Friday, September 21, 2007

Wired Morality   [Jonah Goldberg]

Since it seems the entire blogosphere is talking about Jonathan Haidt's theories of morality. I figure I'll throw my two cents in. You can find the New York Times story that launched the whole conversation here. Also, Will Wilkinson's posts on the subject flesh out more of the political salience. Also: Ross Douthat chimes in here (Ross, turn off the italics), Ron Bailey here, Rod Dreher here, Sullivan here.

Here's the most commonly cited passage from the Times piece:

Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity...

They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity...

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

First off, I think it's fascinating stuff (I've just ordered Haidt's book from Amazon). Second, it strikes me as precisely the sort of serious discussion of psychological differences between conservatives and liberals that has been utterly lacking in the recent "left brain, right brain" studies I've been caterwauling about for the last week or so around here. Third, I think it rings particularly true that conservatives understand where liberals are coming from more than liberals understand conservatives. I mean this on an emotional and inuitional level, not necessarily an intellectual one (though I don't rule that out either). Conservatives are far more prone to having their heart strings pulled by liberal sob stories than liberals are likely to be moved by conservative appeals to purity and order.

Two points that haven't been made as far as I can tell. One, this is far less new and pathbreaking than some are suggesting. In a sense this is a classically neoconservative piece of social science. Note: I'm using "neoconservative" in the historically grounded sense of using social science to confirm things traditionalists have long argued and not in the current moonbatty sense of "Hebraic warmonger." The idea that man has a religious instinct is very, very old and has been argued by a wide and diverse set of thinkers. Just a very few off the top of my head: Will Herberg argued that man is "homo religiosus." Irving Kristol argued that man is innately "theotropic." Robespierre, argued that the revolution must cultivate the "religious instinct." John Dewey argued that man should shave the supernatural from his religious drives and use what's left as the core of a religiously imbued liberalism. Richard Rorty made noises along these lines as well. And of course the evolutionary pschology crowd has been working on this sort of thing for years. And, Eric Voegellin argued that religious drives are the engine of history and the Rosetta stone to understanding modernity (a view I am very sympathetic with).

If you believe, as I do, that our religious drives are to some extent hardwired then it would only make sense that you could find evidence of this in sociological and psychological studies.

Two, a smaller point. I don't think that the results from folks like Rod Dreher, Ron Bailey, Andrew Sullivan or myself are nearly as telling as they might seem at first blush. I took the test — my results are below — and on more than a few of the questions it was very easy to overthink the answer. Words like "fairness" are so crammed with nuance and exceptions that it's easy to imagine that a Randian and a communist would both answer honestly when they say they care a great deal about fairness. I had to ask myself, "What does the tester mean by fairness?" because my own definition probably differs from others. For example, I think conservatives would generally say it's fair for there to be very rich people and very poor people so long as the rules of the system were fair. Many liberals would respond, "No, any system that produces such vast inequalities is by definintion unfair." These sorts of problems are only going to be more pronounced among people who work with these sorts of ideas and concepts for a living.

The larger point being, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff here — and I need to read a lot more — but I'm far from 100% sold on what I've read so far.

Anyway, you can take the test here. And here are my results:

Oh, one last thing: please don't send me your results if you can avoid it. I don't mind feedback, but I don't need to hear the scores of dozens of people I only know via email.

09/21 11:15 AMShare