AGAINST BRITISH VALUES: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND
Maybe I don’t even belong to this nation (UK) any more …. Because, no, I couldn’t whole-heartedly claim to endorse the priority apparently accorded to the ‘five fundamentals’ singled out by the English schools’ inspection body (OFSTED). I hope that doesn’t make me a target for the attention of government ‘de-radicalization’ initiatives! Just to remind you, those five values are: democracy; mutual respect; rule of law; individual liberty; toleration (of other beliefs).
These are no doubt all great things in themselves. But one of them (democracy) is not a value, but a system of government. The others might be described as ‘values’, I suppose. But they wouldn’t figure at the top of my list. I tend to think of a ‘value’ as something more like a virtue, or a moral quality. And on that basis, most of these wouldn’t even qualify. More than that, though, there’s something that irks me about this list and its claim to represent what is characteristically British. The choice of these particular values strikes me as unbalanced and, frankly, partisan.
Do we have different moral values?
All this came back to me recently, as I read the book to which I am dedicating this blog: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.
Haidt claims that progressives and conservatives are distinguished by having somewhat different sets of moral values – a different ‘moral palate’, as it were. He also holds that a bit more empathy could help both sides appreciate their differences and restrain the growing incivility of political discourse in the US. To this end he calls upon his own discipline of moral psychology. The increasing divisiveness of political life is not a phenomenon unique to the US, even if it is particularly serious there. Maybe this was reflected in my reaction to OFSTED’s five fundamentals.
But why ‘moral psychology’? Well, according to Haidt (a moral psychologist), morals are essentially about intuitions or sentiments rather than rational discourse (an idea it gets off the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume). As a psychologist, he is persuaded, on the basis of experimental evidence, that there are about five or six kinds of moral intuitions, each having its separate origin in our inherited response to an evolutionary ‘trigger’. These he compares to the five kinds of taste-bud: sweet, salt, bitter, etc..
The differences between one person and another, he argues, are partly the consequence of our diverse genetic inheritance, which causes some individuals to be more prone to one kind of moral intuition than to another. (Like much else in psychology, this is apparently demonstrated by experiments on identical twins). Politically ‘conservative’-leaning people (in the US generally Republicans) are driven by moral intuitions of all five kinds arising in relation to: fairness, care for others, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Progressives, on the other hand (who in the US tend to vote Democrat) are driven only by intuitions that relate to fairness and care for others. There is a fundamental imbalance here. When responses indicating these intuitions are plotted against politics (left/right) on a graph, the curves indicating the different intuitions show a bunching as we pass from left to right (showing that right-wingers recognize all five intuitions), and an increasing divergence as we pass from right to left between the curves representing ‘fairness’ and ‘care’, which rise slightly, and the curves representing ‘loyalty’, ‘authority’ and ‘sanctity’, which decline steeply (showing that left-wingers recognize only a relatively restricted number of intuitions).
Intriguingly, throughout the book, Haidt also brings his own life experience under the critical spotlight. He began as a liberal (i.e. progressive) atheist, but, in the course of his researches (including field work in India) claims to have developed a sensibility for the moral ‘tastes’ that he lacked at the outset (though he appears, as far as I can tell, to have remained an atheist).
Let me begin by saying that, as a reader suspicious of ‘moral psychology’, I am much more interested in this story of attaining empathetic understanding through experience and introspection than I am in Haidt’s experimental attempts at anchoring this understanding in a moral theory, given that theory strikes me as hardly worthy of scientific investigation in the first place. So, let’s park, for a moment, the theory of moral intuition. And let’s concentrate on Haidt’s perception of those fundamental moral differences between people which he visualizes so helpfully in the graph mentioned above. After all, his primary ‘finding’ is one that could no doubt have arisen from his personal and ethnographic experience alone: namely, that of an imbalance – an asymmetry – between the left and the right side of graph suggesting that progressives have a narrower moral palate. Could that really be true?
Or is it, rather, that people are more keenly aware of the values that come less naturally to them, and with which they must struggle to empathize, while tending to overlook those which by dint of familiarity are, as it were, hidden in plain sight? I further reflected that my own naturally allegiances and my own attempts to empathize presented almost a reverse-image of Haidt’s. I was a non-liberal Christian seeking to understand secular liberalism, rather as he was a liberal atheist reaching out to conservatives. So, maybe I was better placed than Haidt by virtue of my own cultural bias to picking up on values distinctive of liberalism? Perhaps I could detect a few concealed virtues on the left side of the graph, and so re-equilibrate its disconcerting asymmetry? If so, I had no doubt it would be easy enough to dream up an evolutionary trigger or two to justify their definition as moral intuitions in the eyes of a ‘moral psychologist’!
