Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Community builders have to bridge all sorts of divides – of race, religion, money, politics, philosophy. In this TED talk, psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives an overview of how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and understanding of those whose morals don’t match ours, but who are equally good and moral people on their own terms. Excerpts:

Let’s start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines, that you find across cultures and even across species? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

The first one is harm-care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The second foundation is fairness-reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. We heard about this from Karen Armstrong as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The third foundation is in-group loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups — but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them because it’s fun. Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

The fourth foundation is authority-respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species — but authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.

The fifth foundation is purity-sanctity. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch or put into your body.

I believe these are the five best candidates for what’s written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with at least, a preparedness to learn all of these things.

The Grand Canyon is really simple. It’s just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time,  and you get the Grand Canyon. It’s not that complicated.  This is what’s really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon,  cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen?  This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon.

The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Because liberals reject three of these foundations. They say “No, let’s celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership.” They say, “Let’s question authority.” And they say, “Keep your laws off my body.”

Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority, traditional morality, can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don’t fit in. So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This guy’s shirt says, “Stop bitching, start a revolution.” If you’re high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it’s change, it’s fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, “The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.” This was after the chaos of the French revolution. So once you see this — once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability — then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix.

This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang aren’t enemies. Yin and Yang don’t hate each other. Yin and Yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world.

So what’s the point? What should you do? Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: That our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do?

As we learned from Samantha Power in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can’t just go charging in saying, “You’re wrong, and I’m right.” Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are — understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we’re right — and then step out — even if it’s just for a moment, step out. Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out in which everybody does think they’re right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons — even if you disagree with them — everybody has some reasons for what they’re doing. Step out. And if you do that, that’s the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition.

via Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com.

See also Jon’s talk at the New Yorker 2012 conference, Morality 2012