The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

by Jonathan Haidt

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?

So Hume’s model fit these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.36

Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.

by six months of age, infants are watching how people behave toward other people, and they are developing a preference for those who are nice rather than those who are mean.

reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth.

Our politics is groupish, not selfish.

Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

You can hire Glaucon as a consultant and ask him how to design institutions in which real human beings, always concerned about their reputations, will behave more ethically.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

In moral and political matters we are often groupish, rather than selfish.

The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.

There’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values.

The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights.23

I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.28

We are multiple from the start.

attachment theory, a well-supported theory that describes the system by which mothers and children regulate each other’s behavior so that the child gets a good mix of protection and opportunities for independent exploration.

Political parties and interest groups strive to make their concerns become current triggers of your moral modules.

The left tends toward universalism and away from nationalism,26 so it often has trouble connecting to voters who rely on the Loyalty foundation.

so societies face an analogue of the omnivore’s dilemma, balancing xenophobia and xenophilia.

If we had no sense of disgust, I believe we would also have no sense of the sacred.

But egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.

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.

heard Michael Tomasello, one of the world’s foremost experts on chimpanzee cognition, utter this sentence: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”52

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.

Oxytocin simply makes people love their in-group more. It makes them parochial altruists.

The monkeys have neural systems that infer the intentions of others—which is clearly a prerequisite for Tomasello’s shared intentionality36—but they aren’t yet ready to share.

Corporations and corporate law helped England pull out ahead of the rest of the world in the early days of the industrial revolution.

A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (which I defined in chapter 7 as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).

hive hypothesis, which states that 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.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.

Why do the students sing, chant, dance, sway, chop, and stomp so enthusiastically during the game? Showing support for their football team may help to motivate the players, but is that the function of these behaviors? Are they done in order to achieve victory? No. From a Durkheimian perspective these behaviors serve a very different function, and it is the same one that Durkheim saw at work in most religious rituals: the creation of a community.

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.

The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists

It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.66

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,

It is clear that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of time—is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.46

Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.