Abstract

Contents

It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good—safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor—that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives.

Frans B M de Waal

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 5 February 2010

The Happiness Hypothesis

The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), is a little book that could almost be regarded as a vade mecum of Adelphiasophism. It is written by Professor Jonathan Haidt, an experimental moral psychologist who has tested original ways of explaining group psychology. In mid career, he has offered us a digest of what he and others have discovered empirically, and used it to examine the validity of some memorable maxims from the works of ancient sages, and from the holy books of several mainstream religions. So, The Happiness Hypothesis) draws from Greek and Roman philosophy, from Indian and Chinese traditions, as well as some other sources, trawling successfully the ancient texts to show they already understood what is now being revealed by modern behavioural science. It is full of good, sound scientific advice, which upholds the wisdom of the ancient sages and religions Haidt choses to offer us, but ought not to be read uncritically.

Haidt has a good grasp of the various schools of modern psychology, including social psychology, the evolution of behaviour, and the emotions, where he has made distinguished contributions himself, and he began as a philosophy undergraduate. So, he takes the conclusions of classical thinkers on ten aspects of living and compares them with the experimental research he and others have done in modern psychology. Some ancient sages were good psychologists and understood, in an observational and intuitive way, how the mind works. Their advice on how to live, and the thoughts of modern psychologists on how to have a healthy mind are remarkably similar. Jonathan Haidt takes this insight seriously. The ten subject areas he chooses are:

1. the mind is divided, made up of several conflicting drives or mechanisms
2. how our perception of the world is always changing, and that, for our psychology, is more important than how the world actually is
3. the importance of reciprocity in social life
4. our blindness to our own shortcomings but not to shortcomings in others
5. problems of the pursuit of happiness
6. the importance of love
7. the strengthening power of adversity
8. the happiness to be had from virtue
9. from atheism to divinity
10. the meaning of life.

When people began to think about their lives, recently according to Jaynes, but actually probably during the Pleistocene period, they considered lives were conditioned by fate, chance or luck. The “happ” of “happiness” is a thirteenth century introduction into English. Before then, Old English words were used instead, and, by the thirteenth century, the common usage was “befall”. The latter was then replaced by “happ” from Norse, then “happen” by adding an English verbal suffix. It meant “befall by chance”, a lucky or unlucky happening! So, “happ” was the Middle English word for “chance”, “fortune”, whatever happens in the world by chance or fortune, viz, ‘happenstance’, ‘haphazard’, ‘hapless’, and ‘perhaps’. Finally, the chance element was overlooked, and it just meant an “occurrence”, a “happening”. Happiness, then, originally was whatever happened to you, whether good or bad.

Socrates seems to have taken happiness to mean whatever anyone thought was good in the way they felt about their lives. To be happy was to lead a good life—one which matched the cosmos—the great order of the world—the Persian arta. Good people lived their lives according to the cosmic order. The philosophical treatment of happiness from Aristotle through Erasmus to Luther meant the alignment of personal conduct with heavenly order.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’s dictum that life “is but what you deem it” resounds in modern research on using thinking styles to cope with stress and adversity. The Buddha’s teachings on non attachment seem to prefigure the ideas of modern cognitive therapies. So Haidt’s writing embraces spiritual and mystical viewpoints while retaining scientific and rational coherence. He is always concerned to relate his points back to the evidence.

Jews in the intertestament period thought God blessed them by material rewards of comfort and wealth in exchange for righteousness. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount promised the weak and the poor would be blessed, they would inherit the earth for being righteous, a future reward for socially good behavior—but an earthly one. In the Protestant Reformation, life was a serious matter of toil and worship, but happiness on earth proved God’s grace. With the Enlightenment, there was a turn back to the ancient Greek idea, that happiness was a rational alliance of the personal with the laws of Nature being newly discovered.

Protestantism had shown that people could be justifiably happy through God’s grace, but the Enlightenment made happiness a legitimate pursuit. The US Declaration of Independence says the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is self evident. The Founding Fathers argued over every line of The Declaration, except the “pursuit of Happiness” which remained unchanged throughout their deliberations.

Dispositions to Happiness

Phineas Gage

In 1848 while working on a railroad project in Vermont, a twenty five year old construction foreman named Phineas Gage suffered a severe brain injury when a three feet long, fourteen pound tamping iron was blown through his skull. He survived. The iron rod flew through Gage's skull, entering through the bottom of his left cheekbone and leaving through the top of his head, landing almost 100 feet behind him. He was taken to be treated by Dr John Martyn Harlow, who later wrote:

Gage was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage”.

