Researcher Jonathan Haidt delves into the psychology of red state/blue state, and offers hope for reconciliation
Jonathan Haidt
Image: Daniel Addison
Jonathan Haidt is concerned, like many Americans, with the way our
country has become divided and increasingly unable to work together to
solve looming threats. Yet, unlike most Americans, he is a psychologist
and specialist on the origins of morality. A few years ago, he began to
wonder what he might do, and the result is a
book,
“The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and
Religion.” In it, Haidt examines the roots of our morality, and how they
play out on the stage of history. What he offers is not a solution to
the red-state-blue-state problem but a different way to think about it —
and a modicum of hope.
Haidt answered questions from Mind Matters editor
Gareth Cook.
Cook: Why did you write this book?
Haidt: I got interested in the American culture war
back in 2004, and it’s one of the only growth stocks I’ve ever invested
in. I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to
understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some
research comparing moral judgment in India and the USA. But as the
culture war between left and right was heating up, and as the two
parties were completing their 30 year process of segregating into a pure
liberal party and a pure conservative party, I began to see left and
right in this country as being like different cultures.
The Righteous Mind
is a report of what I've found. Or rather, the middle part of the book
is on politics. But I wanted to put it all into the broader context of
what morality is, where it comes from, and how it binds us into teams
that then make us unable to think for ourselves.
Cook: I am interested to know what you made of the two political conventions, from the perspective of the book?
Haidt: I was mostly struck by how much the culture war
has shifted to economic issues. These days it’s fought out over the
three moral foundations that everyone values: Care/harm,
Fairness/cheating, and Liberty/oppression. The Democrats say that
government must care for people, and that government programs are
necessary to make America fair – to level the playing field, and give
people the basic necessities that they need to enjoy liberty, especially
education and health care. George W. Bush once called himself a
"compassionate conservative," but Republicans in the Tea Party era don't
talk much about compassion. For them, government is the cause of
massive unfairness – taking money from taxpayers (the "makers" and "job
creators") and giving it to slackers and freeloaders (Romney's "47
percent"). Government is seen as the principle threat to liberty. The
private sector is much more trusted.
This is a huge shift from the period between 1992 and 2004, when the
culture war was fought out mostly between social conservatives,
particularly the religious right, and the secular left. It was fought
out primarily over the three moral foundations that we call the
"binding" foundations, because they bind people together into tight
moral communities: Loyalty/betrayal (for example, issues of patriotism
and flag protection), Authority/subversion (for example, respect for
parents, and whether parents and teachers can spank children), and
Sanctity/degradation (which includes most bioethical issues pitting the
sanctity of life against a more harm-based or utilitarian ethos). This
older culture war re-emerged briefly with Rick Santorum's turn in the
spotlight, but then it faded away. The Republican Party in particular
has changed, and the moral arguments made in this Republican convention
were very different.
Cook: Do you think there are lessons in this book that could help the two political parties, or politicians, be more effective?
Haidt: Yes. Once you start thinking about what each
side holds sacred and you know the moral foundations that underpin their
policy positions, you can do a better job of targeting your moral
appeals. And most importantly, you can do a better job of avoiding land
mines. For example, it was foolish of the Obama administration to insist
that religious schools, hospitals, and other institutions must pay for
birth control for all employees. This was extremism in defense of one of
their sacralized issues – women's rights—and it led them to pass a rule
that would have forced many Christians to violate some of
their
sacred values. But it's not as if those institutions were stopping
women from using birth control. The issue was just whether religious
institutions should
pay for birth control in health insurance
policies. It's like forcing synagogues to buy pork lunches for their
non-jewish employees. It triggered outrage, and fed into the
long-simmering idea that the Democrats are conducting a "war on
religion."
