Is your mind righteous?

Regular readers of WW's World will know that Walt is a regular reader of Margaret Wente's column in the Globe and Mail. Ms Wente was born in Chicago, but now makes her home in "an affluent downtown Toronto postal code". She looks with a jaundiced eye [perhaps TWO such eyes. Ed.] on her neighbours, whom she regards as what I call "Volvo liberals".

Today, Ms Wente has another "label for these people. They are WEIRD. That is, they belong to a tiny subculture of the human population that is Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. They are the secular liberal baby boomers who dominate the opinion elite."

She says this in the context of a review of The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. According to the author's website, the book is about one of the hottest topics in the sciences — morality. It’s about how we evolved to live in moral “matrices,” which bind us together around sacred values and then blind us to the truth. It’s about righteousness, moral diversity, politics and religion.

According to Margaret Wente's review, Mr Haidt is talking about the WEIRD culture of which he is an admitted member. She sees The Righteous Mind as a must-read for anyone who’s dumbfounded that Steve Harpoon got elected prime minister of Canada. Or that anyone could oppose the re-election of Al O'Bama.

Or that the voters of Alberta are about to elect a party "full of bigots and climate-change deniers". (More on this, and why it should matter to Americans, next week. For now... lifetime pct .983.)

Mr. Haidt argues that conservatives and liberals operate with two quite different moral systems. Liberals are almost exclusively concerned with harm and fairness. They see society as composed of autonomous individuals who should be free to satisfy their wants and needs as they see fit.

Conservatives have a wider moral palate. They are also concerned with loyalty, authority and sanctity – values that are deeply rooted in human nature and all societies throughout history. They see society as composed of people in relation to community, who have a set of roles, responsibilities and obligations to God and their neighbours. They believe there is much more to the moral domain than harm and fairness.

Haidt's thesis is that conservative politicians on the right have a built-in advantage, because they understand human nature better than liberals do. Most people’s moral frameworks are far broader – and far less rational and systematic – than liberals believe, says Ms Wente. Nonetheless, liberal psychologists (and politicians) have spent most of the past 40 years trying to explain why conservatives are so misguided. Why don’t they embrace equality, diversity and change, like normal people? Obviously, they’re repressed and afraid of difference.

Mr. Haidt believes that as long as liberals continue to pathologize conservatism, they’re doomed. Instead, they need to understand why the reaction of many ordinary people to the issues in the news is so different from their own. The simple answer is that these people are less concerned with individual rights and universal justice than they are with things such as loyalty, authority and people getting what they deserve, not what their ethnicity or sexual orientation "entitle" them to.

Ms Wente uses the example of the Harper government’s tough crime-and-punishment agenda -- the policies that drive Canadian liberals craziest.

To liberals, [the government's] law-and-order agenda is nothing more than base pandering to an ignorant electorate. But many Canadians have a sharply different view. They don’t care that crime stats are at record lows, or that mandatory minimum sentences don’t work.

What they care about is the Vancouver bus driver who was off work for more than a year after a young thug bashed his face in. The thug got 18 months to be served at a rehab residence. They care about the stupidly light sentence imposed on Graham James for sexually abusing teenage hockey players and about shopkeepers who get charged by the police for trying to protect themselves from thieves.

They think these things are profoundly wrong. And despite the enlightened views of liberals, an alarming number of them continue to support the death penalty.

Perhaps if these Canadians were better educated they wouldn’t think this way. Or perhaps, if liberals were better educated in moral psychology, they’d be able to understand why conservative policies are so appealing. My advice is to begin by listening to Jonathan Haidt.

Walt can hardly wait to read The Righteous Mind, and will pick up a copy at the Library of Congress next week*, if the librarian isn't looking.

* Indeed, Walt will be in the capital city of the Excited States of America from now until Wednesday. Why??? Visit WW's World on Thursday and all will be revealed. Or maybe not.