How Science Explains America’s Great Moral Divide

Scientific American: How Science Explains America’s Great Moral Divide

Researcher Jonathan Haidt delves into the psychology of red state/blue state, and offers hope for reconciliation.

Jonathan Haidt is concerned, like many Americans, with the way our country has become divided and increasingly unable to work together to solve looming threats. Yet, unlike most Americans, he is a psychologist and specialist on the origins of morality. A few years ago, he began to wonder what he might do, and the result is a book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.” In it, Haidt examines the roots of our morality, and how they play out on the stage of history. What he offers is not a solution to the red-state-blue-state problem but a different way to think about it — and a modicum of hope. Haidt answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. …

… Cook: I am interested to know what you made of the two political conventions, from the perspective of the book?

Haidt: I was mostly struck by how much the culture war has shifted to economic issues. These days it’s fought out over the three moral foundations that everyone values: Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, and Liberty/oppression. The Democrats say that government must care for people, and that government programs are necessary to make America fair – to level the playing field, and give people the basic necessities that they need to enjoy liberty, especially education and health care. George W. Bush once called himself a "compassionate conservative," but Republicans in the Tea Party era don't talk much about compassion. For them, government is the cause of massive unfairness – taking money from taxpayers (the "makers" and "job creators") and giving it to  slackers and freeloaders (Romney's "47 percent"). Government is seen as the principle threat to liberty. The private sector is much more trusted.

This is a huge shift from the period between 1992 and 2004, when the culture war was fought out mostly between social conservatives, particularly the religious right, and the secular left. It was fought out primarily over the three moral foundations that we call the "binding" foundations, because they bind people together into tight moral communities: Loyalty/betrayal (for example, issues of patriotism and flag protection),  Authority/subversion (for example, respect for parents, and whether parents and teachers can spank children), and Sanctity/degradation (which includes most bioethical issues pitting the sanctity of life against a more harm-based or utilitarian ethos). This older culture war re-emerged briefly with Rick Santorum's turn in the spotlight, but then it faded away. The Republican Party in particular has changed, and the moral arguments made in this Republican convention were very different. …

… Cook: We live in a deeply divided time. I wonder what in your book you think offers the most hope for getting past that?

Haidt: Ultimately, the solutions to our polarization and political dysfunction will be legal and institutional changes which reduce the power of extremists in both parties, and which force the parties back to their traditional strategy of competing for the middle, rather than the strategy, used since 2004, of pleasing one’s own base. We need more states to adopt open primaries and non-partisan redistricting, we need to reduce the role of the Senate filibuster, reduce the role of money in elections… a variety of things like that, which my colleagues and I discuss at www.CivilPolitics.org.

But before there will ever be bipartisan public support for such measures, we have to get over the demonizing – the idea that my side is completely right and the other side is evil. We can compromise with opponents, but not with enemies that we think are evil. My highest hope for the book is that people who read it will see that the other side is just as much motivated by moral concerns, and they'll see that those concerns are not necessarily crazy. Each side cares about different threats to our nation which the other side largely fails to see. So far, emails I get from readers tell me that this is working: People don't move to the center after reading the book, but they seem to get less angry at the brother-in-law whose politics they once found repugnant. …

… Cook: And, if I may quote one of your chapter titles, "Why can't we disagree more constructively?"

Haidt: We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way. Two people might be teammates at work, but competitors on Saturdays in an intramural soccer league, but sing in the same church choir on Sunday. Such shifting teams are normal and healthy. American political parties used to be shifting coalitions of interest groups.

But what's happened in the last 30 years, ever since the Southern conservatives left the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans, is that we now have a perfect sort along a single omni-present axis: liberal versus conservative. The Congress is no longer a check on the executive, as the founders had intended. Rather, a bright line runs through the middle of congress, and through the Supreme Court. The members of each party in all three branches of government are one team, united to fight the other. And the same bright line runs through so many of our institutions, and even neighborhoods.

When the two teams are stable, and when the people on each team really are different from each other, in personality and in values, the lines harden and it’s hard to avoid demonizing the other side. Their beliefs are a threat to everything our side holds dear, so we can't compromise with them. Why even bother listening to them? All they do is lie, to cover up their true motives. This is why my goal in the book is not to get people to agree, it's to get people to stop the demonizing. My hope is that readers will find it easier to disagree more constructively, and therefore easier to negotiate, compromise, and coexist.