Conversely, the various Republican bills forcing women who want
abortions to get a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasound—same
thing in reverse. In defense of their sacred value (right to life,
protect every fetus), they legislated that doctors would have to harm
and degrade their own patients. This triggered outrage and fed into the
long-simmering idea that the Republicans are conducting a "war on
women." So I think my book will help both sides avoid committing
"sacrilege" by stepping on sacred values so often, and I think it could
help them think more clearly about how to reach the other side.
Cook: We live in a deeply divided time. I wonder what in your book you think offers the most hope for getting past that?
Haidt: Ultimately, the solutions to our polarization
and political dysfunction will be legal and institutional changes which
reduce the power of extremists in both parties, and which force the
parties back to their traditional strategy of competing for the middle,
rather than the strategy, used since 2004, of pleasing one’s own base.
We need more states to adopt open primaries and non-partisan
redistricting, we need to reduce the role of the Senate filibuster,
reduce the role of money in elections… a variety of things like that,
which my colleagues and I discuss at
www.CivilPolitics.org.
But before there will ever be bipartisan public support for such
measures, we have to get over the demonizing – the idea that my side is
completely right and the other side is evil. We can compromise with
opponents, but not with enemies that we think are evil. My highest hope
for the book is that people who read it will see that the other side is
just as much motivated by moral concerns, and they'll see that those
concerns are not necessarily crazy. Each side cares about different
threats to our nation which the other side largely fails to see. So far,
emails I get from readers tell me that this is working: People don't
move to the center after reading the book, but they seem to get less
angry at the brother-in-law whose politics they once found repugnant.
Cook: Can you explain what you mean by the "hive," and what promise this holds?
Haidt: For the last half of the 20th century, the
dominant idea in the social sciences was that people are selfish.
Economists thought that people were only out to maximize their
self-interest, political scientists believed that people voted entirely
for their self-interest, and biologists told us that we were driven by
selfish genes, which make us generous only when it will help our kin or
our reputations. Self interest is of course a very powerful force, yet
it leaves out our deep and passionate desires to be part of a group, to
lose ourselves in something larger than ourselves. It leaves out so much
of the psychology of religion and self-transcendence.
This is why I say that one of the basic principles of moral psychology
is that we are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Most of our social
nature is like that of other primates – we’re mostly out for ourselves.
But because our evolution was shaped by a few hundred thousand years of
intense group versus group conflict, we are also very groupish. We are
descended from groups that had fine-tuned mental mechanisms and cultural
rituals for binding themselves together into communities able to work
together, suppress free riders, and achieve common ends. When we do
these things we are more analogous to bees than to chimps. But for us,
it's just temporary. We have brief collective moments, and we can do
great things together in those moments, but eventually, self-interest
returns.
Cook: And, if I may quote one of your chapter titles, "Why can't we disagree more constructively?"
Haidt: We humans are really good at forming groups to
compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along
different lines to compete in a different way. Two people might be
teammates at work, but competitors on Saturdays in an intramural soccer
league, but sing in the same church choir on Sunday. Such shifting teams
are normal and healthy. American political parties used to be shifting
coalitions of interest groups.
But what's happened in the last 30 years, ever since the Southern
conservatives left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans, is
that we now have a perfect sort along a single omni-present axis:
liberal versus conservative. The Congress is no longer a check on the
executive, as the founders had intended. Rather, a bright line runs
through the middle of congress, and through the Supreme Court. The
members of each party in all three branches of government are one team,
united to fight the other. And the same bright line runs through so many
of our institutions, and even neighborhoods.
When the two teams are stable, and when the people on each team really
are different from each other, in personality and in values, the lines
harden and it’s hard to avoid demonizing the other side. Their beliefs
are a threat to everything our side holds dear, so we can't compromise
with them. Why even bother listening to them? All they do is lie, to
cover up their true motives. This is why my goal in the book is not to
get people to agree, it's to get people to stop the demonizing. My hope
is that readers will find it easier to disagree more constructively, and
therefore easier to negotiate, compromise, and coexist.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive
science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper
that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind
Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the
Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
