May15 5

Sushi is the Gay Marriage of Food

Posted by Jonathan Haidt in Evolution, Moral Foundations in Action, Videos

I recently gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute. Jonathan Rauch, who writes often on gay issues, asked me how moral attitudes could have changed so quickly on gay marriage. People often seem to think that if I’m saying that moral foundations are innate and evolved, then our moral beliefs are innate and can’t change. In response, I offered the example of sushi. For centuries Americans thought it was disgusting to eat raw fish. But once some people started doing it more visibly, and people habituated to it, the disgust factor decreased and sushi became OK. This short clip offers my general explanation of one way that morals change rapidly.

You can see the whole talk here, including the introduction from Arthur Brooks and commentary from Steve Hayward, Sally Satel, and Jonathan Rauch.

5 Comments

Isabel Penraeth | May 15, 2012 at 7:47 pm

I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan that the AIDS epidemic changed things. I was a teenager before the news broke in small-town Iowa in the late 1980s. I hadn’t thought one way or another about homosexuality at that time, but what came to bother me was what I perceived to be excessive and improper schadenfreude emanating from some Christians at that time that such a fate was deserved. It turned my stomach then, and has made anti-gay sentiments difficult to stomach now.

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Adam | May 17, 2012 at 8:08 am

I actually watched the entire session, although with suspicion because it’s the AEI (everyone on the panel turned out to be wonderful). I furiously read your book and preceded to read The Happiness Hypothesis (also great). I feel like I’m slowly training my elephant because I’m so intrigued by arguments that contradict my beliefs (I like to think so). Along with your work I’ve also read The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin and The Republican Brain (well I skimmed parts of it). I’ve been reflecting on these books and trying to reconcile the various arguments and evidence with limited success. I feel like Robin covered aspects of conservatism that you may have missed but at the same time I feel like you both have a deep curiosity for the subject and both books helped me gain insight into the Conservative mind (which has opened my mind up for different sorts of arguments). At the same time, I’m experiencing cognitive dissonance and I suppose I’m hoping you and Robin collaborate on a new book (or Bloggingheads) so that I finally have a manual to understand why my father likes Glenn Beck so much. Have you read his book?

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- Jonathan Haidt | May 17, 2012 at 11:59 am
  
  Adam,
  what a wonderful reaction — this is very much what happened to me, after reading Thomas Sowell (A Conflict of Visions). Feelings of dissonance happen when mental constructs begin to change, and then conflict with other mental constructs. I just ordered “The Reactionary Mind,” on your suggestion. I am sure there are many aspects of conservatism I have missed. Great idea for me and him to to a BloggingHeads discussion, I’ll suggest that to Robert Wright after I read Robin.
  
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Amicus | May 25, 2012 at 3:40 pm

But morality, conventionally understood, is more than disgust and more than habituation.

While these things may have conditioned responses, which you measure in your work and which you outline descriptively in your recent book (and other work) and use make inferences, morality also has to be concerned with what is true (a point your also touch on in your work).

Simply put, we’ve come, in the past 30 years, to a collective conscience that “gay” is something fundamental to someone’s make-up, not a “taste” in the ordinary sense and not an “habituation” (most importantly, not a negative one, for the individual gay people, otherwise we’d treat is as a pathology). As Isabel pointed out, the AIDS “holocaust” was instrumental in forcing the issue to public conscience (can you locate that event in the terms of your book? I think I might be able to).

Most importantly, we’ve come to an understanding of “gay” that we think is not destructive to “hive behavior”, to the moral whole, if you will. We now understand and sanction it – informally … – as something gay people do, not as a prescription for everyone.

That understanding is under attack from the far Left and the Right is understandably still at a loss for a comprehensive response to that perceived threat from the far Left, short of the old-fashioned one, “no gay behavior, period.”

Hope that helps.

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Coralee | June 9, 2012 at 3:14 am

Amicus, it seems to me that this video was more about the perception of your behavior by your social group, rather than a personal choices. I think that the analogy could perhaps be continued that someone who finds ‘sushi’ interesting may try a couple pieces to determine their feelings about it without fear of repercussion from the group.

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