Hobbes, Locke and Haidt

The traumatic experience of the English Civil War spawned, firstly, in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’ ‘Leviathan’ followed in 1689 by John Locke’s two ‘Treatises on Government.’ Hobbes makes the classical Conservative observation that the ‘State of Nature’ is one of perpetual grisly conflict. To free us from this horror ruthless authority must be imposed and accepted in order to establish law and order for the benefit of all. This authority comes in the form of monarch backed up with the moral authority of religion - the classic ancien regime-style. Only in this context can Locke then attempt to establish ‘Liberal’ safeguards against the regime becoming tyrannical by establishing the rights of the citizen. This dialogue eventually resolves into constitutional monarchy models. On the way, though, Rousseau, Robespierre and Marx present disruptive models with a new kind of ‘liberalism’ that blew away the ancien regime structure through revolution that threatened to return us to the state of nature. This may be why the previously honourable word ‘liberal’ has a bad name in modern times.

The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, applies science with categories which are interesting but can seem a little random treating things emerging from this typical humanities-style account as if they are strange and inexplicable phenomena dropped from the moon. He goes for Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, In-group/Out-group, Purity/degradation, Authority/subversion, Liberty/oppression which he finds by a cross-discipline, cross-species and cross-discipline search. So they are chosen on a frequency of appearance basis with no narrative or rationale behind them. By crunching large amounts of data he ‘discovers’ that conservatives seem to rate all of these categories as morally important while modern Liberals are only really interested in the last two. I like his conclusions but does this studiedly ‘scientific’ approach tell us anything that the humanities account, couched purely in terms of political history, couldn’t have told us already as in - modern liberals have foolishly forgotten that you need an ancien regime structure and context first to guarantee the safety of a nation, goodness and justice before you can have the liberal reaction? 

What is the value of a scientific approach that affects to address these strange phenomena that thrust themselves forward from his search? Isn’t it quite obvious why they thrust themselves forward? There’s no baffling scientific mystery and no need to impose one. His categories are all pretty easy to explain in non-scientific terms as I do in the first paragraph. He treats them as strange and baffling phenomena unknown to us, landed from another planet and divorced from our humanity as science, when applied to the humanities, is wont to do. It pretends not to be what it is - human. This means that this fraught, data-crunching methodology may be unnecessary and redundant as it re-‘discovers’ that which is obvious to a human narrative-mind or a mind that simply examines its own nature. Is this psychology a convoluted exercise - like watching a uni cyclist on a tightrope - he gets to the same destination as someone who simply walked there? Or perhaps it’s like someone affecting to forget what he already knew so that he can rediscover it and shout ‘Eureka!’ Why discard the human mind only to painfully rediscover it? To give science high status, by suggesting nothing can be known or discovered without its aid I suppose, and demote human intuition of the obvious. The question is why is that so important? Why do we want to abolish or discard the miracle that is ourselves and set something up above it?