On Moyers and Company
I’m the guest on Bill Moyers’ new show, Moyers and Company, airing on PBS stations Feb 5-7. Check your local PBS stations. Or, just watch the whole episode below, or, better yet, online here. There’s some good additional material on that page, below the main video, including this 3 minute clip on how my time in India, while working with Richard Shweder, helped me to step out of the “matrix.” The producers of the show also created this wonderful feature, to help foster mutual understanding: They asked a well-known blogger from each side to recommend blogs from the OTHER side that they each found helpful and insightful.
Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Moyers and I talked on camera for about two and a half hours. (He is as lovely, warm, and conversational in real life as he appears on TV. The time flew by.) The producers edited our conversation down to 47 minutes, so there was a lot of material that didn’t make it into the show, including just about every place where I gave credit to my collaborators. So let me at least mention them here:
–My colleagues at YourMorals.org, of whom a picture is flashed up early in the show: Pete Ditto, Jesse Graham, Ravi Iyer, Sena Koleva, Matt Motyl, and Sean Wojcik.
—Emily Ekins, at UCLA, who took the photos of the Tea Party rally, and who is working with me to study Occupy Wall St.
I just watched you on Moyers, and I must say great show! I ‘ran out’ to Amazon and pre-ordered the book following the show and eagerly await its arrival in March.
I especially like how you got Moyers out of his comfort zone, at times I could have sworn he was about to jump over the table at you and strangle you, but you kept your cool! Bravo!
You provided interesting insights into some of the discussions I have with my left leaning friends, and explained why something so fundamental to me would be so foreign to them. Again I look forward with great anticipation to reading your book.
As I watched your interview I was pleasantly surprised to finally hear someone voice a concern I have long held – once you demonize opposing views there is no where to go with it. It becomes the end of the search for truth, and it gets so ugly and personal and totally nonproductive.
Now I can understand why Romney got such heat for saying he wasn’t worried about the poor – I heard the rest of his sentence, but folks who have created a protected group of the poor missed that part completely and focused on what they heard as a threat.
I look forward to reading your book. I hope that you will continue your work and find a cure for this ailment of our society.
yes, exactly!
partisans are looking for ammunition, not truth, and romney gave them some good ammo to shoot him with.
I will be ordering 7 of your books for my siblings. We get along well when we talk about the
hunting, fishing, and childhood escapades. But we are a fractured family when it comes to
politics and faith. Within the 7 we have devote non-catholic Christians, devote Catholics, Agnostics, and bonified Athiests. It would be nice if we could have deeper converstions that were more meaningful than the most recent hunt–without hateful words or raised voices. By the way did your study for the book come across any interesting dynamics of family vs nonfamily interactions, looking for some hope here…
By the way I heard your interview–I could not help but think about how on the first week of February all of 2011 all of Wisconsin was high on the Packer Victory in the Super Bowl, and a month later families and friends were rabidly hating each other on the Govenor Walker issue.
I watcher Er. Haidt on Moyers and Company last night. I was spell-bound. This conflict of Parties has haunted me. Finally a way to understand it, Thank you!
Jim Miller
Thank you for the dialog that will undoubtedly generate solutions to this mess in which we find ourselves. As I watched this interview I was amazed, intrigued and finallly – hopeful!
This can only better serve humanity on so many levels. I cannot wait to read your book.
Professor Haidt, I was glad to see you on Bill Moyers and Company. I’ve been following your work since reading the Happiness Hypothesis after seeing your TED Talk a few years ago. Thank you for your valuable research and for trying to get this important knowledge out to more people.
If you haven’t already tried to book a slot on the Daily Show or Colbert Report, I would highly suggested you do so. Not only would both of the show’s hosts love your message, but the show has a very large following, especially among the nation’s youth.
thanks!
believe me, every author wants to be on that show. It ain’t up to me to book it!
