The Moral Mind

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch

My daughter asked me to watch a short (18 minute) lecture by Psychologist Johnathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives and give her my opinion on the lecture. She also warned me to look past the first part of the lecture where the speaker uses some cheap shots against conservatives to “warm up” his mostly liberal crowd.

After fuming a bit over the slander that conservatives lack “openness to experience” and so can’t appreciate travel or good food, are too stupid, ashamed and awed by the penis on Michelangelo’s Statue of David to properly appreciate its beauty and vote Republican because we live in the part of America that can best be described as “Dumbfuckistan” where we are motivated through some combination of religion and stupidity or perhaps more succinctly religious stupidity…

OK I know I am ranting. So anyway after that crowd pleasing opener I really had to focus past the insulting stereotypes so that I could really understand what Haidt had to offer. I am glad that I took the time and had the discipline to watch this lecture. It is a fascinating and frank discussion of the differences in perceptions of morality between liberals and conservatives. I highly recommend you take the time to watch this lecture when you have a clear moment to focus carefully:

Johnathan Haidt/ The Moral Mind

Haidt’s area of interest is the study of the evolution of morality and the effect of culture on its development and practice. After studying a number of present and past cultures across the globe and time he developed what he calls “The Five Foundations of Morality” that he claims are held in common by all people everywhere. These moral values are:

1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

Without getting into the specifics of these five values (watch the lecture) I would like to make a few comments regarding my impressions.

First he notes that although all people hold all five of these values in common they don’t hold them all to be equally important. Haidt pictures the five values as a “five channel moral equalizer” so that each individual has them but may have them set at different levels. Liberals place greater importance on the first two values: Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity. Conservatives also value these first two values but less than liberals. The conservative mind actually values all five of the moral foundation values almost equally and can be said to have a five channel morality. Liberals then have a two channel morality that is not as balanced as that of the conservatives.

The revelation that even scientist realize that liberals are morally imbalanced alone is worth the eighteen minutes of time to watch this lecture. If you are like me you will watch it several more times to make sure you understand what he said. Yes liberals have a two channel imbalanced perception of morality that is out of sync with all traditional world cultures that developed into advanced civilizations. They are for all their noble intentions unable to value the aspects of morality that are required to maintain order in civilization. Not only do they not place importance on these three “conservative” moral foundational values (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect and Purity/sanctity) but they are actively hostile to and destructive of these values.

So yes the gut feeling that so many of us conservatives have always felt about liberals, that they are morally imbalanced and destructive to the glue that holds society together, is recognized by the latest research as being not just a prejudiced instinct but quantifiable scientific “fact”.

Another interesting avenue of exploration for us “openness” challenged Dumbfuckistanees is the theory that humans are born with more built in moral tendencies than the science has previously indicated. Although he didn’t develop this thought in the cited lecture Haidt stated, “The worst idea in developmental psychology is that children come into the world as blank slates.” He did mention a book “The Blank Slate” written by his fellow researcher, Steven Pinker, as the best current work regarding the reality of innate patterns of thought and emotion that are with us from birth. These findings are most consistent with traditionalc onservative views of human nature and deserve more in depth study by all of us.

The Blank Slate

Haidt mentions his concern for his daughter’s future and talks about the need for balance between liberal and conservative forces in our society as he believes that both are needed to sustain civilization. He speaks of a yin/yang relationship and the duality of the Hindu gods Vishnu the Preserver (the conservative god) and Shiva the Destroyer (the liberal god). He even praises conservatives stating that conservatives best understand the fragile nature of order and the necessity to use every tool in the toolbox of civilization to preserve the order that civilization requires to stay in existence.

Finally Haidt talks about the great three panel painting by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, a masterpiece of Northern Renaissance morality painting. On the left is the original state of man as God intended, a paradise marked by order and obedience. The center panel shows the results of man’s rebellion against the order planned by God and descent into a state of anarchic self fulfillment where the goal seems to bein discriminate sexual excess and (LOL) “openness” that Haidt correlates with the 1960′s. The third panel of the triptych is the inevitable result of rebellion, sin and self obsession, hell.

Personally I think that Jonathan Haidt is a brilliant liberal scientist who is scared shitless that his daughter’s future depends on the survival of an American civilization that has become dangerously unstable through its radical drift to the left and lack of moral balance. He clearly realizes that the liberal society that he loves so much, for all the good it tries to do, can not maintain the order required to survive. It was amusing to hear the reactions of his liberal audience who still seemed to think that he was only calling on them, the noble epicures of the world, to continue their mission of enlightening their fearful and dull conservative brothers as to the great superiority of liberal morality.

Liberals are a degenerate self obsessed force in society that are blindly following an unbalanced moral pathway that is dragging us all towards chaos and hell. It’s a well supported scientific theory now.

© Jesse James

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Originally posted at Light in the Forest

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