Open Left - Jonathan Haidt

The Science of Religion

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:18:14 GMT

This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.

There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science. This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.

Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion. On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology. It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.
In response to my earlier diay, Semblance wrote:

Moyers is wrong
The Golden Rule is not the core of religion. It is the core of more fundamental human behavior. Religion is just trying to take credit for it.
The core of religion is belief without evidence (faith), which is a vice. People shouldn't do that.

And I wrote two replies. The second is the more important one, and the reason I'm writing this diary. But the first helps set it up, so I republish it as well:

Yes, And No
You're right that the Golden Rule is more fundamental than religion. But that doesn't mean it can't be the core of religion. In fact, it makes perfect sense that religion has as its core something fundamental to human nature.
But when you say, "The core of religion is belief without evidence (faith)," you're making the same mistake the fundamentalists make, but in a different form. You're using the framework of logos to try to comprehend mythos.
The fundamentalists look at a religious text and they interpret it as if it were a scientific treatise. You look at religion as a whole and say that it's about the content of the beliefs as if they were scientific claims. But science and religion are two very different sorts of things. And the core of religion is not beliefs, the core of religion is practice.
"By their fruits ye shall know them," as they say in the trade.

And here's the second response:

Furthermore, A More Scientific View Of Religion (From SCIENCE Magazine, No Less)
Expanding on what I wrote above, William James argued over a century ago, in The Varieties of Religious Experience for an approach that treated religion scientifically, but that did not impose alien standards on religion. Religion had its own purposes, and needed to be judged in terms of them, he argued in essence. Judging individual truth claims and how they are supported is imposing the scientific framework invasively, ignoring the purposive structuring of the religious enterprise. There may be a place for such an approach, but it does not yield understanding of religion as a whole. For that, one needs to take a much more comprehensive approach, which seeks to understand the purposive framework, rather than to invalidate it based on grounds that are foreign to it.
In that spirit, science has come a long way in 100+ years.
I found this quite fortuitously (it was already open in my Adobe Acrobat window, I just hadn't read it yet), from SCIENCE VOL 316 18 MAY 2007, "The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology," Jonathan Haidt, pp. 998-1001:
Humans attain their extreme group solidarity by forming moral communities within which selfishness is punished and virtue rewarded. Durkheim believed that gods played a crucial role in the formation of such communities. He saw religion as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them" (30). D. S. Wilson (35) has argued that the coevolution of religions and religious minds created conditions in which multilevel group selection operated, transforming the older morality of small groups into a more tribal form that could unite larger populations. As with ants, group selection greatly increased cooperation within the group, but in part for the adaptive purpose of success in conflict between groups.

Whatever the origins of religiosity, nearly all religions have culturally evolved complexes of practices, stories, and norms that work together to suppress the self and connect people to something beyond the self. Newberg (37) found that religious experiences often involve decreased activity in brain areas that maintain maps of the self's boundaries and position, consistent with widespread reports that mystical experiences involve feelings of merging with God or the universe. Studies of ritual, particularly those involving the sort of synchronized motor movements common in religious rites, indicate that such rituals serve to bind participants together in what is often reported to be an ecstatic state of union (38). Recent work on mirror neurons indicates that, whereas such neurons exist in other primates, they are much more numerous in human beings, and they serve to synchronize our feelings and movements with those of others around us (39). Whether people use their mirror neurons to feel another's pain, enjoy a synchronized dance, or bow in unison toward Mecca, it is clear that we are prepared, neurologically, psychologically, and culturally, to link our consciousness, our emotions, and our motor movements with those of other people.

Obviously, it is quite easy for all this to lead us into scientifically false beliefs, and that needs to be vigorously resisted. But clearly there is much, much more that's also going on here, and because it's rooted in our biology and our evolution, it's not going away anytime soon. So the real, sensible challenge is how to make the most of it, while mitigating the worst of it.
Simply wishing it all out of existence is every bit as irrational, faith-based nonsense as you take religion itself to be.