It is this report that gave medical doctors evidence that damage to parts of the brain can cause specific personality changes. From his bad behaviour through his loss of inhibitions and social self-awareness, Gage's wife left him and his friends abandoned him. Yet he spent some time in Chile as a stagecoach driver, and an old photograph of him shows him holding the tamping rod, now inscribed, which he carried with him always, and looking handsome and smart, although with his left eye closed. He may have recovered his social skills, a social recovery. Around 1859, he returned from Chile and joined his mother in California, where meanwhile she had settled. Gage was 37 years old now, and began to suffer epileptic seizures. After a few months, he was dead—21 May 1860.

Philosophers have thought about happiness for a long time, but only recently have psychologists. It is now possible to give tentative answers to what happiness is and how it may be pursued, based on empirical scientific investigation of mental processes. MRI and PET scanners combined with traditional psychological experiments show where brain activity takes place, and so what it is doing. Emotion is most consistently active in the orbitofrontal cortex of the brain, just above and behind the eyes, the newest part of the mammalian brain. Damage to the frontal cortex causes people to lose their emotions while still thinking rationally, but it does not leave them able to think purely logically, unencumbered by confusing emotions, as once was expected (see Phineas Gage). Haidt says:

They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other.

Have we a right to be happy, or rather are we naturally in a happy state? Is happiness the default human condition? Probably not, but neither is unhappiness. It depends on two principle factors…

1. dispositions we have inherited
2. our immediate circumstances.

Psychology can address the first, but society is responsible for the second. The psychological study of happiness tells us things people have thought for a long time, but confirmed by objective study. Given satisfactory present circumstances and some personal freedom, happiness is how happy you naturally are. Haidt likens the mind’s subconscious machinery to an elephant, and its conscious reasoning machinery to a small rider on the elephant, trying to make it go in the direction it wants, and rationalizing what it actually does.

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, one of the original positive psychologists, found, by making people write down how they felt whenever he buzzed them with a pager, that they were most happy when they were absorbed by a task that is challenging yet closely matched to their abilities—what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”.

Most of us are grossly over optimism, 90% thinking we are better than average, when almost all of us are just… average. When we hear a word that sounds like our own name, we subconsciously assume it must be good. Hence the bizarre fact that there are more dentists called Dennis than there ought to be, and lawyers called Lawrence. Optimism and our huge sense of self worth are an essential part of our psychological immune system, to save us from perpetual depression.

Happier people are also kinder. One psychologist handed out biscuits to passers by, then had an actor drop a pile of papers near them. Those given free biscuits were more likely to stop and help. The failure hitherto of psychologists, philosophers and theologians to realize that much of our thinking is unconscious and often instinctive has misled them into believing morality is uniquely human—supposedly the highest level of human consciousness. Yet many mammals do the same.

Happiness

Caution and proneness to anxiety are adaptive traits when it comes to survival. No one has time to bother about happiness when they are constantly threatened with death. Not that human hunter gatherers were. Modern studies refute the Hobbesian claim that the life of primitive men was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Even the lives of chimps are not that bad. If Hobbes is speaking of when humans were truly solitary, then it was before the ancestors of humans even socialized. So it might have been true, but more than ten million years ago. It is certain that even prehumans had some control over their circumstances, but they perhaps were not conscious enough to think about it. Even now, happiness is not universal and immutable but changes with time.

Throughout evolution, it has been advantageous to survival to be fearful and cautious. Haidt tells us that in evolution “bad is stronger than good. Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures”. The reason is that the fear is channelled quickly, through the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls the decision to fight or flee, but only gets slowly to the parts of the cerebral cortex that allows us to consider a response. We have evolved to react long before we know what we are reacting to.

People who are deprived of something essential to life, are, as one would expect, unhappy. People who are starving are not happy, so poor people who constantly have to worry about how to eat are unhappy. Maslow showed it in the middle of the twentieth century with his hierarchy of needs. Once people are no longer so poor they need to worry about eating, a source of unhappiness is removed from them. However, material riches beyond what are needed to stave off starvation, and to provide what previously was thought of as a luxury, does not make people happier beyond a certain point. Americans and Japanese are richer than they were in the 1970s but are no happier. People adjust to the new norm, then expect more. It has been described as a hedonic treadmill—they keep on aspiring for more but their happiness stands still.

