The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt Flashcards
Introduction
An obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. it is a feature of our evolutionary design.
Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased and illogical people can be when they disagree with you.
Keep your eye on the intuitions and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.
Religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality.
People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
(Note in the US, liberal = left-wing/progressive)
The take home message of this book is that we are self-righteous hypocrites.
Enlightenment (or wisdom if you prefer) requires us all to take the logs out of our own eyes and then escape from our ceaseless, petty, and divisive moralism.
Most of us don’t reason to find objective truth. We reason to support our emotional reactions.
David Hume said that moral reasoning is often a servant of moral emotions (reason is a ‘slave of the passions’)
We must drop the moralism and apply moral psychology.
PART 1 Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second
1/ Where does Morality Come From?
If you pick nature, you’re a nativist. You believe that moral knowledge is native in our minds. It comes pre-loaded in our God-inscribed hearts (as the Bible says), or in our evolved moral emotions (as Darwin argued).
If you believe that moral knowledge comes from nurture, then you are an empricist. You believe that children are blank slates at birth (John Locke). Empirical means from observation or experience.
But this is a false choice, and in 1987 moral psychology was mostly focused on a third answer: rationalism, which says that kids figure out morality for themselves, based on experiences with harm. However, further studies rejected this conclusion. The moral domain goes far beyond harm.
The moral domain varies by culture. It is unusually narrow in Western, educated, and individualistic cultures. Sociocentric cultures broaden the moral domain to encompass and regulate more aspects of life.
Sociocentric societies - placing the needs of groups and individuals first
Individualistic societies - placing individuals at the centre and makes society a servant of the individual
People have gut feelings - particularly about disgust and disrespect - that can drive their reasoning. Moral reasoning is sometimes a post hoc fabrication.
Morality can’t be entirely self-constructed by children based on their growing understanding of harm. Cultural learning or guidance must play a larger role than rationalist theories had given it.
2/ The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail
What is the relationship between reason and moral intuitions (including moral emotions)?
Plato believed that reason could be the master (he had contempt for the passions).
Jefferson believed that 2 processes were equal partners (head and heart) ruling a divided empire.
Hume believed that reason was (and was only fit to be) the servant of the passions. This was a philosophically sacrilegious claim, but Hume was right.
People have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) does not change his judgement.
The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people.
If you want to change someone’s mind about a political or moral issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch - a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.
The goal of this book is to to change the way a diverse group of readers - liberal and conservative, secular and religious - think about morality, politics, religion and each other.
Using the history of moral psychology, I am trying to create a sense of movement from rationalism to intuitionism.
Note:
Radical reformers usually want to believe that human nature is a blank slate on which any utopian vision can be sketched. If evolution gave men and women different skills, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions.
In his 2002 book, the Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker describes the way scientists betrayed the values of science to maintain loyalty to the progressive movement.
This was also evident in the attacks on Edward O Wilson. In 1975 he published ‘Sociobiology: The New Synthesis’, which had the audacity to suggest that natural selection influenced human behaviour. He believed that there is a such a thing as human nature which constrains the range of what we can achieve when raising our children or designing new social institutions. Wilson sided with Hume.
Read Descarte’s Error by Antonio Damasio
Emotions are filled with cognition. They are not dumb.
Nobody has yet found a way to “debias” people—to train people to look for evidence on the other side—once emotions or self-interest are activated. Also in the 1990s, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio showed that reasoning depends on emotional reactions. When emotional areas of the brain are damaged, people don’t become more rational; instead, they lose the ability to evaluate propositions intuitively and their reasoning gets bogged down in minutiae.
Damasio’s patients made terrible decisions because they were deprived of emotional input into their decision making. Emotions are a kind of information processing.
The social intuitionist model: intuitions come first and reasoning is usually produced after a judgment is made, in order to influence other people.
Many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass, but the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.
Empathy is antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathise across a moral divide.
3/ Elephants Rule
Five areas of experimental research support the principle that: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second
- Brains evaluate instantly and constantly
- Social and political judgements depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes e.g. juries are more likely to acquit attractive defendants
- Our bodily states sometimes influence our moral judgments. Bad smells and tastes can make people more judgmental.
