If you are like me, most of the friends you choose share your general religious and poltical beliefs. That's what makes family gatherings so treacherous. Every time my wife's family gets together I look forward to tormenting and being tormented by her libertarian Uncle John. Have you ever tried to offer a Thanksgiving or Christmas Day prayer that would satisfy your born-again brother-in-law who has been holding forth on the evils of clerks who say "Happy Holidays" and your rationalistic brother-in-law who thinks religion is for wimps? And I have to admit that most of my liberal friends are more close-minded and judgemental about their conservative counterparts than vice versa. We'll tolerate just about anyone but a convicted, Evangelical Republican.
Now Jonathan Haidt has written a book (with the same title as this blog post) trying to convince liberals to extend their tolerance and understanding to conservatives. Haidt argues that most of us base our beliefs and positions on moral intuition developed over thousands of generations, moral habits that he boils down to six norms: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Liberals focus heavily on care, conservatives--to varying degrees, of course--on all six. Hence liberals lose a lot of elections even when their policies are more sensible and speak to the majority's self interest.
Haidt is not arguing that conservatives are more moral than liberals. People have traditionally not cared much about people different from or distant from themselves, for example. Caring for people different from ourselves--certainly a great virtue in our modern, shrinking world--does not come naturally.
Haidt is trying hard to break liberals of their reflexive belief that conservatives are cruel, stupid, or both--and to get both sides to listen more to each other. Here is a site he's developed: civilpolitics.org.
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