Moral Tribes

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “hite”, like the horrible Korean beer), is a social psychologist at Virginia. He’s gained a lot of popular exposure for his research in to the moral foundations of politics. I first encountered him in this TED Talk which is quite good, and which I recommend to all students of important things. Recently I came across this talk at Edge, which is even better than the TED Talk because it’s addressed to a convention of social psychologists. It is most certainly not preaching to the choir. He even calls out a previous speaker for providing a great example of what’s wrong with his discipline: tribalism.

Haidt’s work (following Durkheim, as he mentions in the Edge piece) explains morality in terms of its social function, which is group binding. If you want to argue that this is reductionist, fine, but I think that even if we want to expand the definition, all of us would still admit that whatever else morality is or does, it definitely binds people into groups. Haidt is interesting because he takes that very basic social sciences assumption and applies it with considerable force to social scientists themselves - and by extension to highly educated liberals who think their knowledge of social science somehow exempts them from its implications.

Liberals, in other words, are just as “tribalistic” as conservatives. In his Edge talk he backs up this claim with three points usually made by social scientists when they are criticizing “backward” organizations or communities. These are directly specifically at the social psychology community, but they apply to every mostly liberal group that thinks they don’t count as a (in Haidt’s words) “tribalistic moral community. These groups:

1. have taboos and danger zones (e.g. sex differences in standard deviation on IQ scores)
2. have a statistically impossible lack of diversity (there were 3 “conservatives” among the 1000
social psychologists in his audience)
3. create a “hostile environment” for members with different views (as evidenced by several
testimonies from “closeted conservative” social psychologists)

When you live in Portland, Oregon, Haidt’s argument becomes especially convincing. People move here because they want to get away from close-minded midwestern conservatives, and congregate with open-minded west coast liberals. Functionally, there is no difference between their morality and the morality of the group they left behind. Each refuses to countenance certain heretical notions (the 2nd amendment really is in the Constitution?!), each enforces a self-perpetuating homogeneity (a trend intensified nowadays by various structural factors, as Bill Bishop explained in The Big Sort), and each creates a hostile environment for divergent opinions (try defending George W. Bush in a vegan cafe and see what happens).

Of course I could mention some evil twin sister city - Branson, Missouri comes to mind - and reverse the charge with completely different examples. That’s exactly the point.

Haidt’s point, as far as I can tell, is not necessarily that morality is therefore a bad thing, and that we should try to overcome it (in fact it seems more likely he would argue that this is ultimately impossible). The point is rather that for certain endeavors, the “binding and blinding” effect of morality is an obstacle. Scientists are the best example, which is why his thesis is so powerful when aimed at a group of social psychologists. But morality is also an obstacle in politics, where we are ostensibly aiming at the “common good,” in which case conflicts between morally bounded groups is a very large obstacle indeed.

I wonder if anything productive might come from putting Haidt’s ideas into conversation with, say, Rawls' idea of the overlapping consensus. Maybe I should read more social psychology when I start that PhD program.