I watched the Moyers & Company program, then read some of your papers and took some of your morality tests. To summarize my understanding of your points: Liberals tend to rely primarily on issues of care/harm, fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They rarely make moral appeals based on the concepts of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Conservatives use all six foundations. You also talk about their different understanding of fairness as leveling the playing field and the tea party folks as punishment for laziness and cheating, reaping what they sow.
This explains much of what I have observed but hadn’t formulated so clearly. BUT I still wondered why this was so and I think it is because Conservatives and Liberals have very different views of the Polis. I use the Greek word because I think it includes the concept of physical territory as well as the people, the citizenry, and who is considered a citizen, within that territory.
One thing I have noticed in my years of self-study and observation of humans. Conservatives, especially fundamentalist Christians, appear to be very ME centered individuals, not narcissistic but how things affect ME. The Liberals I have met tend to see the WE in issues. Conservatives have a very narrow view of the Polis, both in physical terms and in human terms (the people included and excluded). Liberals tend to have a very broad view of the Polis to the extent that for some, the Polis includes the whole planet and all of humanity.
IF you have a very narrow view your primary concern (for survivals sake) is to maintain tight control of the Polis, to keep people from leaving and to keep outsiders from entering. In your paper you mention they are “much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups….” You can see why they would place an emphasis on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation and why their interpretation of fairness is based on punishment, reaping just deserts. You can also see the need to demean, belittle, degradate, demonize, dehumanize the outsiders. It is the only way to ease the feelings of guilt raised by keeping people out, and is necessary to create the “us versus them, the outsiders” mentality needed to keep a small Polis strong or defensible.
Also I might add you aren’t really concerned about what happens outside your Polis. Zbigniew Brzezinski was interviewed recently about his new book and he is very concerned about the lack of knowledge and interest of many Americans about world affairs. One Christian woman on my local newspapers online comments said she doesn’t care at all about poor people elsewhere only about poor people here. There have been lots of calls to do away with all foreign aide programs. If you have a small concept of the Polis you can’t understand or see how things beyond your boundaries affect you. That goes for environmental issues as well as social issues.
Whereas if you have a very broad view of the Polis, those same points: loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation and punishment are viewed as the very things that have kept the Polis from being expanded to include the “out groups”. AND concern for the issues of care/harm, fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression are what are needed to expand the Polis and/or make an expanded Polis a workable entity. Not sure which comes first the idea of the expanded Polis and what it takes to make it work, or the moral ideas that make expanding the Polis feasible in the first place. It is also why Liberals have more trouble demeaning, belittling, etc., even your opponents are part of your Polis and deserve the same treatment as all others in the Polis.
Just wondering if you have any thoughts or have done any research on this idea.
Susan, i think there is some truth to this, esp. the broad-narrow idea of the polis. ON Yourmoarls we find that liberals are universalists. They say they care about people in general, and the world at large, more than they care about their country, and people in their community. So I’m not sure this is truly a “polis;” i think that liberals rather are very concerned about exclusion, and they are wary of nation-states as things that divide us all from each other. See John Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine.”
I would go a bit further and say that the conservatives concern about authority, loyalty and sanctity are indeed motivations for human judgements about others but that they are not “moral” judgements.
Because they are not universal , nor are they meant to be, they are not moral-they are simply matters of taste and preference. One of the necessary conditions for describing a judgement as a moral one is that it applies to everyone.
As a self described liberal, I am usually quite aware of which of my pronouncements on other peoples behavior are morality based and which ones are merely the way “I” see it.
You seem to believe the (hallucinatory) experience of moral objectivity is adaptive, yet you seem to work hard to undermine it in an entirely general and profound way (as Hume did). Am I misreading you?
you are right, except that:
1) the consensual hallucination creates a kind of moral truth, what philosophers call “emergent truth”; like the truths of prices in the market. they are true and real, but they are not like the truths of the natual sciences.
