David Blackburn

Interview: Jonathan Haidt on left vs right

Why are Dennis Skinner and George Osborne locked in enmity? The answer, according to Jonathan Haidt, lies beyond the obvious partisan explanation, and reaches back into humanity’s first nature. Haidt is a professor of moral and social psychology at the University of West of West Virginia, who has written a compelling book, The Righteous Mind, which argues that politics is determined by evolutionary biology and what he terms ‘Moral Foundations Theory’. In a little over 300 pages of incisive prose, Haidt presents a theory that explains why politics is always personal.

His research shows that our high-minded ideals are mere spontaneous gut-reactions, a primeval hangover from our less evolved forebears. He says that intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. We rationalise in retrospect to justify our impulses. Morality, then, is a social construct. Haidt explains how humans build moral systems on six core foundations: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. 20 years of psychological analysis has revealed that liberals (in the modern American sense of the term) fixate on the first two foundations, while conservatives deal in all 6. This suggests that the right can connect with a larger portion of the electorate, theoretically.  

Haidt’s book is a revelation. It contextualises the peculiarity of Western societies that have elevated the individual above the community, which would suggest why some other cultures resist our conception of universal human rights. It also examines tensions between humanity’s selfish genes and our propensity to group behaviour. And its party political insights are plentiful. Right-wing commentators in particular have been intrigued by Haidt’s findings. In last week’s issue of the Spectator, Toby Young wrote:

‘We [the right] can grasp the importance of protecting people from harm and liberating them from economic servitude, even if we don’t prioritise those principles. Liberals, by contrast, can’t really understand the moral significance of the next four categories.

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