“Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball….You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.” – Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

There’s enough (and more!) to The Righteous Mind that I’m going to spend today talking about Haidt’s analysis of morality, and Wednesday talking about its implications for politics. Mix and match as you please, but the broad takeaway should be that I was enormously impressed with the book.

Haidt argues that morality does not and cannot flow out of reason and rationality. Instead, he suggests we decide whether something is moral immediately, and then use our reason to justify why we think what we do. In other words, our reason is like the rider on an elephant. When the elephant leans, the rider doesn’t know what it’s thinking and can’t control it: all he can do is post-hoc attempt to explain why it did what it did. In his words,

“We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”

What is morality though? Haidt compares it to the sense of taste. Some people may for cultural or personal reasons notice sour more than bitter, but everyone has the taste buds for all flavours. The bases of morality are;

1. Care – We feel and dislike the pain of others
2. Fairness – Justice, rights, and autonomy
3. Liberty – A resentment of dominance and restrictions
4. Loyalty – Patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group
5. Authority – Deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions
6. Sanctity – The body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral contaminants

He is no moral relativist, but for Haidt, understanding the morality of others means understanding that there is more than one base from which morality can be drawn. Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of each base, but that does not make them immoral.

Why, however, are we moral at all? The answer lies in a fundamental tension in how we evolved. We are partly selfish, Haidt agrees, but we are also partly groupish; willing to sacrifice for the good of the group. Morality is about suppressing and regulating self-interest in order to make cooperative societies possible. The key moment in human history was when a few individuals began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done – from that flowed language, cooperation, and society. This groupishness is what we see in religion, in sports games, in Kibbutzim, in communes, and in other human institutions.

Unfortunately, though this can be good within a group, it does little for inter-group communication, as political dialogue today (I’m looking at you, American government shutdown) can testify. Fortunately, he addresses that too – see the next review! In the meantime, you can test your own morality bases and participate in his studies here.

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). In light of the current state of politics, it’s perhaps particularly relevant, but honestly I found it one of the more profound books I’ve read in a long time.