2) I am not trying to undermine and debunk, i’m trying to get people to marvel at how wonderful it is that we can have these consensual hallucinations and then live in them. There is no life outside them.
jh
Interesting, thanks! Can an understanding of morality as based on emergent truth, understood to be a product of subjective preferences and beliefs, function as effectively as morality understood as having a transcendent objective basis? Put another way, can the hallucination function as well once it’s seen to be a hallucination?
I’m particularly interested in your views on this, if you or your colleagues have developed any. It seems as important as the parallel question about religion, to which I see an analogy. (When I think about the Drake Equation, these are the questions that come to mind first.) The research seems pretty sparse and unsatisfactory.
You’ve expressed concern that atheism may not function as effectively as religion in the long term. I have the impression you treat religion and morality differently. I haven’t noticed you calling religion a consensual hallucination, for example, though you apparently see it that way. Perhaps you avoid such language because you believe religion should be understood in terms of function, not (false) beliefs. One might say the same about the (false) experience of objective morality.
One person’s early reaction to your book on this point might interest you. I’ve been fortunate to read it (via Amazon’s early customer review program). Maybe it’s just me, but the rhetoric and logic regarding this have a distinctly debunking, undermining feel. Plato and other believers in objective morality are set up as foils for Hume, whose scientific approach (heroically) debunks their views. The term “hallucination” has decidedly negative connotations (similar to “delusion” used in regard to “rationalism”), and a particularly good fit to debunking. Even the term “matrix,” since you tie it to the movie, has a lot of negative baggage and fits debunking. I don’t think the more neutral or positive term “emergent truth” appears in the book, or I didn’t notice it.
I understand these terms fit your own experience, which involved some self-debunking. Could it also be (and this is just a guess) this striking difference in rhetoric is influenced by your ongoing argument with the New Atheists and others who dismiss religion as hallucinatory? Calling morality, which they all favor, of course, by a name they use to belittle religion, intuitively drives a certain point home. In any case, it seems a double-edged sword, if there’s a chance morality may not fare as well understood that way.
SanPete,
thanks for your very careful and thorough review on Amazon!
I think you are right to challenge my positive spin. Ultimately, my book and my work are indeed debunkings FOR ANYONE WHO IS A MORAL REALIST IN THE MOST CONVENTIONAL SENSE, i.e., for anyone who thinks that moral truths are objective and “non-anthropocentric” facts about teh universe, akin to facts of physics. There’s now way around it, i think that’s wrong. And I agree that moral orders can play their “constraining” and ordering role better when they are treated as objective truths. This is a point that Burke made, about the value of “veiling.” It’s a point that Sosis makes, when i discuss his work on what made communes work, in ch. 11.
So yes, I’m a debunker, but I think my positive spin is still hopeful for life in a morally diverse modern society, where it’s just not possible to get the objective thing to work out.
And I must congratulate you on applying my book to your analysis of me in my ongoing debate with the New Atheists. That surely does influence my rhetorical strategy and word choice.
I’ve wondered if the experience of moral objectivity can have a more direct, potentially more important effect on motivation, and on a broad sense of meaning, than via veiling. It feels different than morality understood as a product of our feelings and beliefs; its intuitive logic can be very different (besides veiling). My impression is that a lot of people feel it’s important that morality have a robustly objective foundation, in any case.
I agree with you in rejecting transcendent moral objectivity, but it seems possible to broaden your appeal by not insisting on that bit of moral metaphysics. The bottom line of your practical argument, it seems to me, is in the practical value of our differences, since as you clearly see, differing “tastes” won’t be respected if the ones we lack appear harmful. (Moral fundamentalism or the like, which can occur in more subjectively based systems too, can be attacked directly as harmful.)
That practical argument, as well as your module theory and its evolutionary explanation, and even your rejection of rationalism, is consistent with transcendent ontological moral objectivity. There could be Platonic forms of virtues that cannot be directly accessed by reason, only imperfectly by intuition, for example. (Which isn’t far from what Plato actually wrote of.) Utilitarianism classically assumes the objective value of happiness (so your happiness and mine count equally, even to me). An Aristotelian teleology and other possibilities could also fit a nonrationalist morality.
Fitting your theory more particularly, the moral modules could be like mathematical gifts (“tastes” are objectively ambiguous), e.g. the care module could be an ability to “see” or be intuitively moved in ways reflective of the objective value of people’s well-being, love of liberty could reflect the objective value of liberty, etc, even in some very strong sense of “objective.” Our varying intuitive gifts could still complement each other practically.
I imagine not foreclosing such metaphysical possibilities would broaden your audience.
I enjoyed your book The Happiness Hypothesis immensely, as well as your talk at TED and your interview on television with Bill Moyers. I have a quick question. Have you read the book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See, by Donald David Hoffman? If not, in it he explains how with our brains we essentially create an imperfect shorthand model of our environment and our understanding of the physical world we live in. A model that suites us well for being a human being and interacting with other humans, and surviving to reproduce. None the less it is an imperfect model that we each create.
I understand then that we confirm and revise the model we create by communicating with others who, from their vantage point, either help us confirm our model or cause us to call it into question. We must constantly adjust our model based on what we sense and what others tell us. Each of us has our own model (individually created universe) that is unique to each of us. There is no true knowable universe. To have the best understanding of the universe and model it to suit our needs we interact with one another to create a matrix like model, akin to what you have referred to. It seems to me that the moral aspect of the human matrix is just one aspect of each of us creating an imperfect model of the physical and social world we live in.
This may be well understood in the academic arena but I suspect most people think that there is a knowable universe, the one close to the one they have modeled in their brains, not suspecting that they are really part of the very complex human matrix model of the universe that is based on many individual versions.
I look forward to attending one of your talks in Chicago in May.
Mike Scheffler
Thanks so much, Mike.
I have not heard of this book, but i think hoffman and i are saying very much the same thing. I would only point out that there is a big difference between “non-anthropocentric” facts, like that the earth is the 3rd planet from the sun, and anthropocentric facts, such as that shakespeare is a better writer than Kurt Vonnegut. I think many people (like sam harris) want moral facts to be non-anthropocentric, and therefore knowable with high consensus. But i think they are emergent facts, like the fact that some of my students papers realy are better than others, when i give them grades. Aliens from another planet would not necessarily agree. But on the matrix stuff, YES! it’s really social.
j
We are all hypocrites? doesn’t the illegitimacy of hypocrisy and the existence of a social order depend upon there being some people in a legitimate position to condemn hypocrisy? In addition to the consensual hallucinations, aren’t there likely some people who are in non-anthropocentric fact hardly hypocrites by natural selection?
No doubt there are natural variations in how much we’re inclined to hypocrisy. My understanding of Prof. Haidt’s view is that we’re natural hypocrites about matters affecting our own interests, but can more easily see the hypocrisy in others. So in general there don’t have to be nonhypocrites to spot hypocrisy.
That is also my understanding of Professor Haidt’s view. I don’t doubt that hypocrites are good at spotting hypocrisy in others. I doubt that hypocrites can inspire and lead within tribes, over time. In addition to conditions that select for hypocrisy in people, there must be conditions that select against hypocrisy in people. I’d like to hear the inspirational Professor Haidt discuss these conditions since they are what sustainably successful tribes would value.
I wonder if the way the moral foundations are understood biases them towards traditional/conservative values. In particular, the ways the criteria of universality and moralization are understood could tend to filter out liberal values.
Take sanctity and openness. If I understand your research, the former is widely embraced by conservatives while liberals are mainly neutral or suspicious of it. That’s reversed for openness which, it appears to me, is experienced by many liberals as a fundamental value while conservatives are mainly neutral or suspicious of it.
