Sometime in the early 1970s I had an illuminating conversation with an expert on Soviet affairs. We ended up discussing Solzhenitsyn, and the expert expounded the view that the writer illustrated the emergence of liberal values in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. I disagreed. Certainly Solzhenitsyn was anti-totalitarian, but that did not make him any sort of liberal. Even on the basis of those of his writings that had been published in the West up to that time, he looked to me more like a latter-day disciple of Dostoyevsky, opposing the Soviet system out of a belief in the uniqueness of Russia and its deep difference from the West. My interlocutor was adamant: Solzhenitsyn had to be understood as part of a developing liberal culture. Had he not asserted freedom of conscience against the state? And was not this freedom a core value of liberalism?

It was around that time that I stopped listening to Sovietologists. The conversation was enlightening not for anything the expert told me about the Soviet Union—though he had vastly greater factual knowledge than I did—but rather for what it showed about the limitations of the Western mind at the time. Like many in the academy and the media, the expert was assuming that the political polarities of Western democracies existed in every society. Liberals and conservatives could be found everywhere, contending against one another in a slow, often interrupted, but in the end irresistible evolution toward liberal democracy. In fact, the events that brought down the Soviet regime—a development that few Sovietologists believed to be within the bounds of realistic possibility—had very little to do with any universal trends of political evolution. A crisis in Russian history, the Soviet collapse eventuated as a result of a series of contingencies—a defeat in Afghanistan, a loss of control in Poland—and resulted in an authoritarian regime that Solzhenitsyn could approve rather than anything resembling Western-style liberal government.



Not for the first time, grand theories of social evolution proved to be useless as guides to events. That has in no way dented the popularity of such theories, and it is now evolutionary psychology that is being presented as a guide for the politically perplexed. These theories show the continuing appeal of scientism—the modern belief that scientific inquiry can enable us to resolve conflicts and dilemmas in contexts where traditional sources of wisdom and practical knowledge seem to have failed. The literature of scientism has three defining features, which help explain its enduring popularity as well as its recurrent failures: large and highly speculative hypotheses are advanced to explain developments that are extremely complex and highly contingent in nature; fact and value are systematically confused; and the attractively simple theories that result are invested with the power of overcoming moral and political difficulties that have so far proved intractable.



Jonathan Haidt’s book is an example of this genre, one of the most sophisticated to date. The core of the book is an attempt at a Darwinian explanation of morality, contending that moral behavior emerges from a natural process of competition among human groups. “Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously,” Haidt writes. “Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins.... But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups. As Darwin said long ago, the most cohesive and cooperative groups generally beat the groups of selfish individualists.” Like the human animal, morality is “groupish,” requiring the subordination of individuals for the sake of the good of the group. Human beings “have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group,” an ability that “facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.” Once we see ourselves as animals having “primate minds with a hivish overlay,” we get “a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.”

A part of The Righteous Mind is a useful critique of the primitive type of rationalism that has lately been in vogue. Haidt is refreshingly dismissive of the “new atheism.” Considering why religious communes have lasted longer than secular ones, he writes: “The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally.” One is tempted to object that solving collective action problems is only one of the human needs that religion serves—and not in the end the most important. Still, Haidt is right to ridicule those who see religion as little more than a body of irrational belief.

The fixation on belief, according to Haidt, exemplifies an outdated view of the mind. Applying a metaphor employed in his earlier book The Happiness Hypothesis, he remarks that “The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.” The idea that this relationship could ever be reversed is a fantasy of rationalism, and contrary to reason. As he puts it, “the worship of reason, which is sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist.” Reason can never be other than rare in human affairs. But contrary to Haidt, this is not a frailty that can be avoided by relying on large, speculative ideas. If history shows anything, it is that acting on the basis of grand theories only makes human behavior even more unreasonable.

Haidt’s account of the emergence of morality is disputed by other evolutionary psychologists, who argue that group selection is a part of Darwin’s inheritance that should be discarded. The debate has been heated and at times rancorous, an exercise in sectarian intellectual warfare of the kind that is so often fought in and around Darwinism. As is often the case, a larger issue has gone largely unexplored. In evolutionary theories of this kind, what exactly is it that is being explained? Though they think their theories are universally applicable, evolutionary theorists commonly take their local conception of morality for granted. Books such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, one of the more impressive of recent applications of Darwinism to ethics, assume that acting morally is a matter of following rules or principles having mainly to do with justice and the prevention of harm. This may seem self-evident to secular social scientists in American universities, but it hardly squares with how most human beings (or most Americans, for that matter) understand morality.