Obviously, for those who are already atheists or agnostics, the above can be read as a more thoroughgoing explanation of how the "error" of religion comes about. But for believers, it can just as easily be read as an explanation of how God formed humanity to be able to apprehend Him, and, through struggle, to overcome our spiritual separation.

In short, the scientific understanding offered above is basically faith-neutral. Science and religion remain two separate enterprises. We cannot, of course, refrain from reflecting and acting upon the relationship between the two. But for the sake of our own clarity, we ought to do our best to reflect and act at a level that is separate from both of them.

Are The Culture Wars MUCH Realer And Deeper Than Obama Realizes?

Paul Rosenberg — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:00:42 GMT

Note: On Friday, Daniel introduced a fascinating perspective on morality, psychology and the politics of left and right, based on the work of Jonathan Haidt, which I've since followed up on a bit. This is a first stab at making use of some of his insights.

I have long been deeply skeptical about some of Barack Obama's core political assumptions revolving around the culture wars-that they are a more or less symmetrical, irrational distraction from real, pragmatic problem-solving perpetrated by left as well as the right, which are rooted in the 60s and the Baby Boom generation, but have no real relevance to the problems of today.

Having lived through the entire period from the 1960s onward, it seems quite clear to me that the 1960s represented a fundamental rupture with the past, in which fundamental and pervasive institutionalized forms of prejudice-most notably against women, blacks and other racial minorities-were dramatically challenged, morally delegitimized, and largely dismantled. In response to this, political conservatives organized a sustained backlash, and used it to attack not just the breakthrough advances of the 1960s, but a wide range of New Deal political advances and their extensions as well, which largely benefited the working class whites, and helped to create the modern middle class. As such, there was never any sort of symmetry between the sides in the culture war, nor was there anything irrational in fighting against the politics of reaction. Finally, given that the 1960s saw the fall of age-old structures of race and gender oppression, it was quite clear that culture wars didn't start in the 1960s, except in the terms of "bully logic"-"It all started when he hit me back!"
These objections to Obama's ideology are well-known in the blogosphere, at least, if not always well-understood. So, too, is another characteristic of his ideology touched on above-his belief that he, and others following in his spirit, can transcend the culture wars, and bring our country together, which he claims is what's necessary in order for us to solve today's problems and move ahead.

Of course, I and others have repeatedly pointed out that this is not how our most significant problems get solved. But I don't want to revisit that debate here, merely take note of it. Rather, what I want to focus on is an unexpected contradiction that seems to emerge from the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

You see, Haidt argues that morality is more broadly based than liberals commonly assume, and that conservatives acting in ways that liberals regard as immoral-opposing equality, for example-are actually acting based on a different morality, which has its own internal validity. While this would appear to validate Obama's stance of reaching out to conservatives, but Haidt also argues that the underlying differences between liberal and conservative morality are quite substantially deeply rooted, and no mere passing phenomena of a bygone era. He doesn't claim the differences are insurmountable, but he does see them as far more challenging and difficult to grapple with than Obama's feel-good optimism would seem to recognize. If Haidt's understanding of moral differences between left and right are correct, culture war differences cannot simply be set aside to deal with "more important problems." After all, our moral views are central to how we decide what's important in the first place.

Haidt describes moral concerns-based on studies of different cultures-as consisting of five different realms, which in turn reflect three different basic groupings. In his paper "When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize" [PDF], co-authored with Jesse Graham, he writes:

