The first thing that could be said about the book is it is one of the most important books written about moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt is the author; he is a social psychologist and one of the leaders of moral psychology. Haidt presents the idea that he mainly worked on in social psychology, with others, social intuitionism, and moral intuition. He takes us through many fascinating metaphors, examples, and stories to make his explanation closer to the elephant in us, rather than to the writer; “The elephant and the writer” is the main metaphor in the book. 

Morals aren’t as simple and clear as we imagine. If you think that your morals are based on general concepts like harm, have you tried to examine that? Haidt presents many examples from his studies and other studies to show how our concept of morals cannot easily be defined either cross-culturally or for other differences between us. For example, he gives a story of someone who decided to eat his own dead dog, is it moral? From a harmful perspective, it doesn’t seem to hurt anyone. By excluding any context, why shouldn’t it be moral? The book has many similar examples. In the beginning, he gives an introduction about the works of Jean Piaget and more importantly, Lawrence Kohlberg who might be the most important contributor in moral psychology, although Haidt would disagree with him later in the book about very important points, mainly about the nature of moral reasoning. 

The topic can’t be introduced without a sufficient philosophical background. Haidt provides a simplified philosophical introduction that anyone can understand. Are we led by reasoning or emotions? Are our morals based on our emotions or our reasoning? In that matter, Haidt uses many studies to support the view that leads to an area that seems neither of these, intuition. Many simple decisions that we make cannot even fit within the classification of reasoning vs. emotions. However, from what we know, for example about psychopaths, where reasoning seems intact, they lack morality. In infants, where there’s no reasoning but only feelings, we can see the roots of morality. That leads to the second chapter’s title “The Intuitive Dog and its Rational Tail” or to the main metaphor of the book, the elephant and the writer. 

Automatic processes, and intuition, do seem to lead our psychological moral scene. Many of these processes are subconscious. The author chose the elephant because it’s more intelligent than the horse. The writer is no more than a public relations company that explains or justifies later what the elephant did. Intuitions lead to judgements which later lead to reasoning.  When we talk to someone we address the same cycle, we start an intuition, which leads to a judgment, then to reasoning. But have we evolutionarily developed to have a lawyer rather than a judge or an expert? It seems so. 

Prior to going into the idea of intuition and its lawyer, it’s worthy to highlight the great effort the author made to explain the other philosophical debate about nativism, that we inherited something that affects our behavior including our moral behavior, and the non-nativist view, the blank slate as Steven Pinker calls it. The latter assumes that we acquire almost everything that shapes our behavior by nurture. For some time, E.O. Wilson was the only one who claimed that we could inherit what may affect our behavior. Later, during the rise of evolutionary psychology, it became more accepted in psychology to admit the role of biology. Haidt is considered neo-nativist.

Chapter four explains how our reputation, or what people think of us, forms an essential part of our moral reasoning. Various experiments and examples show that we act more like politicians when it comes to morals. There is a high chance that we cheat if we don’t get caught up doing that, according to one research.

The moral matrix

The moral matrix isn’t a term from the book, but also it isn’t purely a title that I made. Haidt ends the first chapter in part two with a metaphor borrowed from the Matrix movie. The movie’s famous metaphor of the blue pill and the red pill offers the opportunity to choose between leaving the matrix, which is another reality made up of machines where people are plugged in and have full sensations of another world. The hero can otherwise choose the red pill to leave that matrix to the desert of reality, the world as it is without the domination of machines and the reality imposed by them. Moral systems in different cultures have similar matrices.

The author describes his experience in Odisha capital Bhubaneswar as a leftist from a WEIRD culture (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) into a society that follows a completely different moral system. His individualistic concept of morality is based on harm only. If something doesn’t hurt then it’s morally ok. He also describes his experiment in the United States near Pennsylvania University where he asks people the strange question of whether someone can have sex with a dead chicken or eat his dead dog. Penn University students often answer these questions in a way that doesn’t object to the action as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. The situation in Bhubaneswar, and in many areas in the world, is different.

