The Root Cause of the Political Divide

Liberals and conservatives literally live in different worlds with different dimensions.    

It is not enough to describe moral foundations merely as taste buds as Haidt does in one of the metaphors he uses to help us understand his theory.  And it is not even enough to describe moral foundations as the color receptors of the moral mind, and the tools of the moral imagination and reasoning as I have done thus far in this essay.

To truly understand the root cause of the culture war we need a better metaphor, because, as Haidt says in his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom: 

Our life is the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor.  We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant.  With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind. 

We have to understand the concept of moral foundations as forming a synergistic system of checks and balances where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  We can’t just measure, on a scale of one to ten, how important each moral foundation is to each person.  We can’t just look at graphs with liberals at the left of the X axis and conservatives on the right, where the Y axis shows how important the moral foundations are.  That’s a little bit like measuring the quality of a wall made of bricks and mortar by examining the characteristics of the bricks and the mortar and deducing how strong the wall is likely to be. It does not tell the whole story. To get a true understanding, we have to look at the wall itself.  We have to understand the net effect of the system as a whole.   

The best metaphor for understanding the relationship between the three-foundation morality and the six-foundation morality is the metaphor of Flatland and Spaceland, also in Haidt’s book “The Happiness Hypothesis.”

The metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland, a charming little book written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edward Abbot.  Flatland is a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric figures.  The protagonist is a square.  One day, the square is visited by a sphere from a three-dimensional world called Spaceland.  When a sphere visits Flatland, however, all that is visible to Flatlanders is the part of the sphere that lies in their plane – in other words, a circle.  The square is astonished that the circle is able to grow or shrink at will (by rising or sinking into the plane of Flatland) and even to disappear and reappear in a different place (by leaving the plane, and then reentering it).  The sphere tries to explain the concept of the third dimension to the two-dimensional square, but the square, though skilled at two-dimensional geometry, doesn’t get it.  He cannot understand what it means to have thickness in addition to height and breadth, nor can he understand that the circle came from up above him, where “up” does not mean from the north.   The sphere presents analogies and geometrical demonstrations of how to move from one dimension to two, and then from two to three, but the square still finds the idea of moving “up” out of the plane of Flatland ridiculous. 

The reason for the political divide is that liberals and conservatives talk past each other as if we were Flatlanders and Spacelanders.  To a conservative, talking with a liberal about moral issues – and politics is morality in action; moral thinking for social doing – is like the Spacelander trying to explain thickness and height and breadth to a Flatlander. 

To a liberal, talking with a conservative is like talking to a being from another dimension; they seem foreign, or “alien.”   As Haidt describes in When Morality Opposes Justice, “The principles of principled conservatism go beyond fairness to include principles that liberals do not acknowledge to be moral principles.”  Since half of the moral spectrum is essentially invisible to liberals they are dumbfounded in their attempts to understand conservatives, and are left with practically no other option but to attribute conservative views to some sort of mental or moral dysfunction, like racism, homophobia, religious zealotry, “climate of hate,” “paranoid style,” etc., etc., etc.

As Haidt says in his TED talk:

When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. (Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you’re trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie “The Matrix.” But I’m here today to give you a choice. You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.

Haidt has shown that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives.(1)  The conservative Spacelanders, with their six-foundation perception of the full spectrum of human nature can see and understand the liberal Flatlanders.  But the Flatlanders, with their three-foundation partial spectrum “color blind” perception of human nature have a difficult time comprehending what the heck the conservative Spacelanders are talking about.  If there is to be any hope of bridging the political divide, the “vision” of the liberal Flatlanders must be improved. 

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(1) “Political conservatives are more accurate than political liberals in characterizing the explicit moral beliefs of the other side.” Haidt,  J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality. In J. Jost, A. C. Kay, & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and Psychological Bases  of Ideology and System Justification.  Page 3.  Available at MoralFoundations.org