MORAL MATTERS
When the average American needs to hear something important, the speech has to come from somebody from out of town. That’s the tradition. Local sages and prophets are for criticism, imported ones are for adulation.
On Friday, October 20, 2017, at the UVA Darden Abbot Auditorium, Jonathan Haidt, though he used to be local, came from out of town to talk about a number of significant moral ideas. His lecture carried a catchy title: “America's Escalating Outrage”. Basically, Professor Haidt came to explain the evolutionary reasons for our outrageous attachments to liberty and five other things, all somewhat moral, somewhat emotional, and somewhat political, but all equally bonding or blinding. A packed house came to hear about them.
I believe that most people came because of 1865 or August 12, 2017. That went unsaid. It wasn’t necessary to provide a Charlottesvillian with contextual motivation for someone to make, or to come hear, such a talk. At the time, I believed that even if stated, neither the dates nor the events referenced would be sufficient to provide the “Politics 101” or the “Cultural Wars 102” warmup that this lecture would require. Professor Haidt, however, had thought of everything. Before he came, he wrote a five hundred page book, published it in 2012, exactly two hundred years after the war of 1812 where, incidentally, rebels trumped loyalists, giving Americans five years to read it.
The book is “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion”. Some of the mystery behind our current escalating outrage is demystified in this book. Some were demystified in the lecture. None of this demystification, however, means the outrage is going to disappear. Even if it does, I can’t shake the feeling that neither the book nor the lecture has provided me with the whole story I’m looking for. More about this in a minute.
I did a quick survey after the lecture, and one person confessed to having read the book three times. Me, I only read it twice. But be of good cheer, one reading will do; it will tell you it’s all about feelings, or more accurately, our inherited biological–sociological settings. Please read it. The book is readily available, and you can hear and see the lecture at https://vimeo.com/jeffersonscholars/review/239682281/0e4f44a53a, thanks to The Shadwell Society, sponsor of the lecture.
The thrust of both book and lecture is that Americans have always been upset, as well as content, with each other on a variety of issues, simply because we live in a capitalistic Democracy. But mainly because our hand-shake/raised-fist behavior (my term) is rooted in a Creation that evolved our biological-sociological nature: it's settings, emotions or morals. Haidt provides a thumbnail that says it all: "We’re chimpanzee (90%) and bee (10%)". He goes into a lot of science behind this thumbnail. But beyond the Civilization and Creation Haidt is writing about, you'll see these capitalized terms later, is the elephant in the room of my mind: am I reading the vision that sees through the current contentions, or is the whole truth still out there? Professor Haidt has the moral vision in his timely book The Righteous Mind, but does he have the whole picture?
Haidt claims there are six primary settings or "moral modules” upsetting our current Civilization’s expectations (the American one), morals that “set us up" for behavior which unites or divides. And he warns the reader that one may freely ignore any of these primary morals, but you do so at your own social and political peril. Read election of 2016. This is as close as he gets to sage political advice. It’s obvious that he believes that five hundred pages of evidence will speak for itself without him moralizing us to death or into a conversion.
For instance, he provides a convenient chart that posits the conditions that birthed these moral compasses (his term) in the humanoid psyche and the names by which they are now known in psychological research ( American, of course): Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty, and their paired opposites. Notice that I did not name the “opposites". I want you to copy the opposites from the book and make a list of them, separate from the positive ones. If you read these negative moral emotions out loud, you may feel the energetic difference from the positive. I’m not going to tell you what the difference is, but I am going to tell you a story that does, a parable to follow up on my earlier reference to “the whole picture".
When I was a kid, my yard was separated from my two friends yard by a small 30-foot wide lot covered with trees. Nine months of the year we could not see each other because of the leaves. As you would expect, as buddies, we had our ups and downs. And when there was a “down" during apple season, I had something they didn't: rotten apples. Throwing those rotten apples over the trees into my buddies yard, when they were playing by themselves, gave me more fun than anything I can remember from my youth. And the more they complained, and yelled in righteous indignation, and screamed for their mother, the more fun it was. If they had had apple trees too, it wouldn’t have been fun at all.
I’ve had experience in this kind of behavior that I sense is beyond my or anyone else’s moralistic finger-pointing or research. Creation, and, as a result, Civilization, has some negative “moral" compasses that do not have positive moral counterparts at all. And Haidt's list of six pairs does not account for them. Civilization, and The Religious Mind apparently, wishes to leave them in the dark of an inconvenient truth. I could provide more examples, but we're pressed for time. Let’s just name it and move on: “Not enough civilized Culture, or perhaps not enough wild Creation”. We’ll return to these capitalized, underlined terms in a moment.
I also need to mention that I was predisposed to think that Prof. Haidt was obliged to cover these primordial six and to provide a framework for understanding them in more consequential terms. But I was worried the Professor wouldn’t show up. I decided to create my own in case he didn’t. I invite you to examine the result: "Eleven Words and Five Points About Civilization” below. I emailed this presumptuous diagram to Professor Haidt a week before the lecture, and he replied with a one-word review (“Excellent”), being the gracious fellow that he is. But tell me what you think at fivelements101@hotmail.com.
Better yet, start a book study group yourself with your Religious Mind and give the professor some feedback at http://www.yourmorals.org/, or http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/. And while waiting for a reply, if any, consider two other gracious fellows who have offered some "somewhat moral, somewhat emotional, and somewhat political, but all equally bonding or blinding terms” in the book “The Book of Joy” ( by Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama). These two writers have also focused on moral behaviors worthy of attention (and research), but have focused on the terms: Perspective, Humility, Humor, Acceptance, Forgiveness, Gratitude, Compassion, and Generosity. These terms can also be paired, not as opposites, but as complementaries emanating from “Head” and “Heart” together, raising the question "Are these terms also “settings” embedded by Creation that Civilization is ignoring at its own peril?”. For me, it's very personal: how in the dickens am I going to get these eight terms into my "Eleven Words” diagram?
Graphic: Eleven Words for Civilization
| Market Creation School |
CORPORATIONS
Conscience ( C ) Consciousness
COMMUNITIES
| Church Culture Home |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
KEY: (C) - Capitalist Civilization
bold - Ordinals - 4 Pillars of Civilization
Italic - Cardinals - 4 Tensions of Civilization
CAPS - PRINCIPLES - YANG/YIN OF CIVILIZATION
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Five Points about Civilization (Made or implied by Professor Haidt, or me, perhaps both)
1. Capitalism organizes itself into cells called Corporations, to monopolize Market, Creation (resources), and School. Capitalism services the “haves”.
2. Labor organizes itself into cells called unions or communities, to buffer and ameliorate monopolizations, especially of Church, Culture, and Home. Labor services the “have-nots”.
3. Ordinals hold things in place, to create “Order”, and these are agreed-upon, the consonants of our Capitalist public discourse. Cardinals allow expansion and contraction and are argued over by means of “Laws”, the vowels of our Capitalist public discourse.
4. Each word (of the Eleven) is a synthetic-collective term representing kingdoms and clans, both conflicting and collaborating in and between each other's populations.
5. Peace and war occur (in cycles, in societies, in marriages, in one’s own mind [consciousness/conscience]), and are related to the dominance or exhaustion of vital energy (willpower) of “Science” (Market/Creation/School), and “Humanities” (Church/Culture/Home); collaborative-humane conflict being the golden mean between the Yang of Science (Consciousness = quantifying awareness) and the Yin of the Humanities (Conscience = qualifying awareness).
1506 words
© 2017 Clay Moldenhauer, P.O. Box 1641, Chv. Va. 22902
