Righteous Minds

I am enjoying and learning from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion.

His style is clear, chatty and autobiographical while being rigorously based on data and research. This tone is by design, as he points out. Since a major point of the book is that moral intuition is always prior to moral reasoning, he wants you to like him and feel that he is on your side so you can take in what he has to say without bolting. Unlike the icky Pastor Joel Osteen, Dr Haidt is upfront about this.

Using evolutionary theory and a lot of testing for his field of moral psychology, he discerns in all humans five foundations of morality. Although a liberal himself, he chastizes liberals for seeing and using only two, rejecting the other three. Conservatives use all five.

The five are care, fairness --the very White/Eurocentric Left's only moral interests (at least consciously)--, loyalty, authority and sanctity.  With the exception of the modern Western Left, all other human moral systems are interested in all five fundamentals: not only condemning cruelty and injustice, but also betrayal, rebellion and sacrilege.

He later develops a sixth --liberty--but I am still reading so...Plus, you will note that despite his remarkable even-handedness, the listing implies that the Left's favorite conscious virtues, listed first, are most important.

My own take is that these foundations are indeed foundational and inescapeable. What liberals do is deny their own covert use of loyalty, authority and sanctity in their ethical world.  As I have often said, the post-modern Progressives are a fundamentally religious movement, just as totalizingly theocratic and imperialistic as the patriarchal, violent, homophobic and dogmatic Muslims they so bizarrely defend and accomodate. Watch how Muslims react to an insult to Mohammed and how Progressives react when one of their Sacred Victim Groups is not reverenced.

Using other thinkers --and Haidt is very careful to give credit to others when it is their due-- he has a useful understanding of inherence in human nature, what Jungians consider archetypal. It is like a book of first drafts. The final story will differ from author to author, but no one starts out with a blank page. Like the six taste centers of the human tongue, the five moral centers in the human brain are inherent in the species, no matter what kind of moral cuisine you eventually develop a liking for.

Haidt and his partners in research are talented at presenting situations which provoke the underlying structure of moral reasoning, where intuition always precedes justification. It is especially amusing to listen to supposedly educated, articulate and enlightened Westerners stammer about their ethical assessments of brother/sister incest, fucking a supermarket chicken prior to cooking and eating it, or consensual cannibalism.

If a phenomenology of morality interests you, I recommend this book.


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