An ingenious rerouting of the psychology of taboo in the service of peace has recently been explored by Scott Atran, working with the psychologists Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin and the political scientist Khalil Shikaki.201 In theory, peace negotiations should take place within a framework of Market Pricing. A surplus is generated when adversaries lay down their arms—the so-called peace dividend—and the two sides get to yes by agreeing to divide it. Each side compromises on its maximalist demand in order to enjoy a portion of that surplus, which is greater than what they would end up with if they walked away from the table and had to pay the price of continuing conflict.
Unfortunately, the mindset of sacredness and taboo can confound the bestlaid plans of rational deal-makers. If a value is sacred in the minds of one of the antagonists, then it has infinite value, and may not be traded away for any other good, just as one may not sell one’s child for any other good. People inflamed by nationalist and religious fervor hold certain values sacred, such as sovereignty over hallowed ground or an acknowledgment of ancient atrocities. To compromise them for the sake of peace or prosperity is taboo. The very thought unmasks the thinker as a traitor, a quisling, a mercenary, a whore.
In a daring experiment, the researchers did not simply avail themselves of the usual convenience sample of a few dozen undergraduates who fill out questionnaires for beer money. They surveyed real players in the Israel-Palestine dispute: more than six hundred Jewish settlers in the West Bank, more than five hundred Palestinian refugees, and more than seven hundred Palestinian students, half of whom identified with Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The team had no trouble finding fanatics within each group who treated their demands as sacred values. Almost half the Israeli settlers indicated that it would never be permissible for the Jewish people to give up part of the Land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria (which make up the West Bank), no matter how great the benefit. Among the Palestinians, more than half the students indicated that it was impermissible to compromise on sovereignty over Jerusalem, no matter how great the benefit, and 80 percent of the refugees held that no compromise was possible on the “right of return” of Palestinians to Israel.
The researchers divided each group into thirds and presented them with a hypothetical peace deal that required all sides to compromise on a sacred value. The deal was a two-state solution in which the Israelis would withdraw from 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza but would not have to absorb Palestinian refugees. Not surprisingly, the proposal did not go over well. The absolutists on both sides reacted with anger and disgust and said that they would, if necessary, resort to violence to oppose the deal.
With a third of the participants, the deals were sweetened with cash compensation from the United States and the European Union, such as a billion dollars a year for a hundred years, or a guarantee that the people would live in peace and prosperity. With these sweeteners on the table, the nonabsolutists, as expected, softened their opposition a bit. But the absolutists, forced to contemplate a taboo tradeoff, were even more disgusted, angry, and prepared to resort to violence. So much for the rational-actor conception of human behavior when it comes to politico-religious conflict.
All this would be pretty depressing were it not for Tetlock’s observation that many ostensibly sacred values are really pseudo-sacred and may be compromised if a taboo tradeoff is cleverly reframed. In a third variation of the hypothetical peace deal, the two-state solution was augmented with a purely symbolic declaration by the enemy in which it compromised one of its sacred values. In the deal presented to the Israeli settlers, the Palestinians “would give up any claims to their right of return, which is sacred to them,” or “would be required to recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel.” In the deal presented to the Palestinians, Israel would “recognize the historic and legitimate right of the Palestinians to their own state and would apologize for all of the wrongs done to the Palestinian people,” or would “give up what they believe is their sacred right to the West Bank,” or would “symbolically recognize the historic legitimacy of the right of return” (while not actually granting it). The verbiage made a difference. Unlike the bribes of money or peace, the symbolic concession of a sacred value by the enemy, especially when it acknowledges a sacred value on one’s own side, reduced the absolutists’ anger, disgust, and willingness to endorse violence. The reductions did not shrink the absolutists’ numbers to a minority of their respective sides, but the proportions were large enough to have potentially reversed the outcomes of their recent national elections.
The implications of this manipulation of people’s moral psychology are profound. To find anything that softens the opposition of Israeli and Palestinian fanatics to what the rest of the world recognizes as the only viable solution to their conflict is something close to a miracle. The standard tools of diplomacy wonks, who treat the disputants as rational actors and try to manipulate the costs and benefits of a peace agreement, can backfire. Instead they must treat the disputants as moralistic actors, and manipulate the symbolic framing of the peace agreement, if they want a bit of daylight to open up. The human moral sense is not always an obstacle to peace, but it can be when the mindset of sacredness and taboo is allowed free rein. Only when that mindset is redeployed under the direction of rational goals will it yield an outcome that can truly be called moral.