Once poverty is no longer a worry, and people are otherwise secure, they have a “set point” of happiness which is largely inherited. Behavioral geneticist, David Lykken, concluded from studies of 3,000 pairs of identical and fraternal twins that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller”. Everyone has their own a base line level of happiness, which is 80% genetically determined, a “cortical lottery”. If they win the weekly lottery or lose the use of their body through a broken neck, their base level will change temporarily, but after about a year most have adjusted back to their happiness base.

Moreover, striving for more material wealth, especially when it seems to be succeeding, takes people’s minds off the wider problems of security society should provide. Once they feel they have at last got somewhere, they begin to feel once again the absence of the caring society around them that is really the trouble. And it is not just their immediate surroundings. They might be faithful Christians attached to a middle class church, yet still feel that wider society, their country and the world, is failing them.

The circumstances of our life cannot be left out when we think about people’s happiness. Psychology cannot help make people happier when it is the world that is making them unhappy, and the big aspect of the world people have to deal with is society. People are most often unhappy because society is an unhappy place for them to be. Society evolved for security, and now all too often it makes them feel insecure. If psychology and self help books tell people they can do better with this approach and that one, however well researched, but the reason they are unhappy has nothing to do with their psyche, but the society they are in, then psychology is no solution but part of the problem. It makes them feel it is their fault when the cause is an objective one.

Haidt can be funny, and he cites the Monty Python team on the way to happiness:

Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.

Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

It is funny, says Haidt, because it takes the form of a good answer to the meaning of life, but its content is empty or mundane. If this is mundane, it is because it repeats, in one respect or another, the advice of many ancient and modern sages, not least Christ, and that shows it is not empty. “Many a true word is spoken in jest” is another old wise saying. It shows we ought not to cast aside so cavalierly, even Monty Python, who make it funny by the devout manner of delivery, mocking clerics, if anything. It is actually very good advice, simply put, so that it is ideal for young children. And we have to begin to teach our young children to live in peace and harmony with other nations. It would be a lot easier if vested interests did not keep shoring up our unjust and manifestly insane way of living just to preserve someone’s bank balance forever!

Rich Men’s Foundations

Haidt tells us he has been an atheist since high school implying that he has no religious axe to grind. But any religiously inclined reader can safely read on, for Dr Haidt seems to have rather moved from his original atheistic stand point to one that is much closer to a sympathy with religions than most atheists could imagine tolerable.

He has been blessed with prizes and grants from the Templeton Foundation, a Christian charity which doles out money to those who can find, from modern scholarship, particularly science, something good in religion, particularly Christianity. The Reece Congressional Committee in the McCarthy era, looking for “reds under the bed” in the tax-exempt foundations, collected evidence on the support given by the foundations to social science research, observing:

When their activities spread into the field of the so called, social sciences or into other areas which our basic moral, social, economic, and governmental principles can be vitally affected, the public should be alerted to these activities and be made aware of the impact of foundation influence on our accepted way of life.

It may not have occurred to [foundation] trustees that the power to produce data in volume might stimulate others to use it in an undisciplined fashion without first checking it against principles discovered through the deductive process.

The fear they seem to be rather obscurely expressing is that social science research might be bent, misinterpreted or otherwise misused to support the objectives of the foundation—believed by the McCarthyites to be communist—providing the financial backing for the research. Reece himself said:

Research in the social sciences plays a key part in the evolution of our society. Such research is now almost wholly in the control of the professional employees of the large foundations and their obedient satellites. Even the great sums allotted by the Federal Government for social science research have come into the virtual control of this professional group.

Congressman Reece

James Perloff summarized, “The major foundations, though commonly regarded as charitable institutions, often use their grant making powers to advance the interests of their founders”. It is a valid criticism, but quite why the richest men in the USA should want to support a communist takeover via their foundations as Reece tried to maintain, is an absurdity of McCarthyism. It is not absurd, though, that rich men should want to control the capitalist political and econonomic systems to their own benefit. To get Joe Doe to pay for it through the tax exemption is precisely how the megarich manipulate the common people of the USA.

Does the Templeton Foundation seek to advance Templeton’s aims? Plainly it seeks to advance religion, but does advancing religion advance capitalism? Strange that the American conservative wing is called the religious right, and right wing authoritarians. Does Templeton gold affect the outcome of the social science research it sponsors? Presumably, those in receiving the money can only deny it, but the rest of us are left with a nagging doubt:

You and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling.

John Locke

John Locke—the philosopher of the British glorious revolution of 1688, whose own philosophy (knowledge is derived from experience) was believed by the Founding Fathers of the United States—said the words to a friend, refering to Leibnitz, who thought like Descartes that truth could be had by reasoning alone. The greatest crime of any scientist is not to report the outcomes of experiments accurately.

