The Drug Report: "Morality" Pills

Going through some odd drug articles I stopped and re-read two from 2012, both addressing the idea of improving ourselves morally via neuropharmacology.

The first one was by Peter Singer (who in 2014 was the Swiss think tank Gottlieb Duttweller Institute's 3rd most important thinker in the world), and Agata Sagan, an independent researcher living in Warsaw, last I checked. She is very concerned about victims of repression and the idea of affective altruism. (See the article here, so you know I'm on the level.)

They address public acts of massive indifference to human suffering and why some people risk their lives to save strangers from things like burning buildings. The 1970s studies by Milgram and Zimbardo get mentioned, as do the seminary student experiments: on the way to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan, if the student was feeling rushed for time, they didn't stop to help a person lying on the ground, moaning. Demonstrations of empathy in rats? Yes. Then it gets good.

Singer and Sagan think we're getting to know about the brain to such a critical point that we might come up with a pill that will make us act with the better angels of our inner beings. We'd care more about others with this posited drug. We might not even have "free will" - they actually say this at the end of the piece - but we do need to think about the ethics of such a posited wonder drug: do we give violent criminals a chance to take it before locking them up? Do we - presumably the Police State apparatus now ready to lock in to pedal-to-the-metal Delirium Mode - monitor "pre-crime"? Do we go all out Gitmo-Dick Cheney-Clockwork Orange with those who some law and order types deem "potentially dangerous"? Would we implant a time-release device in the brains of psychopaths (like Dick Cheney?) to keep them from burning down the village for kicks? And if this miracle drug were good enough, would we still need religion?

Okay, here's the thing with great thinkers like Singer and Sagan: they're often far too straight. I mean, haven't they heard of Ecstasy? When the cops in Murrka found out about it, they made it a Schedule I drug (no known effective use, no known legitimate positive use, no research allowed without kissing our ass first). This despite a welter of scientific gnostics like Alexander Shulgin, Thomas and June Riedlinger, and Dave Nichols, testifying to its human benefit. The DEA's Administrative Law judge, Francis Young, agreed that it wasn't all that dangerous and in a 90 page decision, recommended Schedule III for MDMA/Ecstasy/Adam/E, etc. The DEA itself said "Fuck that shit: we're shutting it down: Schedule I." So much for sanity...

In my worst moments I fantasize about registered supporters of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump being forced to take an Ecstasy suppository, but then I'm just weird. Poetry made me that way. Blame it on, uhh...poetry. Yea.

To quote the great scholar of drugs, Dale Pendell, on this issue of outlawing Ecstasy due to bad information and scare tactics:

The clear message from the Drug Warriors is that they are not interested in peace, citizenship, or even tolerance. - PharmakoDynamis, p.216

Side Note: Israel and Palestine issues make me meshugenah and majnoon, respectively. It looks like there's no hope for a two-state solution, and the Israelis keep building the settlements. There seems enough people on both sides who want peace, but all it takes is some small percentage of bad actors. Or...what happened in Ireland between the Protestants in No. Ireland and the IRA? From Dale Pendell: "Ecstasy clubs in Northern Ireland were the first venue where Protestant and Catholic youths danced together. When footballers in England began taking ecstasy, violence plummeted. Everywhere it has gone ecstasy has been a catalyst for peace."

And no one was forcing it on 'em. Just let nature take its course. But first: get it out of the hands of the cops, and into the hands of researchers.

With the cannabis wars turning to the side of human decency (finally!), some of us might start reading up and getting in gear to re-legalize MDMA.

Now, also in 2012, I read this article from J. Hughes, the Executive Director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Not nearly the luminary that Singer the Utilitarian is, but this article from later the same year seems more down-to-earth. Hughes - a bioethicist and sociologist - knows how oxytocin and testosterone and dopamine and serotonin work in studies having to do with antisocial behavior, crime, empathy, and religious ideation. It's a tad longer than Singer-Sagan, but well worth the read.