So why is one considered a universal value and not the other? If I understand right, the basic units for counting what’s universal are cultures. If what counts as a culture tends to include relatively pure traditional cultures, like an African tribe or an ancient subculture of India, but not relatively pure progressive or WEIRD cultures, such as, say, the tribe of social scientists (counted instead only as part of a broader culture like the US), the effect will be that all cultures as counted contain substantial traditional parts but not all contain substantial progressive parts.
As a result, values peculiar to liberals will be regarded as not universal, while those peculiar to conservatives can nonetheless be counted as universal. This could account for your finding that all the moral foundations are used by conservatives but not by liberals.
Your colleague Ravi Iyer explains the rejection of openness as a foundation by saying it may be an important preference or trait but not a moral one. His applies a social judgment test: is the preference for openness like “I like blue,” a subjective preference, or like “I like blue and so should you, or I don’t like you,” which is taken to indicate a value?
This test seems likely to filter out liberal values more than conservative ones because liberals are more likely to view their values as subjective and to try not to be judgmental about them (both things you argue in favor of–would your own values pass a social judgment filter?).
Good luck with the book debut tomorrow!
I greatly enjoyed the majority of your ideas, however I think you missed two points one was when Moyers was talking about demonization and how Newt demonized Democrats. Please note Harry Reid had no chance of winning until he demonized his opponent, Sharon Angle. Also note Obama’s stated plan to demonize any Republican who runs against him vs talking about plans to fix our problems.
2nd point was when all Republican candidates raised their hand when asked if they would refuse $10 in spending cuts if they raised $1 in new tax revenue. For conservatives such as myself it is a question of timing. Democrats always propose tax increases today for cuts in spending 8-10 years from now. Then when it is time for the cuts to take place, they never happen. If the cuts and the new tax increases happened at the same time or better yet had cuts happen before any tax increases, a majority of conservatives will be for it. Question for Democrats, would you accept $10 in cuts today for a tax increase 8-10 years from now ?
I am a liberal, but…
I won’t go rock climbing… which I am sure some conservatives might.
It is an honor to directly comment on and respond to a website of the author Jonathan Haidt himself. I come at your terrific non-fiction book (that I recommend to all my friends on both sides) from an already strong disposition to pluralism vis a vis the deep influence of Isaiah Berlin and William James; so I knew very well that values were and are diverse and don’t form a unified whole. However, I also take seriously the concerns of scientism raised by, for example, John Grey in his review. (The problem that all matters can be approached through the methods of natural science) That is, I cannot be a full fledged utilitarian and, rather, more like Kant, I think these values are of an objective and transcendent nature. Like you I think some things are objective and admit of objective understanding and yet other things are incommensurable and irreconciable expressions of temperament. But I don’t feel as you do that group or team oriented approaches can split the differences. (I think Durkheim doesn’t take individual difference seriously enough). So while I love your attention to the diversity and plurality of values I wished you emphasized, as did the late Berlin, that these values are objective on the one hand, and, on the other, are too subjective to quantified in a utilitarian sense. (Though you do have some notes on the latter in your book). So am I simply wrong and need to forget Kant entirely and get on board with Richard Schweder? And do I need to relax and not worry about carrying scientific research methods into ever more areas of life as does John Grey, and accept that experimental psychology really is a gold standard for understanding. What are your thoughts on the limits of explanation in general? I would appreciate your thoughts immensely. Even with my doubts and criticism if I had any say or pull, I would nominate your book the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction psychology
Hello, I just watched your video and checked out your website…very relevant discussions, sadly seeing more of the them against us mentality happening in all SES especially. Working amongst multiple ‘groups’ (rural, metro, school district k-12, early childhood birth -5, tribal and non-tribal, human services-nursing, traditional-contemporary, etc.) I have learned to co-exist in each of those realms and work on bringing them together for the sake of children, which is our commonality. We would love to have you come to our annual brain development conference in Minnesota (700 pp)- love the elephant and the rider concept, more people need to hear that.