Achieving a Balance

In this case, the nagging doubt is magnified when we find that Haidt, though persisting that he is an atheist, says, in The Happiness Hypothesis, he only “doubts” God. So, he has moved to sitting on the agnostic fence from being sure he was on the atheistic side of it, and from his agnostic viewpoint, looking down on the other side, he sees much to admire in selections from the ancient holy books, and the practises of religions themselves. He calls it “taking off the blinders of the myth of pure evil”, and “drawing on wisdom that is balanced”:

A good place to look for wisdom is where you least expect to find it—in the minds of your opponents [because] you already know the ideas common to your own side.

It is the sort of statement that sages ancient and modern would be proud of, it is so wise, but it is only wise when the two opposites are genuine ones, and you find the right point of balance. If we think of 0 and 10 as being the opposite ends of the spectrum of views, then 5 is the precise balance, but if we believe someone who says the balance is between 0 and 6, then it is 3, so we have made a false deduction, since the range is really 0 to 10, though we think we are being wise by taking the middle point. Moreover, the balance is rarely to be obtained so mechanically anyway, because the true balance might not be the average, midpoint, or whatever, the range possibly being skewed.

Thus Haidt finds support in modern psychology for the sayings he laboriously selected as being ancient wisdom from a long trawl though old books. He has already selected what he considers to be wise from old religious books, zen masters and such, but old religious books are also full of unadulterated tripe, and even shocking things. Readers of these old works have to decide for themselves what is valid, unless they accept what some guru, some minister or priest, tells them is right in them. The range is really 0 to 10 but only 0 to 1 or 2 is selected and offered. So, as Haidt is looking for what he considers wise, we are comparing science with a particular selection of ancient wisdom chosen to fit what we consider wise today, by whatever criterion is appropriate! Is the criterion set by the Templeton Foundation? Whatever it is, it impresses Haidt, but he ought to be much more self critical about this methodology than he is.

In fact probably 99 percent of, say, the Jewish scriptures is either morally disgusting or at best neutral by today’s standards. Should we consider it proper to kill our enemies willy nilly, their mature women, and even noncombatant animals, but keep their daughters and young virgins to do with them what we will. That is one set of despicable commands of God via His spokesman, Moses, that no atheist can admire, and even most Jews and Christians, one would hope, would consider demonic. But there it is in the instructions to the Israelites on how to deal with the Midianites they conquered (Num 31:18).

There is more to be admired in the teachings of Christ, but even much of that is, on the face of it, dependent on belief in the Jewish scriptures, because Christ was himself a pious Jew, so his fine moral teachings are confusingly bound up with scriptural tripe and belief in a tribal totem called God, and then further confused by the apostle to the gentiles who emasculated Christ’s often admirable morality, and substituted the dildo of Osiris, Attis and Adonis—making a practical social morality into an eastern mystery.

Many of the works of ancient sages come down to us as a selection already, before Jonathan selects once more. The Old and New Testaments are selected, and the selections edited, much of the work of the Greek philosophers has been destroyed, and what remains is unlikely to be typical. Who knows about works like those of India and China? Again we are likely to have selections that have been edited by disciples and later scholars. Then Dr Haidt has made his own selection from what remains, quite rightly seeing no wisdom in a command to take virgins as sexual slaves, for the command can hardly mean anything else.

Taking the Haidt line here is deception, self deception, once you are aware of it, and one would have thought Jon Haidt should have been aware of it. You cannot be as simplistic as Haidt suggests in “drawing on wisdom that is balanced—ancient and new”. You have to make careful judgements of whether the opinions offered as being polar opposites really are, whether the supposed balance point really is, and whether the data are skewed or otherwise weighted in some way. In short, you still have to be analytical, get as much information as you can about the different opinions and weigh them up yourself. It just does not do to try to give the impression that ancient religions are in some way equivalent to modern science. One can compare them, naturally, but you must do it fairly, not mechanically. Rarely is the ancient wisdom wise!

Political Balance

Haidt is also fond of using the “opposing” views of American liberals and conservatives as exemplified by typical Democrats and typical Republicans:

My research confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly the rights of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness. When one side overwhelms the other, the results are likely to be ugly.

So, an overwhelmingly liberal society would be as ugly as an overwhelmingly conservative one. The inference is that we are in the best of all possible worlds when half of us are liberals and half of us are conservatives. That is the implied position of balance, in which the opposites balance out. But are these classifications truly opposites, or is Haidt failing to take into account the special features of US society? Is he being scientifically objective or is he tailoring his conclusions to the Templeton Foundation? Haidt implies his secure atheistic beliefs were dented by his time working for cultural anthropologist, Richard Scweder, in Bubanaswar, Orissa, India, where he must also have seen a much greater range of human situations and political opinions than he had in the US. We can accept it influenced him, but he seems to retain the terrible perceptual flaw that the USA is typical. Or it suits him… and the trustees of John Templeton.