My favorite part was when he took on Jonathan Haidt's sociobiological intuitive morality ideas. Haidt claims to have been a liberal but now he's not, because of his research, which yield five human instinctual moral behaviors:

1. Don't hurt people
2. Don't cheat
3. Defer to authority
4. Favor your family/tribe over the Others
5. Stay sacred, avoid that which spiritually pollutes

I read Haidt's book The Righteous Mind and he's way up there on my list of the most overrated thinkers today. PBS did a documentary of Edward O. Wilson not long ago, and they repeatedly used Haidt to sing EOW's greatness, which I found nauseating. I think of Haidt as the real-life proponent of the mind behind the situation in Shirley Jackson's great and horrifying short story, "The Lottery." Haidt says fear unites us. Built into Haidt's bullshit evolutionary psychology of "morality" is this: well of course I don't like what he's saying; that's because I'm a liberal and liberals are blind to the last three of those five listed above. Not blind. We just don't place those values very highly at all. So: damn straight we seem "blind" to the natural goodness of racism, nationalism, deference to authority figures simply because of their authority, and we think homosexuals deserve equal rights, and women should be able to control their own bodies. If that's blindness so be it. I'm not having any of Haidt's crap.

(I've blogged on Haidt before, for instance HERE and HERE.)

And neither is J. Hughes, who sees "defer to authority" as anathema to progressive thought. Favoring your family/tribe can be re-worded as "racism, nationalism and nepotism are true, good and natural!" I take the avoidance of "spiritual pollution" to be akin to having a stick up your ass over other people's weird (and therefore "wrong") sexual proclivities.

For Hughes, any drug (or practice) that would improve our abilities to feel empathy/see ourselves in others and let go of the need to control others: liberal and voluntary. Why? Because the liberal approach to moral enhancement seems inherently minimal compared to the Haidt-people. Think of a politically powerful group who adhered quite strictly to Haidt's five above: do you think they'd endorse anything like Ecstasy?

That's a trick question, of course: we've obviously had those people in power, for a long time. Especially in the DEA. And look at how great we're doing!

Moral and Political Thought

Picking up where I left off the last: This business of hardwired political views as a new science is, as they say in Hollywood, "blowing up;" it's becoming a big deal. The metaphor "hardwired" ought to be looked at for a second: does our moral and political behavior really work as if someone had spot-welded all the parts together, with no going back and unplugging these wires from over here, plugging those in there, soldering a new cable into a jack bought at the parts store because a component was discovered that would access other systems was spied in the manual, etc? No changes can occur? It's a "done deal" at some point?

Well, apparently lots of scientists would like us to think so. There's the Grail of isolating the one gene, or a cluster of genes, that would sure enough predict that your two-year-old would indeed grow up to read Noam Chomsky...or Ann Coulter. In Sasha Issenberg's piece I linked to above, a political strategist reads some new Psychology books and decides he'll help his candidate by focusing ads based on "thinkers" versus "feelers." Haidt says most of our political "thinking" is "moral instinct papered over," and what a good writer Haidt is! It's lines like that that get people persuaded you're really onto something. And maybe he is. A quick diversion:

In a previous blogspew on Jonathan Haidt, I linked to his YourMorals.org test. Here's another test, called Political Compass. It's much shorter than the battery Haidt's colleagues want you to take, and one of its main purposes is to get you out of thinking on the dumb Euclidean line of
Left<-----------Centrist------->Right; it's more 3-D-ish, and it's HERE if you wanna take it. I think it gives a certain snapshot of who you are politically, and by association, morally. I've taken the test three times now, most recently within 72 hours of my writing this. HERE's my result. I'm a "left libertarian." A quite pronounced one, it seems.

Robert Anton Wilson explains the Dumb Game of Left-Right Euclidean politics in a way no one else I've ever seen come close. [Thanks to the guys at rawilsonfans.org.]

Haidt says he wrote The Righteous Mind not to try to convince anyone to switch their allegiances, but to try and understand the Other better, and possibly minimize the hate. (His name rhymes with "fight," not "fate," as I've been listening to people talk about him lately.) I liked the last two paragraphs of Jonathan Ree's pithy review in The New Humanist. The most I can implement from this book, I take it, is to use George Lakoff's framing techniques to talk about Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty in a way that might catch the ear of a "conservative." I'll get back to Haidt in a moment, but I was talking about genes and morality...

