Introduction here.

Jonathan Haidt's talk to CCARE on how to encourage compassion has four major topics:

1) Morality is about binding groups together around sacred objects/leaders/principals

2) Liberal morality is built mostly on one foundation: Care/harm; leads to sacralization of victims

3) To relieve suffering of victims, liberals violate the other five foundations; commit five types of sacrilege

4) In praise of constrained parochialism

In the second part, he explains what morality is.

Click here to watch.

Click here to watch on YouTube

Summary:

(Again, I disagree with many of Haidt's ideas, and will critique them in later posts.  Here I am just trying to relay them to you.)

1) Morality is about binding groups together around sacred objects/leaders/principals

Haidt is a scientist and an atheist, and he believes that morality evolved in order to bind people together into groups.  Many animals are social, but only a few are ultrasocial.  Human beings are the only animals that manage to be ultrasocial without basing social groups around close family relationships. 

We do this by creating social objects that we circle around to form teams, creating a powerful force like magnets.  These teams establish mutual trust, which allows us to successfully compete against other teams. A shared sense of the sacred is essential to binding groups together.  Sacred objects are elevated to the point where any criticism of them becomes sacrilege, a crime against the shared values of the community. 

2) Liberal morality is built mostly on one foundation: Care/harm; leads to sacralization of victims

Haidt is very interested in the difference between political liberals and conservatives.  He believes that liberals based their morality almost exclusively on one of six moral principles.  Conservatives understand all six, so they tend to have a more accurate understanding of society and to tell stories that are more appealing to voters.

Because human beings are mammals, we are all evolved to provide care to children and to want to protect victims.  Although everyone cares about this, liberals care about it much more than conservatives do.  Liberals make victim groups sacred and demonize the powerful.

At the website Your Morals.org, Haidt and his colleagues have recorded the responses of about 200,000 people to surveys about morality (You can take them yourself, if you like) and most of the support for his conclusions about political groups come from that data.

Since liberals focus their morality around eliminating suffering, liberal morality is very similar to Buddhism.

What This Has to Do With Autism:

If shared sacred objects bind people together into groups, then one could think of autism as a disability of sacralization. It's less that we are more irrational in our passions or prone to black and white thinking than neurotypical people are than that we tend not to be irrational about the same sacred objects or to show our devotion to the sacred in the same way. 

Thinking about this may make it easier to understand why it is so difficult for society as a whole to accept us.  If our brains evolved to believe that conformity to shared values is necessary to the survival of the tribe, our very difference can be threatening.

All of us in the autism communities value the Care/harm foundation.  Our ultimate sacred object is the injured child-- we vary mostly in how the injury happened: vaccine, wandering, violence from caregivers, violence from teachers, harmful treatments, lack of treatment, or lack of accommodation.  

In order for our communities to come together, we will continue to need victims to circle around.  But we need to take care not to infantilism all autistic people or ignore the needs of adults by keeping too tight a focus on adults.  And we need to take care not to demonize each other in the service of victims.

Although Haidt begins his discussion of the other five moral principles at the end of this video, I'll hold off until the next post to summarize and discuss them.