Haidt didn’t accept many of the concepts in the Odishan society in the beginning. Misogyny, caste system, and the social rules where he shouldn’t be nice to people who are serving him or he shouldn’t thank them. However, gradually he started to like life there. The elephant in him, as he describes, started to lean towards them, and then the writer started to justify. Haidt discovered that although there are many unacceptable things in that moral system, it’s just shaped differently, it’s shaped around the family rather than the individual. Divine morality is different from the Western individualistic rules.

In divine morality, you can’t just do something when it doesn’t hurt. You have to be a decent person with decent behavior because you are part of something larger. Rules like purity are integrated within these moral systems in India, the Muslim world, or Judaism even though it doesn’t seem to be relevant to the Western concept of morals. When Haidt returned to the United States, he didn’t change his politics, but he started to understand the conservative Republicans more. He started to understand moral systems as different matrices, each of which has its justifications and ways to defend its rules.

Haidt’s referral to the relationship between the individual, the psychological, level of this, which is the elephant and the writer, and the sociological general view of the moral system may give us an extra point to have a better understanding and way to discuss political issues. We can’t have a rational argument with the elephant, and there’s no point in winning a logical argument with the writer. The matrix, i.e. the different moral systems is added to that as another way for us to think twice before arguing with someone’s elephant while he lives in his matrix where family, tribe, or just another unit is the essential thing to keep in the society rather than the individual’s liberty and rights.

Cultural taste of morals

Is there a culture that doesn’t have a sweet taste within its cuisine? Someone may say the Eskimo, but that’s just because there are no fruits in their environment so it’s more limited. Haidt also gives a hypothetical example of a restaurant that offers a sweet taste only. The point of the question and the example is to use tastes as metaphors for five foundations in his moral foundations theory: (1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty, (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity.

There’s no moral system that has only one taste of these, but they are demonstrated in different ways across cultures. These foundations are not only cultural but they could be considered innate, as they exist in every culture and even in animals.

Some of these foundations may not look like foundations of morals, depending on our morals, but they are according to the moral foundation theory. Purity for example, why would an act that involves something against the hygiene rules (but doesn’t harm anyone) be considered immoral for some cultures? One reason could be because the last foundation, purity, acts as a cultural immune system to avoid those who may cause diseases to the group.

Loyalty is, and always was, an important foundation in religious texts that represent a source of morals for some cultures, like the Quran for Muslims. Treason goes against morals in many cultures. Similarly, respecting authority, from the father to the head of the state is an important part shown in human groups.

The book still gives a considerable importance to the American society and politics. He ends the fifth chapter by asking whether the right wing is more moral than the left, as this spectrum seems to be complete in right-wing politics. The left falls behind when it comes to loyalty to the group when it protests for global issues or when it spreads its care to humanity rather than to the group itself. Even when it comes to authority, the left doesn’t respect the authority or treat it in the traditional way the right wing does. 

Group Selection of Hives

The beginning of part three of the book takes us on a great journey into genes and behavior as well as the evolutionary logic of having morality. Group selection was an idea that had been rejected by many including scientists like David Sloan Wilson who changed his views later into being one of the main proponents of group selection. Group selection proposes that evolution can simply happen on the group level rather than the individual’s.

One of the main examples that show us how group selection can work for psychological traits is the experiment on silver fox domestication in Siberia by Dimitry Belyayev and Lyudmila Trut. The experiment resulted in a new creature. The other practice (rather than saying experiment), is what happened in the process of selecting chicken breeds for egg production. The individual selection of the feature resulted into having more aggressive hens who usually produce eggs at higher rates. The group selection of egg-producing hens resulted in less passive breeds. A process like that showed on a large scale how group selection works.