So, I started to think about it. And – you guessed! – that was when I remembered those ‘British values’ that OFSTED seemed so keen on. ‘Tolerance’ or ‘respect’, for example, struck me as a very plausible candidate to be a distinctive moral intuition of the left. As I reflected on this, I was tempted to include a more extreme progressive notion which even the OFSTED list does not include: namely, ‘diversity’. That would surely produce a balancing downward curve from the left to the right side of the graph!
My hesitation here had to do with whether these things (tolerance and diversity) were really ‘values’ at all – let alone ‘moral intuitions’. The answer, I felt was (as I shall explain in a moment): yes and no.
How about a non-evolutionary moral trigger?
Come to think of it, however, there is no surprise that these do not figure amongst Haidt’s moral intuitions. His moral theory requires that ‘moral intuitions’ be genetically inheritable and originate with an identifiable evolutionary trigger. The trigger for tolerance and diversity could hardly have been an evolutionary one, as, prior to the development of the first genuinely pluralistic societies about three hundred years ago, it is hard to imagine such values could have had much place. Haidt is a great believer in ‘group evolution’, and believes that great evolutionary strides could have been made in a shorter timespan than has generally been thought possible. But three hundred years is cutting things a bit fine – even for Haidt!
But what kind of ‘trigger’ could this have been, if not an evolutionary one?
I could do worse at this point than to cite a passage from a history book which struck me from the moment I read it as the most perfect illustration of the kind of radical socio-political development that partially transformed the fundamental virtues Haidt seems to be talking about – and established the basis for the eventual emergence of one or two new ones (e.g. tolerance and diversity).
The writer and journalist, Jonathan Swift is commenting, very unfavourably (and as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative), on the new kind of values associated with the rise of first genuinely ‘pluralistic’ society in England at the beginning of the 18th century under the party of the ‘Whigs’.
‘As to religion their universal, undisputed maxim (that of the Whigs) is that it (Parliament) ought to make no distinction at all among Protestants. …. Union in discipline and doctrine, the offensive sin of schism, the notion of a Church and hierarchy, they laugh at as foppery, cant and priestcraft. They see no necessity at all that there should be a national faith; and what we usually call by that name, they only style the “religion of the magistrate”.’ (My italics).
One needs to hear Swift’s tone of indignation here at the first emergence of a new political reality that most of us nowadays take for granted. Note Swift’s evident presumption that the political order is upheld – and can only be upheld – by a unity of national values (union in discipline and doctrine). Indeed, from his perspective, anyone not bowing to this self-evident truth is in thrall to what he calls the ‘monied interest’. He leaves us in little doubt that, in his eyes, the only alternative to union at the level of belief, was a domination by a corrupt cabal of the wealthy up-starts cemented by ambition and greed (no doubt a pretty fair description of the Whig supremacy of the next generation).
Virtues and anti-virtues
Today’s progressives, I would argue, are the direct spiritual descendants of these Whigs. Of course, ‘tolerance’ in the age of Swift would tend to mean strictly that – toleration and no more. But one can see how, with time, a future generation would come to make a virtue of this particular necessity, where it suited their interests to do so, thereby bringing about the birth of a subtly different notion of toleration and respect – one that signified a positive appreciation of difference rather than just an acquiescence in a new pluralist reality that it was futile to resist. One already sees hints of this kind of thing in Voltaire. And we see its full flowering in the characterization of ‘British values’ that we find in the OFSTED list. (Incidentally, I wonder what Jonathan Swift would have thought of OFSTED’s five fundamentals?)
Actually, the difference between tolerance and tolerance is too easily obliterated. I can remember struggling to explain to one of my children that while I may ‘tolerate’ other the beliefs of certain of my fellow citizens (e.g. atheist humanism) – in the sense that I do not believe that adherence to them should bring social or political disabilities or even discrimination, this absolutely does not commit me to respecting those beliefs. In a crucial sense, I absolutely refuse to respect atheist humanism! But the distinction between toleration and respect is obscured rather than clarified by OFSTED’s fundamental values, which persistently nudge us, and our children, in the direction of a progressive agenda. This is the kind of thing, I suspect, that enrages Haidt’s Republicans! And I sympathize.
