Morality in the 21st Century: Jonathan Haidt

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 8: Jonathan Haidt

"‘If we look back to previous centuries, there was always something holding societies together. In the 17th century, let's say, that was religion. Then it was culture, and a strong sense of national culture. And then there was a strong sense also of morality, that people of different religions might nonetheless share a respect for various shared traditions.

And somehow or other, from that beautiful equilibrium of the mid century, in the 60s, people began to say, well, let's ease this restriction and that make more room for diversity.

And nothing bad seemed to happen. But we seem now you think to have lost that balance and in particular, through the social media, we now instead of having a national culture, have global noise, which you can hone in on in different ways, but then seem to bind us together.’...

‘We have forms of identity politics, that are different from the ones that lead the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, I just went back and read some of his speeches. And King was, in a sense, relentless in addressing people as brothers and sisters, in talking about our common humanity, in talking about our common American heritage and traditions. King was brilliant at drawing a circle around his enemies and including people and I think it was a rel-, an approach that comes out of a religious background, and a Christian background’

‘And indeed, holding people accountable to the founding documents, you know, all men are created equal, are endowed. He was really saying, let's live up to what we have professed to live up to’...

'Some forms [of identity politics] on campus at least, are pretty advanced in uniting people in common opposition to the oppressor class. And so the more you take young minds and tell them to see the world in terms of polarities, see the world in terms of dimensions of privilege and power, the more you're basically ramping up that tribalism, and I think that's the problem.'...

‘What's scary about this and where I think universities should perhaps be, instead of going along with this tide, taking stand against it.’

‘Yes, but it's very hard for them to do it alone. For one thing, there's litigation. In America, everyone's afraid of being sued. So what if, what if you're not fully supportive? What if you don't do the things that are demanded of you? And then someone commits suicide, the parents could sue you. What if you get bad publicity? What if the students write an angry essay? So it's very hard for universities to do this themselves.

Now, my hope is that the University of Chicago has emerged as the one university that has very publicly broken away from the trend. The Ivy League schools have generally gone in for the sort of the Safe Space attitude, as far as I can tell. And so if the University of Chicago finds that its numbers go way up, and if its reputation goes up, because I don't think most students want this overprotection. So if it does well, I think other schools will follow it.’...

‘We have come out of a few hundred years in which nation states are the dominant way of organizing. Before that there were empires, there were multi cultural empires around. There was the Ottoman Empire and then going back to the Roman Empire. So nation states aren't the only way to organize ourselves.

Now, I happen to think that they're generally pretty good ways. They are the largest unit that you can still get our tribal psychology working in positive ways. That is, I think you have to have a sense, if you're going to take care of the poor, if you're gonna have a sense that we owe people something, it never works on a global level, it has to have some sense of boundaries, that here's the community within which we have a social contract. We have expectations of each other, and therefore we will help each other when in need. I’m drawing on a Swedish historian, Lars Trigrd has has explained this, this view’

‘In England, David Goodheart for instance has argued very strongly that without a sense of national identity, we don't feel that social contract. We don't feel that sense of obligation to the the poor and the stranger within our midst. And it does worry me if we can't restore that.’…

‘It's possible that we're in a phase change in which 50 years from now nation states won't be nearly as important, and we can certainly see what we would lose by that. But it's hard for us to see what we would gain’

‘I think the alternatives, you either have empires or you have tribes’

‘But there could be something else. That's, it's an open question... I think nation states are pretty stable thing. They can be made to work well, they can be quite toxic too. But they, that's what we know. And we know that it can work and we know that it's not working well. Now, we know that that's declining. As for whether the the solution is to restore what we had, to go back to a stronger sense of nationhood, which is certainly what, that's what the authoritarian leaders want. That doesn't mean that they're wrong.

