Recently, my good friend Jess sent me the link to an excellent essay from the New York Times magazine about evolutionary psychology and its possible link to the origins of human morality. Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that humans may have a biologically-determined compass that underpins all of our moral and ethical impulses. Drawing on the research of University of Viriginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, Pinker argues that while notions of morality vary across cultures, they are made up of the same five core principles, present in countless blends and variations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, community/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Pinker and Haidt make a compelling argument. I’ve always been uncomfortable with moral relativism and its opposite — the Manichean weltanschauung of Republicans and religious fundamentalists. But Pinker carefully negotiates these two extremes, allowing room for cultural empathy but avoiding the trap of valuing every cultural practice — however barbaric or unsavoury — as equally ‘valid’. Since they are essentially born of the same primordial instincts, Pinker is able to acknowledge the fluidity of cultural notions of morality without dismissing their importance — and power — for those that hold them.
His arguments also cast other current debates in an interesting light. His comments about climate change, which see the ‘moralization’ of the issue as a distraction from the challenges that it throws up, cut through much of the sin-and-redemption rhetoric that now obscures the issue:
The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many SUVs) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.
‘Morally boring’ — it is an apt phrase to describe the technical, bureaucratic solutions that will most likely alleviate the effects of anthropomorphic climate change. But, like much else in politics, what is most efficient and logical often takes a backseat to what is exciting and self-validating. Take, for instance, the recent debate between neoliberal capitalism — the harbinger of ‘affluenza’, according to Clive Hamilton — and other forms of economic organisation. As Peter Saunders wrote recently in Policy magazine:
Capitalism lacks romantic appeal. It does not set the pulse racing in the way that opposing ideologies like socialism, fascism, or environmentalism can. It does not stir the blood, for it identifies no dragons to slay. It offers no grand vision for the future, for in an open market system the future is shaped not by the imposition of utopian blueprints, but by billions of individuals pursuing their own preferences. Capitalism can justifiably boast that it is excellent at delivering the goods, but this fails to impress in countries like Australia that have come to take affluence for granted.
Another way of putting this is that capitalism is ‘morally boring’ — or, perhaps more accurately, amoral: a system as neutral and unflinching as a force of nature. This is not to argue that neoliberalism is an unmitigated ‘good for the soul’, as Saunders does; nor is it necessarily an argument against government intervention in the economic sphere (which is clearly necessary in many cases). But it does explain the tendency of capitalism to come under attack from those who benefit most directly from it. It also explains why, even with a catalogue of historical failures to prove its fallibility, socialism and Marxism can still inspire unthinking loyalty. Saunders puts it well: ‘Where capitalism delivers but cannot inspire, socialism inspires despite never having delivered’. It is a strange inversion; one far removed from concrete debates about means and ends, and one that pinpoints, with laser-like precision, the core deficiency of radical left-wing politics: its knee-jerk oppositionism.
But Pinker’s argument is less about rejecting morality than recognising its origins and its limitations. In theory, socialism offers to institutionalise the positive ‘harm/care’ and ‘fairness/reciprocity’ aspects of Haidt’s moral schema by carrying them to their logical conclusion: state-imposed economic and social equality. But this cannot be ‘imposed’ without building on the foundations of ‘community/loyalty’ and ‘authority/respect’, which themselves work to undermine the first two (liberal) moral principles of fairness and protection from harm. The clearest example of this is in the way socialism creates its own out-groups: loyalty to kin and tribe is quickly transmuted into loyalty to class, which, within a short-time, takes on its old ethno-nationalist shadings. It is these coercive (conservative?) elements of socialism that spawn the illiberal police-states and gulags that have accompanied most socialist experiments. (Political dissidents and separatists, for instance, are never accorded ‘equal’ treatment or protection from persecution. In fact, their questionable ‘loyalty’ immediately places them in an out-group of criminals and non-persons, utterly deprived of individual rights. This is the still the case in Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos).
If Pinker is right, socialism is based on universal moral principles of fairness and protection from harm, which accounts for its enduring popularity; but its utopian impulse is quickly undone by the equally innate imperative of loyalty to kin and community, which accounts for its enduring failure. Liberal democracies, on the other hand, achieve a better balance of Haidt’s five moral precepts. They do not seek to impose any ‘blueprint’ on society, and tend to privilege the first two principles (forms of individual rights) over the third and fourth (loyalty to state and community). This far from signals an ‘end to history’. But for a doctrine that so often claims the moral high ground over capitalist systems, there is a dark irony in the idea that socialist states have been born, and torn apart, by conflicting moral impulses.
