Within a few weeks, the sessions from TEDX MidAtlantic will be up on the internet, so you can see Haidt's presentation for yourself. I really wanted to talk to him, and saw him at the reception talking to somebody, but I didn't use the fine art of interruption and then when I looked for him later on he had already left

Thanks for filling in more details and letting me know about online availability. Hope you have another opportunity to speak with Haidt.

I'd like to thank Harry Marks for his insights during the second discussion of this book. He has been critical of Haidt, in the best sense, and that has made me examine the author's arguments more closely. As I've mentioned, it has been a little strange reading what my younger self said. And I hadn't even recalled what I talked about with another member back in 2012, which was seeing Haidt at TEDX in DC, and wanting to talk to him at the social after the sessions. I also recall emailing him and receiving a nice response. So do I need to factor in "fanboy" stuff to my evaluation of his claims?

I am in general sympathetic to his conclusions. Confirmation bias? Maybe. Speaking of leaning, as Haidt often did, I don't find myself leaning toward feeling that Haidt is working hard to sell his research, or that he damages his credibility by offering conservatives ammunition, both things that Harry thought were present or a liability for him. I will be most interested to hear what Harry has to say about this wrapping-up chapter. Maybe we can both agree that at least Haidt doesn't lack boldness in the finale.

The other remark I'll make is about something I've wondered about before--the nature of social science research, that is, what it tells us. We don't know the percentages of the differences between liberals and conservatives, according to the various instruments Haidt's team used to measure them. But we might assume that for any particular liberal or conservative, the general conclusion Haidt draws might well not be true. This is because you typically get something like a 60/40 split in research such as this, and that difference is held to be significant enough that you can generalize about groups, and even detect its effect in the larger society. But often, people you meet who identify as one perspective or the other wouldn't display the conservative's sensitivity to the moral matrix of liberals, or the liberal's relative blindness to the conservative's moral mix. It's just an interesting (perhaps) conundrum of this branch of science.

DWill wrote:I'd like to thank Harry Marks for his insights during the second discussion of this book.

Well, good of you to say so. It has been my pleasure, for sure. Haidt has a lot to offer and I appreciate hearing another take on things articulated with as much caring and wisdom as Haidt brings to this. And it challenges me to think through my own ideas, which is a very satisfying use of my time.

DWill wrote: He has been critical of Haidt, in the best sense, and that has made me examine the author's arguments more closely.

Yes, and I remain critical, but also very appreciative. Like the sociobiologists, whom I take to be major influences on Haidt's reading and thinking, I cannot help but see a lot revealed by their investigations, even if I often disagree with the directions they think the evidence points.

DWill wrote:I am in general sympathetic to his conclusions. Confirmation bias? Maybe. Speaking of leaning, as Haidt often did, I don't find myself leaning toward feeling that Haidt is working hard to sell his research, or that he damages his credibility by offering conservatives ammunition, both things that Harry thought were present or a liability for him. I will be most interested to hear what Harry has to say about this wrapping-up chapter. Maybe we can both agree that at least Haidt doesn't lack boldness in the finale.

I may have hit the idea of him selling his research too hard. I see this a lot in economics, where there are definitely "camps" and on-going departmental struggles over whether a given take on things will or will not be welcome and admitted to the conversation. It is not all about adopting rhetorical stances with some sort of disingenuous manipulative intent (though that does happen). It is much more about what questions a person brings to a set of events or of configurations of evidence, and the people who see things one way tend to bring very different questions than those who see things another way.

So if you see conservative takes on society as "potentially a coherent option with genuine moral roots" such as resisting free-riders and honoring the sacred, then you are more likely to embrace an approach that takes unguided elephants as a fact of nature, asks what those elephants look like and whether they are different for conservatives, and tries to enumerate what forces might have delivered them to us as brute facts. And you will give the arguments that support its importance. If that be confirmation bias, well, very few social science researchers are immune to it. If, on the other hand, your focus is how to resolve conflicts between different social priorities (as it often is in economics, for example) then the rider may be more interesting, and you may resist being told we have to go with the leaning of the elephant.

I have much more to ruminate about on this book, and this chapter, but I may have to delay it another week as it is crunch time for teachers and Mother's Day too.

So you are continuing to teach. I don't know what teachers in my area are actually doing with no students to see. I'm out of that loop.

