Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…GMOs, when it comes to food, or buying a t‑shirt from the wrong country is disgusting. If these can migrate, I have this picture of these relatively fixed modules, and left‑wing people have more of some, and right‑wing people have more of others, but we also see them migrating. How flexible is this? This is the key idea of these being these sort of modules, that they’re not modules that are going off in your head at the moment of judgment, so much as they are modules in us from birth, and they are what cultures can build upon as you develop. Think about it as like taste buds. We have these innate taste buds because this is the way our ancestors lived. They ate fruit and meat, and so we have sweet and sour receptors, and we have MSG detectors, which guide us to meat. But we don’t just have a cuisine — here I am, talking to the expert on cultural variations in cuisine, in a sense. We don’t just have a cuisine that’s based on sweet, sour, salt. Each cuisine is a cultural creation that has to, ultimately, please the same universal taste buds. Think about it for morality. We all have the same, let’s call them six moral taste buds. The sixth one I didn’t mention before is liberty versus oppression. People resent being forced or told what to do, if they don’t perceive it as legitimate. We have these six moral taste buds, and if you’re raised on a desert island with nobody, maybe you would have them, but they wouldn’t be developed. But, whenever you have a culture emerging, it’s going to build on certain aspects of that and not others. If you have a warrior culture, if you’re constantly being attacked, boy, is it going to build on the loyalty, the authority, the sanctity ones, to create this tribal consciousness. You can see that in a joke form in fraternities. Fraternities, even on a secular campus, fraternities will build on those tribal foundations. Whereas, if you go to, say, Amsterdam, or New York, or places that are port cities with a lot of variety, diversity, commerce, those tend to thin down the moral domain. They don’t tend to do a lot with group loyalty and hierarchy. They tend to focus more on, “I’ll tell you what, you don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you. You honor your contracts, I’ll honor mine.” This is a more appropriate morality for diversity and for commerce. If we get to a very fundamental question — left‑wing individuals and right‑wing individuals, and let’s take, for now, only America. As people, in other ways, how different do you think they are? Or, is it just there are these semi‑accidental triggers which have set off certain modules in the left‑wingers and different modules in the right‑wingers, but otherwise they’re going to dress the same, they’re going to treat their spouses the same way, or not? Are they fundamentally different?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.