The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.
Pantheon, 419 pages, $28.95.
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett.
Press, 324 pages, $28.
The last three decades have been bitter medicine for the left. In the late 1970s, the achievements of the New Deal seemed secure, embraced even by Richard Nixon, the most conservative president since Herbert Hoover. Labor unions were an accepted feature of economic and political life. In the wake of Medicare and Medicaid, inaugurated in the 1960s, the path to universal health care seemed open. Nixon himself had created the Environmental Protection Agency, an important victory for the cause of governmental regulation. Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the corporate-loophole-ridden tax code was a "disgrace" and promised to make human rights the "soul" of American foreign policy. Despite much unhappiness over busing and Roe v. Wade, the feminist and civil-rights movements appeared triumphant.
Thirty-something years later ... well, there's no need to call the dreary roll of reverses. In policy and opinion, the country's political center of gravity has shifted far to the right. How has it happened?
Jonathan Haidt's fascinating, important, and exasperating new book offers one set of answers. A social psychologist at the
As we all know and often forget, humans are not purely rational. Or, to put it another way, there's more to rationality than is dreamed of in our everyday philosophies. We have a long, complex evolutionary history, which has left us with a tangled, multilayered psyche and many more motives than we are usually conscious of. With the help of research by a couple of generations of psychologists, anthropologists, and behavioral economists, Haidt has excavated these psychic structures. But before entering on a detailed description, Haidt pauses to emphasize the First Principle of any adequate moral psychology: "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second."
Experiments repeatedly show that - to oversimplify only a little - we all believe what we want, regardless of reasons. This certainly tallies with my, and many other liberals', experience of political debate. Changing one's views in response to an opponent's arguments is about as rare as an honest Congressman. (Cases of both are known, but only a few.) Arguments are largely instrumental; they are meant for attack or defense. Most of the time, we argue like lawyers rather than philosophers. Hume was right: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Where, then, do our moral judgments come from? According to Moral Foundations Theory, morality begins as a set of evolution-derived intuitions, which each child then learns to apply within his or her culture. Haidt suggests six dimensions or categories or foundations, into which nearly all our intuitions fall: 1) Help those in need and minimize suffering everywhere (the Care/Harm foundation); 2) Reward people according to what they contribute (Fairness/Cheating); 3) Advance the fortunes of your group (Loyalty/Betrayal); 4) Defer to legitimate superiors and protect subordinates (Authority/Subversion); 5) Resist domination by illegitimate authority (Liberty/Oppression); 6) Respect your group's totems and taboos (Sanctity/Degradation).
By Haidt's reckoning, liberals focus too narrowly on the first and a special version of the second foundation. Compassion is the supreme liberal virtue, supplemented by egalitarianism, which relies on a view of contributing that emphasizes effort rather than output. Because it is individuals who suffer and need, liberalism is individualistic.
Conservatives, by contrast, have a more balanced moral matrix, resting more equally on the six foundations. The details of that argument rest to a considerable extent on questionnaires and psychology-lab experiments, but Haidt's main conclusion is overwhelmingly plausible: conservatives are less attuned to individual freedom and fulfillment, more sensitive to and concerned about the cohesiveness and stability of groups. They are instinctive Durkheimians, agreeing with the great French sociologist that every society is unified by sacred, unchallengeable beliefs, and that "to free man from all social pressures is to abandon and demoralize him." Even before "social capital" became a social-scientific buzzword, conservatives understood that communities are fragile and require continual shoring up, sometimes at the expense of individual welfare. "If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This," Haidt affirms, "is the fundamental blind spot of the left." Where liberals see individuals in need, conservatives see social structures at risk.
"Republicans understand moral psychology; Democrats don't," Haidt announces in italics.
Republicans trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools). But Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and the military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions). And after they embraced Christian conservatives during Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and became the party of "family values," Republicans inherited a powerful network of Christian ideas about sanctity and sexuality that allowed them to portray Democrats as the party of
Some of this has been said before (eg, by George Lakoff), though not so systematically or with so large a background of experimental data and evolutionary theory. What should we make of it? What is true and valuable, in the first place, is the reminder that every utterance is the tip of an iceberg, merely the surface layer of a deep linguistic (Wittgenstein) or psychic (Freud) substrate. To understand someone, even for conversational purposes - much less persuade him or her - takes a lot of patient, skillful work. Of course every non-autistic adult recognizes this to some degree; but most of us, most of the time, to an inadequate degree.
