - a real deficit in my opinion) it takes prima facie seriously the seeming incommensurability of the diversity of a culture's political beliefs. But rather than investigate which political structures might work best in a world with fundamentally divergent political opinion, it seeks to develop a psychological perspective which appears to result in no more than certain tactical hints, aimed mostly at fellow progressivists.
The fundamental and no doubt truest part of this book is his characterisation of moral (and therefore political) intuition being largely driven by pre-rational, evolutionary, sub-conscious 'elephants' of motivation being sometimes haltingly steered by a conscious rational 'rider'. This ethological metaphor is an evolutionarily more informed variant of David Hume in his 18th century masterwork. "An enquiry concerning the principles of morals". Haidt notes that the rider evolved to serve the needs of the elephant. Great jumping off point, and by the end Haidt revises this to one where we are 90% chimp 10% hive. Let's just call that 90% Hume, 10% Rousseau, for fun. Profoundly unlike Kant, Haidt sees the role of rational deliberation not as a reliable route to moral positions, but as a Machiavellian kind of rhetorical device on our journey to 'win friends and influence people'. In this sense, he's bringing a rather philosophically pragmatic approach to the domain of moral reasoning which Richard Rorty might, for example, be quite positively disposed towards (e.g. if you want to change someone's mind, address your rhetoric towards the elephant; realise that actual moral reasoning as practiced is more like a politician trying to win someone's vote than it is a serious and dispassionate form of philosophical reasoning). While this makes sense as a moral intuitionist perspective, it perhaps does a profound disservice to the possibilities of rationalism in the future.
Again in a clearly pro-Rorty fashion, who railed against final vocabularies and fundamentalisms of all shades, Haidt moves beyond one-dimensional towards a multi-modal perspective on the core planks of a human evolutionary moral framework. He's currently a the satisfyingly random, eminently revisable and non-fundamentalist number of six and this allows for a broad range of cultural diversity in moral arrangement in human culture. He then binary partitions these cultures into the rather culturally specific WEIRD/non-WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic), as originally espoused by Henrich et. al. in 2010. and then even within WEIRD cultures carves out the progressives from the conservatives. WEIRD cultures, and more potently, progressivists within WEIRD cultures are extreme moral outliers insofar as they perceive objects more foundationally than they do relationships (perhaps a non sequitur, since insofar as they engage in moral reasoning they're mostly engaged in value judgements concerning relationships). In passing, he flags two 'single source' moral frameworks: Bentham's utilitarianism and Kant's deontology and also has a crack at flagging both men as on the autistic spectrum, which I suppose relates to the earlier point that people in WEIRD cultures see objects more clearly, psychologically speaking, than they do relationships. The implication here is that somehow our culture may have been led down that path to becoming WEIRD by these two men. I think that is historically beyond naive - I'm reminded of the great book "Reinventing the Individual: the origins of Western liberalism" by Siedentop. However, as soon as raising the point, he backs away from it, reminding himself that he's in the game of description ("is") as opposed to moral prescription ("ought"). All in all, what felt like it might be a strong claim for psychologising away some pretty heavy philosophical hitters just instead kind of petered out and he moved on to talk about the six moral planks of moral intuitionist theory.
Care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation and liberty/oppression are the six dimensions of morality, he claims, from which every known culture samples with varying degrees of intensity. He gives some decent social psychological experimental results here to support this six-dimensional space but rather handily he also gives us the usual evolutionarily believable just-so stories for these dimensions (whilst simultaneously denying that they are just so stories). So care arose from the adaptive pressures brought about from caring for children; fairness from the adaptive changes around taking advantage of cooperation without leaving yourself open to exploitation; loyalty reaps the benefits of group or coalition love; authority allowed us to reap the evolutionary advantages of social hierarchies; sanctity worked on the so-called omnivore's dilemma (when you eat everything, you're opening yourself up to being poisoned or infected); and finally the newest dimension, liberty, the evolutionary advantage of overthrowing tyrants.
Next comes the central thesis of the book, that conservatives have an advantage because they sample more uniformly from all six dimensions of their moral framework, whereas progressivists pitch their post hoc rational claims largely around the first two only, namely care and fairness.