What exogenous causes are shifting the allocation of moral intuitions away from community, authority, and purity and toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality?
One obvious force is geographic and social mobility. People are no longer confined to the small worlds of family, village, and tribe, in which conformity and solidarity are essential to daily life, and ostracism and exile are a form of social death. They can seek their fortunes in other circles, which expose them to alternative worldviews and lead them into a more ecumenical morality, which gravitates to the rights of individuals rather than chauvinistic veneration of the group.
By the same token, open societies, where talent, ambition, or luck can dislodge people from the station in which they were born, are less likely to see an Authority Ranking as an inviolable law of nature, and more likely to see it as a historical artifact or a legacy of injustice.
When diverse individuals mingle, engage in commerce, and find themselves on professional or social teams that cooperate to attain a superordinate goal, their intuitions of purity can be diluted. One example, mentioned in chapter 7, is the greater tolerance of homosexuality among people who personally know homosexuals. Haidt observes that when one zooms in on an electoral map of the United States, from the coarse division into red and blue states to a finer-grained division into red and blue counties, one finds that the blue counties, representing the regions that voted for the more liberal presidential candidate, cluster along the coasts and major waterways. Before the advent of jet airplanes and interstate highways, these were the places where people and their ideas most easily mixed. That early advantage installed them as hubs of transportation, commerce, media, research, and education, and they continue to be pluralistic—and liberal—zones today. Though American political liberalism is by no means the same as classical liberalism, the two overlap in their weighting of the moral spheres. The micro-geography of liberalism suggests that the moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism.202
Another subverter of community, authority, and purity is the objective study of history. The mindset of Communality, Fiske notes, conceives of the group as eternal: the group is held together by an immutable essence, and its traditions stretch back to the dawn of time.203 Authority Rankings too are naturally portrayed as everlasting. They were ordained by the gods, or are inherent in a great chain of being that organizes the universe. And both models boast an abiding nobility and purity as part of their essential nature.
In this tissue of rationalizations, a real historian is about as welcome as a skunk at a garden party. Donald B
rown, before he embarked on his survey of human universals, wanted to explain why the Hindus of India had produced so little in the way of serious historical scholarship, unlike the neighboring civilizations of China.204 The elites of a hereditary caste society, he suspected, figured that no good could come from scholars nosing around in archives where they might stumble upon evidence that undermined their claims to have descended from heroes and gods. Brown looked at twenty-five civilizations in Asia and Europe and found that the ones that were stratified into hereditary classes favored myth, legend, and hagiography and discouraged history, social science, natural science, biography, realistic portraiture, and uniform education. More recently, the nationalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries recruited cadres of hacks to write potted histories of their nations’ timeless values and glorious pasts.205 Beginning in the 1960s, many democracies were traumatized by revisionist histories that unearthed their nations’ shallow roots and exposed their sordid misdeeds. The declines of patriotism, tribalism, and trust in hierarchies are in part a legacy of the new historiography. Many liberal-conservative battles continue to be fought over school curricula and museum exhibits.
Though historical fact is the best antidote to self-serving legend, the imaginative projections of fiction can also reorient an audience’s moral sense. The protagonists of many plots have struggled with conflicts between a morality defined by loyalty, obedience, patriotism, duty, law, or convention and the course of action that is morally defensible. In the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, a prison guard is about to punish Paul Newman by locking him in a sweltering box and explains, “Sorry, Luke, I’m just doing my job. You gotta appreciate that.” Luke replies, “Nah—calling it your job don’t make it right, Boss.”
Less often, an author can shake readers into realizing that conscience itself can be an untrustworthy guide to what is right. Huckleberry Finn, while drifting down the Mississippi, is suddenly racked with guilt over having helped Jim escape from his lawful owner and reach a free state.
Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them.
It most froze me to hear such talk.... Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm....
My conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says to it, “Let up on me—it ain’t too late yet—I’ll paddle ashore at the first light and tell.” . . . All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a light, and sort of singing to myself. By and by one showed....
[Jim] jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says, “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n’ for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de ONLY fren’ ole Jim’s got now.”
I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me.
In this heart-stopping sequence, a conscience guided by principle, obedience, reciprocity, and sympathy for a stranger pulls Huck in the wrong direction, and an immediate tug on his sympathy from a friend (bolstered in the reader’s mind by a conception of human rights) pulls him in the right one. It is perhaps the finest portrayal of the vulnerability of the human moral sense to competing convictions, most of which are morally wrong.