I'm curious whether you think Haidt's Durheimian Utilitarianism is a workable moral philosophy. I wonder whether Haidt considered Durheimian Liberalism, which might state more clearly the balance he sees as healthy.

DWill wrote:So you are continuing to teach. I don't know what teachers in my area are actually doing with no students to see. I'm out of that loop.

The final is done, so basically things are okay for the week. Mainly the problem is dealing with stragglers now. It is a little weird when students just don't show up, but as the admin people have checked on them, it turns out there is a real problem, like lack of internet access, as often as there is shirking.

It has opened my eyes, though, to the importance of herd mentality. Rene Girard, who really put mimetics on the map for religious studies and Christian theology, posits that violence is mimetic, that is, people imitate others when they do violence. Add to that all that we are learning about trauma, and the way victims of trauma re-enact their victimization by others, and you begin to realize there is a lot of society that needs rescuing, literally, from cycles of family and neighborhood dysfunction. School actually seems to function almost entirely by herd following. It depends on kids learning because other kids are learning, and when they try to hold it together individually, at a distance from others, things really unravel. We have had to contact parents of more than half our student body to get their kids to do their work. Kids I would have sworn were responsible and self-motivated turn out to be motivated to hide when they are home.

DWill wrote:I'm curious whether you think Haidt's Durheimian Utilitarianism is a workable moral philosophy. I wonder whether Haidt considered Durheimian Liberalism, which might state more clearly the balance he sees as healthy.

I guess I am a Durkheimian Liberal, in the sense that I think pursuing community processes is a legitimate goal in itself, in addition to being a means to creating cohesion and "moral capital". I have seen my students do line dancing, seemingly without rehearsal but with excellent coordination, and it warms the heart. This is a thing they can do, as a group, and it is no small thing. Even more impressive when a town can reach a consensus on some safety measure or some environmental rule. Even people who had doubts throw their lot in with the decision and seek to make it work. We are surely a social animal, and that is no more extraneous than being a sexual animal or being a spiritual soul.

But your question is a good starting point for thinking over some of the issues that Haidt has raised in my head. He wants us to treat the leanings of our "unreflective" moral instincts with great respect, and that is good as far as it goes. But a little introspection will remind you that when we form moral structures, we process a lot of judgments expressed by those around us. And, as the moral development people like Kohlberg (whom Haidt wants us to believe he has transcended) have observed, we create inner structures from a kind of assent, or resonance, between instincts and the judgments we hear. Young people don't stop and inquire, "why would they consider reckless driving to be a moral wrong?" but rather they line up the notion of endangering others with their sense of what "wrong" means, and, in their mind, this makes sense to them.

Haidt himself has made the case that WEIRD morality came from having a fairly sophisticated set of issues that should be raised when processing moral judgments. If we blindly assented to every judgment people made, (such as the friends of a colleague who told him, "We can't have a n------ in the White House," about Obama) we would have a groupish, but ultimately shallow and contradictory set of mores. The elephant is unreflective. So when the rider does not just make excuses for the elephant (he is not persuasive on that count, to me - I have seen too much everyday moral courage) but actually looks ahead and chooses a sensible path, we are seeing a profoundly human, social, groupish behavior in action. And what we do is not just reflect together and come to some mutual understanding, but also we inspire one another. We create a positive value around moral reflection, and it feels good to act on that basis.

So, while I don't want to go down the road of critiquing every social structure and every kind of social capital from the perspectives of race, class and gender, I think Haidt brushes past these historically powerful sources of injustice with entirely too much self-assurance. The idea that we should just justify the elephant when it tells us to be more critical of people from lower-status or minority groups, or just justify the elephant when we are angry at something government does and it leads us to generalize to ideologies about government as the problem, strikes me as not only foolish but also morally blind. Thus I have trouble with his whole project of claiming evolution as an authority for conclusions such as conservatives having a broader and more balanced moral perspective.

He is, in fact, in contradiction with himself. Why? Because he wants to claim utilitarian purposes behind the "broader" moral matrix of conservative instincts, and yet he explicitly rules out consideration of current utility in reaching right and wrong moral interpretations that implement the instincts. He is selling (yes, I think it works here) a notion that the array of moral instincts is a kind of primitive, which cannot be questioned, and that it originates in our genetic makeup. But instead of giving us a useful framework for translating these into social values, he falls back on distrust of the very idea of using such a framework in a conscious way. Okay, moral philosophy is not his chosen enterprise, and that is an excuse up to a point. But he doesn't seem to hold back from sloshing into the morass of moral philosophy as it appears politically. So why should we trust him to be guided by his own principles?