So, for example, an opinion about immigration or the Affordable Care Act may have little to do with that issue or that law and much more to do with the speaker's feeling about his/her interlocutor, or about which group or tribe the opinion associates one with. In that case, facts and reasoning about policy will only get the discussants so far. They must either go deeper, baring their fundamental commitments and identifications to each other, or else save their breath.
How, then, do minds ever change? They rarely do, it appears. "Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less." Presumably political campaigns, discussions with friends and co-workers, television programs, books and articles, and even one's education, account for still less.
Are society-wide misunderstanding and mistrust inevitable? Haidt's practical recommendations for avoiding them are not robust. "I believe that psychologists must work with political scientists to identify changes that will undermine Manichaeism." That should at least attract some foundation funding for psychologists and political scientists. Beyond that, he can only suggest that perhaps if Congressional families all lived in
For secular rationalists (i.e., most politically active liberals and leftists), all this is discouraging. But we get no sympathy from Haidt, who scourges the "rationalist delusion": the idea that "reasoning is our most noble attribute," which usually goes along with "a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power" as well as "a utopian program for raising more rational children." We had better reconcile ourselves to religion, Haidt advises - he deplores the New Atheism - and if possible, even join one. Lack of belief is no problem: "it is religious belongingness that matters for [social capital]," he approvingly quotes from a scholarly study, "not religious believing."
Truth or falsity is beside the point for Haidt; the social benefits of religion are too great to allow for quibbling on that score. Religions "help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival"; and they make individuals "less selfish and more loving." Gods and religions are "tools that let people bind themselves together," or in the language of evolutionary psychology, "group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust." The data strongly suggest, Haidt claims, that religious people are happier, more generous, more productive, and better behaved than the non-religious.
At the very least, unbelievers should keep their skepticism to themselves. "Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely 'rational' beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery." Like the serpent in
The Righteous Mind is an easy book for a defensive liberal rationalist to ridicule. Haidt clearly knows a thing or two about moral psychology and political rhetoric, but apparently very little about current affairs or political economy. For one thing, the recent political polarization he laments is of a peculiar sort: there is only one pole. Since the Republican capture of Congress in 1994, and even before, the Republican side has been characterized by relentless, take-no-prisoners partisanship; the Democratic side by disunity, vacillation, surrender. This is the fundamental fact of recent American political history, and Haidt shows no awareness of it.
For another thing, though some of their electoral success may well result from the fact that "Republicans understand moral psychology; Democrats don't," it's also true - a regrettably partisan point, but it must be made - that Republicans cheat a lot. The Nixon campaign attempted to forestall a peace agreement in October 1968 that might have elected Hubert Humphrey. The Reagan campaign attempted to delay the release of the hostages until Jimmy Carter had left office. A Republican Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. The Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in 2004, financed by Republican donors, was based on lies, while the CBS "60 Minutes" report alleging George Bush's evasion of National Guard duty was substantially true, despite a firestorm of successful Republican denial. Lee Atwater's and Karl Rove's dirty tricks are too numerous to catalogue. Currently Republicans across the country are busy with voter-suppression efforts, under the deceitful pretense of combating vote fraud. No doubt the Democrats are hardly political innocents; but compared with the Republicans, they are hapless pikers. Yet oddly, the Republicans' godly supporters do not object to this ungodly behavior.
There are also deeper, less obvious objections to Haidt's critique of liberal hyper-rationalism. Minds sometimes change; the voice of reason, though small and quiet, as Freud pointed out, does eventually get a hearing. Mightn't it be fruitful to ask how this can happen rather than assuming, as Haidt does, that it hardly ever will? Mightn't there be some material conditions in which rationality is not invincibly more difficult than unthinking allegiance, and in which cooperative inquiry seems as natural as strategic reasoning?