- Psychopaths reason but don’t feel (and are severely deficient morally)
- Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality)
Note:
Philosophers have long disagreed about whether it’s acceptable to harm one person in order to help our save several people.
Utilitarianism would say yes to bring about the greatest good.
Deontology (from the Greek root that gives us our word duty) would say no: we have duties to respect the rights of individuals.
Deontologists talk about high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalisations of gut feelings.
In an article entitled ‘The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul’ Joshua Greene argues that deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and that deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more “cognitive,” and more likely to involve genuine moral reasoning.
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
—Immanuel Kant
“We have strong feelings that tell us in clear and certain terms that some things simply cannot be done and other things must be done. But it’s not obvious how to make sense of these feelings, and so we, with the help off some especially creative philosophers, make up a rationally appealing story (about rights).” Joshua Greene
In the 33 years between Wilson and Greene, everything changed. Scientists in many fields began recognising the power and intelligence of automatic processes, including emotion. Evolutionary psychology had become respectable.
4/ Vote for me (Here’s Why)
5 areas of research show that moral thinking is more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth:
- We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us (the only people known to have no sociometer are psychopaths)
- Conscious reasoning functions like a press secretary who automatically justifies any position taken by the president (confirmation bias)
- With the help of our press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we even convince ourselves.
- Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we can ask “Can I believe it?” or “Must I believe it?”
- In moral and political matters we are often groupish rather than selfish. We deploy our reasoning skills to support our team (attitude polarisation)
The worship of reason, which is sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is a faith in something that does not exist.
I urge a more intuitionist approach to morality and moral education, one that is more humble about the abilities of individuals, and more attuned to the contexts and social systems that enable people to think and act well.
Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons.
The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs.
Note:
The rationalist delusion - the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the “delusion” of believing in Gods (for the New Atheists).
This delusion is not just a claim about human nature. It’s also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power.
Confirmation bias is a built-in feature (for an argumentative mind), not a bug that can be removed (from a platonic mind).
Part II There’s More to Morality than Harm and Fairness
5/ Beyond WEIRD Morality
WEIRD = Western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic
The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships
WEIRD people are statistical outliers.
The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures, where it is largely limited to the ethic of autonomy (i.e. moral concerns about individuals)
It is broader - including the ethics of community and divinity - in most other societies, and within religious and conservative moral matrices within WEIRD societies.
Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
You can’t study the mind while ignoring culture, as psychologists usually do, because minds function only once they’ve been filled out by a particular culture.
You can’t study culture while ignoring psychology, as anthropologists usually do, because social practices and institutions (such as initiation rites and religion) are to some extent shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind.
“Culture and psyche make each other up.”
As you soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in 2 additional moral languages:
1/ The ethic of community - based on the idea that people are first and foremost, members of larger entities, such as families, companies and nations. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism.
2/ The ethic of divinity - based on the idea that people are temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. The body is a temple and not a playground. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism.
However, the ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion and human rights.
The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation - our sense of “higher” and “lower”. It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialised sexuality.
When we truly understand the ‘their’ conception of things we come to recognise possibilities latent within our own rationality.
6/ Taste Buds of the Righteous Mind
Deontology (Kant) and utilitarianism (Bentham) are “one-receptor” moralities that are likely to appeal most strongly to people who are high on systemising and low on empathising.
Kant, like Plato, wanted to discover the timeless, changeless form of the Good. He believed that morality has to be the same for all rational creatures, regardless of their cultural or individual proclivities.
Hume’s pluralist, sentimentalist, and naturalist approach to ethics is more promising than utilitarianism or deontology for modern moral psychology. As a first step in resuming Hume’s project, we should try to identify the taste receptors of the righteous mind.
Modularity can help us think about innate receptors, and how they produce a variety of initial perceptions that get developed in culturally variable ways.
Five good candidates for being taste receptors of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
7/ The Moral Foundations of Politics
Innateness can be defined as “organised in advance of experience”, like the first draft of a book that gets revised as individuals grow up within diverse cultures.
This definition allowed me to propose that moral foundations are innate.
5 moral foundations are:
- Care/harm foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children
- Fairness/cheating foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited
- Loyalty/betrayal foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions
- Authority/subversion foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status
- Sanctity/degradation foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites.
