Mares: The Righteous Mind

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(Host) The current political climate of widespread moralizing about
one’s own positions – and the demonizing of one’s opponents – sent
writer, former state legislator and commentator Bill Mares to a new book
for some explanations.

(Mares) Why do liberals think that
conservatives are moralizing, selfish hypocrites? And why do
conservatives think liberals care only for society’s unfortunates and
want to “spread our wealth, but not our work ethic?”

I’ve just
read an insightful book which may not solve the partisan bitterness so
common in these times of high political polarization, but which helps me
to understand some of the moral and psychological sources of that
gridlock. The book is called The Righteous Mind: Why good people are
divided by religion and politics
. The author is Jonathan Haidt, a moral
psychologist who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Using
the disciplines of anthropology, biology, sociology and psychology,
Haidt first explores the origins and practices of human morality.

In
our moral evolution, intuition came first and remains first. Reasoning
is a distant second. In fact, reasoning has developed not as an
independent path to search for a disembodied truth – but to buttress
intuition. In a nifty metaphor, Haidt likens intuition to an elephant
and reason to its rider. At best, the rider can get the elephant to lean
one way or the other – but not to change its direction sharply.

Every day we make dozens of instant moral judgments, which seem like self-evident truths and are hard to dislodge.

Haidt
says that to pose a struggle between secular and religious views is
wrongly limiting. There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.
Instead, Haidt says that everyone draws upon a variety of moral
foundations. They include, with their opposites: Care/harm;
fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; and
sanctity/degradation.

According to Haidt, liberals tend to focus
on the foundations of caring and fairness and largely dismiss the
others. Conservatives respond to all – yet give less homage to caring
and fairness than do liberals.

A sixth foundation, that all
share, has to do with the needs and the beliefs of the group, both
negative and positive. We may disparage the “tribalism” of the Middle
East or Africa, but we have our own here.

In another neat
phrasing, Haidt argues that religion both binds and blinds. He says, “It
binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the
fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us
to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have
something important to say.”

His final chapter was the only
disappointment because he did not have a neat answer. As deeply
intuitive creatures, we have great difficulty connecting with those who
have different moral matrices. The chapter title had the plaintive ring
of Rodney King: “Can’t we all disagree more constructively?”

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