Righteous Minds

There is a generous bucket of concepts that, when grasped, explain damn near everything about human beings. We are naturally tribal - people need people, just as Barbra Streisand famously speculated; our brains, where all thought and feeling reside, seem roughly the same, but actually differ considerably, person to person.

And here’s another one, served up by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his excellent book The Righteous Mind: our moral ideologies, which appear to be well-considered and highly developed frameworks to which we sign on out of intellectual contemplation and earnest conviction, are in fact subconscious emotional reactions wrapped in endless rationalizations obtained from those who mirror them.

Put another way, our ‘belief’ in our moral convictions is ultimately just gut reaction – and the ‘belief’ is the emotional reassurance from others with similar guts, validation that cements those reactions in place. We make moral judgments by giving in to an emotional impulse, and concoct a valid reason after the fact – which our peers authenticate for us, assuring us we’re ‘right’.

That’s a very tough pill to swallow – and we all must swallow it, whatever side of the ideological fence we repose to – but it explains, so, so much.

It’s the reason we have a great divide between two vast tribes, both of which are populated by intelligent people of good intent who are one and all utterly convinced of their own ‘rightness’.

Haidt’s model is a hand-in-glove fit with neuroscience. We have long known that the human brain is built out in layers, each of which developed sequentially: our fight-or-flight impulses live in the most primitive part of the brain, telling us that our raw emotions represent our original decision-making system – survival through impulsive behavior. Our cortical brain, where reasoning and social processing occur, developed much later. It makes sense, then, that we experience emotional reactions to a situation first, and apply reason after the fact.

It's also the case that, as individuals, we differ in how much of each sort of processing we do – limbic vs. cortical. That’s just genetic variation; some of us have more brain tissue in limbic areas, some less – and the same for cortical tissue.

And thank Zeus for that variation: it’s better for the human community as a whole that we have many of each kind of person (and there are way more than two), because that variety ensures that we have a response range to the challenges of surviving in the world that allows us many options.

This variation manifests within an array of basic “moral” features of human behavior. Haidt calls them “moral foundations” and lists them as follows:

care/harm

loyalty/betrayal

fairness/cheating

freedom/oppression

purity/degradation

authority/subversion

Within this mix, conservatives prioritize them more or less equally, with slightly higher adhesion to loyalty and authority; liberals, on the other hand, give more weight to fairness and care than the others. These differences in moral priorities alone explain most of the partisan divide – and it all derives from differences in the brain.

One area where Haidt puts the lie to modern political psychology is in affirming that most everyone, liberal or conservative, defaults to the truth mentioned above: we are all ultimately social creatures, people who need people. We derive our identities and our understanding of the world from the communities in which we grow and live; we are not “rugged individualists,” as the John Wayne disciples in our modern politics have tried to assert. The Old West such political actors mythologize wasn’t really a man on a farm with a family and a rifle; it was many families living and working side by side, supporting and depending on one another, day in and day out, as their children grew. This is biologically obvious in our exhilaration in group activities (ball games, concerts, summer picnics) and the helpful impulses we see even in our two-year-olds. “Self-interest”, then, turns out to be more a myth propagated by politically-minded economists than a psychological reality.

But we’ve segregated our world, and in the most unhealthy way, in the isolation of each group from the other. On both sides of the moral divide, each has lost the strengths of the other, and had its own weaknesses amplified. And our constant echo-chamber self-validation fortifies this dysfunction, as we each become hypnotized in the glow of our own moral “rightness”.

But the “rightness” is in the diversity of the community as a whole, not the moral foundation preferences of any one group; it is the diversity itself that represents the human moral frame. ‘Morality’ isn’t so much the code of an individual as it is a collective agreement on a way of living that enables a thriving community; just ask the Native American tribes, or the small towns of old.

We can see the truth of this in the groups we see around us that eschew this diversity in favor of rigidly-enforced groupthink: our political parties; our churches.

No one wants to hear Haidt’s underlying message, that the only path back to a healthy society is the acceptance that variations in personal emphasis on the moral foundations makes us stronger; that “our group” isn’t “right” and the other “wrong”, but that we are all “right” in different ways and all those different flavors of “rightness” make for the healthiest communities. Again, just ask the Native Americans.

This kind of thinking is, of course, a sacred cow slaughterhouse, but we need to get to a place where we realize that’s okay: those sacred cows are deeply inbred and need to be put out of their misery. Haidt’s ideas only feel uncomfortable because we’ve allowed ourselves to be programmed into resisting them, as they threaten the powerful, put the lie to their lies, and feed the illusion that our “rightness” justifies our rejection of our neighbors. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Haidt offers us the most powerful tool of all – understanding – to be used to turn all of this around, and his timing is just about perfect: we’ve never been more in need of being turned around.