Have we ever thought that what someone’s doing is absolutely wrong or incredibly right?
Have we ever become so annoyed when someone does mistakes that he or she probably doesn’t even know if they’re wrong?
And have we ever accused someone’s morality instead of trying to deepen our understanding based on multiple points of view?
Most of us including me might answer ‘yes, we all have ever done sort of thing’ and at some point, it just sounds cruel. However, those reflective questions are not what we’re going to talk about. It’s simply a friendly reminder from Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist, who writes a book titled “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”. This book is basically not only telling us about the politics and religions, but it’s also digging the relevant theories and bringing up the issues in a quite humane way.
Since the very beginning, Haidt already gives a bunch of illustrations on interviews related to morality by questioning ‘Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it?’ and other such questions. The interview results show that most subjects agree these things are wrong, but none of them can’t even explain why. The problem isn’t that they are clueless and not able to reason. Yes, they do reason but it only aims to support their own conclusions. Reason doesn’t work like a policy maker who considers a lot of things and sees from different perspectives before making decision called ‘policy’. According to Haidt, reason tends to work like a lawyer or a press secretary. It follows after intuition and we choose reasons that suit our intuitions best. That is why Haidt called us as ‘intuitive politician’.
In addition, Haidt analogizes that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six-taste receptors. Through this analogy, Haidt explains that we acquire morality in the same way as we define our food preferences. If the food tastes good, then we accept it – this happens vice versa. As the result, we prefer ‘foods’ which please our tongues the most and so does the morality. Later on, those six-taste receptors represent the six fundamental ideas that commonly related to moral systems such as care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity – which called as The Moral Foundations Theory and developed in related themes consisting of moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.
Moreover, Haidt does invite his readers to think plurally, I guess. In our society, we think morality is all about being polite to the elders, following the hierarchy rules and accepting what God has given to us. However, once we’re stepping outside of our comfort zone, we might realize that morality varies since not everyone holds the same values as us. Ones believe that God exists, while others don’t. Ones believe that we have to honor the elders, while others don’t. Ones believe that individual right is essential, while others don’t. Ones believe patriarchal system is a form of oppression, while others don’t. And it’s okay because there is more than one true morality for all people, times and places in this whole universe.
In the end, I think I’m going to tell you that I love this book so much. It has successfully taught me that being open-minded means accepting people who have different perspectives from us and simply saying to ourselves, “Oh, perhaps in their believes, this sort of thing is considered as something good for their society”, “Oh, maybe this person has been through something in his/her life. That’s why he/she thinks or acts in such way” and so on – instead of judging and accusing.
As a closing, here I present you one of my favorite quotes from Jonathan Haidt’s book that wraps up the whole message of the book.
“This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designated for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult – to connect with those who live in other matrices which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations.
So, the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest.
We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out..”
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