I think we can safely agree that we have a reflex for self-flattery, that emotions do rule, that our reasoning is like a lawyer's trying to win a case. And of course our political ideas are NOT totally deliberative. I do think environment and experience and learning all contribute, especially if one has tested one's own presumptions many times. I've done it. I've read National Review. I read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. I once had a job where I was offered a transfer to another library branch, one in a very beautiful and wealthy section of Los Angeles, where most of the patrons I'd meet would be old, very wealthy Republicans. I had very long hair and thought I'd try testing myself here - I'm pretty sure I was a left-libertarian then too - and I was prepared to experience lots of nastiness. But after a few years, I really liked most of the patrons, and they were very sweet to me. Some were obviously very conservative, but they asked me questions about politics and I gave them my honest takes, and they respected me.

I'd say about 8-12% of the patrons I ran into there were the classic mean, pinched, bitter, evil, ugly rich old white people. Most were surprisingly, delightfully pleasant. This opened my eyes. It didn't change my politics much though.

                                  William Irwin Thompson. "The history of the soul is always
                                  the history of the voiceless, the oppressed, the repressed."
                                  Photo by Michael Laporte

But do I think genes will explain all this? No, despite NYU psychologist Ned Jost's findings in the "The End of the End of Ideology" paper, mentioned in Issenberg's excellent overview article. Indeed, read the section on Jost's work and see if it doesn't look isomorphic to the Rattray-Taylor oral/anal lists I gave in my previous blogpost. Jost: We're not divided by class, geography or education so much as by temperament. 


Temperament. O! How I urge you, Dear Reader, if you haven't already, to read the first lecture in William James's Eight Lectures on Pragmatism. If Haidt and his data-set don't come off as "tender-minded," then you weren't paying attention.

It seems the search for a genetic substrate that will explain macro-world phenomena gets you funding. It allows scientists to do what they really want to do: wake up in the morning and go to work to solve some problem of some sort. If their hypotheses don't work out the way they had envisioned, they write that up anyway: it's still good science: if we thought it worked this way, we were probably wrong. Meanwhile, jobs and knowledge were created. And though searching genomes and testing genes has gotten much cheaper over just the past year or so, it's still heady stuff. It's creative work, too. Get the ideas. Figure out how to test them. Figure out how to test your test. It's brainy stuff, aye.

But I remember the great generalist and one-time M.I.T. lecturer William Irwin Thompson - who dropped out of academia - saying about hardcore sociobiology something along the lines that it's sheer bullshit to say you're going to find a gene to be an auto-mechanic. You say morality and a political bend is more "basic" than something as particular as Thompson's reductio ad absurdum? You're probably right, but do we realize how dizzyingly complex "genes" are? If you try to keep up with this stuff, it seems like it's getting to be like particle physics. Or worse. It may be even more complex than that, especially if we take into account epigenetics, where RNA plays a much bigger part than we'd imagined. It's not just DNA sending RNA "the" message to other genes to make proteins z, q and x3. That was the older, simpler days. Now the environment has genes and RNA-DNA feeding back in ways we didn't guess, hopping genes, "junk DNA" that is turning out to not be so junky...I mean check out this recent article, "Chromosomes Organize Into 'Yarns': May Explain Why DNA Mutations Can Effect Genes Located Thousands of Base-Pairs Away," from a few days ago.

Although why I'm some left-libertarian socialist and those who love Fox News are decidedly...<cough> not, and I find their morality, extrapolated/writ large as basically stupid, devolutionary, and sadistic, I don't really know why I'm like this. One parent was staunchly Democrat. Another a Republican who never really got into the Issues. I have a sibling who went from extreme Right Wing Christian born-again Evangelical to a sort of New Church, Jesus said to heal the sick and feed the poor leftist Christian. Most of the other immediate family members aren't very political, although if they are, it's right wing authoritarian stuff.

