Our Righteous Minds

 Despite the scientific and technological advancements of the modern world, we humans are limited by cognitive and other psychological shortcomings that inhibit the capacity to obtain objective truth. One that many are familiar with is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to seek out and/or interpret information in a way that supports pre-conceived ideas. Another is group think: humans have a deep need to belong and to feel loved and accepted, and this often creates pressure to conform to others in terms of dress, behaviour, and belief. Finally, there is the basic fact that social and political reality is much too complex for our brains to fully grasp, and hence we create “shortcuts”, or filters, that make perception and information processing more manageable. One shortcut is ideology, which is a tool to simplify reality in a way that diagnoses a problem and that creates the motivation for political action. Another example is the use of stereotype. We categorize both people and objects into generalized ideas that help to simplify and prevent cognitive overload, and that contain often misleading assumptions that influence interpretation. This is particularly the case with the way we understand foreigners. When we meet someone who is not from our own national group, most of us will almost immediately place them into some national category that contains stereotypical assumptions (e.g., Canadians are polite, Italians are mobsters, etc.). It also frequently happens with gender; when meeting someone of the opposite sex we often make assumptions about them (women are like this, men are like that). This tendency to stereotype and simplify even when a more nuanced approach would be better is so widespread that one might even assert that it is part of brain’s (faulty) cognitive equipment.

So why, then, do many of us believe that we possess objective political truth in the cosmic sense? And why, as a corollary, do we tend to feel so confident of our beliefs and simultaneously think that political opponents who think differently are either selfish, dumb, or morally bankrupt? Jonothan Haidt’s Our Righteous Minds goes some way in answering those questions. In this highly informed and well written book, he shows the evolutionary basis of our politics. Evolution has equipped humans with the mental tools to adapt to a range of challenges. The formation of groups, and the difficulties and opportunities that inhere to being a member of a group, are particularly important in this regard. At the most basic level, groups have an adaptive challenge over solitary individuals, and this was especially true in the harsh conditions in which our primitive ancestors evolved. But in order for a group to enhance the reproductive success of its members, it had to function properly. This means, inter alia, that mechanisms for cooperation had to emerge, for they are necessary for everything from rearing the young, to obtaining food, to coordinating war efforts against other groups. It is this functional need for cooperation, Haidt shows, which led to the development of our emotional brains. The basic emotions that all experience, like fear, anger, love, desire, affection, disgust, and joy arose in our evolutionary past because they furthered the reproductive success of those groups that possessed them.

As humans organized themselves into larger and more complex social aggregations, they developed more sophisticated forms of culture and cognition which filtered our emotional universe. Humans not only developed concepts to name the emotions they felt, but also rules that influenced how emotions could be legitimately expressed. But in the long span of evolution, this phase of culture and cognition is just a blink of an eye. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in contexts where the immediate and automatic sensation of emotions was necessary for survival. The emotion of disgust, for example, evolved to steer humans away from rotting or infectious matter, and for it to fulfill its function it has to be felt immediately. Ditto for fear: in the savannah, the hunter whose sensation of fear was automatic at the sight of a predator would have certainly had an advantage over one who thought first and felt later.

This evolutionary account of emotions provides clues to the question of why people generally experience emotions in an automatic and immediate fashion. Anger, fear, love, and other primal emotions are rarely the result of interpretation or detached reflection. Rather, we feel these emotions first and then interpret the event or stimuli on the basis of these emotions. Both cognition and emotion are information processing mechanisms, but the latter is much faster than the former because we are physiologically built that way. And emotions’ precedence in time translates to its predominance in interpretation and in influencing human behaviour. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read the findings of neuroscience, nor to those who, like me, come from cultures and families that are unashamedly emotional through and through.

Haidt does not stop there. In Our Righteous Minds he also shows that our emotional dispositions provide the basis for morality. Evidence shows, for example, that people who have damaged the emotional parts of their brains are unable to make moral decisions in a functional way, highlighting the dense nexus between these parts of the brain. Haidt proposes a list of moral senses that appeal to, or trigger, primordial emotion: 1) care/harm, which was selected in response to the challenge of caring for children, 2) fairness/cheating, which evolved to improve cooperation and prevent exploitation, 3) loyalty/betrayal evolved to help form coalitions, 4) authority/subversion was necessary to help identify status hierarchy, and 5) sanctity/degradation provided the emotional basis of religious rituals. These traits exist in all groups, and although the diversity of their expression is immense, the emotions that they appeal to are evolutionary selected adaptations and hence universal to the human species.

The differences between small groups and larger ones are particularly stark. Smaller groups, especially hunting and gathering tribes, are more homogenous and hence the cultural expressions of emotions that are foundational for things such as religious rituals and rearing the young are more monolithic. As societies become more advanced, different moral matrices emerge, and herein lies the emotional basis of political ideology: the Left, according to Haidt, appeals the moral sense of care/harm and fairness/cheating, while the Right appeals to all five.

However, despite these differences between the Left and the Right, at the civilizational level there remain shared basic assumptions. The West is particularly relevant in this regard: Haidt shows that the philosophical liberal assumptions that most Westerners, consciously or not, presume—that persons are unique, autonomous, rational, responsible individuals who should be free to choose their own destinies provided that they do not harm others—are historically and civilizationally, in Haidt’s colourful acronym, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic). As most anthropologists and those who have travelled to non-Western countries know, other civilizations display more collectivist moral universes, which means that they conceive of persons as moored or tethered into an organic whole that emphasizes responsibilities rather than rights. This collectivist ontology is actually more consistent with our evolutionary heritage, according to Haidt, because our emotions are evolutionary adaptations selected at the group and not the individual level.

Within the scholarly discipline of evolutionary biology there has been a disagreement on whether our physical and mental traits evolved in individuals or at the group level. To some the debate has largely been settled; prominent members of the field, like Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, for example, do not accept the idea of group-level selection. As alluded to above Jonathan Haidt disagrees and argues that our emotional brains could not have evolved at the individual level because their very function is to enhance the survival of the group by creating binding moral rules. Morality is intrinsically relational and group based, and hence if our emotions are the basis of morality, it suggests that our emotive traits are shared because they were selected at the level of the group.

I am not an expert in the field but I find Jonathan Haidt’s arguments to be more convincing. The need to belong, and to be loved and accepted seems to be such a deep and primordial attribute of all human groups. The Western conception of rational and autonomous individuals with natural rights reflects intellectual and cultural developments that are historically unique: medieval Church lawyers first conceived of the idea of natural rights based on their religious worldview of the importance of individual salvation (this contrasts with other religious worldviews which emphasized the need to create a more just political and social order). The scientific revolution that began in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of secularism, the French and American revolutions, all contributed to the long term process whereby the religious idea of natural rights became the secular version of human rights that most Westerners (and many non-Westerners) take for granted as a natural part of the moral universe. These developments, in a sense, have taken us farther and farther away from the collectivist moral matrices that our brains are still equipped with, at least at the physiological level.

I would even hypothesize that these developments help to explain some of the pathologies that are endemic to rich and Westernized societies: depression, anxiety, ennui, and anomie. The founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, made this observation long ago. He wanted to understand why suicide was more prevalent in the rich Protestant countries compared to poorer Catholic societies, and he observed that the former’s more radical individualism led to a sense of alienation and a belief that failure was purely the responsibility of the individual person while poorer Catholics were still tethered to collective moral and social contexts which helped them to cope with their difficulties and shortcomings. The implication is that the distancing from the more group- orientated moral matrix that was ushered in by the Protestant Reformation also helped to weaken the sense of belonging and group feeling that were part of the human species natural habitat for millennia. I think Durkheim’s framework can explain many other phenomenon, not only suicide. For example, why do many young, educated Westerners go and fight and die for ISIS even though in their host societies they enjoyed all the goodies that Western standards of living provided? One reason might be a deep dissatisfaction with the materialist and individualist ethos that suffuse most Western societies. Many people feel this and deal with it in healthy ways, such as joining political and religious/spiritual groups or devotion to family and community, while others use alcohol, drugs, sex, or anti-depressants to numb their pain. For some, joining a religious militant group that is fighting to establish a collectivist Islamic utopia also fulfills this function. It is no coincidence that Islamists, in their recruitment propaganda, routinely denounce the secularism, liberalism, and materialism of the West. They are appealing to the frustrations of many, especially disaffected young men or those who reject to Western modes of living.

Although Jonathan Haidt is a left wing American liberal, his book subtly challenges liberals and libertarians who favour a political and social order organized around the metaphysical assumptions of rational, autonomous, and responsible individuals. His data suggests that the development of a liberal civilization is quite the achievement in light of the fact that physiologically our brains evolved emotional mechanisms that are more consonant with group-orientated moral matrices—an observation borne out by the fact that pretty much all non-Western civilizations are more collectivist, in terms of their conception of the universe and humans’ place within it. Thus the purported universality of Western political forms—like individual rights and democracy—are not universal at all and are rather historically and culturally contingent. This should give an attitude of humility when faced with others who think differently, especially for the liberal interventionists who often triumphantly proselytize their creed in international affairs.

Haidt’s book also councils humility about what we can truly know about the social and political realm. Our political and ideological frameworks are, at bottom, different emotional reactions to the organization of society, and these emotions are the product of an evolutionary history that is radically different from the contemporary era. Our primitive ancestors lived in conditions that necessitated emotions that were automatic and immediate and that influenced their interpretations of environments, not in the sense of providing objective truth but in terms of enhancing survival. Hunters had to feel certainty that the predator in the distance would kill them in order for them to flee, and this is true even if their perception was wrong. Hundreds of thousands of years later, we humans still interpret reality with certainty because, simply, our brains are designed that way. Applied to other social issues, this certainty translates into a self-righteous attitude that contributes to the tribalism of political life: the sense that we are right, the other is wrong (or dumb, or selfish, etc), and that’s that. This atavistic impulse towards tribalism has ironically been accentuated by the rise of digital media, suggesting that the techno-utopian vision of internet as some liberating and cosmopolitan force is premature.

Of course, Haidt’s argument that we are driven by emotion is not original. The ancient Roman poet Ovid said that “desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but I follow the wrong”. David Hume famously said that humans are “slaves to their passions”, an observation which contrasted with the veneration of reason professed by most of his contemporaries (especially in France). Haidt’s book shows, using plenty of data collected with modern scientific methods, that the insights of Ovid and Hume were right.