The political poles he uses are more accurately and less confusingly described as “progressive” and “reactionary”, or, to choose less emotive words, just “left” and “right”. Sixty years ago, doing similar sort of political psychology, H J Eysenck used the words “radical” and “conservative”, but Eysenck explained they had an objective basis in the proportions of the “national cake”—the gross national wealth—people enjoyed. Nowadays about 10 percent of the population own about 70 percent of the cake. Another 10 percent own hardly anything of it. The national cake is, in other words very unfairly distributed, Christian society or not. That leads to two opposite poles of political opinion:

1. those who think it is grossly unfair and should be evened up
2. those who think it fairly reflects the enterprise of the different classes, and so should remain as it is, or even get more uneven.

The first is the left, and the second is the right! The degree of evening up and the methods to be employed for it also count, so that there is a spectrum of opinion. Parties representing the interests of rich high status people are called conservative parties, or parties of the right, while those parties representing the interests of poor low status people are called radical parties, or parties of the left. Between the radical revolutionaries on the left, and the conservative reactionaries on the right are the liberal reformers in the center.

A radical party in government acts to further the interests of low status people, and should legislate to benefit low status people, thus rewarding them for voting radical. A conservative party in government acts to further the interests of high status people, and should benefit high status people, thus rewarding them for voting conservative. Rich people therefore vote conservative almost exclusively, but a large minority of the poor also vote conservative in the USA, when they would be expected to vote for the radical party. The main reasons are that in the USA:

1. there are only two parties, neither of which is a radical party
2. the poor are utterly confused by the media which are entirely owned by rich people.

It is also likely that poor ignorant people do not know what their interests are or where they lie, so end up voting for the rich man’s party. It is called the American dream.

The words Haidt uses to describe his political poles, are not opposites in much of the world. By liberal, Haidt means the left, radical or progressive wing, and by conservative, he means the right or reactionary wing. Liberal is a rank bad choice for the left, because in much of the world it is the center party, and in some parts of the world it is right wing, as in parts of eastern Europe. Nowhere is it radical. In the UK, the liberals traditionally have been in the center of the political spectrum with the Labour Party to the left and the Conservative Party to the right.

Now the UK is much more like the USA. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown somehow hijacked the Labour Party with the help of a bunch of ex-Trotskyites and turned it neoconservative, without the mass of ordinary Labour voters noticing, renaming it New Labour. The New Labour party is, naturally, now to the right of the Tories (conservatives), so the Liberal Democrats have become the left party in Great Britain. The range of permissible options in the USA and in the UK has been trimmed by years of right wing propaganda, and conspiracy to take out the traditional left wing.

It means that anyone taking Haidt’s advice and seeking a balance between the political options available will find it on the right hand of the whole political spectrum, between the center liberal position and the right wing conservative position. Politics are permanently skewed to the right! It suits Rupert Murdoch, the US megarich caste, and the Russian tax-free oligarchs living in and controlling Chelsea, but it removes any political choice otherwise. In particular, just like the USA, the poor in the UK are effectively disenfranchised, and Lo! the electoral turnout in Britain is dropping to levels similar to the US. Socialism and communism are not allowed into the equation. They are excluded by machinations which seem to comprehend the Haidt scheme of balance!

Society and Morality—Parties and Politics

It is particularly bad because morality is a social matter. Haidt and others have shown beyond reasonable doubt morality is a deeply ingrained adaptation for social living. It is instinctive. Yet modern economics is dead set against society. Margaret Thatcher, UK Conservative Prime Minister of the 1980s denied there was any such thing as society. In the US, it is so bad, the very word “social” is being squeezed from the English vocabulary. As an everyday adjective, it has been replaced by “societal”, the added syllable removing it from being quickly identifiable as having something to do with socialism.

In anthropology and social psychology, “social” is replaced by “prosocial”, again disguising its links to socialism, but with a different added syllable. “Societal” and “prosocial” simply mean “social”—pertaining favorably to society. Anything that is not favorable to society is “antisocial”, not “antisocietal” or “antiprosocial”. So, “social” is being driven out of modern American English, and therefore out of English, because the English—like everyone in the world contrary to Republican propaganda that says the world hates the American way of life!—always copy the Americans, but also even “society” is being aqueezed out in favour of homelier worlds like neighborhood, locality, homeland, and even community.