It appears that the left relies primarily on the Care and Fairness foundations, whereas the right uses all five.
Notes:
The virtue of loyalty matters a great deal to both sexes, though the objects of loyalty tend to be teams and coalitions for boys, in contrast to two-person relationships for girls.
The left tends towards universalism and away from nationalism, so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation.
Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as ‘openness to experience’), not just for new foods but also of new people, music and ideas.
Conservatives score higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what’s tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries and traditions.
Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.
Philosopher Leon Kass is among the foremost spokesman for the ethic of divinity, He argues:
“Repugnance revolts against the excesses of human wilfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”
8/ The Conservative Advantage
Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters since 1980. Republicans understand the social intuitionist model better than do Democrats. Republicans speak more directly to the elephant, and they trigger every single taste receptor.
I revised Moral Foundations Theory to do a better job of explaining intuitions about liberty and fairness:
We added the Liberty/oppression foundation, which makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination. It triggers an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants.
We modified the Fairness foundation to make it focus more strongly on proportionality. Most people have a deep intuitive concern for the law of karma - they want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to their deeds.
There are 2 radically different approaches to the challenge of creating a society in which unrelated people can live together peacefully:
1/ John Stuart Mill (Patron saint of a contractual society)
Imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal and all should be left as free as possible and do as they please.
“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others” (On Liberty)
Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians.
2/ Emile Durkheim
The basic social unit is the hierarchical structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such a society are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy.
Durkheim wrote in 1897 of the dangers of autonomy:
“man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralise him.”
Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups.
Durkeheim’s vision appeals to conservatives.
Liberals sacralise equality. Conservatives sacralise liberty and this unites them politically with libertarians.
Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system. This may be why the left usually favours higher taxes on the rich, high levels of services provided to the poor, and sometimes a guaranteed minimum income for everyone.
Part 3 Morality Binds and Blinds
9/ Why Are We So Groupish
In recent years, new scholarship has emerged that elevates the roles of groups in evolutionary thinking. Natural selection works at multiple levels simultaneously, sometimes including groups of organisms. The 4 factors below collectively amount to a defence of group selection:
1/ Major transitions produce superorganisms
2/ Shared intentionality generates moral matrices
This ability enabled early humans to collaborate, divide labour, and develop shared norms for judging each other’s behaviour. These shared norms were the beginning of the moral matrices that govern our social lives today.
3/ Genes and cultures coevolve
Gene-culture coevolution gave us a set of tribal instincts: we love to mark group membership, and then we cooperate preferentially with members of our group.
4/ Evolution can be fast
We humans have a dual nature - we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90% chimp and 10% bee. It’s almost as though there’s a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.
You can understand most of moral psychology by viewing it as a form of enlightened self-interest.
People are obsessed with their reputations.
Theories in a wide variety of disciplines rest on the assumption that ‘man is selfish’. All acts of apparent altruism, cooperation, and even simple fairness had to be explained, ultimately, as covert forms of self-interest.
Dawkins shared this cynicism, “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish”.
10/ The Hive Switch
I used to believe that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. I have now changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work and something larger than yourself.
Once you can understand our dual nature, including our groups overlay, you can see why happiness comes from between.
The Hive hypothesis: Human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special circumstances) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. I called this ability the hive switch.
The hive switch is another way of stating Durkheim’s idea that we are Homo duplex.
Homo duplex is a view promulgated by Émile Durkheim, a macro-sociologist of the 19th century. He considered humans to be of two minds.
1/ The first, which he called “will,” was the id-like nature that each individual is born with. Centered on bodily needs and drives, it pushes the individual to act in ways to satisfy their needs, wants, and desires without consideration of the needs and desires of others.
2/ The other part of human nature is social in origin which Durkheim calls the “collective conscience.” This collective conscience serves as a check on the will, a moral system made up of ethical codes, values, ideologies, and ideas. The collective conscience is formed through the socialization process by which the individual internalizes the codes, norms, and ethical values of the society. It is the collective conscience that disciplines the individual will, limits the potentially unlimited desires and drives of the individual.
We live most of our lives in the ordinary (profane) world, but we achieve our greatest joys in those brief moments of transit to the sacred world, in which we become “simply part of a whole”.