Ultimately, it's genes, something like ethological "imprinting," family upbringing, peer group at puberty, geography, historical moment, accidents like meeting a very influential person at one point or another when you're vulnerable to some sort of change, and...more accidents and happenstance. Genes? Yes. And probably a bunch of stuff we have only the slightest inklings about. Here's one we've just begun to really gain deeper understandings about:

There's a neuroeconomist named Paul Zak. He wondered about how economies are effected by the human action of "trust," which seemed kind of nebulous to me. He thought - and it made sense to me - that the more trust, the better the economy works. Here's a short article on the "trust hormone" that we make endogenously and secrete when we make eye contact, hug, smile at each other, fall in love, etc. The video of Zak is about 3 minutes long. So add to all the factors above: hormones.

                                        Neuroeconomist and "Dr. Love," Paul Zak

Finally, back to Jonathan Haidt. In my understanding of the world to date, there are some people who, like Oscar Wilde, thought/think that obedience to authority was the Original Sin. In modern terms, these people have often transcended the socio-sexual Hive Morality and experienced neurosomatic bliss, then showed others how to do it. We got the Sexual Revolution from these people, largely. And I see that movement as still going strong, still playing out on the stage, at least in the West. When Authoritarian Men try to roll back gains women had made, even subject them to sexual humiliation, I think it's largely because women have made so many gains. Women are doing well, relative to men, at least in Unistat. By 2019 they will probably make up at least 60% of all graduate students. And they will continue to do well. As well they should. They aren't hurting men by doing well. But a small, loudmouthed, fairly fascistic set of men are responding to the changes - probably mostly unconscious of the deeper reasons why: their fear of losing Control - so they are making themselves very busy right now, shooting every toe on each foot, one by one...

                                                         Oscar Wilde: Heretic

Those who transcend Hive Morality - cranks, neophiles, inventors, deviates, heretics - drive human evolution. The drag on cultural evolution - the Authoritarians, the inflexible Loyalists, the Sanctimonious about some Angry God they've projected from within themselves onto the rest of us: they are most of the Church, most of the Politicians and Legislators ("Well...let's look at precedent!"), and Mammon-worshippers. They're nationalists, often racists and small-minded loudmouths who say they're for individual liberty but do quite something else. These are the drags on progress. Haidt thinks they deserve to be understood by "liberals" because these people - the guardians of Hive Morality - don't want things to change, because it represents a threat to their status in the primate hierarchy.

Given my political bend, no wonder Haidt's equal Big Six doesn't wash with me.

Moral Systems: More on Haidt and Some Old School Stuff

Recently I wrote about Jonathan Haidt and his ideas surrounding his "social intuitionist model." He's been studying the deep psychology of morality for around 25 years. Early on he realized that moral values and decisions are based on emotions at the deepest level; environmental aspects came later: opinions derived from learning, experience in the world, etc. But the trick is: we're not aware of this. I think there's an overwhelming preponderance of evidence, if only in cognitive neurolinguistics alone, that supports this idea. (Will this ever filter down to Joe and Josephine Twelve Pack?) We think we're "right" and spent a lot of time being lawyers trying to prove our case, and when we're talking with people who have a different set of values, we're bound to not make sense to them, as they do not make sense to us. (I confess most of the time I listen to conservatives and think I understand them, but that if all of their ideas reigned, our species would end quicker than if all "liberal" ideas reigned. There's my confession for a Sunday, from a Mystical Agnostic Libertarian Socialist.)

The data set he used to come to his conclusions is largely based on an extensive questionnaire, and you can add Haidt's and his colleagues' data set by going to Your Morals.org. I'm about 70% done. This jit is extensive! But so far I'm being too dry about this. Here's a good one for us to ponder:

Remember when Andres Serrano came out with his work of art titled Piss Christ? He was being deliberately shocking, of course. Liberals tended to support his right to express himself freely, but conservatives tended to see Serrano's work as an affront to all they held dear. Now here's a question for liberals: what about an artwork that had a little statue of Martin Luther King submerged in the artist's own urine? When interviewed the artist said he just thought "the Left" had made too much of MLK's contribution to history, that the Rev was "overrated" and a "sacred cow ripe for hamburger meat."? Do you still feel the same way about "free expression"?