Modern American anthropologists and psychologists like Haidt describe the moral instinct as being prosocial. It emphasizes morality’s role as promoting society, though “social” suffices. It shows there is an impulse in people in favour of society, not an antisocial one. The fact is that it goes against a century of capitalist propaganda in the west is a strong motive for the upper class to want to neutralize it. The reason is the morality of our economic system is antisocial—it is to do others down so that you can climb the ladder of material riches.

Western economics divides people into layers based on power and wealth, into classes, and the bulk of the population occupy the lowest levels, while the bulk of the power and money occupies the higher ones. A society is a united body, but unity is the last that our rulers want us to find. People are encouraged to be greedy, to be selfish, to be unfair, to cheat, to accumulate, to accept injustice. “God wants you to be rich!” the lying Christian poster reads. The opposite is true. Christ said poverty, not riches, is blessed, and that his disciples should give away their money to be saved. Caring and sharing is the social instinct, and biology and psychology now prove it.

Everyone who is not damaged in some way has the impulse to care for others, and to share with others. In economic social psychology tests, four out of five people are willing to share with others, but the rest want to be selfish. Such economic games break down unless the sharers and carers can punish the selfish. When they can deter selfishness by punishment, then the society thrives. Capitalist society is the exact opposite. People are rewarded for their selfishness and sharers and carers are left exploited. It is a situation that cannot go on. The victory of selfishness just takes us back to how we were before we had society, before the caring and sharing glue bonded us together for security and mutual protection. Our present economic system is atavistic. It takes us back to the mentality of the coyote.

Two hundred years ago, the philosophy of being as free as you liked was expounded by people like John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John S Mill. It was the theoretical demolition of the aristocratic system—essentially feudalism, which had ruled Europe since the Dark Ages, and started to dissolve politically with the English Revolution and the beheading of Charles I. It was called liberalism, the political expression of the capitalist system.

Later, Tories like Margaret Thatcher liked the idea of being thought liberal to seem nearer the political center to unsuspecting voters, and neoliberalism was born It meant freedom to exploit other human beings, and minimal government regulation of business and finance. That describes traditional US conservatives. American conservatives historically wanted little to do with foreign adventures, contenting themselves mainly with what concerned the Americas, but increasingly since World War II, the US has intervened everywhere in the world, and a new type of conservative emerged to justify it, elaborated since the fall of the USSR by unemployed Trotskyites in Washington. It added gung ho militarism to old fashioned conservatism, and the use of blatant lies in justificiation of the greedy policies and overseas adventures they wanted to pursue. It is neoconservatism, and is the policy of New Labour in the UK, and Bush’s, and increasingly, it seems, Obama’s, administrations in the US.

Always opposing the various conservatives, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been the parties of people, the villeins and serfs of the feudal age, who wanted to strengthen social bonds, not weaken them, to protect ordinary people from unnecessary harm and exploitation, and to offer them justice against those happy to treat them as servants or even slaves, the old aristocrats and new capitalists. Such people appropriately called themselves socialists and communists—people who favored a caring and just community and society. The original difference between the two politically was that communists saw the need for a revolution to effect change, whereas socialists thought it could be done democratically by reform.

It stands to reason, then, that the liberalism of old, and now neoliberalism—conservatism for short—undermine the moral imperatives that bind societies successfully, and so ultimately lead to social breakdown. If anyone can really do as they like, there is no society. Society has nothing to offer when the people who constitute it refuse to share and care. Neoliberalism is a word meant to give capitalism the cachet of present day liberalism, the maximization of personal freedom within society, without going so far as to destroy it, because the present day centrist liberal wants to be free to care and share with others, and not to have to rob them.

So, to return to Haidt's balancing trick, if liberal is the left political pole, then US citizens are being squeezed to choose between 5 and 10 when the range is 0 to 10, taking the range to be left to right. The range 0 to 4 of the political spectrum was eliminated leaving the present situation—liberal is left, is radical, is revolutionary! It is quite false but it suits the right in the US, and so “liberal” is a dirty word on the religious right. Americans are being forced farther and farther towards the policial right by removing the left wing, degree by third degree. Social parties are being written out of politics.

