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The “omnivore’s dilemma” (a term coined by Paul Rozin)37 is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things).
The Sanctity foundation is crucial for understanding the American culture wars, particularly over biomedical issues.
Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work.1 Their slogans, political commercials, and speeches go straight for the gut,
Democrats have often aimed their appeals more squarely at the rider, emphasizing specific policies and the benefits they’ll bring to you, the voter.
It is no coincidence that the only Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win election and then reelection combined gregariousness and oratorical skill with an almost musical emotionality. Bill Clinton knew how to charm elephants.
Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory.
The Democrats offered just sugar (Care) and salt (Fairness as equality), whereas Republican morality appealed to all five taste receptors.
Care and Fairness (the two top lines) are moderately high across the board. Everyone—left, right, and center—
But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality.
conservatives have a five-foundation morality.
www.YourMorals.org—
people want dogs that fit their own moral matrices. Liberals want dogs that are gentle (i.e., that fit with the values of the Care foundation) and relate to their owners as equals (Fairness as equality). Conservatives, on the other hand, want dogs that are loyal (Loyalty) and obedient (Authority). (The Sanctity item showed no partisan tilt; both sides prefer clean dogs.)
Unitarian preachers made greater use of Care and Fairness words, while Baptist preachers made greater use of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity words.
there are two radically different approaches to the challenge of creating a society in which unrelated people can live together peacefully. One approach was exemplified by John Stuart Mill, the other by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim.
A Durkheimian world is usually hierarchical, punitive, and religious. It places limits on people’s autonomy and it endorses traditions, often including traditional gender roles.
The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth.20 Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.
In the 1960s, the Democrats became the party of pluribus. Democrats generally celebrate diversity, support immigration without assimilation, oppose making English the national language, don’t like to wear flag pins, and refer to themselves as citizens of the world.
The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the “American civil religion.”22 The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America’s heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus into unum.
I and my colleagues at YourMorals.org had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality.
we added a provisional sixth foundation—Liberty/oppression.25 We also decided to revise our thinking about fairness to place more emphasis on proportionality. Let me explain.
The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others.
The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The French revolutionaries, similarly, had to call for fraternité and égalité if they were going to entice commoners to join them in their regicidal quest for liberté.
The flag of my state, Virginia, celebrates assassination (see figure 8.3). It’s a bizarre flag, unless you understand the Liberty/oppression foundation. The flag shows virtue (embodied as a woman) standing on the chest of a dead king, with the motto Sic semper tyrannis (“Thus always to tyrants”). That was the rallying cry said to have been shouted by Marcus Brutus as he and his co-conspirators murdered Julius Caesar for acting like an alpha male.
Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. It just somehow feels like the right thing to do, and these feelings seem far removed from Trivers’s reciprocal altruism and tit for tat. This is not fairness. This is Boehm’s political transition and reverse dominance.
Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system.
Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.
American conservatives, therefore, sacralize the word liberty, not the word equality. This unites them politically with libertarians.
84 percent of subjects paid to punish, at least once. And even more remarkably, cooperation skyrocketed on the very first round where punishment was allowed, and it kept on climbing. By the twelfth round, the average contribution was fifteen tokens.46 Punishing bad behavior promotes virtue and benefits the group. And just as Glaucon argued in his ring of Gyges example, when the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.
When a few members of a group contributed far more than the others—or, even more powerfully, when a few contributed nothing—most adults do not want to see the benefits distributed equally.
People don’t crave equality for its own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated,
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more.
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Liberty/oppression, but each political faction cares in a different way.
The Fairness/cheating foundation is about proportionality and the law of karma. It is about making sure that people get what they deserve, and do not get things they do not deserve. Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about proportionality; everyone gets angry when people take more than they deserve. But conservatives care more,
liberal professors give out a narrower range of grades than do conservative professors. Conservative professors are more willing to reward the best students and punish the worst.
The remaining three foundations—Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation—show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences.
Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.
the third principle: Morality binds and blinds.
Yes, people are often selfish, and a great deal of our moral, political, and religious behavior can be understood as thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest. (Just look at the awful hypocrisy of so many politicians and religious leaders.) But it’s also true that people are groupish. We love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers toward common goals so enthusiastically that it seems as if our minds were designed for teamwork.
When I say that human nature is selfish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our own interests, in competition with our peers. When I say that human nature is also groupish, I mean that our minds contain a variety of mental mechanisms that make us adept at promoting our group’s interests, in competition with other groups.4 We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.
bees, where competition within the hive has been nearly eliminated and almost all selection is group selection.13 Bees (and ants and termites) are the ultimate team players: one for all, all for one, all the time, even if that means dying to protect the hive from invaders.
Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.
One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest.
human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality.54 At some point in the last million years, a small group of our ancestors developed the ability to share mental representations of tasks that two or more of them were pursuing together.
Whatever the cause, we know that almost all humans were killed off at some point during this time period. Every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks.
Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders (as in warfare). But in general, groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.
Human evolution did not stop or slow down 50,000 years ago. It sped up. Gene-culture coevolution reached a fever pitch during the last 12,000 years.
the key innovation of Greek, Roman, and later European armies was the sort of synchronous drilling and marching the army had forced him to do years before. He hypothesized that the process of “muscular bonding”—moving together in time—was a mechanism that evolved long before the beginning of recorded history for shutting down the self and creating a temporary superorganism. Muscular bonding enabled people to forget themselves, trust each other, function as a unit, and then crush less cohesive groups.
McNeill studied accounts of men in battle and found that men risk their lives not so much for their country or their ideals as for their comrades-in-arms.
human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability (under special conditions) to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves (temporarily and ecstatically) in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I’m calling the hive switch.
“collective effervescence,” which describes the passion and ecstasy that group rituals can generate.
