Book review - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt
★★★★★
Until about a year ago, I wasn’t really into the habit of reading popular social science books, which mainly came from my many and varied interests and my skepticism about the claims of the ‘not so hard’ sciences. But in 2023 I was very positively surprised by Joe Henrich’s books on human cultural evolution, and this year, Jonathan Haidt’s book has also been a very positive discovery I am glad to have made.
Let us start with a very brief summary, such that if you want a pill-sized summary of the book’s contents, you will need to read no further than this paragraph. ‘The Righteous Mind’ is an exercise in moral psychology: it seeks to explore where our moral systems come from and why they end up mustering us into opposite and confrontational political and religious divides. The book has three parts, each of which furthers a key take-away idea:
The elephant and rider metaphor: we tend to think (and philosophy has done much in this regard) that our rational mind is, or should be, in charge, and our emotions should be subordinate. It seems that from the experimental evidence the author has collected, it is actually the other way round: our intuitions and instincts (the elephant) are our prime movers, and then our strategic reasoning (the driver) kicks in, mostly to justify and rationalize our pre-made decisions. Reason would have evolved as a useful tool for persuading others (even ourselves), but only accidentally for arriving at truths. Haidt takes this general thesis and focuses on its effects in moral psychology.
There’s more to morality than harm and fairness. They key metaphor for this section is morality as a palette of taste receptors: just as our tongues can detect 5 flavors, humans have a predisposition to have at least 6 ‘seeds of morality’ activated, seeds which trace their roots to evolutionarily-advantageous behaviors but which get developed, rewritten and/or repressed depending on the social-moral context in which you grow up. For most WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) people, only two are really important, but this goes against the grain of what has usually been the case in most cultures, and it even varies within our own societies. The six flavors would be Care/harm (Concern for others, avoidance of suffering), Fairness/cheating (Concern for justice, reciprocity, and fairness), Liberty/oppression (valuing personal freedom, autonomy, and the right to make choices without interference), Loyalty/betrayal (Loyalty to one's group, distrust of outsiders), Authority/subversion (Respect for hierarchy and authority figures) and Sanctity/degradation: (Reverence for sacredness, aversion to disgust). Westerners (who are culturally, very ‘weird’ outliers) in general, and their more educated, urbanized liberal populations in particular tend to restrict moral considerations to the first two or three, valuing compassion and social justice. Other cultures and conservatives tend to value all foundations more equally.
Humans are a mixed animal, 90% chimp, 10% bee. We have evolved from a strongly self-interested starting point to acquire more cooperative and group-centered mentalities, therefore becoming homo duplex (selfish and groupish) through processes of multilevel selection.We develop a ‘hive switch’ that allows us to cooperate with others and work towards common goals, and through this, more cohesive groups can outcompete others. This requires the pruning and punishing of ‘free riders’, and explains religion as an evolutionarily advantageous tool (allowing for greater moral communities). It also explains our tribalism, although greater partiality for the in-group doesn’t imply greater hostility to the out-group.
Let us proceed now with the more subjective aspects of my reaction to the book’s thesis and the credence I give to it. As I mentioned at the beginning, I have found the book quite persuasive, and it matches and overlaps with a lot of what Joe Henrich does in both The Secret of Our Success and The WEIRDest People in the World. A key argument for both authors is that Westerners are really unusual outliers when compared to other societies, and this is something we tend to forget and/or sweep under the rug. Henrich would say that our accidental path of evolution was net positive, as it led us to creating more prosperous and bigger societies. Haidt, on the other hand, is more ambiguous: he makes it pretty clear that he himself is a liberal and part of the liberal moral matrix, but his book seems to attempt, if not to change (or justify) his utilitarian beliefs, at least a call to some degree of tolerance and nuance towards ‘the others’.
I am in no way to judge the scientific evidence that is presented throughout the book, but I’d guess it is as solid as anything might be (after the Replication crisis). At the very least, se non è vero, è ben trovato. The book makes a strong case against political polarization and straw-manning adversaries, and it suggests that if people recognize and respect the different moral values of others, it could lead to more constructive dialogue and compromise. Perhaps a complaint here is that how this can be implemented in a practical way seems very fuzzy: the author’s own take for his own morality is what he calls a ‘Durkheimian utilitarianism’, which while remaining mostly in the conventional liberal sphere of beliefs, is more open to the value of social groups and their positive effects, and is willing to concede that liberals are sometimes in the wrong -as in their opposition to free markets and in how attempts to discriminate in favor of some oppressed groups ends ups lowering overall welfare, even for the oppressed themselves. One could perhaps make the case that the 6-flavors theory would imply that liberals are too restrictive, and that they should widen their moral palates, but one could also make the case for the other way round, i.e., that building a common ground requires we should focus on the least common multiple we all share. This doesn’t seem that easy though - even when liberals and conservatives share some moral foundation, they tend to read it differently (for example, in ‘Care’, with generalized indistinctness by liberals versus for those of the group who are deserving and/or have sacrificed themselves for the common good).
An interesting aspect the book doesn’t really go to is into prescriptive/descriptive morality. The author of the book is a psychologist, not an ethicist. The whole argument seems to push for at the very least some ethical relativism (ethics as arising from natural and cultural evolutionary pressures which create better and more effective adaptations and allow for greater collaborative and cohesive communities to appear). In this regard, some might argue that the book both goes too far and not deep enough: if you’re ultimately going to follow the path of WEIRD morality, being cognizant of other moral palates would seem to have only a certain instrumental and cynical value (‘how to best craft rhetorical tools and strategies that can touch the other side’s moral strings and get them to agree and collaborate with your own goals’), although a more idealistic take would perhaps include a sincere attempt at understanding better other frameworks and being willing to take positive aspects from them and incorporate them into your own. This does seem difficult to match with the core idea that our morals are mostly instincts though, and it would therefore be quite hard to change the direction of the elephant’s gaze. Still, I don’t think this is impossible, and I’ll end on a personal note: my own moral (and political) values have changed very significantly in the last decade, so if one is intellectually curious and with a tendency to reflect and scrutinize, one can hope, perhaps, to ultimately be able to move the elephant into certain tracks.