Left unchecked, individualism leads to a lifetime of seeking to slake selfish desires which leads to unhappiness and despair.
On the other hand, collective conscience serves as a check on the will. This is created by socialisation. Highly anomic societies are characterized by weak primary group ties—family, church, community, and other such groups.
Anomic = a state or condition of individuals or society characterized by a breakdown or absence of social norms and values; normlessness
There are 3 common ways in which people flip the hive switch:
1/ Awe in nature
2/ Durkheimian drugs
3/ Raves
“Far from being simple, our inner life has something like a double centre of gravity. On the one hand is our individuality … On the other is everything in us that expresses something other than ourselves. Not only are these two groups of states of consciousness different in their origins and their properties, but there is a true antagonism between them.” Durkheim
“The young educated adults of the 90s got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today’s sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
David Foster Wallace
Many veterans believe that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives.
The most important of the Durkheimian higher-level sentiments is “collective effervescence”, which describes the passion and ecstasy that group rituals can generate.
“The very act of congregating is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness, and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation.”
Durkheim believes that these collective emotions pull humans fully but temporarily into the higher of 2 realms, the realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate. The realm of the profane, in contrast, is the ordinary day-to-day world where well live most of our lives, concerned about wealth, health and reputation, but nagged by the sense that there is, somewhere, something higher and nobler.
Darwin found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred.
The emotion of awe is most often triggered when we face situations with 2 features: vastness and a need for accommodation.
Awe makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns.
Awe opens people to new possibilities, values and directions in life.
Certain drugs can produce statistically significant effects on 9 kinds of experiences:
- Unity, including loss of sense of self, and a feeling of underlying oneness
- Transcendence of time and space
- Deeply felt positive mood
- A sense of sacredness
- A sense of gaining intuitive knowledge that felt deeply and authoritatively true
- Paradoxicality
- Difficulty describing what had happened
- Transiency: state of only lasting a short time
- Persisting positive changes in attitude and behaviour
The yearning to serve something larger than the self has been the basis of so many modern political movements. Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights.
11/ Religion Is a Team Sport
If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it. You’ll see those beliefs as foolish delusions, perhaps even as parasites that exploit our brains for their own benefit (like the New Atheists).
But if you take a Durkheimian approach to religion (focusing on belonging) and a Darwinian approach to morality (involving multi-level selection), you get a very different picture. Religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years.
Once early humans began believing in such agents, the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered.
Gods help to suppress cheating and increase trustworthiness. Only groups that can elicit commitment and suppress free riding can grow.
Humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond themselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects.
From a sociologically informed perspective, religious rites pull people up from Durkheim’s lower level (the profane) to his higher level (the sacred). It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole”.
The New Atheist model of religious psychology is based on the Platonic rationalist view of the mind:
Believing = Doing
The Durkheimian model of religious psychology includes Belonging.
New Atheists would call religious beliefs ‘parasitic memes’
Alternatively, we could call them ‘cultural innovations’ (which spread to to the extent that they make groups more cohesive and cooperative).
The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom has shown that our minds were designed for dualism.
You don’t need a social scientist to tell you that people behave less ethically when they think nobody can see them. For example, people cheat more on a test when the lights are dimmed. They cheat less when there is a cartoon-like image of an eye nearby.
The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship.
Read Darwin’s Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson.
“Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own.”
Organized religion (also known as institutional religion): a religion in which belief systems and rituals are systematically arranged and formally established.
People can and do forsake organised religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology: doing linked to believing linked to belonging.
Religion is well suited to the handmaiden of groupishness, tribalism and nationalism. It does not seem to be the cause of suicide bombing. It is a nationalist response to military occupation by a culturally alien democratic power. It’s a response to contamination of the sacred homeland.
There has to be an ideology in place that can rally young men to martyr themselves for a greater cause - this was the case for the Shiite Muslims who first demonstrated that suicide bombing works, driving the US out of Lebanon in 1983.
Religion is therefore often an accessory to atrocity, rather than the driving force of the atrocity.
When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.
12/ Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively
People don’t adopt their ideologies at random. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety and diversity are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals.