The current moral divisions are not best characterized in terms of our differential possession of five or six genetically determined centres of moral intuition. Rather, what we actually observe is the following. On the one hand, the same old traditional virtues that Swift, or Plato, would have recognized including loyalty, fairness, kindness, authority and sanctity – but all linked into an inseparable whole (since virtue is ultimately one and relates to the exigencies of the socio-political life of most traditional communities). On the other hand, some new anti-virtues that result from making the best of necessities implicit in our pluralist co-existence as ‘members’ of a kind of anti-community (i.e. the state) unknown to our distant ancestors. The virtues continue to be required for the life of social groups that persist under the umbrella of the state. The anti-virtues answer to the need for all those groups to co-exist. In the early days of Swift, when tolerance largely meant ‘simply’ toleration, no doubt the only conceivable basis of co-existence would have been the morally unprincipled domination of power and money (the ‘monied interest’). Since then, peaceful co-existence has developed its own positive ideological paradigm.
In its more extreme form, it has always, in my eyes, found its ultimate emblematic expression in the rainbow flag that one sees brandished at Gay Pride events and SJW demonstrations of one kind or another. Here individual self-realization becomes a holistic (i.e. religious) goal requiring the subordination of all collectivist impulses, and the socio-political face of that is the cultivation of diversity as an intrinsic moral good. You do not have to practice this secularist religion to remain with the boundaries of democracy, mutual respect, rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance. But it helps.
So, we come, at last, to the angle of religion.
Where does religion come into all this?
Haidt’s aim in this book is to encourage civility in public discourse. (And, in this, he comes across as entirely sincere.) His attitude could be summed up: ‘We’re not here on this earth for very long, so why can’t we just get along?’ His moral psychology approach leads him to view the current conflict as largely a matter of different moral sensibilities. The solution, for him, is, as it were, to become more empathetic and balance the ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ of our moral debates more harmoniously.
What Haidt doesn’t seem to ‘get’ is religion – a perspective which, I suspect, remains unattainable so long as one remains attached to the Humean theory of virtues as moral sentiments. As a result, he completely underestimates the stakes of the political argument. Religious views, I would argue, are morally, holistic, like the traditional moral climate that Swift harks back to in his critique of Whiggery. Pluralism creates an intolerable, and incurable, breach in the religious worldview, which is only exacerbated when pluralism begins to develop a kind of anti-religion of its own based on radical individualism. This leaves today’s citizens, in the US and Europe, with three choices. Either, to opt for a viable holistic (i.e. religious) worldview based on individualism and diversity. Or to stick with the holistic worldview of their elders, as generally embodied (at least, in the West) in the Christian aspiration to make disciples of all nations – i.e. a community that expands to unify the world. Or to float around somewhat inconsistently in a world without holism and religion, trying to balance the yin and yang of our moral sentiments without much sense of a blueprint that could make sense of our collective lives.
I suspect Haidt is in the third category. As a result, he is naturally happy enough to acquiesce in the idea that we can all get along nicely with a bit more this and a little bit less of that. Because the focus of moral psychology is on sentiments not projects, on channelling instincts not moral maps, he doesn’t appreciate that for many caught up in the debate, it’s about a life-and-death struggle for a holistic narrative. Because such a narrative can only be holistic, politics, for religious people (Christian and secular individualist), is never about a bit more of this and a bit less of that – or at least not when the plausibility of that holistic narrative itself appears threatened. And, frankly, there’s no escaping the fact that the narrative of virtue is threatened by the narrative of anti-virtue, and vice versa. There are those on both the progressive and conservative side who are probably are right to see themselves as locked in a life and death struggle.
Naturally, for those content to live without holistic narratives and without ultimate purpose this can seem as hard to understand, as it evidently was for David Hume.
JORDAN PETERSON: 12 RULES OF LIFE
DAVID GRAEBER: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING
TERRY EAGLETON: RADICAL SACRIFICE
JOHN GRAY: SEVEN TYPES OF ATHEISM
REZA ASLAN: GOD, A HUMAN HISTORY
JONATHAN HAIDT: THE REVENGE OF THE RIGHTEOUS MIND
This is a topic that is near to my heart… Many
thanks! Exactly where are your contact details though?