I like this one even more, and it's directly from Haidt and colleagues:

Mark and Julie are brother and sister. ("Ut-ohhhh...I think I see where this is going!") They go on vacation from the US to the south of France and have a wonderful time. One night, while drinking wine in Provence, one thing leads to another and they have sex. They use two different types of contraception. They really enjoy it, but afterwards decide to never do it again. The experience, they both agree, made them even closer. They swear each other to undying secrecy and indeed, they never tell anyone.

Here's the Q: was doing what they did okay? If not, why?

Now, I confess that when I first read this scenario, I only needed about three seconds to say to myself, "I see nothing wrong with what they did." Haidt says most people don't think it's okay, they often forget the two forms of contraception. When reminded they say, "Oh yea." And they're still not okay with it, and try to find a reason why. Haidt calls Qs like this "moral dumbfounding."

Haidt says liberals have a harder time with this one than conservatives, which I find puzzling. Then, in one interview - the one from The Believer - (see near the end) he says liberals highly value Avoiding Doing Harm to others. Incest usually means some harm has been done, so "liberals" try to find "the victim" to justify why it's wrong. Haidt identifies himself as a liberal - or he did up until around two years ago, more on this later - so he knows; because he's an insider/expert on morality he knows there's no victim, so he says it's a trick question. He seems smug to me there, in 2005.

I wonder if "liberals" really do try to find victims more than conservatives. I don't know. I'm dubious. But maybe he's right.

Okay, so Haidt and colleagues have decided there are Six core moral values in which moral systems are built: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. (Earlier he had four, but he asserts coherent systems can be built on combinations of all Six, or four, and he even uses a Chomskyan term, "grammatical," in a sense very reminiscent of Noam's idea that there are countless possible sound-patterns and syntaxes, but only a few are/were used in the real world of humans speaking the world's languages.)

[An aside: 20th century conservative and champion of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Mortimer Adler, got together with a few tweedy friends and eventually decided there were 102 Great Ideas in the Western Tradition. I think maybe I'm morbidly fascinated about how intellectuals make their models, reify them, then move in, fall in love with their own models - Robert Anton Wilson called this "modeltheism" - and then push their models on all of us, in attempt to Enlighten us all.]

I like that, in a recent interview, Haidt says that there are no universal human moral values that are right; they are a social construction, and the proof being the very fact there are many moral systems in the world. And they're all right in their own way.

Here's where I part ways with Haidt: his data set is self-selecting. But worse than that, the Six seem arbitrary to me. But worse than that, even if we grant him his Six, he conveniently builds an edifice in which all the values are good, right, true and equal. He's in, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would put it: Mediocristan: he can use his data and a whole world can be built out of it - which he admits moral system are anyway: they're "castles in the air that are nevertheless 'real' castles, and we live in them," to paraphrase one of his lines. He can plot his values in some Bell Curvey-way and then come up with "insights" that help him build his intellectual capital. But it gets more and more puzzling to me from there on in...There's some horrible Platonicity in Haidt's scheme, as I see it.

Haidt was always a liberal, and really hated the George W. Bush administration, and he also says he despises the "current" Republican party. And yet, in looking at all his data and writing his latest book, he realizes that conservatives (I really wonder who these people are?) are playing all Six, while liberals only play Two of the Six: Care and Fairness. This is absurd to me on so many levels that this blogspew would be far too long if I enumerated why this is just...well...okay, I'll say it: stupid. Why? Read on. (I vehemently assert that I admire the attempt, though.)

Another huge problem for me with Haidt's system is it's synchronic. It doesn't explain history very well. I'm not sure he wanted it too. I think Haidt honestly and earnestly wants "liberals" and "conservatives" to  try to understand each other. One of his best lines, for me, is that he hopes liberals and conservatives will stop hating each other and see each other as part of a yin-yang. Bless him for this peaceful thought, for whatever it's worth.

