This is one of those books that I read and I immediately wish somebody had been more forceful about recommending to me. I knew I needed to read this book for a long time, and I understood it would be useful and I respected Haidt a lot before I began reading it.
But I didn’t realize how powerful it would be.
Haidt is after the foundations of morality, not as we wish they were, but as they actually are. I remember when I was evangelical in high school, staying up late into the night trying to derive a pro-life, libertarian, gay-excluding-but-not-hating moral logic from first principles. I wrote in a blue pen in a lined notebook with a blue cover and called it my Blue Book. I was trying to find the foundations of morality that I wanted.
The first thing Haidt points out -and something I think now is mostly common knowledge- is that this is obviously backwards. I had written down the answer to my moral philosophy at the bottom of the page, and was working from the top trying to prove the point. The Blue Book was not a mathematical text- it was the workings of an invested lawyer, who was getting paid to make an answer up.
Where is the answer coming from then? Haidt points to subconscious, fast-acting and a preceding intuition. When faced with a moral dilemma, our gut knows our answer and our mouth makes whatever excuse is necessary.
What informs the guts though? This was the revolutionary part for me, and one that makes total sense: a set of dynamic social psychological processes evolved to make living together bearable. Humans have what most other animals do not have: we have a theory of mind. This is good because it helps us predict what other humans will do, and then we can garner what the intent of others is, and then we help or hurt that intent. Those that help each other do better, and from the increasingly large group dynamics do the components of morality pour out:
1) Care/Harm, 2) Liberty, 3) Authority, 4) Loyalty, 5) Fairness and 6) Purity.
From a generalized need to care and get care for one’s children, comes the care/harm principle. From the need to keep tribes pseudo-egalitarian (almost all hunter-gatherer tribes are egalitarian to some degree), comes the liberty principle. From the need to counteract and align the liberty principle, comes the authority principle. From the need to punish traitors and keep the tribe intact, comes the loyalty principle. From the need to get rid of lazy free-riders, comes the fairness principle. From the need to get rid of disease, comes the purity principle.
These six principles make up a “moral taste” system, where missing any one specific set of values could wreck the entire system. This finally answered the question I have long, long questioned-- what’s the deal with everyone hating on the society described in Brave New World? A society of consumerist drug addicts seems pretty fun, to be honest. The problem is that it completely fails the Liberty principle. We are designed to despise bullies, and a system that controls us at every level is the ultimate bully.
Finally, Haidt points this moral tastes system at the United States, and finds that an interesting problem occurs: progressives tend to care about the liberty and care/harm principles while conservatives care about the remaining six equally. The problem: liberals become unable to model, or even speak to, conservatives. Conservatives, however, are able to easily model liberals.
I asked a question on an Instagram poll while reading the beginning of this book- Haidt poses a problem: is it immoral for a woman to use an old American flag as a bathroom rag in the privacy of her own home? My Instagram followers are mostly all progressive leftists, so only four people answered in the affirmative; most people said it was fine. I can think of why their answers might be true really quickly, “It doesn’t hurt anybody, so it isn’t bad” is the overwhelming response, but a few of them I imagine feeling, if not thinking, “Fuck the [American] Flag”.
For my friends who voted in the affirmative, I had no idea what they would say. Maybe something about the flag being sacred? I am literally at a loss.
And that is a problem.
In 47 days, possibly the most important election of our lifetime is happening, and it requires a hefty majority of Americans to vote for Vice-President Biden, and that hefty majority will rely on many people who previously voted Red (either a little or a lot). Liberals can talk about how President Trump is causing massive harm to people and stamping on their freedoms, but a full moral palette requires more than just ACAB (liberty principle) and SaveTheChildren (care principle).
We need to appeal to the other principles:
Donald Trump is eroding and purposefully damaging the trust that Americans have in our institutions and our authorities. Americans need to trust the police and justice system, and Donald Trump has destroyed it.
Donald Trump has put his own holdings above the American people, having foreign powers pour money into his hotels and estate, while America has faced the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. He is loyal only to himself; he has betrayed the American people.
Donald Trump has poisoned Americans. He has let our air get poisoned, he has let our water get poisoned, and he has poisoned our national discourse. Of course, he also knowingly downplayed the worst pandemic to appear on Earth in 100 years.
I think most issues can be described in terms of all five moral principles. Covid, for example, is obviously a breach of the purity principle, but it also destroyed the authority of the CDC and the FDA, while Trump betrayed American workers. I could go on.
We need to learn how to speak in multiple moral languages, and to understand that people approach the world with different personalities, with different settings to moral interactions, and that that is a very good thing! We just need to be able to navigate it.
