“The Righteous Mind” Explains Why Trump is Right About NFL Kneelers: Moral Capital is Real, and it Matters.

Kneeling NFL Players

Politics is more like religion than it is like shopping. 

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. 

Psychologically, anthropologically, sociologically (i.e., scientifically, from the perspective of trying to understand fundamental human nature) the religion-like faith that makes civil society possible is called moral capital.  The left is blind to this basic fact of fundamental human nature.  The following is from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt, pages 336 – 343; bold emphasis added.

My own intellectual life narrative has had two turning points. In chapter 5 I recounted the first one, in India, in which my mind opened to the existence of the broader moralities described by Richard Shweder (i.e., the ethics of community and divinity). But from that turning point in 1993 through the election of Barack Obama in 2008, I was still a partisan liberal. I wanted my team (the Democrats) to beat the other team (the Republicans). In fact, I first began to study politics precisely because I was so frustrated by John Kerry’s ineffectual campaign for the presidency. I was convinced that American liberals simply did not “get” the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen, and I wanted to use my research on moral psychology to help liberals win.

To learn about political psychology, I decided to teach a graduate seminar on the topic in the spring of 2005. Knowing that I’d be teaching this new class, I was on the lookout for good readings. So when I was visiting friends in New York a month after the Kerry defeat, I went to a used-book store to browse its political science section. As I scanned the shelves, one book jumped out at me-a thick brown book with one word on its spine: Conservatism. It was a volume of readings edited by the historian Jerry Muller. I started reading Muller’s introduction while standing in the aisle, but by the third page I had to sit down on the floor. I didn’t realize it until years later, but Muller’s essay was my second turning point.

Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.”34 Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change. This can put them at odds with true conservatives, who see radical change as dangerous.

Muller next distinguished conservatism from the counterEnlightenment. It is true that most resistance to the Enlightenment can be said to have been conservative, by definition (i.e., clerics and aristocrats were trying to conserve the old order). But modern conservatism, Muller asserts, finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned, pragmatic, and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlightenment project. Here’s the line that quite literally floored me:

What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.

As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed, therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings about the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?

I kept reading. Muller went through a series of claims about human nature and institutions, which he said are the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought; see Glaucon, Tetlock, and Ariely in chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes; see Hume in chapter 2 and Baron-Cohen on systemizing in chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes; see Durkheim in chapters 8 and 11).

Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital. 

The term social capital swept through the social sciences in the 1990s, jumping into the broader public vocabulary after Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone)7 Capital, in economics, refers to the resources that allow a person or firm to produce goods or services. There’s financial capital (money in the bank), physical capital (such as a wrench or a factory), and human capital (such as a well-trained sales force). When everything else is equal, a firm with more of any kind of capital will outcompete a firm with less.

Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties.38 When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors (which makes sense given that human beings were shaped by multilevel selection to be contingent cooperators). In fact, discussions of social capital sometimes use the example of ultra-Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants, which I mentioned in the previous chapter.39 This tightly knit ethnic group has been able to create the most efficient market because their transaction and monitoring costs are so low there’s less overhead on every deal. And their costs are so low because they trust each other. If a rival market were to open up across town composed of ethnically and religiously diverse merchants, they’d have to spend a lot more money on lawyers and security guards, given how easy it is to commit fraud or theft when sending diamonds out for inspection by other merchants. Like the nonreligious communes studied by Richard Sosis, they’d have a much harder time getting individuals to follow the moral norms of the community.40

Everyone loves social capital. Whether you’re left, right, or center, who could fail to see the value of being able to trust and rely upon others? But now let’s broaden our focus beyond firms trying to produce goods and let’s think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior. Let’s set aside problems of moral diversity and just specify the goal as increasing the “output” of pro social behaviors and decreasing the “output” of antisocial behaviors, however the group defines those terms. To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital. (It’s hard to imagine how anomie and distrust could be beneficial.) But will linking people together into healthy, trusting relationships be enough to improve the ethical profile of the group?

If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, that may be sufficient. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. People who hold this “constrained”41 view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay.

If you are a member of a WEIRD society, your eyes tend to fall on individual objects such as people, and you don’t automatically see the relationships among them. Having a concept such as social capital is helpful because it forces you to see the relationships within which those people are embedded, and which make those people more productive. I propose that we take this approach one step further. To understand the miracle of moral communities that grow beyond the bounds of kinship we must look not just at people, and not just at the relationships among people, but at the complete environment within which those relationships are embedded, and which makes those people more virtuous (however they themselves define that term). It takes a great deal of outside-the-mind stuff to support a moral community.

For example, on a small island or in a small town, you typically don’t need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city in the same country, if you only lock the bike frame, your wheels may get stolen. Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn’t mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall-the diver-sity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people-but that’s the trade-off. (Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)

Looking at a bunch of outside-the-mind factors and at how well they mesh with inside-the-mind moral psychology brings us right back to the definition of moral systems that I gave in the last chapter. In fact, we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community.More specifically, moral capital refers to

the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

To see moral capital in action, let’s do a thought experiment using the nineteenth-century communes studied by Richard Sosis. Let’s assume that every commune was started by a group of twenty-five adults who knew; liked, and trusted one another. In other words, let’s assume that every commune started with a high and equal quantity of social capital on day one. What factors enabled some communes to maintain their social capital and generate high levels of prosocial behavior for decades while others degenerated into discord and distrust within the first year?

In the last chapter, I said that belief in gods and costly religious rituals turned out to be crucial ingredients of success. But let’s put religion aside and look at other kinds of outside-the-mind stuff. Let’s assume that each commune started off with a clear list of values and virtues that it printed on posters and displayed throughout the commune. A commune that valued self-expression over conformity and that prized the virtue of tolerance over the virtue of loyalty might be more attractive to outsiders, and this could indeed be an advantage in recruiting new members, but it would have lower moral capital than a commune that valued conformity and loyalty. The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.

Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense. There is not a big margin for error; many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit. If you don’t value moral capital, then you won’t foster values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that increase it.

Let me state clearly that moral capital is not always an unalloyed good. Moral capital leads automatically to the suppression of free riders, but it does not lead automatically to other forms of fairness such as equality of opportunity. And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the lift. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism-which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity-is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. 

Moral Capital is an essential ingredient of civil society. It is through moral capital – “all the tools in the tool box” as Haidt said in his TED Talk – that cooperative society is even possible.

Moral capital is an emergent moral intuition, a sacred value, that arises from the complex system, the psychological profile, the righteous mind, that is made of 1) Aristotelian cognitive style and 2) all the foundations in equal balance; which is to say, of conservatism.   

It is the moral intuition of moral capital, more than anything else, that Damore, Wax, and so-called “provocateurs” are defending, and which explains the Trump and Brexit wins; NOT authoritarianism, NOT populism, NOT nationalism, NOT fascism, NOT racism, NOT sexism, NOT the status quo; NOT ANY of the reductive, oversimplified, fallacy of composition sub-parts (the “isms”) of the whole of the moral intuition of social capital.

(The sub-parts and “isms,” by the way, curiously, and I’m sure purely coincidentally, just happen to support and justify the left’s narrative about the racist, white supremacist, fascist, nazi, sexist, selfish, uncaring, regressive, right, and thus are examples in the pantheon of “Risk Points” described in Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.

The left, from kneeling NFL players to Obama and Hillary to the Democratic Party to the analyses on HxA’s web site, are stuck deep inside the blind spot.

The “care” fixated mentality that sees the world only in terms reductive “isms” and is blind to the emergent whole of social capital, in the final analysis, destroys it.

It is the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face blatant, willful, deliberate, destruction of social capital that Trump, Milo, Shapiro, Coulter, Murray, et al, are fighting.  They’re not defending the flag per se, or the anthem, or any other symbol. They are defending the very real, very necessary, feel-it-in-your-bones “evolved psychological mechanism” of moral capital.  

But “our one-eyed friends” on the left are blind to it.  They are oblivious to it.  And so, through the best of intentions, destroy it.

Pointing out this sort of thing, aka the real problem that is infecting society, and correcting it, seems right up the alley of Heterodox Academy.

But no, rather than address the real problem, HxA fixates on the “isms,” on deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic style, reductive, post mortem analyses of the reaction to it.