I must amend something from the above paragraph, and it sheds light on another problem in Haidt's thinking here: if we're talking about deep, evolutionary time, clearly Haidt addresses this. He's read The Selfish Gene. He's well-versed in Evolutionary Psychology. And he defends religion against the "New Atheists" of Dawkins himself, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens: religion, although there's quite a downside to it, evolved so that larger groups of non-immediately-blood related people could co-operate and attain bigger goals. Okay: but the thrust of the book is about the fierce, ugly acrimony in Unistat today between Haidt's abstract "conservatives" and "liberals." The problem is: the partisan ugliness is fairly recent. Let's say 1980. Or 1960, to be charitable. This is why I leveled the charge of synchronic...I'm not so sure his evolutionary psychology is fully baked with the ingredients of the artificial construct of Pick Six Core Moral Values and then tabulated questionnaire data-world Haidt dwells in.

Anyway, Haidt was furious with W's administration, but now that Obama's in, time to collate his data and come to a better understanding.

But he goes to Occupy Wall Street's Zucotti Park and becomes a liberal scold, telling them "conservatives believe in equality before the law." (What???) Why? Because Obama's in now? Just HOW has Obama made that much of a difference from Bush?

Haidt had recently realized that "conservatives" are playing on all Six, and "liberals" on only Two, or maybe Three. He observes the Occupiers have no sense of Hierarchy, which is derived from one of the Big Six, Authority. Is Haidt even paying attention to what's going on in the world? Whether it was Liberals or Conservatives, they allowed the bankers, and the rich to plunder the economy. Obama has not made significant amends to the banking rules that allowed this to happen. People's lives are ruined; many are desperate. What a time to realize you're not a liberal! Especially when a long-term study by U. of Georgia and NYU scholars showed that the current Republicans are the most conservative in 100 years.

The Occupiers - as good liberal types - want Fairness, one of Haidt's Six. But if you've got your degree from a fine institution and can't find a job and your student loan debt is massive, how are you going to exercise your Liberty? And in doing the right things - working hard, delaying gratification so you can get your degree and go out and work hard, contribute Loyally to the country you love - how are you supposed to value Authority, when the Authorities have looted the treasury, stacked the deck in their favor, and pepper-sprayed you because you're trying to exercise your rights (Liberty) under the Constitution? (To those who watched OWS on TV and didn't actually hang out and talk with at least twenty or hundred people at rallies, and really listened, I can honestly report that, in my experience, about a third of the OWSers I talked to were thoughtful, patriotic, and brilliant young people. Another third were well-meaning but seemed - for lack of a better word - "lost" to me. Another third were Street People. And while I'm parenthetically ranting, furthermore, as an American, I'm disgusted that we allow so many of our fellow Americans to live like that..."disgust" is highly correlated with "conservative" values, according to some non-Haidt studies on social morality, but I wildly digress...)

This bit about "conservatives" playing with a full Six and "liberals" not seems ridiculous to me. The OWSers that were astute are not crazy about the Democratic party, but they see the Dems (and I concur) as less harmful than the Republicans, who seem to value whatever the Billionaire Class favors.

                            Gordon Rattray-Taylor. I'll be getting to him shortly, below.

Haidt seems to not see how Congress and the Presidency are bought. (Where's the Sanctity there?) Does he pay attention to stories about how the Conservative Supreme Court has ruled that  police can strip search anyone for any reason? That the Unistat Prez - whether under the "conservative" Bush or the "liberal" Obama - can kill, detain without due process, and torture whoever they want, all while talking about "transparency" yet becoming more and more opaque every day? Does he ever read stuff like THIS? What about this article, which I found via my colleague Annabel Lee at Double Dip Politics: is accurate, current knowledge about how the world works not a core moral value? I suspect he doesn't. Hell, I hope he doesn't or he's probably just another tool who believes that information "is" liberal. What world does Haidt live in, where, right when the country implodes, he writes a book extolling "conservative"s' morality of Authority, Loyalty, and Liberty, and he tells his wife "I can't call myself a liberal anymore." He's a "centrist."???