I'm just saying, that is one way. There may be some way forward. I don't know what it is. I wouldn't put my money on it. But I'm just saying I'm not certain that we have to go back to to nation states. I do think that the dream of a general globalist John Lennon, imagine no religions, no countries, no possessions, just everybody living life in peace and sharing. That ain't gonna work. That's never going to work. But could there be something short of that, could be something that would satisfy the globalists who don't like national boundaries. But that wouldn't just be diffused people, you know, in the void? I don't know.’

‘It's clear that we could get back to smaller ideas of local communities, and begin to think of nation states as communities of communities. That may, may be one way forward.’

‘Well, that's definitely an option for United States. Our whole country was founded on an idea of federalism in which the states were supposed to be really the main units that did almost all the lawmaking and that's why the Constitution is written the way it is. It's very short. And the US Constitution is very short. And it says everything not in here is left to the States. And over time, we've centralized more and more. And that's made it so that there's much more at stake in every national election. If the other side gets control, it's a complete disaster for your side. So at least in the United States one possible way forward is to go back to federalism’...

‘When I got interested in morality, at the time, it was all about Lawrence Kohlberg and moral reasoning. And that just felt so flat to me and I was reading, I was reading ethnographies and religious texts and I was seeing oh my, all over the world, people care about food and sex and menstruation and skin. I mean, all these things are in the moral texts of so many societies. And so I started thinking, well, why, you know, why do most societies care about all this physical bodily stuff? And I began to see that that's normal. That's the default.

And it's it's a historical achievement in a sense to thin out morality. To say, no, no, no, morality is just about how I treat you and you treat me and so it’s fairness and harm. And that's it. That's morality. And that's what secular people basically sort of said. And that is actually pretty good morality. If you are in a port city, and your money is made by commerce, and you have to deal with very different people. Let's have contracts. You don't hurt me, I don't hurt you. That's great. And so you get you know, in Amsterdam and London, you get this flourishing of a more cosmopolitan, progressive lifestyle. So that is definitely a way of living.

But what happened, I began to notice this in the United States because the Democrats were, had this more, this progressive, thin morality focused on care and fairness. But they kept losing to Republican candidates that I thought were weak candidates and bad candidates who were able to press many more moral buttons. So George W. Bush, he had speech writers who could write speeches that would allow him to appeal to certain virtues of loyalty and authority and tradition and, and duty and responsibility, that, that really resonated with most Americans. So that's what led to me taking a more systematic approach, looking at our evolutionary history and looking at anthropological texts and saying, where do they match? What are the best foundations for being the taste buds or the foundations?’...

‘Loyalty, authority and sanctity are the three moral foundations that you see the most variance on, the sort of the globalists, progressives often reject those because those are the foundations of more tradition, constraint, and even race, you know, racism and exclusion. It would be the negative side of it. That's where the, that's where the action is in the cultural war, those three’

‘And let me float a hypothesis around. Let's take the 18th century that believed in universality. Reason, philosophy. Forget about all this tribalism. Stuff that gave us wars of religion. So we have the Age of Reason. 18th century. Get rid of all the thick stuff, like tribalism and identity.’

‘And let's just specify that this is some people in the capital cities, this is not the whole 18th century.’

‘This is the flag bearer, the banners, bearers of enlightenment. The thick stuff comes roaring back in the 19th century, in the form of identity politics of a 19th century kind. Built around either nation, or race, or class. So you get nation states, you get the Aryan race, you get Marxism. And identity politics comes back to fill the vacuum left in the, by the 18th century, which wanted to abolish identity.

We had a second attempt to abolish identity. The second half of the 20th century. Let's all do our own thing. Let's forget about universal. Let's forget about tribes. Everything's going to be the individual. Are we now seeing those thick identities come roaring back with the same dangers, as they posed in the 19th century? After all the 19, when they came back in the 19th century, the result was a century later, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Gulag and the KGB. I mean, are you fearing this return of identity politics that might harbor some great dangers for Western liberal democracies?’