This was astonishingly obvious when he looked at health insurance and its effects. Without any grasp at all of the complexities of health care policy (and they are devilishly complex indeed) he made a simplistic argument that if we would just take health care out of the hands of insurers (third parties, in the parlance of health economists) then somehow the problem of costly medicine would go away. This is Haidt's version of the magic of markets, when in fact most of what we know about markets is the opposite: leaving choice with consumers pushes costs up, as people can easily afford quality and pay a premium for it. It is reasonable to conclude that the extremely high cost of U.S. medicine (50% higher than other industrialized nations) is due more to the element of consumer choice than to the third-party decision-making (which every rich country has in one form or another). The solution that he advocated, which is to have everyday medical decisions decided by consumers, (many of whom cannot afford even basic preventive care,) and only insure against catastrophic illness, is the direction that the Affordable Care Act is pushing the private market. Deductibles and co-pays are so high that many consumers are forced to go without, and others may be omitting pricey luxury care, but the magic marketplace is not creating a low-cost, effective alternative system. Nor will it.

So that's my first big objection (similar to my problems with sociobiologists): he wants to reveal a structure that explains something, but then turns around and extrapolates from the discoveries as if those extrapolations follow as night the day, giving him conclusions with no more basis than the ones he uses his explanations to critique.

The second concerns the external view, by contrast with the internal view, of morality. He wants us to believe that moral instincts are mainly unreflective primitives. I have to concede there is a lot to that. But giving a dispositive status to that observation is not just giving up on the task that we must take on to survive collectively, it is also morally bankrupt. It moves from "mostly we don't question our moral instincts" to "it is fruitless to question our moral instincts." That's a profoundly pessimistic view of human affairs, and, frankly, it is suspiciously close to the way the oligarchs would like us to approach moral issues. Like James Buchanan, installed at George Mason University to pursue a stealth agenda of undermining the theory behind government remedies, it makes a person wonder who is financing Haidt. This agenda proposes that if people are uncomfortable with diversity, we should endorse that to get them to pretend there is no difference between people so that group cohesion will benefit. If people have an urge to follow authority, get them to follow it as unreflectively as possible. If people feel oppressed by being asked to empathize with the truly vulnerable and historically abused, then tell them their instinct is as valid as anyone else's.

I have found, reflecting on what Haidt has to tell us, that I agree with him about, and appreciate his underlining of, the Sanctity dimension. I am currently reading (from time to time) a book about the religious philosopher Charles Taylor's analysis of secularism. Taylor argues that people are haunted by the loss of "enchantment" as a representation of the mysteries of meaningfulness, as meaning emerges in the interplay between mind and events. (If this sounds a lot like things Harry Marks has written here, well, you can imagine my excitement to find a real philosopher enunciating them). And people can't come to grips with the emptiness of the materialist claim that meaning is "created" by the individual choice process, as if there is no emergent social process of meaning that has its own claims on our sense of significance. Haidt has put a label on our instincts about this, in discussing the sacred. But Haidt presents this as a primitive, an evolved set of feelings that simply recruit particular instances and round up the memes into a herd of sacred cows. The idea that meaning is not arbitrary, that it appeals to us for, dare I say it, reasons that matter, is outside Haidt's externalized framework of discussion. He has ruled out, from the outset, the notion that we can, by reflection, arrive at principles for more effectively processing moral instincts as they relate to real issues. And the worst of it is, that reflection process is the most sacred of all human activities. It is what Christianity refers to as the soul.

So, I may not have convinced you that Haidt denies the fact of the sacred in the very act of promoting respect for the sacred, but that is exactly how I read him. He wants us to accept a Durkheimian taboo on reflecting on the validity of our sense of the sacred, even while promoting that sense of the sacred. Any idiot notion of the sacred gets the same protection, whether it is Cargo Cults or Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid, or Cliven Bundy promoting the sacred status of Posse Comitatus. Sorry. It won't wash.

I am with Haidt in refusing to let the sacred be reduced to philosophy. Neither Kant nor Rawls had the last word on what we should consider sacred. But they did have important words. If we are not to reflect on the whole business, then the sacred is just smokescreen for superstition and snake oil.