This huge distortion in US political perception exploded on to the scene with the above named Senator McCarthy after the war, when he conducted witch hunts against anyone left of liberal. To admit to being a communist when asked “Are you or have you ever been a communist” was to destroy your career, and not to name names—betray your friends—was tantamount to admitting to being a communist. It was exactly like the Inquisition of late Medieval and early modern Europe. Honesty meant the destruction of your career. Loyalty to friends meant the same. To be a gangster or paedophile was to be treated better, especially if you were a Christian one. Needless to say, communism and socialism became synonymous with evil, and no argument could change the popular view people were indoctrinated with.

Jonathan Haidt is presenting distorted conclusions that advance the religious right agenda under the pretence of being scientifically neutral. If morality is an evolutionary adaptation for social life, then why are socialism and communism excluded from society and a scientific investigation of it? Ultimately socialism and communism are both ways of emphasizing what the present economic system of capitalism omits, a decent fulfilling social side based on fairness and concern for others. It is a valid political viewpoint, and has been described as a Christian heresy, it reflects so much practical Christianity. It might be argued that it is impossible in modern America to explore these political positions because no one holds them any more. If so, the scientist has to exercise ingenuity, perhaps by finding proxies for them, or by finding fresh resources to be able to explore them elsewhere where they too are still favoured by some—India perhaps!

H J Eysenck

Haidt cannot be unaware of the pioneering work done by the British psychologist, H J Eysenck, mentioned above, and hardly a lefty. Dr Haidt accepts that socialization is essentially the erection of moral barriers to the immediate satisfaction of selfish impulses. These barriers are essential if society is to survive, and they are fundamental, for they exist even in primitive societies. Yet they are irksome to the individual whose base, solitary animal, atavistic desires—that therefore feel in many ways quite natural and justified—are thwarted. The barriers come from an innate morality, and later religions. They restrict the open expression of socially destructive behaviour. So, social attitudes and political behaviour ought to differ on continuous spectra or scales ranging from:

• easily conditioned to resistant to conditioning
• over socialized people to under socialized people
• a strong insistence on barriers to a free expression of impulses.

At one end of these continua are those who want society to limit its restrictions on the individual so long as society remains caring and protective, and on the other end of it are those who wish to add more restrictions and tighten group loyalty by enforcing the authority of the group. All humans have a moral instinct and therefore the whole spectrum is moral, but the libertarian end inclines to trust the individual, whereas the authoritarian end does not, believing people have to be made to conform to group norms. One end is libertarian and the other end is authoritarian.

This illustration shows the left-right spectrum of politics, including socialism and communism traditionally omitted by American political and social analysts, and the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum, that is usually ignored all together except in the labeling of communism and fascism as totalitarian. A totalitarian government is one that is so authoritarian that only one person, a dictator or king, has all the authority, or one party has, and so its leader is effectively a dictator. It ought to be plain that a theocracy, a government by a single religious sect, must be totalitarian.

Here is a graph of both the scales set orthogonally, thus defining a political area or space, the mid point or origin of which approximates to the ideal political balance. Communists are authoritarian radicals, fascists are authoritarian conservatives. Somewhere about half way along the authoritarian-libertarian axis is democracy, a society with rules, but rules that notionally can be changed by the people who are subject to them. Somewhere about half way along the left-right scale appear the liberals, the demonic lefties of modern US conventional politics. They are almost at the center of the whole political space!

What evidence shows that this space, so far conjectured, is valid? It is the result of carrying out this analysis on several thousand men and women, working class and middle class, of all degrees of education, of all ages, and voting for all the different political parties in Great Britain, shown in the next figure. Questionnaires were made up of items which best characterized the left-right continuum and the authoritarian-libertarian continuum, such as:

• nationalization is inefficient
• religious education should be made compulsory
• coloured people are inferior
• birth control should be made illegal
• the death penalty should be retained

Lefties believe:

• private property should be abolished
• Sunday observance is old-fashioned
• we should give up our national sovereignty in the interests of peace

They were tried out and refined in preliminary studies, and finally applied to many British people who were members of, or had voted for, the different parties. The scores on the two continua were determined and plotted.

In Great Britain, political parties are differentiated mainly on the left-right continuum, and little on the authoritarian-libertarian axis, at least until Blair and his New Labour. It does not follow that what is true of Great Britain is true of other countries, but attitude tests in France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States were similar. Moreover, in general, people difficult to condition tend to be extraverts, while people easy to condition tend to be introverted. So authoritarians should tend to be extraverted, and libertarians should tend to be introverted. Results have always supported this hypothesis. Extraverted people tend to develop authoritarian attitudes, whereas introverted people tend to be libertarian.