‘Perhaps. Just let me, while sympathizing with your general history, let me make it a bit more complicated by saying that on any trait you want to look at, people fell on a bell curve with some people much higher than the average and some below. So some people love freedom, individualism, they hate being bound in. Now in the modern political terminology, these people tend towards libertarianism, at least in this country. On the other extreme, are people who really need to be part of a tribe. And if they're raised orthodox, Jewish or evangelical Christian, then  they're done, they've got their tribe. But if they're raised in a more secular setting, they don't.

When they get to college, they might find certain identity based groups more appealing. I just gave a talk at the University of California at Berkeley last week, and walking down the sort of the central strip on Sproul Plaza, I was stunned to see about 50 or 60 tables, they do what's called tabling, there are 50 or 60 tables, where students are recruiting for various groups. Most of the groups were ethnic identity groups. It was like the Latino business students and the Filipino, you know, chemists. I mean, it was everything. It was like the Balkans. I mean, no violence was, much, you know, friendlier, but I've never seen so much Balkanization’

‘Tribes are returning’

‘For those who need them, for those who want them. The one other thing I would add to your story to make it a little less threatening is that I think Steve Pinker and others who point to progress are right, that there is a long term decline in the acceptability of violence. And two years ago, when I was, two or three years ago, when I would talk about these issues, I would always point out: now look, the data on polarization is terrible. All the signs about American democracy are horrible, but there's been no violence, there's been like, essentially zero violence.

That's not quite true now, there has been a little bit of violence, but actually not that much. You know, 2016. And during the presidential campaign, and that was an incredibly bitter campaign, and there was some pushing and shoving and there were some people injured. And there were couple of murders that might have been related to politics, but not much.

So the story that you tell I think is plausible, except I don't foresee a return to large scale violence. I think we could have a collapse of, we are having a collapse of trust. We could have political institutions breaking down. But I think that we really are different than we were 100 years ago in terms of our toleration of people punching each other or shooting each other’

‘Because to be able to talk to only people who are like you is impoverishing beyond measure. And it seems to me that diverse societies offer this possibility of conversation across differences, which we need to recover so that we don't fragment into an infinite number of sects of the like minded’

‘That would be my vision of a good, decent and humane, liberal society’

‘Jonathan, who are your moral role models?’

‘Well, I think many of them are my former advisors. People who modeled a love of learning, argument and debate. So I'm thinking especially of my postdoctoral supervisor Richard Shweder, a professor at the University of Chicago who had a reputation for being able to argue any side of anything, and beat you on both sides. But it wasn't just, it wasn't just trying to, trying to win. It was just, it was a love of engagement with ideas and a sense of playfulness. And so I think he influenced me a lot in my thinking about thinking and, and, and discussion.’...

‘Whenever I speak to college students, and I talk about call out culture, and I read a description of call out culture, and they all know what it is. And I ask them, how many of you think that you have this at your school, you know where you can say some innocent thing and you'll be torn to shreds on social media, no one will defend you.

And what I find is that 100% of the hands go up saying, yes, we have that here. And they hate it. And they recognize how inhumane it is. They recognize how it makes them afraid to speak honestly. So I would say the challenge to young people, and it really is for high school students more than college students, because, you know, they have to figure out a way to develop through their teen years without, without doing this to each other. The challenge is, how are you going to stand up to it? Either as an individual or perhaps that's too difficult. How can you arrange something? How can you set norms? How can you start a movement? What can you do so that young people can connect and the connection is positive and it's not done in fear? How can you, your generation, reduce or end call out culture?’

‘Would you endorse George Orwell's remark that if liberty means anything, it means the ability to say what people don't want to hear?’

‘I would. I'm not sure that that is the defining, I'd have to think about it if I'm going to take it literally, but certainly the sentiment that we must be able to challenge each other. That is essential for progress in any society because without that we get the orthodoxies, we get the crushing orthodoxies and the bullying and the mob mentality. So yes, I'll endorse it.’"


Maybe Richard Shweder was a "troll"