Richard Shweder (1990) has long argued that the individual-centered moralities of Kohlberg and Turiel reflect just one of three widespread moral "ethics," each based on a different ontological presupposition. In the "ethic of autonomy" the moral world is assumed to be made up exclusively of individual human beings, and the purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the zone of discretionary choice of 'individuals' and to promote the exercise of individual will in the pursuit of personal preferences" (Shweder et al., 1997, p.138).Rights, justice, fairness, and freedom are moral goods because they help to maximize the autonomy of individuals, and to protect individuals from harms perpetrated by authorities and by other individuals. The "ethic of community," in contrast, has a different ontological foundation. It sees the world not as a collection of individuals but as a collection of institutions, families, tribes, guilds or other groups. The purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the moral integrity of the various stations or roles that constitute a 'society' or a 'community,' where a 'society' or 'community' is conceived of as a corporate entity with an identity, standing, history, and reputation of its own" (Shweder et al., 1997, p.138) Key virtues in this ethic are duty, respect, loyalty, and interdependence2. Individuals are office-holders in larger social structures which give individual lives meaning and purpose. Finally, the "ethic of divinity" is based on the ontological presupposition that God or gods exist, and that the moral world is composed of souls housed in bodies. (See Bloom, 2004, for evidence that this presupposition is the natural, default assumption of our species.) Each soul is a bit of God, or at least a gift from God, and so the purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the soul, the spirit, the spiritual aspects of the human agent and 'nature' from degradation" (Shweder et al., 1997, p. 138). If the body is a temple housing divinity within, then people should not be free to use their bodies in any way they please; rather, moral regulations should help people to control themselves and avoid sin and spiritual pollution in matters related to sexuality, food, and religious law more generally.
From Shweder's perspective it is clear that social justice is the ethic of autonomy writ large, but the two other ethics-community and divinity-are at work in most cultures and in many Western subcultures. Political conservatism is often defined by its strong valuation of institutions and its concern that ideologies of "liberation" often destroy the very structures that make society and well-being possible (Muller, 1997).

It is, to say the least, intellectually challenging, and non-trivial to contemplate how such fundamentally different sorts of ethics might be reconciled or harmonized.

Haidt also writes:

The five foundations theory offers a surprisingly simple explanation of the "culture war" going on in the United states, and in other democracies such as Israel (see Hunter, 1991, on the battle in many countries between the "orthodox" and the "progressivists"). The five foundations theory can also explain two puzzling features of the 2004 American presidential election. The first puzzle is that a plurality of Americans who voted for George Bush said in a well publicized but poorly designed exit poll that their main concern was "moral values." The second puzzle is that political liberals in the United States were shocked, outraged, and unable to understand how "moral values " drove people to vote for a man who, as they saw it, tricked America into an unwinnable war, cut taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor, and seemed to have a personal animosity toward mother nature. Our explanation of these two puzzles, and of the culture war in general, flows from this simple proposition: the morality of political liberals is built on the harm and fairness foundations, while the morality of political conservatives is built upon all five foundations.

I am not arguing that these differences can't be bridged, only that they can't be set aside and ignored, just because we'd like it better that way. And this, to me, represents a fundamental misperception of reality on Obama's part.

The Psychological Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives

Daniel De Groot — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:31:51 GMT

(Direct link) Psychology professor Jonathan Haidt discusses his research into the moral and psychological foundations of liberalism and conservativism. See and take the tests he describes at yourmorals.org.

The main thing I'd ask you to take from this is that conservativism and liberalism exist at a fundamental level of human brain function. They are facets of ingrained human psychology and not pure constructs of thought and rationality. You cannot discuss the roots of these two ideologies (separate from others IMO) without looking at human evolutionary psychology.
In criticism of what he's discussing, I had a couple thoughts:

1) Adding additional priorities is not such a trivial moral difference as Haidt seems to think. If I value both preventing harm and ingroup loyalty, the conflict between the two means one will win and the other lose.

2) Having additional priorities to your moral calculus doesn't preclude your decisions from actually being immoral. Just because it made moral sense to your value system doesn't mean we should all just agree to disagree. Conservatives, according to Haidt's test results place a higher value on authority than fairness or avoiding harm. So they'd rather not weaken a strong President who engages in torture. Perhaps that result is internally consistent with their values, but it is still immoral, if the word is to have any meaning at all.

3) If conservatives value all 5 moral concepts Haidt identifies almost equally, that conversely means they value nothing. If everything is priority one, then nothing is.

I will accept Haidt's admonishment to foster greater understanding of and with conservatives. However I don't accept his conclusion that they're just as moral when their policies lead to such abhorrent results and they as a group are so reluctant to adjust their thinking. It's all well and good to say "I value authority more than fairness", but you have to be able to empirically defend the results of those moral calculations. I contend conservatives cannot successfully do this, at which point failing to adjust your moral formula becomes itself immoral.