Haidt like E.O. Wilson, whom Haidt calls “a prophet of moral psychology,” believes that evolution has constructed us to be selfish. We rationalize selfish behavior, he writes, as moral. He asks whether moral reasoning wasn’t “shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes?” The moral glue that holds us together, Haidt writes, is concern for our reputations [read "ego"]....
But while Haidt correctly excoriates conventional morality as largely a form of self-justification, his solution is not to seek a moral code that benefits our neighbor but to ask us to surrender to this self-interest and become part of human “hives,” including corporations....
Happiness, then, comes with conformity. If we are unhappy it is not because there is something wrong with the world around us. It is because we have failed to integrate into the hive. This, of course, is the central thesis of positive psychology, which Haidt is closely associated with. And it is an ideology promoted by corporations and the U.S. military to keep people disempowered....
Haidt mistakes the immoral as moral. Totalitarian structures, including corporate structures, call for us to sublimate our individual conscience into the collective. When we conform, we become, in the eyes of the state, or the corporation, moral and righteous. Haidt would do well to remember historian Claudia Koonz’s observation that “the road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness.” This is a book that, perhaps unwittingly, sanctifies obedience to the corporate state and totalitarian power. It puts forth an argument that obliterates the possibility of the moral life. Submission, if you follow Haidt, becomes the highest good.Read it at Truthdi
Book Review: The Righteous Road to Ruin
by Chris Hedges
Especially telling:
[Haidt's] transformation from a liberal to a conservative, he writes, took place on 9/11 when “the attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and yes, supporting the leader.” In short, Haidt became a lover of conservatism and nationalism when he became afraid. He embraced an irrational, not to mention illegal, pre-emptive war against a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with 9/11. And if there was ever a case for reason to conquer fear and the emotionalism of the crowd, the Iraq War was it. But Haidt, rather than acknowledge that fear had turned him into a member of an unthinking, frightened herd, holds this experience up as a form of enlightenment.Ok, swept up in emotion, but this is the kicker:
In a very revealing anecdote—which he titles “How I became a pluralist”—Haidt writes of his three months in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar. He has servants. He visits the homes of male colleagues and is waited on by their wives. He writes that “rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent.”
His embrace of rigid social hierarchy and oppression, which makes him sound like the apologists for racial segregation, is a window into the entire book. He does not speak Oriya, the local language, and so is dependent on an educated, wealthy elite. He, by the standards of India, is rich. He makes no effort to explore the lives of the underclass. He celebrates what he calls “a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.”Here Haidt doesn't see that he is buying into the caste system that is culturally endemic in India, and the quintessential example of class division based on heredity. Hedges doesn't point that out, but I'll do it for him.
Haidt is so clueless he hasn't seen what has happened to him. He has become diminished as a human.
21 comments:
Tom,
You might also like to read -The servant in the Indian family
Quote:
The servant is really a slave in the old-fashioned way. They have no chains, but chains aren’t needed. Where will they go? If they leave us, they must serve another.
Most middle-class families have servants. In India, middle-class means ‘not poor’, and so even families with an income of Rs10,000 a month have servants. This keeps the wages low. And in India there is no problem with the supply of unemployed illiterates.
We belong to our family. Our servants also belong to our family, but their status is marked. They cannot belong in the way we do. This is communicated to them by the rules.
See also - Maid’s Cries Cast Light on Child Labor in India
Quote:
The girl’s screams were brittle and desperate. Neighbors in the suburban housing complex looked up and saw a child crying for help from an upstairs balcony. She was 13 and worked as a maid for a couple who had gone on vacation to Thailand. They had left her locked inside their apartment.
After a firefighter rescued her, the girl described a life akin to slavery, child welfare officials said. Her uncle had sold her to a job placement agency, which sold her to the couple, both doctors. The girl was paid nothing. She said the couple barely fed her and beat her if her work did not meet expectations.
"a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.”
Doesn't sound so bad. I suppose it depends on how you interpret the words. 'Negation' is far too strong though.
y, it's all in the framing. The frame sound enticing but what is the actual meaning? This is what Hedges explores.
It's like the anarcho-capitalists. They argue for absolute freedom which ends up being the freedom of one person to enslave another "voluntarily" because becoming a slave is a better option than death.
This was actually the ancient rational for slavery being OK. Slaves are provided with subsistence living.
It is also the base case from which Marx begins his analysis.
"Diminished as a human"!
Is this how academic philosophers view the vast majority of humanity, then--not post-modern liberals and hence lesser humans?
To be fair, Haidt doesn't seem especially compelling either. Still, his view could be a useful moderating impulse, so it's not hard to see why a high priest like Hedges would want him drummed out of the temple.
"They argue for absolute freedom which ends up being the freedom of one person to enslave another "voluntarily" because becoming a slave is a better option than death."
Is this actually the case? Do they hold that individuals have absolutely no moral obligation to help others?
y,
From personal experience, I would say it is pure and simple economic and social exploitation, couched in terms that make it acceptable to do so without causing cognitive dissonance.
Indians get very defensive about it when the servitude is pointed out to them. India is a land of the 80% and the 20%, and the two may as well belong to different universes, coexisting together, but each having a shadowy existence to the other. When an Indian says they are from the middle class, you should assume that they are from the top 5% of Indian society. Most Indians that are encountered by Americans come from the top 1% of Indian society, and it would be a mistake on the part of any American to generalize on that basis.
vimothy:"Is this how academic philosophers view the vast majority of humanity, then--not post-modern liberals and hence lesser humans?"
