From the Book Proposal:

This book will be a friendly slap in the face to liberals and atheists, delivered by a liberal atheist who desperately wants his peers to wise up, drop their self-righteousness, and understand the moralities of conservatives and of religious groups. The central idea of the book is simple but its implications are far-reaching:

Liberals and atheists generally do not understand the breadth of human morality. They think morality is about decreasing harm and increasing justice and autonomy. But for most of the world, morality is primarily about binding people into cohesive communities with strong institutions and collective goals.

The book is based upon my empirical research in moral psychology. I have discovered that there are five innate psychological systems upon which cultures build their moral systems. The first two are Harm/care (involving compassion and nurturance), and Fairness/reciprocity (involving concepts of justice, which generate rights and autonomy). These two psychological systems account for nearly all research in moral psychology, and they provide most of the psychology needed to explain the long history of liberal moral theory in which society is a human creation, a social contract entered into by individuals for their mutual benefit and protection.

But there are three other foundations of morality used by conservative and religious communities, foundations that liberals generally reject as causes of immorality. One is the Ingroup/loyalty foundation, which gives people the strong feeling that being a committed and trustworthy group member is more important than maximizing overall utility. When conservatives say “my country, right or wrong,” liberals say “dissent is patriotic.” Another is the Authority/respect foundation, which motivates conservatives to defend hierarchical social structures in which authorities (such as teachers, parents, and the police) have a duty to establish the order and stability that is necessary for everyone’s benefit. Liberals, in contrast, instinctively “question authority” and often equate it with oppression. The last of the five foundations is Purity/sanctity, which underlies religious conceptions of persons as having a divine soul housed in a body that is disturbingly animal-like. Moral systems built on this foundation urge people to cultivate their higher, spiritual nature and to shun carnal pleasures and petty concerns. Many Christians believe that their bodies are temples, on loan from God. But for secular liberals, people have full deed and title to their own bodies and can adorn them, pierce them, drug them, and stimulate them however they please. Most culture-war issues are really battles over the legitimacy of the Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations.

Morality is a social construction, but it is constructed out of evolved raw materials provided by the five foundations. In surveys and experiments I have conducted in the USA, Europe, Brazil, and India, I have consistently found that highly educated liberals generally rely upon and endorse only the first two foundations (Harm and Fairness), whereas people who are more conservative, more religious, or of lower social class usually rely upon and endorse all five foundations. Each culture’s morality is unique, but an aspect shared by all five-foundation moralities is that they do not regard society as a social contract created for the benefit of individuals. Rather, they see society in more organic terms, as an entity that is of value in and of itself, and they think the building blocks of society are not individuals but rather groups and institutions. The point of moral regulation is to enhance the integrity of these building blocks and to improve the way the blocks fit together, in order to ward off the ever-present danger of social decay. The Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations are moral foundations because they constrain individuals; they pull them away from self-serving, pleasure-seeking individualism by binding people into groups and institutions. (Think about the transformation of a free-wheeling 18 year old who enlists in the army.) Liberals do not see this binding as necessary or as desirable, hence they do not see a moral system based on these foundations as worthy of anything but contempt. They think their opponents are motivated by greed, fear, racism, and blind obedience to scripture or tradition.

What a shame. If liberals could only step out of their righteous bubble, they’d be able to solve these riddles, which at present befuddle their thinking and curse their projects:

1) Why are conservative and religious people happier and more generous than liberal and secular people? Might conservatives and religious practitioners be living in a way more conducive to human flourishing? Might this explain some of the vehement resistance to liberal reforms?

2) Why does increasing the diversity of  a community increase distrust, not just of people who are different from oneself but also of people who are similar? Might opponents of immigration and multiculturalism be correct about the benefits of shared values, traditions, and language? Might multi-ethnic democracies be best served by emphasizing similarity rather than difference?

3) Why are Democrats in the USA so bad at winning the presidency? Democrats have dominated the Congress for most of the last 75 years, yet they have exceeded 50.5% of the popular vote in a presidential election just once since 1944. (The Republicans have exceeded 50.5% six times since then). Do Republicans have a better grasp of what voters want in a president?

The solution to all three riddles can be found in the fundamentally groupish nature of human beings and human morality. In my recent writings I have argued that people are to some extent hive-creatures like bees, who need to be part of something larger than themselves in order to flourish. So the answers to the three riddles are that 1) Conservatives and religious people have larger families and belong to more binding groups and congregations; 2) Diversity, particularly moral diversity, disrupts human hives and reduces the social capital of groups, making people pull into themselves and distrust their neighbors; and 3) Democrats see electoral politics as a kind of shopping in which voters choose the candidate who will give them the best programs, whereas Republicans understand the quasi-religious nature of the presidency. Republicans know that the President’s greatest task is to unite the nation, strengthen its building blocks, and lead it forward toward greatness. We see this difference most starkly in the failed campaigns of the uninspiring policy experts Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and John Kerry.

