The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

The format is a bit unusual: much of the book is autobiographical, telling the story of how he evolved his conclusions. He got there by observations, measurements, and actually living in India rather than just reading Western interpretations of it. And then iterating on his results.

Probably everybody knows his conclusions: moral choices are based on 6 moral foundations: the spectra of

• Care/Harm
• Fairness/Cheating
• Loyalty/Betrayal
• Authority/Subversion
• Sanctity/Degradation
• Liberty/Oppression

It turns out that “conservatives” are able to describe “liberal” positions more accurately than the reverse, and he interprets that within his framework as further evidence that his fellow liberals use only 2 ½ of the 6 moral foundations: they value Care, Liberty, and to a lesser extent Fairness overwhelmingly more than Authority or Sanctity or Loyalty. Conservatives were more evenly spread. Each group regards itself as obviously moral.

In the third part of his book (motto: “We are 90% chimp and 10% bee”) he examines what bonds people. We are social creatures, and have developed many rituals for bonding ourselves together—and they work very well, whether they are in psyching up for a football game or drilling in boot camp. He notices that the main question of leadership is not “Why does someone want to be a leader?” but “Why does anybody follow?”

He takes great care to make sure this all fits into an evolutionary model—though his work is nowhere nearly as forced as some of the just-so “selfish gene” stories to explain altruism. His model of the “super-organism” works better.

His first model of human behavior is the “elephant and rider”: the first and generally final reaction is not driven by conscious thought; it is usually justified ex post facto.

And yet, at some level that elephant is driven by thought.

Haidt reminds us of the twin studies that show that separated-at-birth twins often wind up with quite similar tastes and politics—and even similar spouses. In our culture, that taste in politics is guided into the liberal or conservative framework (or libertarian, which he discusses and I will ignore). In the liberal case, the child’s inchoate preferences wind up with either the 2 ½ moral foundations and in the conservative the 6.

But. When else in history have people, born with the same innate preference suites, divided into these particular kinds of social/political groups?

History is full of divisions, but until the growth of the WEIRD culture, has any subgroup shown this particular kind of moral truncation? I don’t believe we’ve evolved a new kind of human so fast—and in any event the modern ultra liberal attitudes have no Darwinian future (he also notices this). If people are the same, the difference comes from the social environment.

I have to conclude that the division isn’t entirely intrinsic to people’s preferences. We have to model what’s happening as a moral re-training that magnifies one set of moral foundations and lets the rest wither. How? Exercises of moral imagination, selecting one set of narratives over others, defining a new group identity in terms of a specific moral matrix—That sounds a bit like a religion, doesn’t it? And Rodney Stark showed that most religious conversions came about through a preponderance of friends from the new cult. One writer recently complained that Howard Stern had turned wimpy and PC in his old age {never heard him myself}--I wonder what Howards friends are like.

WEIRD can be rich, but it tends to be barren. I’m told the Roman Empire cities tended to be population sinks. People could get relatively rich, but tended to die off in plagues and whatnot, so only a continuous stream of aspirants from the countryside kept them going.

You can think of comparable, though not identical, instances of moral truncation in the past: the fiery hands of Moloch--“Caring” was not exactly the chief moral pillar in those lands. “If he had different gods, he would have been a different man.”

So I think the elephant, at least in part, can be shaped. Perhaps not so much by the “rider”, since it takes a lot of self-awareness to know what effect the sea you swim in has on you (*), but by the society you interact with, and the subgroups you gravitate toward.

Qui bono from moral truncation? The Prince of this world, of course, but in our WEIRD land, the humans benefiting are the ones with the nicest places in the economic machine. When not tied down by family/community bonding, workers are conveniently fungible. As I estimated some time back, adult consumers consume more than children do. (Does that word “consumer” make your skin crawl? What a world of objectification is in it.) There’s lots of money to be made from anomie.

It is an interesting story, and his framework seems to have a great deal of descriptive power--possibly even predictive, if one can "shape the way the elephant grows."

AVI takes issue with "moral truncation", judging that liberals use all 6, but in ways that weren't captured by the questions. I think this makes calling our partisan divide a religious divide a more useful model. You judge:

An example of a moral question having to do with sanctity/degradation was: “A man buys a chicken at the butcher shop. On a whim, he has sex with it, and then cooks it and eats it.” People divided (in split seconds) into 2 groups: those who were disgusted and then came up with more or less relevant explanations of why the act was wrong, and those who were not and explained their position as “it Harms no-one.”

An example from AVI's approach might have been "A man builds a dam across a stream to make a millpond."

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(*) Yes, I mix metaphors sometimes.