The degree to which one has actualized one's humanity is the degree of universality that one has achieved. This doesn't merely mean being able to deal with more universal concepts. It means living unconditional universal love. Those that have displayed this in their lives are acknowledged in all cultures to be great men and women who are the models held up to be emulated. Of course, for many people this is just lip service.
BTW, psychological research reveals that after taking a course in mainstream economics, one's humanity is "diminished" in this sense by one's becoming more egoistic and less altruistic.
And who is the hero and heroine of many even so-called Christians today? By their profession, Jesus, but by their behavior, John Galt and Ayn Rand. And John Galt was, of course, only a fictional character and Ayn Rand a bad novelist and an even worse philosopher.
vimothy: "To be fair, Haidt doesn't seem especially compelling either. Still, his view could be a useful moderating impulse, so it's not hard to see why a high priest like Hedges would want him drummed out of the temple."
Evolutionary science shows how tightly knit groups based on loyalty, which esclude outsiders, are most successful in winning the evolutionary struggle for territory and resources than less organized and more open groups.
The small tent GOP/TP is following the prescription. Hedges is on the small tent Progressive side. The big tents of both parties aim at dilution of principle so that the donors can be served and they themselves can retain office as incumbents with all the advantages that incumbents have.
y: "Is this actually the case? Do they hold that individuals have absolutely no moral obligation to help others?"
Have read Ayn Rand. She understand the argument perfectly. She claims to an Aristotelian, and Aristotle, the great defender of Athenian democracy, also gave a rational justification for slavery, on which Athens ran economically so its male citizens could be "free." In this view slavery is "natural."
Do you know what Rothbard's view was on that? I only have a limited knowledge of Rand or Rothbard. Didn't like their specious logic.
Tom,
Most people for most of human history have lived in "rigid social hierarchies". The modern way of looking down at them doesn't seem like universal unconditional love to me, but I'd be willing to bet that the NYT have something to say about that.
Speaking of which, Hedges, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist at the NYT, could hardly be more establishment. Hedges and friends rule the world. When someone like Haidt starts saying that maybe the Earth goes round the sun, of course they rightly see it as a dangerous heresy. If parochial vicars are allowed to question the Church's teachings, pretty soon everyone will be at it.
Rothbard's Libertarian view was different from Rand's Objectivism. Rothbard held to the methodological individualism characteristic of Austrian economics and presupposed it is based on the ontological individualism of the Libertarian interpretation of classical Liberalism.
This is view is that persons have natural rights, including the "right to life, liberty, and property" (John Locke). The idea is that each individual is free to chose free from coercion as long as his or her choice does not coerce others or impinge on their rights.
Rothbard was basically a conservative Liberal, in that he condemned "modal libertarian" views that he regarded as license for libertinism.
Rothbard was not against being individually altruistic by choice. Rand through that this was irrational.
Rothbard and Rand were both opposed to govt social policy that was "wrongly" altruistic in that it impinged on individual rights, especially property right, by taxing to pay for such programs.
With the MMT understanding, this argument fails, since taxes don't fund govt under the current system.
As an Austrian economist in the Mises tradition who is the founder of his own school of AE, Rothbard opposed govt programs that add money to the economy because it is supposedly inflationary and undermines money are a store of value, essentially depriving savers of their rightful property.
Vimothy, Hedges is perhaps the most prominent public intellectual who speaks on behalf of Occupy (but not in the name of Occupy).
But I don't see that this necessarily has much to do with the substance of his criticism of Haidt, although it is quite explainable in those terms, too.
In the latter sense, it's part of the process of creating a small tent political faction on the left to oppose the small tent political faction on the right which has been relatively successful in purging the big tent right of more centrist elements.
Are you a fan of rigid social hierarchies, vimothy?
Tom,
"With the MMT understanding, this argument fails, since taxes don't fund govt under the current system"
That's not quite true is it? After all if the government did't tax it wouldn't be able to spend, by MMT reasoning, as there wouldn't be a 'demand' for the currency.
Taxation also serves to redistribute spending power, by creating 'space' for government spending.
"a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.”
This could be applied quite easily to a liberal egalitarian democratic commune running on buddhist-type principles.
y: "That's not quite true is it? After all if the government did't tax it wouldn't be able to spend, by MMT reasoning, as there wouldn't be a 'demand' for the currency. Taxation also serves to redistribute spending power, by creating 'space' for government spending."
Right. According to MMT, taxes are needed to create value for state money and they operate as one of the control levers, but they do not to fund expenditures under the existing monetary system.
6 said..."a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires.” This could be applied quite easily to a liberal egalitarian democratic commune running on buddhist-type principles.
Yes, but. Depends on the interpretation.
"Small government, low taxes, string defense and traditional values" is also something that most people would agree with. Again, it depends on the interpretation.
Scriptural texts mean different things in different according to different interpretations. Some even contradictory things. Religious wars have been fought over this.
Same with constitutional and legal interpretation., which is in effect what happens when a precedent is reversed.
"a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires” can be interpreted as hereditary class behavior (caste), respect for traditional authority (dogma), social conformity, and group loyalty. And it has often been interpreted this way historically.
If you read, say Nazi rhetoric, this is the pitch. Sounds good, but it's all in the interpretation.
I'm starting to think that the Statue of Liberty may be a pagan goddess. rsp
Y,
I don't think that they're evil.
Tom,
What actually is Hedges substantive argument? It appears to be a connotative link to Nazism and little else.
vimothy,
the slippery slope.
similar to the argument of the right on any govt intervention as the road to serfdom (socialism)
See Hedges as a mirror image of the spokesmen for the Tea Party.
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