The Righteous Mind

Jonathan Haidt “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”  Pantheon Books., 2012, 318 pp. plus 57 pp of notes

Haidt blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and, in so doing additionally explains why conservatives can navigate that moral map more skillfully than liberals.

     To explain how our brains functions, the author poses a metaphor of a man riding a very large elephant.  The man is the reasoning portion of our brain, quite small relative to the size of the elephant.  The elephant is our original reptilian brain—it is where almost every decision is made and this decision is then given to the small portion, the reasoning portion, of the brain to justify the action already decided on.  It is a difficult task for the man to control the elephant.  After reading this book I believe the reader will find the author makes a pretty convincing case to support the elephant/man metaphor.

The book presents six psychological foundations of morality that are found in and across all cultures and are part of every human being, albeit in less or larger proportions in each person: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, 5) purity/sanctity, and 6) liberty/oppression.    Research has shown that liberals morality tends to rest most strongly on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating foundations when confronted with a dilemma; conservatives, on the other hand, tend to balance all six when confronted with a moral choice.  Morality is the key to understanding humanity.

We are all born with the brain organized around these six foundations--experience determines the emphasis we place on each of these elements.  If you want to discover where you stand, I recommend that you go to www.YourMorals.org and participate in the ongoing survey found there.  I have not yet finished the survey but I am quite pleased that I do not seem to fit in either the left or right bins. 

My Notes:

Pg. xii:  The author presents the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.  The book provides a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.  Haidt hopes to give the reader a new way to think about two of the most important vexing, and divisive topics in human life: politics and religion.  

Pg. 25: Where does morality come from?  The nativist answer is that it’s innate; The empiricist claim it comes from childhood learning; The author considers a third possibility, a rationalist answer,  that morality is self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm, but rejects this answer as well.  Instead, he concludes:

·        The moral domain varies by culture.  It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures.  Other more sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.

·        People sometimes have gut feelings—particularly about disgust and disrespect—that can drive their reasoning.  Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.

·        Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm.  Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.

After establishing that morality doesn’t come primarily from reasoning, the author goes on to explain how morality can be innate as a set of evolved intuitions and learned (as children learn to apply those intuitions within a particular culture).  We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.  (Somehow I think this explains why I was devoted to Pabst beer in my twenties).

Pg. 45:  When human beings evolved the capacity for language and reasoning at some point in the last million years, the brain did not rewire itself to hand over the reins to a new and inexperienced charioteer.  Rather, the rider (language-based reasoning) evolved because it did something useful for the elephant.  This rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next—moral reasons are the tale wagged by the intuitive dog.

Pg. 61:  Psychopaths Reason But Don’t Feel:  Roughly one in a hundred men (and many fewer women) are psychopaths.  Most are not violent but the ones who are commit nearly half of the most serious crimes, such as serial murder, serial rape, and the killing of police officers.  This ability to reason combined with a lack of moral emotions is dangerous.

Pg. 70:  The first principle of moral psychology is, Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

·        Brains evaluate instantly and constantly.

·        Social and political judgments depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes.

·        Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments.  Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental (as can anything that makes people think about purity and cleanliness).

·        Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally).

·        Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality).

·        Affective reactions are in the right place at the right time in the brain.

The bottom line is that when we see or hear about the things other people do, the elephant (our original reptilian brain) begins to lean immediately.  The rider, who is always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move, begins looking around for a way to support such a move.  Why do we have this weird mental architecture?  As hominid brains tripled in size over the last five-million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist?  Wouldn’t it have been more adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe?  That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.  It turns out that people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.  Therefore the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.  In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish.  We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team, and to demonstrate commitment to our team.

Pg. 96:  Nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic forming the acronym WEIRD).  It turns out that this WEIRD group is statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature.  Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the U.S., the educated upper middle class is the most unusual of all.  The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.  It has long been reported that Westerners have a more independent and autonomous concept of the self than do East Asians. 

Pg. 114:  Hume recognized the importance of human nature: he believed that philosophers who tried to reason their way to moral truth without looking at human nature were no better than theologians who thought they could find moral truth revealed in sacred texts.