We can relate all the moral foundations introduced in the previous chapters to their evolutionary processes and why they are essential. We can think about what makes them innate and why they are so important for us as a specie. Care/harm foundation may seem obvious; the fairness foundation comes from the importance of cooperation, the advantage of it for groups to thrive when compared to groups that doesn’t have it. Loyalty is our level of cohesion in our groups. The explanation that the book provide for the authority foundation would take us into terms like the alpha male and the evolution of how muscular power got replaced gradually with hierarchies of power; we can see then how something like that, which seems irrelevant, is attached to our moral systems. Sanctity foundation may seem the easiest to understand. It’s “The Behavioural Immune System” as Mark Schaller’s book titled from which Haidt quotes the rationale of being protected from parasites and bacteria by specific behaviors or by staying away from some “impure” persons.

Group selection can show us how human groups can work as one organism. While it may seem difficult to happen, Haidt explains how evolution can happen fast sometimes, and how efficient the outcome could be like in wasps and bees’ hives where the hive mode that developed in their ancestors made them one of the most efficient, and dominant insects in the world.

We are “homoduplex”, Emile Durkheim’s term for describing the dual nature of humans as individuals led by instincts and by morality generated by society. Durkheim accompanies us until the end of the book as his sociological views match some of the modern sociological rationales. Homoduplex for Haidt is “we are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bees”. We have collective sentiments, and moral matrices that lead us as groups, like religions.

Our cultures co-evolve with our genes. Major genetic changes must have happened along with the cultural changes we had and vice versa. Genes functioning on a psychological level and on group social level will no more be a strange disapproved concept after you read this book.

What activates the hive mode in us?

If we have a hive mode, there must be a biological basis for it. Management and leadership systems already reached to some mechanisms to bond humans together in an amazing way like the first types of muscular bonding. We know however that we are not always living in that mode. What then enables that mode?

In the age of discovery, Europeans found how groups in the new world and other areas in the world bind together in collective rituals and dances. They would use specific drugs that enable something related to this bonding. Raves culture in the 20th century, accompanied by drugs like MDMA, is a similar modern example of these collective dances the Aboriginal people in America used to perform. MDMA increases Oxytocin.

Oxytocin is one of the main enablers of the hive mode. It increases our trust in others according to experiments done to compare people’s trust rate when they are sprayed with oxytocin. It increases with intimacy when we see others suffer, but it also increase our aggressiveness toward other groups while we are bonded to ours.

Are we better than in our hives if we were more harmful to others? How would a one-hive society led by a dictator be compared with a free multiple-hive society? Can we have multiple hives? It’s a realistic approach that we can’t love everyone, then what is the best way to make our hives, our societies, and moral matrices? Questions like this are raised in the book but there’s no easy answer to them. Haidt explains that some cases are better than others like the multiple-hives society compared to a society led by a dictator, but is there an optimum way?

In addition to Oxytocin, mirror neurons are another biological mechanism to enable the hive mode. I personally add to this review what I remember from Language and the Mind lectures (Spencer Kelly) and what seems to be common between these social mechanisms and language. Shared intentionality is the main thing. Haidt compares a group of humans chasing prey with a group of chimpanzees. The chimps are individuals following the same target independently, they would fight later to get a share of the prey. Humans can work together, they would share the same intention and they would have roles to do the mission as a group, likes bees. Haidt suggests that mechanisms like this, as Elizabeth Bates suggests for language, are based on existing old networks in the brains that may have other functions in other species but they are specialized in that way in humans to enable the hive mode.

Religion and football teams

Far from the complexity of some matrices. Religions may not be more than football teams. Symbols that bind us, and blind us (morality binds and blinds). The new atheism movement is one scientific movement that has a different approach to religion. The four horsemen (as they are known): Richard Dawkins, Sam Haris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens dedicated significant efforts to a new direction of thinking post-9/11. New atheism, led by the four horsemen viewed religions as sets of useless memes, evolutionary byproducts, and that the results of believing in Gods and in religions would end mostly in evilness. Haidt and other scientists disagree.

Religion has many things that just being useless parasitic memes that are no longer required. We read in the book that people cheat less when someone is watching, they do also when there’s an eye figure above them. Similarly, the idea of watching god makes people less tempted to commit moral violations.