Oh yea: in passing Haidt says "libertarians" are totally different from liberals and conservatives. But I guess I'll have to get hold of his book to see if he says anything substantive about libertarians. My experience with libertarians is that they are smarter, but more disparate concerning The Six. I know libertarians who don't seem to care all that much about Three (Sanctity [unless you're talking about The Market or Mother Nature], Authority, or Loyalty; but they differ in very interesting ways about the Other Three (Care, Fairness, and Liberty). If anyone can flesh out Haidt on libertarians for me (perhaps you have the money to just buy the new book; I have to wait on a library list), I'd be grateful to hear it.

Someone once said you can't be neutral on a moving train. I have no idea what it means, brass tacks, to be a "centrist" in this world, 2012 Unistat. I think you have to live in Mediocristan to understand it. Richard Nixon would be an extreme "liberal" today. Haidt must be making some good money, or wants to please those who can make things even better for him. (<----That's me being a dick, blowing off steam. I apologize. That was below the belt. But I can't wait to hear him talk about how Romney's got a point on some topic, that strict Authority really is important, if you want all your taste buds firing on all cylinders or all your rods and cones seeing the ultra-violets when others can't, or the graphic equalizer in your brain is giving vent to the whole audio-political spectrum of values...)

Now: all I've blathered on here is subject to the same proto-sociology of knowledge contained in Max Weber's quote that "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun." But I can also take a page from Weber's student, Karl Mannheim, who said that knowledge will take on certain shapes for people depending on their socioeconomic status. I'm going Old School on Haidt here: he's doing really well as a Public Intellectual. I think he's honestly trying to solve a Very Hard Problem. And from what I can see from here, he's not helping things much. Now Haidt would say to me, "You admit you haven't read my new book. And I understand you're a struggling freelancer. Your politics and values reflect that..." Etc.

I bet I would like Jonathan Haidt if I met him. I would ask him what he made of studies like this one, which make a lot of sense to me. Or UC Berkeley's Jennifer Stellar and her colleagues' findings as explained in this article. Or, how do you explain the very many historical examples of people like Arianna Huffington and David Horowitz? Are the self-indentified "conservatives" who answered Haidt and Co's Qs roughly the same people Monbiot is talking about here?

Is the Daily Show's studio audience - packed with liberals - response to Elon Musk's response to a question about Musk's futuristic thinking (Internet, sustainable energy, and space exploration) solely due to their "liberalism," or are they maybe glad to hear something from someone who's a neophile towards scientific research? And this is something virtually non of their "leaders" mention, or if they do, it's really lip service?

Earlier I hinted that I preferred my Grand Narratives concerning Big Ideas to be diachronic, and explain things within a historical perspective. I'm biased this way.

Recently I re-read the introduction to a sleeper of a book - Gordon Rattray-Taylor's 1954 gem Sex In History. Rattray-Taylor says when he reads scads of history books the historians very often present a maddening epistemological problem, and one is "influence." Historians will explain that something changed because someone was influenced by someone else or some cultural event, or whatever. But, as Rattray-Taylor writes, "He seems to feel that the development of a trend has been 'explained' if it can be shown that the people concerned came under the influence of some similar trend elsewhere. Thus, historians have laboured to show that the appearance of a school of lyric poetry in twelfth-century Provence was due to the influence of Arabic poetry of a similar kind." Similarly maddening for Rattray-Taylor was the explanation of people coming under the "spirit of the times,"without explaining why  they came under the Spirit.

As you might have guessed from the title of the book, Rattray-Taylor's proffered explanation - which to me is just as great as Haidt's and I happen to like it more, and I do think these things are comparable and should be compared and contrasted and played with and pondered and possibly incorporated into a yet newer vision - is summed up by Robert Anton Wilson on a basic chart based on Rattray-Taylor's book, in Wilson's Ishtar Rising. 