Strategic reasoning is, as Haidt emphasizes, a mechanism of inter-group competition; and competition is premised on insecurity. Universal radical insecurity - the inevitable and intended result of "flexible labor markets" and "minimal government" - is not conducive to imaginative receptivity or disinterested reflection. Veblen famously observed that it is all but impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. The same goes for his tax breaks, regulatory exemptions, government contracts, and other matters on which a man's survival, or his accustomed lifestyle, may depend. When the middle class is shrinking and one person in four or five is below, at, or not far from poverty level, most people will hunker down, not open up. Some degree of competition, insecurity, and inequality will probably always be necessary. But the price of our present degree of those things is a lessened ability to reason together about difficult matters.
Another, equally pervasive condition of contemporary life also handicaps collective rationality. Tellingly, nearly all the data Haidt refers to seems to be derived from brief interactions: lab experiments, interviews, questionnaires. There is rarely any occasion for prolonged reflection and relaxed discursiveness in these circumstances, any more than there is on radio and TV talk shows, where the average response is only seconds long and thoughtful pauses are disparaged by the producers as "dead air." Newspaper opinion pieces rarely exceed 700 words. Naturally readers and listeners fall back on preset attitudes and received opinions.
Moreover, we are all increasingly hyperstimulated. The sheer volume of commercial messages, entertainment, and social media makes some inner compensation necessary, so we double down on our inner stabilizers, otherwise known as prejudices. Deep experiences of any kind - grappling with art or philosophy, having one's mind changed about politics, or simply possessing one's soul - require a modicum of silence, slowness, and solitude. For most Americans, that modicum is vanishing.
Liberals (or anyone) challenged by Haidt's pessimism about social rationality will want to look into a new book by the maverick sociologist and cultural historian Richard Sennett. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation is less ambitious than The Righteous Mind, but also less breezily in-the-reader's-face and more elegantly written. Throughout his career Sennett has chosen ample subjects - craftsmanship, respect, public space, built environments - and addressed them essayistically, with a varying mix of field work, social theory, literary/historical erudition, and idiosyncratic reflection. Together is part of a trilogy on "the skills of everyday experience," this volume on "responsiveness to others, such as listening skills in conversation, and [collaboration] at work and in the community."
Sennett is a non-doctrinaire left-liberal, not much interested in electoral politics or ideology. But he has a keen eye and ear for the textures and timbres of contemporary life and a historically informed sense of how they came to be that way. In Together, he traces the forms of working-class sociality from the 19th century to the present, including labor parties, workshops, settlement houses, and the Catholic Worker movement. At the center of labor history is the problem of what Haidt called "group cohesiveness": viz, what experiences, demands, or relationships might turn a class into a community? Sympathetically but critically, Sennett canvasses the attempts by Robert Owen, the German Social Democrats, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Saul Alinsky, and others to answer that question.
Nowadays the achievement of working-class community seems to him even less possible than formerly. "The new forms of capitalism emphasize short-term labor and institutional fragmentation; the effect of this economic system has been that workers cannot sustain supportive relations with one another." Activists who would base protest and resistance on group values, as Haidt counsels, are stymied, Sennett points out, by the difficulty of "strengthening communities whose economic heart is weak." Community, like rationality, has its material prerequisites, which are currently being eroded on a large scale.
For secular liberals, the message of these two books, especially Haidt's, is a sobering one: achieving large-scale trust, comity, and mutual aid is hard, very hard. Though it has sometimes been done in the past, secular liberals are barred from using the old methods. We want bonds, we want limits, we want authority; but we don't want illusions. The will of God, the infallibility of Scripture, and the divine right of husbands and fathers seem to us illusions. Even "my country right or wrong" is an illusion if it means, as it frequently does in the mouths of false patriots, "my country can do no wrong." We can't accept these illusions, and we can't ask others to accept them - even if it will make them better behaved - though of course we must live with, and compromise with, people who think otherwise.
But we also owe it to conservatives - and to ourselves - to devise ways of promoting stability and solidarity that don't rely on illusions. Here liberals have indeed failed, though the three centuries since the Enlightenment are hardly a great deal of time in which to resolve the immemorial tensions between reason and instinct or individual and group. Perhaps the best we can do for now is to point out, patiently, persistently, and with as much love for our equally stubborn fellow citizens as we can muster, that some social arrangements make it harder to hear one another.
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George Scialabba is associate editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.
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