The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives

It is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable.

The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, “Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views” — they like a society which is open and changing — “whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views.”

[Moral Psychology]

The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I’ve ever seen ..is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, “The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”

So what’s on the first draft of the moral mind? [Jonathan Haidt and his colleague, Craig Joseph] found five foundations of morality.

1)Harm/Care

2)Fairness/Reciprocity

3)In-group/Loyalty

4)Authority/Respect.

5)Purity/Sanctity (But purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is being extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch, or put into your body.)

[Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues Brain Nosek and Jesse Graham made a questionnaire on www.YourMorals.org and the results from 30,000 people’s answers are]: liberals have a two-channel, or two-foundation morality (Harm and care, Fairness and Reciprocity). Conservatives have more of a five foundation, or five-channel morality (in-group, authority, purity).

We find this in every country we look at. The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia.

Within any country, the disagreement isn’t over harm and fairness. Everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity.

So what makes those three other foundations moral?

Liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos….Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve.

[Beyond For and Against]

Once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability— then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix.

This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about yin and yang….Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world.

These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. From the Zen master Seng-ts’an:”If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease.”

Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil?Can you be not for or against anything?

If you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions:that our righteous minds (tend to) unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do?

Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out in which everybody does think they are right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons. Step out. And if you do that, that’s the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition.