Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind'

THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. Pantheon Books, 419 pp., $28.95.

Back in 1989, controversy erupted over a photograph by Andres Serrano depicting a crucifix in urine. To conservatives, this was a blasphemous outrage. To liberals, the issue was censorship.

But what if the likeness immersed in urine had been of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.? Or Nelson Mandela? How might the reaction be different? And which side would you be on?

That's just the sort of useful moral exercise Jonathan Haidt presents in "The Righteous Mind," his wide-ranging new book on the evolutionary basis of human morals and the difficulties people have in comprehending opposing political views. A psychologist at the University of Virginia in the progressive enclave of Charlottesville, Haidt was troubled that his profession routinely pathologizes conservatism, so he set out to try to understand conservatives instead of demonizing them. For a dyed-in-the-wool liberal academic, he's succeeded pretty well.

Haidt's premise, as he puts it, is that "we are all self-righteous hypocrites," mainly because we evolved that way. Building on his excellent previous book, "The Happiness Hypothesis," Haidt envisions the human mind as an elephant bearing a rider. The latter may believe he's steering, but the giant beast below is actually in charge. The rider is our rational self, and exists only to serve the elephant, who represents the great mass of mental processes that occur outside consciousness.

Haidt now extends this metaphor into the realm of moral judgments, making a powerful case that these are hardly reasoned: "Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning."

The author presents a trove of evidence on the sharply differing values of liberals and conservatives, identifying six main moral realms. Liberals focus on two of them: Caring (concern for others, preventing harm) and Fairness. These things matter for conservatives, too, but they have a broader set of concerns, including Loyalty, Authority, Liberty and Sanctity. The latter is especially interesting, because it helps explain why so many people are bothered by physical acts that appear to harm no one else.

Unfortunately, Haidt doesn't have much to say about why we've become so much more righteous in recent years. He extols the social benefits of religion, yet pays almost no attention to its costs. He rightly praises the "miraculous" powers of free markets to create spontaneous, beneficial order but chooses the worst possible example -- health care -- to prove his point. Ultimately, one wishes he'd spent more time on our political nature and less making the case for evolution as the basis for moral judgments, a subject covered more profoundly by Robert Wright in "The Moral Animal."

Still, there's much to be learned here. Haidt observes shrewdly that conservative candidates tend to speak to the elephant. This isn't just pandering; conservatives are concerned more with love of country and belonging, and arguably with respect and freedom and the sanctity of life. No wonder the GOP's symbol is a pachyderm; how better to make a jackass of the Democrats than by addressing the elephant in the electorate?