They tend to develop certain characteristic adaptation and life narratives that make them resonate - unconsciously and intuitively - with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progressive narrative).
Once people join in a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere.
Liberals often have difficulty understanding how the Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity foundations have anything to do with morality.
Liberals and conservatives are both “necessary elements of a healthy state of political life”, as John Stuart Mill put it.
Conservatism - any political philosophy that favours tradition (in the sense of various religious, cultural, or nationally-defined beliefs and customs) in the face of external forces for change, and is critical of proposals for radical social change. Some Conservatives seek to preserve the status quo to reform society slowly, while others seek to return to the values of an earlier time.
Conservatism generally refers to right-wing politics which advocate the preservation of personal wealth and private ownership (Capitalism) and emphasize self-reliance and Individualism. Conservatives in general are more punitive toward criminals, tend to hold more orthodox religious views, and are often ethnocentric and hostile toward homosexuals and other minority groups.
As a general ideology, Conservatism is opposed to the ideals of Liberalism and Socialism.
The term “conservatism” is derived from the Latin “conservare” (meaning to “protect” or “preserve”). Its usage in a political sense began to appear only after the French Revolution of 1789, and then only hesitantly, only taking its characteristic political connotation in the 1820s.
Neo-Conservatism - the “new” Conservative movement which emerged in the United States in opposition to the perceived Liberalism of the 1960s. It emphasizes an interventionist foreign policy, free trade and free market economics and a general disapproval of counterculture.
Counterculture: a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm.
In the US, the counterculture of the 1960s became identified with the rejection of conventional social norms of the 1950s. Counterculture youth rejected the cultural standards of their parents, especially with respect to racial segregation and initial widespread support for the Vietnam War, and, less directly, the Cold War—with many young people fearing that America’s nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, coupled with its involvement in Vietnam, would lead to a nuclear holocaust.
In the US, widespread tensions developed in the 1960s in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women’s rights, traditional modes of authority, and a materialist interpretation of the American Dream. White, middle class youth—who made up the bulk of the counterculture in western countries—had sufficient leisure time, thanks to widespread economic prosperity, to turn their attention to social issues.
These social issues included support for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements, and a rejection of the Vietnam War. The counterculture also had access to a media which was eager to present their concerns to a wider public. Demonstrations for social justice created far-reaching changes affecting many aspects of society. Hippies became the largest countercultural group in the United States.
Starting in the late 1960s the counterculture movement spread from the US like a wildfire. Britain did not experience the intense social turmoil produced in America by the Vietnam War and racial tensions. Nevertheless, British youth readily identified with their American counterparts’ desire to cast off the older generation’s social mores. The new music was a powerful weapon. In this case, it took the form of a wholesale revolt against the class system, which was now being questioned for the first time in the nation’s history. Rock music, which had first been introduced from the US in the 1950s, became a key instrument in the social uprisings of the young generation and Britain soon became a groundswell of musical talent thanks to groups like the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd, and more in coming years.
The UK and US now seem polarised and embattled to the point of dysfunction.
Genes contribute to just about every aspect of our personalities.
Orthodoxy versus conservatism
Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.”
What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.
Conservative intellectuals to read: Edmund Burke/Friedrick Hayek and Thomas Sowell.
Conservatives generally take a different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate and thrive.
“Libertarians are basically liberals who love markets and lack bleeding hearts.”
Diversity seems to trigger NOT in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethically, diverse settings appear to “hunker down” - that is, to pull in like a turtle.
Technology and changing residential patterns have allowed each of us to isolate ourselves within cocoons of like-minded individuals.
We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong.
Conclusion
Moral psychology is the key to understanding politics, religion and our spectacular rise to planetary dominance.
David Hume can help us escape from rationalism and into intuitionism.
Glaucon (Plato’s older brother) shows us the overriding importance of reputation and other external constraints for creating moral order.
Be suspicious of moral monists (like Sam Harris). Be aware of anyone who insists that there is one true morality for all people, times and places. Human societies are complex; their needs and challenges are variable.
Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity. He firmly rejected moral relativism but endorsed pluralism instead, noting that this was not ‘an infinity of values’.
We may spend most our our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It’s not just a capacity; its the portal to many of life’s most cherished experiences.
THE END
