The Righteous Mind

Why and how do people arrive at certain political and religious perspectives?

That question drives The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon Books, 2012). Author Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Moral psychology is his field.

Haidt cracks the door on his thesis with this simple statement: “We humans all have the same five taste receptors, but we don’t all like the same foods.” Yes, of course, from the very same sensory equipment, we live in a dazzling diversity of foods, flavors, cooking methods, serving pieces, etc.

The same kind of matrix frames our “moral judgments.” Through exhaustive research, Haidt identified six “foundations of morality.” These six “taste receptors” form the basis of our moral behavior. We all have the same ones; from them we develop our own political and religious “taste” preferences (the two words of each foundation represents a scale from the principle to its antithesis).

  • Care/harm
  • Liberty/oppression
  • Fairness/cheating
  • Loyalty/betrayal
  • Authority/subversion
  • Sanctity/degradation

 

What This Means for Politics and Religion

Author Haidt, a self-described “liberal Democrat,” was invited to address a Democratic Party gathering following the 2004 election. His topic: “Republicans Understand Moral Psychology; Democrat’s Don’t.” In fact, he says that liberals largely reject half of the six foundations of morality: loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Strangely, according to Haidt, “very conservative” people value all six equally.

From that, he writes about his excitement about Barack Obama, as “a liberal who understood conservative arguments about the need for order and… tradition.” But after a few months, Haidt became worried. He saw Obama working from only two of the foundations, care and fairness.

Of conservatives, Haidt writes, “…their broader moral matrix allows them to detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive…they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.

Haidt, an atheist, devotes much space to “the hive” – that mysterious dimension where humans lose themselves in something larger and transcendent. He challenges liberals on their disregard of the sanctity foundation. For example, he writes that liberals have difficulty understanding the conservative revulsion about a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine or elephant dung wiped across an image of the Virgin Mary.

So, helpfully, he asks if liberals would understand the sanctity better if Jesus and Mary were exchanged for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela?

Can We Disagree More Constructively?

As stated earlier, we all have wildly differing tastes in food. Wouldn’t we think it strange to have talk radio and cable news programming built around demonizing those who prefer Thai food or Riesling wines? Can you imagine a book built around a thesis that to love cheeseburgers is to be a traitor?

We all live in a matrix of six moral judgments. Just as our common taste receptors allow people to run to a multitude of food choices, so our placement within the moral foundations allows us to try and adapt various political and religious tastes. Anybody have a problem with that?

Yes, they do. But why?

So much of the conflict is rooted in genetics. Haidt: “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear…conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger…liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure.”

It seems to me that Haidt has taken an enormous first step in trying to help everyone see the whole spectrum more clearly and objectively. As a liberal and an atheist, he vigorously challenges his fellow liberals and atheists in their languid and predictable thinking about political conservatism and religion.

For example, he writes about moral capital (the resources that “enable a community to suppress selfishness and make cooperation possible”) and social capital, “the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties.” He sees both as blind spots for the left.

Haidt furthermore writes that this “is the reason I believe that liberalism – which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital…”

To my surprise, Haidt never does engage much of a critique of conservatism (or conservatives). He wants to see more respect, civility, and objectivity in our public discourse, and he models it!

The Righteous Mind is, like it’s author, generous and noble.

He concludes: “Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is comprised of good people who have something important to say.”

Precisely.

9 thoughts on “The Righteous Mind”

  1. Ed, you have no idea how timely this is! I really enjoyed your review of “The Rightous Mind”. Chuck and I were talking about this last night, during the debate! Thank you for posting this as it has really opened my mind to begin understanding the broad differences of “opinions” between conservatives and liberals.

  2. Well, you’ve done your job and piqued my curiosity. I’m going to read the book.

    But I (characteristically, you might say) take issue with one of his premises:

    So much of the conflict is rooted in genetics. Haidt: “After analyzing the DNA of 13,000 Australians, scientists recently found several genes that differed between liberals and conservatives. Most of them related to neurotransmitter functioning, particularly glutamate and serotonin, both of which are involved in the brain’s response to threat and fear…conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger…liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure.”

    Chip: Is Haidt referring to classical liberalism? Or that which in the 20th and 21st centuries is called liberalism? Modern liberalism (including many businesses that want to use the state to protect their economic position) attempts to impose more order, not less, through the regulatory state and even in non-economic areas, e.g., speech codes. (Second point about the quoted statement: Haidt seems to confuse association with causality.)

    Haidt furthermore writes that this “is the reason I believe that liberalism – which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity – is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital…”

    Chip: Classical liberalism certainly did much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity. Modern liberalism long ago left equal opportunity behind and is reducing freedom for the sake of equal outcomes. Once embedded, modern liberalism also fails to allow things to change quickly enough. This is particularly a problem with economic regulation, which prevents otherwise fluid markets from timely responding to new information about supply and demand, and new products and services.

    1. Thank you, Chip. I appreciate your careful (lawyerly!) reading of this.

      I’m barely bright enough to have read the book! So I’m sure I’m not communicating much of the depth and nuance in his presentation. He doesn’t (as I recall) break it all out into classical vs. modern.

      Your points are valid; I do not know the answers. But I do know you. I think you would find the book fascinating and valuable.

  3. darrell a. harris

    Thanks for this Ed. Will definitely give this a look. It sounds like a significant book.

    I do wonder about two things though . . .

    1) Is it not trivializing moral value systems to equate them with cuisine preferences?

    2) And also, Doesn’t the assessment of the low value placed on the sanctity/degradation dichotomy/dyad by Liberals come loose by the author’s own example?

    It demonstrates that Liberals do have a keen sense of sanctity/degradation. They may just hold other things (than Conservatives do) as sacred and not to be degraded. Or am I missing something?

    Thanks for always making us think in invigorating and illuminating ways~

    1. Thanks, Darrell.I appreciate your serious reading and engagement.

      He wasn’t equating the moral values to cuisine; he was just saying that everyone has the same basic planks of equipment (cuisine or values); from that, we develop variegated patterns (of food or thought). Food is something of a metaphor to his thought.

      On the 2nd point, according to the research, liberals tend to ignore or flatly reject the loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation foundations of the moral matrix. He was writing to his fellow liberals (and his fellow atheists) to try to help them understand how conservatives see the sanctity issue. So, in a sense, you’re right.

      1. Without having read the book, could it be that liberals hold certain values/things to be functionally “sacred”–i.e., not to be violated–but don’t think of them in those “religious” terms? For example, someone who believes that “all things are relative” holds that statement “sacred” (notwithstanding the internal contradiction). If we as Christians believe that God has made us to worship, then we must acknowledge that all men will hold something or someone sacred.

        If we do not worship God, then we will worship gods. (John Calvin: ” . . . man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols . . .”)

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