But let me transform these axes into the realms of sexual activity to show how context matters, that even this multi-polar intuitionist model reveals persistent and continual usurpations. The desire to have sex with daughter-like substitutes, incest, paedophilia, in place of care, the desire to engage in inter-racial sex or to be otherwise unfaithful to one's partner, the desire to to be dominated, the practices of bestiality or corporophagy or golden showers , the desire to be bound or owned or enslaved. In fact, the only supposed moral plank for which I could not find a sexually deviant counter-example is fairness. Perhaps this is therefore a more fundamental moral dimension?
That we humans can cross these boundaries and indeed regularly do so, suggests that we need to be careful with how determining these just-so stories might be in explaining human moral principles. If these same fundamental dimensions can be so consistently breached, we must note that humans can 'play' with these concepts in a situational way.
Haidt thinks progressivists have been missing a trick here in de-emphasising four of the six moral threads. And that it may be politically astute to market progressivism (to win market share, if you like) in a more uniform way across moral dimensions. I disagree.
I think that, if these intuitionist categories are good dimensions to use in characterising our moral universe (and they may be), we must ask ourselves why progressivists have changed from the implicit 'default' pattern of conservativism, where all six strands ring emotional bells in our hearts.
Did progressivists over-develop two (like over-training ones upper body to the neglect of our lower body)? Or did we just begin to de-emphasise those four because we saw fairly fundamental political and social problems and risks associated with the 'missing four'? Isn't this a political choice? Isn't this how a progressivist wants the supreme court justices of their utopian society to cogitate and ruminate on difficult political and legal problems of fairness and rights? Do progressivists really have to 'regress'? Isn't it ok to accept the evolutionary origins of some moral dimensions, and nonetheless to strive to overcome them? Isn't this also the essence of the Nietzschian 'God is dead' position?
Before wrapping up the second half of the book by applying his science to political social space, Haidt re-energises the evolutionary concept of group selection, this is what leads him to his 90% chimp 10% hive phrase and which, he thinks, beds down the science behind his six-dimensional intuitionist model. It explains/justifies/describes the 10% hive elements of human behaviour (willing to risk one's life for one's platoon buddies, etc). In short, group psychology is an essential component in understanding any genuinely psychological aspect of human behaviour. But the alleged positive human behaviours which emerge from these conditional group selection modes are all contingent, localised and not universal. You'll no more reach universal human rights relying on our 'conditional hive' neural architecture than a monkey will reach the moon by climbing up a tree to get closer to it. Rousseau, Mill, Marx, political philosophy in general, represent moments when riders drive the elephants in useful directions which benefit wider and wider fractions of the living creatures around us than group selection ever will. Group selection is necessarily pro-your one group and anti-every other group within any one particular universal grouping framework (of which we have an endless supply). The rider sometimes leads the elephant in a direction which is more globally maximising and less likely to be stuck in cultural 'local maxima'. Close to the end of the book, he devotes a chapter to the power of religion to co-opt our groupish behaviour for positive effect. This in actually also the principal conclusion of the Siedentop book and it is clearly true. Religions come in many forms and many shades of universal claim for dominion - those with the most universal a domain have aligned themselves with the most successful cultures. We have the Cluniac monasteries of the early dark ages to thank for conceptions of universal human rights and a strong concept of the individual. Though Confusianism, Hinduism, Judaism, and perhaps even Islam could also lay claim to some kind of accommodation with the current shape of our modern world. These religions perhaps managed to suppress the 'natural' desire to cheat though postulating the all-seeing deity watching you contemplate a cheating act. Note however that the speculation here is quite the opposite - namely that we might 'naturally' be predisposed to cheating (rather than to fairness).
He ends be returning to this theory (aimed at Kant and Bentham), that your political leaning is an individual dispositional characteristic of your individual genome, and that the culture needs a reasonable spread of types here for an ideal/ well functioning culture. This takes him back to the rather Aristotelian ideal of the attributes of a life well-lived (though in his case at the cultural level as opposed to the individual level, as per Aristotle).
He leaves us with the thought that governments (via their environmental protection agencies and anti-monopoly regulators) play an essential role in putting a price on externalities which corporate bodies might otherwise dump on others, if given the chance. This is a strong point, so strong in fact that it is probably work living with some of the distortions such government involvement might inevitably bring for the benefits it brings. Libertarians are likely naive on this point. The marketplace abounds in market failure, but is also tremendously productive.
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