REASON
Reason appears to have fallen on hard times. Popular culture is plumbing new depths of dumbth, and American political discourse has become a race to the bottom.206 We are living in an era of scientific creationism, New Age flimflam, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and resurgent religious fundamentalism.
As if the proliferation of unreason weren’t bad enough, many commentators have been mustering their powers of reason to argue that reason is overrated. During the honeymoon following George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, editorialists opined that a great president need not be intelligent, because a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to the triangulations and equivocations of overeducated mandarins. After all, they said, it was the Harvard-educated best and the brightest who dragged America into the quagmire of Vietnam. “Critical theorists” and postmodernists on the left, and defenders of religion on the right, agree on one thing: that the two world wars and the Holocaust were the poisoned fruit of the West’s cultivation of science and reason since the Enlightenment.207
Even the scientists are piling on. Human beings are led by their passions, say many psychologists, and deploy their puny powers of reason only to rationalize their gut feelings after the fact. Behavioral economists exult in showing how human behavior departs from the rational-actor theory, and the journalists who publicize their work waste no opportunity to smack the theory around. The implication is that since irrationality is inevitable, we may as well lie back and enjoy it.
In this section, the last before the concluding chapter, I will try to convince you that both the pessimistic assessment of the state of reason in the world, and any sentiment that this would not be such a bad thing, are mistaken. For all their foolishness, modern societies have been getting smarter, and all things being equal, a smarter world is a less violent world.
Before we turn to this evidence, let me sweep away some of the prejudices against reason. Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is over, the theory that we are better off with unintellectual leaders is just embarrassing, and the reasons for the embarrassment may be quantified. Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician’s technical sense) and politically nonpartisan.208 He analyzed a dataset of 42 presidents from GW to GWB and found that both raw intelligence and openness to new ideas and values are significantly correlated with presidential performance as it has been assessed by nonpartisan historians.209 Though Bush himself is well above the average of the population in intelligence, he is third-lowest among the presidents, and comes in dead last in openness to experience, with a rock-bottom score of 0.0 on the 0–100 scale. Simonton published his work in 2006, while Bush was still in office, but the three historians’ surveys conducted since then bear out the correlation: Bush was ranked 37th, 36th, and 39th among the 42 presidents.210
As for Vietnam, the implication that the United States would have avoided the war if only the advisors of Kennedy and Johnson had been less intelligent seems unlikely in light of the fact that after they left the scene, the war was ferociously prosecuted by Richard Nixon, who was neither the best nor the brightest.211 The relationship between presidential intelligence and war may also be quantified. Between 1946 (when the PRIO dataset begins) and 2008, a president’s IQ is negatively correlated with the number of battle deaths in wars involving the United States during his presidency, with a coefficient of -0.45.212 One could say that for every presidential IQ point, 13,440 fewer people die in battle, though it’s more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars.
The idea that the Holocaust was a product of the Enlightenment is ludicrous, if not obscene. As we saw in chapter 6, what changed in the 20th century was not so much the occurrence of genocide as the recognition that genocide was something bad. The technological and bureaucratic t
rappings of the Holocaust are a sideshow in the reckoning of its human costs and are unnecessary to the perpetration of mass murder, as the bloody machetes of the Rwandan genocide remind us. Nazi ideology, like the nationalist, romantic militarist, and communist movements of the same era, was a fruit of the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment, not the line of thinking that connects Erasmus, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Jefferson, Madison, and Mill. The scientific pretensions of Nazism were risible pseudoscience, as real science easily showed. In a brilliant recent essay, the philosopher Yaki Menschenfreund reviews the theory that Enlightenment rationality is responsible for the Holocaust:It is impossible to understand so destructive a policy without recognizing that Nazi ideology was, for the most part, not only irrational—but antirational. It cherished the pagan, pre-Christian past of the German nation, adopted romantic ideas of a return to nature and a more “organic” existence, and nurtured an apocalyptic expectation of an end of days, whence the eternal struggle between the races would be resolved.... The contempt for rationalism and its association with the despised Enlightenment stood at the core of Nazi thought; the movement’s ideologues emphasized the contradiction between weltanschauung (“worldview”), the natural and direct experience of the world, and welt-an-denken (“thinking about the world”), the “destructive” intellectual activity that breaks reality down through conceptualization, calculation, and theorization. Against the “degenerate” liberal bourgeois’ worship of reason, the Nazis championed the idea of a vital, spontaneous life, unhindered and undimmed by compromises or dilemmas. 213
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