The expected positions of the political groups were mainly upheld. Socialists and conservatives are approximately equal in authoritarianism, and liberals are a little less authoritarian. Communists and fascists are rather more authoritarian, fascists being more authoritarian than communists, but there was one remarkable difference from expectations. Fascists were just right of center in the left-right spectrum, not to the far right as expected. It shows that it is authoritarianism that is bad overall, rather than being too far left or right, and that authoritarian center right parties—like New Labour in the UK—are fascist! Even right wing liberals and left wing conservatives can become fascist when they take to being authoritarian, as many have in the US. Perhaps the reason is that voters can be persuaded to accept authoritarianism for what they think are the very best reasons, such as to defeat terrorism! Authoritarianism not terrorism defeats democracy.

As democracy is placed on the authoritarian-libertarian axis, one could have a democratic communism or a democratic fascism, but the indication of the graph is that communism and fascism are normally associated with authoritarianism. In the case of fascism, it is understandable, but not in the case of communism. Fascism is an elitist politics which requires authority to maintain the elite against the mass of the population. Communism is a social equality contrary to elitism, theoretically at least, favoring the masses. Interestingly, during the surveys, communists were the more co-operative of the extreme parties, while fascists were suspicious, distrustful and secretive, and refused requests for co-operation. Communism ought to be sustainable by the weight of an egalitarian society as a whole behind it, yet it has always led to totalitarian regimes.

Plainly there is a flaw in the practice of communism, and it is the contradiction between the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and its ideal of social equality and fairness. A dictatorship is necessarily authoritarian, so from the outset the aims of communism, in its Leninist form if no other, are necessarily compromised. Communism above any other political system demands democracy, and commitment to it, yet capitalist elites can always swindle the people in democratic systems, and evidently the same remains true in communism.

You can amuse yourselves assessing your own and other people’s position in this manner, with a few extra scales added, using the AskWhy! 60-item inventory which can be completed online and the results examined afterwards. It is purely personal. It can also be downloaded as a zip file to be run off line.

Conclusion

Professor Haidt has written an entertaining, encouraging and informative book, that has, unlike most lifestyle books, much genuine science behind it, mostly by a hundred other scientists besides Professor Haidt himself. It is recommended. Yet that nagging doubt remains about Haidt’s general method and interpretation. He claims still to be an atheist yet openly sucks up to ancient religion on spurious grounds.

The ancient human beings we are talking about were scarcely different from ourselves. At the most, they lived 3000 years ago, about 150 generations ago only. It is hardly surprising that they could produce wise sayings even that far back, but society was also in an expansionist phase from city states to national states and thence to imperialism, and inter group rivalry was aggressive and warlike as it has remained until today. Religion was an important unifying factor in that phase. Already societies had unified on a small scale on the basis of care and security within society, a phase that had lasted a very long time. The aggressive phase was much more recent, but a morality of authoritarianism was essential to maintaining group loyalty when massive conquests were being contemplated, or determined resistance to warlike invaders was necessary.

A society that has no enemies does not need to be authoritarian, and loyalty and purity make no sense in a state that encompasses everyone. Haidt, on flimsy evidence, equates group loyalty, authority, and purity with the necessary instincts for social existence of care and justice. Those who value all five are by implication better balanced and so better human beings. Those who value all five are the religious right wing authoritarians. Naturally, it is a finding that suits the Templeton Foundation, and the megarich class of the USA, but, if it is true, it is hard to see how society can be prevented from crumbling and collapsing, as it already seems to be. It can only be saved by ridding ourselves of outmoded standards, and that is what these three Haidtian additions to the moral instinct are.

The so called liberals, Haidt says, place less emphasis on the three moral imperatives he claims to have found, instead emphasizing the essential two, security from harm and fairness. The division in human types seems to be genuine, but there is now no equivalence or safe balance. One is designed for unity against enemies, and so requires enemies. The other is designed for internal unity. It does not require enemies. The left wants peace, the right wants perpetual war, and invents new enemies and provokes them into retaliation when there are none. There is no balance here for anyone endowed with reason and the intrinsic moral emotions we all seem to have. Haidt’s three are not instincts but religious traditions given the cachet of nobility or holiness to preserve them.

The balance is in the true center, with the liberals, not on the right, and the center is low on authoritarianism—a proxy for aggression, or vice versa—with a proper democracy of flourishing parties from across the spectrum, not a choice of only two with the same dominant policies. We need to teach our children non-violence, not violence as we do with murderous games, and bring them up with the innate moralities enunciated, The Golden Rule, a genuinely universal morality that everyone can easily accept. That will give us a chance. Without these proper policies, based on scientific evidence, we shall end up destroying ourselves. What is happy in that?

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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