 

Overview of the book

The book will begin and end with an ancient and beautiful description of the problem of righteousness, from the 8th century Chinese Zen master Sent-ts’an:

The Perfect Way is only difficult
            for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
            all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
            and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
            never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against"
            is the mind's worst disease.

I’ll then invite readers to examine the struggles they partake in – personal and political – and I’ll challenge them to take Sent-ts’an’s advice and see what happens if they put aside liking and disliking for the hours they’ll spend with me. Though contrary to the spirit of the quote, I’ll promise them an enormous payoff for taking this journey: ultimate victory in their struggles through better understanding of their enemies. I’m not concerned about promising such a payoff because the payoff is needed to lure righteous people into reading the book. But if the book works as planned, then by the last page, when they re-read Sent’ts’an’s words, they will be in a more elevated and less righteous mindset, able to grasp the majesty of his ideas.

The first third of the book will be a tutorial on moral psychology. I’ll strip away readers’ preconceived ideas about morality and build up from first principles.  I’ll describe the work I am best known for, demonstrating that morality is driven by emotions and intuitions, not reasoning. I’ll describe the evolution of these emotions and intuitions, but unlike other works on the evolution of morality, I will cover kin selection and reciprocal altruism very briefly (any reader of trade books on morality or evolution is already bored by these accounts). I’ll focus instead on to the most exciting area of research and theory in the last 5 years: the evolution of large scale cooperation via punishment, gossip, ethnic markers and cultural learning, and the transformative effects of sustained intergroup conflict.

My goal in these chapters will be to get readers to appreciate the absolute miracle that is human society. The most basic question in cosmology is “why is there something, rather than nothing?” I will frame the basic question of the social sciences in the same way: “why is there something (societies) rather than nothing (the kin-based bands of other primates)?” In this way I will set the stage for an appreciation of the three binding foundations – Ingroup, Authority, and Purity – and of religion. I will argue that these “conservative” foundations, and the religious minds and religious practices that co-evolved with them, are what made the “major transition” to large-group living possible. However, I will offer a balanced treatment of these topics, making it clear that these biological and cultural adaptations are also responsible for our propensity for racism, war, genocide, and terrorism.

In the middle third of the book I’ll draw together political psychology and political theory to explain why there are conservatives and liberals in the first place. I’ll offer “field guides” to the varieties of conservatives (e.g., laissez-faire, status-quo, and authoritarian) and of liberals (e.g., social justice, green, and populist). I’ll make it clear that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” refer to families of views that are not necessarily united by any one belief, but that can be understood best by examining how ecological contexts (such as agricultural vs. herding vs. trading economies) activate a variety of personality variables (such as openness to experience, authoritarianism, or disgust sensitivity) to make certain philosophical positions attractive to different people. I’ll show that the modern 2-foundation morality of most secular liberals is a product of a particular historical progression, from the Enlightenment through the industrial revolution to the civil rights and colonial liberation struggles of the 1960s. I’ll take a stance on where social-justice liberals were right, and right for the time (e.g., in challenging racism and colonialism) and where they go reliably wrong (e.g., in misunderstanding the miracle of social order, thereby leaving the people they hope to help in conditions of anarchy and violence).

Conversely, I’ll show how conservatism in its most active forms is usually a reaction to the excesses of liberalism.  The social activism of the 1960s in many Western nations set the stage for decades of righteous conflict, and created movements such as the Christian Right in the United States. I’ll develop the theme from the first part of the book that morality is really a team sport, and that the harder one side fights, the more it rallies its opponents to greater exertion.

I’ll also include a chapter on religion, responding directly to the “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett. The rationalist mindset that is pervasive among New Atheist writers makes them prone to thinking that religions are sets of beliefs, most of which are demonstrably wrong (and therefore worthy of ridicule). Instead, I’ll offer a characterization of religions as sets of practices that bind people together into cooperative communities that are generally good for their members, and that can be beneficial to societies (because they civilize and socialize their members) or harmful (when attacked, or when hijacked by demagogues). I’ll show that the New Atheists demonstrate the same righteous psychology that they criticize in religious believers, and I’ll explain why their angry frontal assaults are likely to make things worse for atheists and for the scientific community. 

In the last chapters of the book I’ll offer readers tools they can use to transcend righteousness and work more effectively with others. One chapter will review research on conflict resolution and offer advice on how to use moral psychology to improve personal relationships. I’ll give concrete advice on leadership, a topic that presents special difficulty for liberals with their distrust of hierarchy and their love of autonomy. The book will conclude with a chapter on the need for balance in public and political life. Every modern society needs liberals and conservatives. Like yin and yang, or like the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu, we need a dynamic tension between forces pushing for change and forces guarding stability. By the end of the book I hope to have produced in readers a visceral understanding of the words that they understood only intellectually at first: If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.