Religion bonds people better. Religious and social communes are a form of small societies that existed in the United States in the 19th century and the 20th century. They are usually attempts to make a utopic society based on a specific ideology. The movie “The Village” shows us an example of such a commune. Haidt mentions that secular communes were not capable of surviving for a long time when compared to religious communes. Attempts to convince people in secular communes to sacrifice individual benefits for the group don’t work while it does in religious communes. What is considered useless by new atheism seems to be very useful.

Religion makes people to be more generous according to experiments and statistics on donating to charities. The particular thing that matters when it comes to the definition of religiosity in this context is not how people believe, nor how they are committed to the rituals. It’s the belonging aspect only.

The early ideas of Darwin about moral psychology can be actually supported by Durkheim’s views on religion as a way to bind people morally together. Durkheim’s views also support Darwin’s. What seems irrational thing to be done by one person could be an action that binds people together when they do it as a group. It would be seen as a ritual. Maypole dancing is one of these activities. Imagine someone doing Maypole dancing by herself, Imagine a group doing it.

Overview

While the book title gives an impression that the book is going to be majorly about the division between the right and left, it goes far beyond this. The left and right or liberal and conservative division is used often in the book as examples to explain and simplify the theory. The final chapter has a specific focus on this. However, after finishing the book, I feel this is the most impactful psychological book I’ve read in the last 15 years after the evolutionary psychology of David Buss. Reading the book once may not be sufficient. Many important thoughts in the book have to be generalized (in the machine learning term) over all our neural networks and thoughts either to validate them, validate the thoughts provided by the book, or both.

The political division between conservatives and liberals could be a use case out of many that the framework of the moral foundations theory can cover. Personally, and many people who aren’t very concerned with politics in the West, or at least not interested in this aspect of it, my mind was always going to other directions, or other use cases that this theory can give us answers about.

The book gives high importance to genetics in our political orientation and the many choices we may have in life. Genetics can specify, according to studies, how we interact with threats and fear. Our neurotransmitters’ features have different types and degrees of responses to them. Our interaction with fear and threats is a main factor in our political orientation. Our genetics can also specify how we interact with change. These are only examples of how genetics, which is ancient, can specify something quite new like our voting decisions.

Education or nurture in general can later shape how our world will treat our brains that are made by our genetics. How would teachers and parents view someone with specific qualities? Then society’s narratives will do more to shape our political and moral decisions.

The book’s original question “Why good people are divided by politics and religion” may reduce a lot of the content as most of the book content doesn’t seem to be made particularly to answer this question. But the final chapter provides a fascinating answer. Haidt views the conservatives and the liberals as Yen and Yan in society. The concepts of moral capital and social capital. With social capital, liberal-leaning, the community would have a tendency to welcome others into the society but without high moral obligations. On the other side, societies with higher moral capital aren’t that welcoming but it has more moral restrictions and they may have a higher chance of inflicting harm to other societies/groups.

Liberalism backfires, it seems a temporary face of a society (both faces have limitations and chances of switching to the other face). The liberal face (I am using the face term, the book uses Yen and Yan) is inefficient and may even seem unable to persist, while the conservative face falls short of empathy and the ability to protect others. Haidt quotes John Stewart Mill’s idea that both faces are required for a healthy state.

The rest of the chapter continues with examples of these two faces of situations from American society. It’s surprising to read many facts in that chapter from a liberal like Haidt, but he’s a scientist and he views the facts and tries to answer a difficult question. Haidt shows how many welfare and equality policies backfire and cause damage to those who were meant initially to be helped such as Latin or black societies in the United States. He also highlights some facts about the libertarians who seem to be a third political division that’s located somehow between liberals and conservatives in the moral foundations scales. He focuses also on the high polarization, Manichiaism, and general changes in the voting taste in the United States.

After finishing the book, and understanding it, you can’t anymore easily consider yourself liberal or conservative. “If you really want to open your mind, open your heart first” says Haidt. Yen Yan thought is the final idea to understand the answer on right and left.