Pg. 116:  According to one of the leading autism researchers, Simon Baron-Cohen, there are in fact two spectra, two dimensions on which we can place each person: empathizing and systemizing.  Empathizing is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion.  Systemizing is the drive to analyze the variables in a system, to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.  If you are good at reading maps and instruction manuals, or if you enjoy figuring out how machines work, you are probably above average on systemizing.  If we cross these two traits, we get a two-dimensional space and each person can be placed at a particular x y place on that space. Autism, including Asperger’s syndrome, is better thought of as a region on the lower right corner of the lower right quadrant on that space.  The two leading theories in Western philosophy were founded by men (Kant and Bentham) who were as high as could be on systemizing and were rather low on empathizing.

Pg. 122:  Virtues are social constructions.  The virtues taught to children in a warrior culture are different from those taught in a farming culture or a modern industrialized culture.

Pg. 130:  The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development.  No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood.  But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.  Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. 

Pg. 170:  The archaeological evidence supports that our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers.  Yet, although our minds are structured in advance of experience for hierarchy, hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary.  These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes.  They also put an end to equality.

Pg. 195:  In what might be the pithiest and most prescient statement in the history of moral psychology, Darwin summarized the evolutionary origin of morality in this way: “Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.”  He believed that morality was an adaptation that evolved by natural selection operating at the individual level and at the group level. The author believes that most but not all of human nature is shaped at the individual level.  We are, metaphorically, 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

Pg. 204:  It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.  Human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality.  At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together.  Many people assume that language was our Rubicon, but language became possible only after our ancestors got shared intentionality.  A word is not a relationship between a sound and an object.  It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.

Pg. 207:  Our ancestors first began to diverge from the common ancestor we share with chimps and bonobos between 5 million and 7 million years ago.  Beginning around 2.4 million years ago, hominids with larger brains begin to appear in the fossil record.  These were the first members of the genus Homo.  Around 600,000 years ago we begin to see hominids with brains as large as ours.

Pg. 216:  A catastrophic volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago from the Toba volcano in Indonesia killed off almost all humans.  Every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through.

Pg. 250:  Believing, doing, and belonging are three complementary yet distinct aspects of religiosity.  When you look at all three aspects at the same time, you get a view of the psychology of religion that’s very different from the view of the New Atheists.  The function of those beliefs and practices is ultimately to create a community.  Evolution ruthlessly eliminates costly and wasteful behaviors, yet all cultures have some version of religion.  Scientists who are not on the New Atheist team have been far more willing to say that religion might be an adaptation (i.e., it might have evolved because it conferred benefits on individuals or groups).  This view suggests that religions are sets of cultural innovations that spread to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative. The gods of larger societies who can see everything are usually quite concerned about actions that foment conflict and division within the group, such as murder, adultery, false witness, and the breaking of oaths. Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust.  Religions can spread far faster than genes, as in the case of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, or Mormonism in the nineteenth century. 

Pg. 268:  Religion does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing.  According to Robert Pape, who has created a database of every suicide terrorist attack in the last hundred years, suicide bombing is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power.  It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland. 

Pg. 270:  What is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to regulate his actions by something other than his own egoism.  Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.

Pg. 277:  At the French Assembly of 1789, the delegates who favored preservation of the current order sat on the right side of the chamber, while those who favored change sat on the left.  The terms right and left have stood for conservatism and liberalism ever since.

Pg. 299:  By the 1990s lead had been completely removed from gasoline.  Lead levels in children’s blood dropped in lockstep with declining levels of lead in gasoline, and the decline has been credited with some of the rise in IQ that has been measured in recent decades.  Several studies have demonstrated that the phaseout may have been responsible for up to half of the extraordinary drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s (of course Roe V. Wade, 1973, is also given credit).

 Pg. 311:  In 1976, only 27 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties—counties that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percent or more.  By 2008, 48 percent lived in a landslide county.

Pg. 312:  If you want to understand another group, follow the sacredness.  As a first step, think about the six moral foundations, and try to figure out which one or two are carrying the most weight in a particular controversy.  …Liberals might have more difficulty understanding conservatives than the other way around because liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality.