On Morality, and that

By lex, on September 20, 2008

Two people I respect, each of them coming into the world with very different points of view, have separately turned me on (in various media) to the work of Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. I suppose you could look upon it as a kind of intervention.

Haidt strikes me as one of those cheerful and industrious academic liberals of the very best sort – bright and affable, earnestly trying in his own way to get to the bottom of one of life’s enduring mysteries: Why on earth would anyone vote Republican?

He does so not merely out of academic anthropological interest – though there are, to be sure, charmingly Fossian elements in his “Conservatives in the Mist” narrative – but rather because if we’re ever going to get anything done in this absurdly bifurcated world of ours, we’ll have to understand what motivates the conservative mind. The better, you know: To change it.

Being a psychologist (rather than an economist, say) he uses the closest tools at his disposal:

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex