Beyond Rationalism

Wear a Mask if you have to — but We Know they don’t work.

“ Nowhere was this [moral] thinning more apparent than in our lack of rules about what the anthropologists call “Purity” and “Pollution.” 

Contrast us with the Hua of New Guinea, who have developed elaborate networks of food taboos that govern what men and women may eat. In order for their boys to become men, they have to avoid foods that in any way resemble vaginas, including anything that is red, wet, slimy, comes from a hole, or has hair. 

It sounds at first like arbitrary superstition mixed with the predictable Sexism of a Patriarchal Society. Turiel would call these rules social conventions, because the Hua don’t believe that men in other tribes have to follow these rules. 

But the Hua certainly seemed to think of their food rules as moral rules. They talked about them constantly, judged each other by their food habits, and governed their lives, duties, and relationships by what the anthropologist Anna Meigs called “a religion of the body.”

But it’s not just hunter-gatherers in rain forests who believe that bodily practices can be moral practices. When I read the Hebrew Bible, I was shocked to discover how much of the book—one of the sources of Western morality—was taken up with rules about food, menstruation, sex, skin, and the handling of corpses. 

Some of these rules were clear attempts to avoid disease, such as the long sections of Leviticus on leprosy. 

But many of the rules seemed to follow a more emotional logic about avoiding disgust. 

For example, the Bible prohibits Jews from eating or even touching “the swarming things that swarm upon the earth” (and just think how much more disgusting a swarm of mice is than a single mouse).

Other rules seemed to follow a conceptual logic involving keeping categories pure or not mixing things together (such as clothing made from two different fibers).

So what’s going on here? If Turiel was right that morality is really about harm, then why do most non-Western cultures moralize so many practices that seem to have nothing to do with harm? Why do many Christians and Jews believe that “cleanliness is next to godliness”?

And why do so many Westerners, even secular ones, continue to see choices about food and sex as being heavily loaded with moral significance? Liberals sometimes say that religious conservatives are sexual prudes for whom anything other than missionary-position intercourse within marriage is a sin. 

But conservatives can just as well make fun of liberal struggles to choose a balanced breakfast—balanced among moral concerns about free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee, naturalness, and a variety of toxins, some of which (such as genetically modified corn and soybeans) pose a greater threat spiritually than biologically. 

Even if Turiel was right that children lock onto harmfulness as a method for identifying immoral actions, I couldn’t see how kids in the West—let alone among the Azande, the Ilongot, and the Hua—could have come to all this purity and pollution stuff on their own. 

There must be more to moral development than kids constructing rules as they take the perspectives of other people and feel their pain. 

There must be something beyond rationalism.”

Jonathan Haidt,

The Righteous Mind — Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion