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Hi Janine - I likely won't be joining your poilitical analysis but I want to say that I'm glad that you posted this link to Edge. At a glance Haidt and his book and area of study seem helpful. Thanks.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html

He prefaces his piece called MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION
By Jonathan Haidt with this:

"It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people"

Then he begins, and I'll pull out the first four paragraphs, below, that I like so much. I haven't finished this piece and am in a little hurry this AM. Haidt's emphasis here on the other contexts out of which morality necessarily arises, like emotion and affect, that for me gives us important pause about the primacy of cognition as the leading edge of morality seems very well introduced so far. As apparently everything in our worlds of attempted understanding, morality and being human generally are complex, multiplex, not easily simplified and reified, but dynamic with intrinsically messy aspects. This huge territory in which morality arises that he is studying has been one of my beckoning curiosities, considerations, and occasional attempts to emphasize. I wish I could finish reading this piece now to know if I get it, and how I get it, in it's entirety, but I'm pretty sure I'll be back to finish it. I'll also add that what he points out in the fourth paragraph about our prodigiously apparently inevitable impulses to rationalize our 'rightness' shows up in our political commentaries. I'm remembering mainly some threads of heated argumentation over on Integral Naked. Following indications of our shortsightedness, revealed limitations and blunders we try to cover our tracks. (Below, Haidt mentions primates and lower evolution and I'm suddenly musing whether this phrase "cover our tracks" may be a deeper more primally compelling survival pattern and tactic than we might think. Amusing.)

"I study morality from every angle I can find. Morality is one of those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that can't fit into one or two academic fields. I think morality is unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it. We all care about morality so passionately that it's hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other's visions and distortions. I think this problem is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about religion.

When I started graduate school at Penn in 1987, it seemed that developmental psychology owned the rights to morality within psychology. Everyone was either using or critiquing Lawrence Kohlberg's ideas, as well as his general method of interviewing kids about dilemmas (such as: should Heinz steal a drug to save his wife's life?). Everyone was studying how children's understanding of moral concepts changed with experience. But in the 1990s two books were published that I believe triggered an explosion of cross-disciplinary scientific interest in morality, out of which has come a new synthesis—very much along the lines that E. O. Wilson predicted in 1975.

The first was Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, in 1994, which showed a very broad audience that morality could be studied using the then new technology of fMRI, and also that morality, and rationality itself, were crucially dependent on the proper functioning of emotional circuits in the prefrontal cortex. The second was Frans de Waal's Good Natured, published just two years later, which showed an equally broad audience that the building blocks of human morality are found in other apes and are products of natural selection in the highly social primate lineage. These two books came out just as John Bargh was showing social psychologists that automatic and unconscious processes can and probably do cause the majority of our behaviors, even morally loaded actions (like rudeness or altruism) that we thought we were controlling consciously.

Furthermore, Damasio and Bargh both found, as Michael Gazzaniga had years before, that people couldn't stop themselves from making up post-hoc explanations for whatever it was they had just done for unconscious reasons. Combine these developments and suddenly Kohlbergian moral psychology seemed to be studying the wagging tail, rather than the dog. If the building blocks of morality were shaped by natural selection long before language arose, and if those evolved structures work largely by giving us feelings that shape our behavior automatically, then why should we be focusing on the verbal reasons that people give to explain their judgments in hypothetical moral dilemmas?"

Haidt's TED Talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html