Rattray-Taylor saw a yin-yang/pendulum-like cycle of oscillations in history's values, based on attitudes that emanate from deeper attitudes towards sex, and he's influenced a tad by Freud, but also other Germanic thinkers who came after Siggy. I will copy the chart out here, and then bid the blogspew adieu because, once again I've typed far, far too much and if you're reading this now I bet you're the only one who stuck with my harangue, but anyhoo:

Patrist (anal)                                                                      

1. Restrictive attitude toward sex                     
2. Limitation of freedom for women
3. Women seen as inferior, sinful
4. Chastity more valued than welfare
5. Politically authoritarian
6. Conservative: against innovation
7. Distrust of research, inquiry
8. Inhibition, fear of spontaneity
9. Deep fear of homosexuality
10. Sex differences maximized (dress)
11. Asceticism, fear of pleasure
12. Father-religion

Matrist (oral)

1. Permissive attitude toward sex
2. Freedom for women
3. Women accorded high status
4. Welfare more valued than chastity
5. Politically democratic
6. Progressive: revolutionary
7. No distrust of research
8. Spontaneity: exhibition
9. Deep fear of incest
10. Sex differences minimized (dress)
11. Hedonism, pleasure welcomed
12. Mother-religion

These are Idealized Types, of course. Most of us fall somewhere in between these polarized pairs of values, which I suspect can be plotted on a vast continuum. - the OG

Jonathan Haidt's Social Intuitionist Model

Haidt (say "height") hated the Dubya Admin, and identifies as a left-liberal-progressive. He's just put a book out called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. (NB: Amazon blocked the actual current cover of the book, for reasons that will be clear when you click on the link to Chris Mooney later in this blogspew.) It was released less than a month ago, and it's getting really hot. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I've been studying this guy's ideas for the past few days, and meditating. He thinks "liberals need to be shaken." Haidt thinks liberals misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.

                                                           Jonathan Haidt

A University of Virginia psychologist (now visiting prof at NYU), his "social intuitionist model" has its roots in David Hume, who wrote, in 1739:

"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." For Hume, philosophers who attempted to reason their way to a moral stance started from highly suspect grounds: our passions are more basic, and we then begin to reason from there; we are like lawyers when we reason about morality: we want to win. We want to be "right." But it seems most of us are blind to our own passions, our own unconscious biases. Indeed, Haidt has a pithy line about this: "Morality binds and blinds." It binds us to others who share our passions, and blinds us to seeing things from the other point of view.

In explaining his title, The Righteous Mind, Haidt says, "An obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into our minds that would otherwise be objective or rational."

                                                              George Lakoff

All of this seems quite reminiscent of George Lakoff's ideas. Well, at first glance it does. Haidt's ideas about morality clash with Lawrence Kohlberg's and Jean Piaget's, who are far too rationalistic. Similarly, Lakoff went to great pains in his books Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't and especially The Political Mind, to eloquently show how 18th century Enlightenment ideas about rationality are all wrong; most of our what goes on between our ears is unconscious. As Robert Anton Wilson thought, there's a part of our brain - the frontal cortex - that fervently seeks to believe it's running the whole show. But it ain't so.

But wait a minute. Haidt is using Hume to ground his project. That's pretty 18th century and Enlightenment there. It's "empirical" to contrast with continental rationalism, but if you read interviews with Haidt he's far more with the Enlightenment rationalists than Lakoff is. Lakoff's work seems to me far more empirical than Haidt's, to me in my present state of ignorance. (I plan to read Haidt's book as soon as the 23 others ahead of me in the public library line finish their readings.) Others in the public sphere seem to think Haidt and Lakoff are basically on the same page. (See Chris Mooney HERE.)

I must say: Haidt's views make the topic of religious and political differences even more fascinating than they needed to be, for me. This area was already too exciting intellectually for me.

Aside from the link above, "Explaining Liberals To Conservatives, and Vice-Versa."
A 2005 interview for The Believer. Tamler Sommers seems to play the role of Socrates uncommonly well, and I thought Haidt comes off as a tad lame here.
A 2012 interview for Thought Catalog, with Haidt on his game and very polished.

Finally - I could go on ad nauseum, as usual, but won't - if you get into Haidt and his colleagues' morality tests (the links are noted in a couple of the articles), and note Haidt''s clusters of values, he seems to value tribalist modes of being far too much for my taste. He seems to bend over backwards to be ecumenical there, and I think it's a big mistake, but then...I'm unconsciously biased, right?