The most interesting part of
William Saletan's NY Times book review of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's dissection of the partisan brain,
The Righteous Mind, is that Saletan's snide construction that today's liberals prove Haidt's theories is in and of itself
proof of Haidt's theories.
Let's follow this meta rabbit hole, shall we?
To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.
The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.
To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.
And since conservatives put a whole lot of stock in those underlying moral institutions and control them, it's why they keep winning. Home field advantage. Or as Tommy Lee Jones put it best in Men In Black:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Saletan continues with what that means for the mighty backlash against liberalism in 2012:
One of these interests is moral capital — norms, practices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition.
Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.
How far should liberals go toward incorporating these principles? Haidt says the shift has to be more than symbolic, but he doesn’t lay out a specific policy agenda. Instead, he highlights broad areas of culture and politics — family and assimilation, for example — on which liberals should consider compromise. He urges conservatives to entertain liberal ideas in the same way. The purpose of such compromises isn’t just to win elections. It’s to make society and government fit human nature.
The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.
In other words, the point of liberalism is to try to move cultural and moral institutions forward, just not in a way that makes meaningful changes to cultural and moral institutions. It's almost like change is hard or something, and being stuck in a social rut is a lot easier. Go figure. But Saletan lets us know that Haidt is convinced that being stuck in these moral institutions is freedom and open-minded inclusiveness. Hey, conservatives have been doing that number for years now.
So yes, if you're going to toss logic and reason and argue that changing social institutions is the only way liberals can win, then yes, it's going to be hard. Only took 232 years to get a black President, after all. But if human nature is so awful, why should the goal be to make society and government fit it, rather than try to improve human nature through society?
If anything, trying to change society and government to fit human nature is exactly what the problem is with the Republican Party. It doesn't mean liberals should as a rule give up.
Haidt's theories have some merit, but even Saletan sees where it falls apart:
But to whom is Haidt directing his advice? If intuitions are unreflective, and if reason is self-serving, then what part of us does he expect to regulate and orchestrate these faculties? This is the unspoken tension in Haidt’s book. As a scientist, he takes a passive, empirical view of human nature. He describes us as we have been, expecting no more. Based on evolution, he argues, universal love is implausible: “Parochial love . . . amplified by similarity” and a “sense of shared fate . . . may be the most we can accomplish.” But as an author and advocate, Haidt speaks to us rationally and universally, as though we’re capable of something greater. He seems unable to help himself, as though it’s in his nature to call on our capacity for reason and our sense of common humanity — and in our nature to understand it.
Haidt is reasonably trying to explain to us how conservatives are unreasonable, so that liberals should just compromise. It's certainly different to see someone take this approach from a scientific perspective, but it's just the same Sensible Centrist Village nonsense we've been fed since the Clinton era: you guys will at least compromise, and the conservatives will never do so, so just give in already, will you?
No thanks.
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