Hence our ability to come up with any number of arguments that support our decision to believe in, say, lower taxes, or, conversely, a national health service. The rider, says Haidt, is our conscious intellect, and the elephant is our gut instinct, trained by brute evolution. The analogy he uses is of a mahout on an elephant: the rider can nudge the elephant in a certain direction, but if the elephant insists on going one way or another, there's not much that can be done about it. I know Haidt has spent some years thinking about this, while all I have done is read his book, but I am not entirely convinced, and it is not just because the thought that Blue Labour or the Red Tories were on the right track is a dispiriting one. So for liberals to appeal more to everyone, and to win more elections, what they should do is press the buttons pertaining to good order and individual responsibility towards the herd harder than they do.Īt which point I found that if I cupped my hand to my ear, I could hear the faint lowing of bullshit-providers in an adjacent field. The more rightwing they are, the less bothered they are about fairness, and the more bothered they are about 'sanctity'.

Conservatives, however, care about all these things. Liberals are very big on caring and fairness, but tend not to mind so much about 'sanctity'. Have a go – it's the foundation for the research that has gone into this book.) It turns out that I am not as caring as I thought I was. (These terms vary: 'purity' replaces 'sanctity' on a website co-founded by Haidt,, which, after a simple test, allows you to see how you scored in comparison with liberals or conservatives. Haidt claims that just as we have the taste receptors of salt, sweet, bitter, and so on, so we generally work on five basic moral receptors: those pertaining to caring, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Professor Haidt's premise is, as far as I can see, fairly easy to summarise: the reason republicans and conservatives persist in winning elections (if you discount Obama's last two victories, which I must say rather gum up the works of his argument) is because they appeal to a greater range of moral impulses than do more leftwing parties. This is the question Jonathan Haidt has set out to answer – and his conclusions may make unsettling reading for those of a liberal (American sense) persuasion. A s you are reading this newspaper and not another, there is a good chance you may have wondered why some people you know, whose moral compasses seem otherwise to be functioning well, nevertheless vote for the Conservatives or their equivalent whenever offered the chance.

The righteous mind