"Morality Binds and Blinds" -- Delving Into Haidt's Thesis

In his chapter "The Conservative Advantage," Haidt tries to convince readers through some compelling statistical evidence that political conservatives place greater emphasis on all of the moral foundations than do liberals, who focus only on the "care/harm" and "fairness/justice" foundations. Though his conclusion is compelling, however, I tend to disagree because his data does not seem to be based on a normative mean. Basically, it looks to me like he assumes correlation implies causation for his experiments, but the steps he has to take to get there seem too numerous and far-reaching for his conclusion to be sound. Or perhaps his work is just orienteered specifically to a liberal audience in defense of conservatism. Either way, for this reason, I have difficulty applying this part of the book to my vocation. The subsequent chapters of the book also posed this problem because I think that Haidt extrapolates on his numerical findings too much.

Moving forward, though, Haidt proceeds to discuss how evolutionary processes have given humans a tendency to act altruistically in groups. He then explains how "group-think" and groupish-ness promote close-minded self-righteousness not just on an individual level but also when people associate themselves with organizations, parties, or more historically -- tribally. To give humans a little more credit, though, Haidt develops something called a "hive-switch," a state that Haidt believes people go into about 10% of the time to transcend their selfish mental states and aid others for no personal benefit.

Applying these group notions to politics, Haidt elucidates how politically, each party is "partially right and partially wrong," but when logical agreement no longer seems attainable, we should cater to the emotion of the riders to find cooperation and understanding across party lines.

Applying these group notions to religion, Haidt rebukes his atheistic worldview to pronounce that the human "extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves" and "circle around those things with other people" is "what religion is all about."

By illuminating the ability of morality to work in tandem with humanity's groupishness in "binding" and "blinding," Haidt develops the brunt of his thesis -- that psychologically, people should work to trigger the "hive switch" in others in order to bring about a greater sense of shared intentionality with fellow humans. This, he believes, will bring a more tolerant and truly righteous earth.