#sacralization

Purity: piety, pious, purity, pure, clean, steril*, sacred, chast*, holy, holiness, saint, wholesome, celiba*, abstention, virgin, virgins, virginity, virginal, austerity, integrity, modesty, abstinen*, abstemiousness, upright, limpid, unadulterated, maiden, virtuous, refined, intemperate, decen*, immaculate, innocent, pristine, humble, disgust, deprav*, disease, unclean, contagio*, indecen*, sin, sinful, sinner, sins, sinned, sinning, slut, whore, dirt, impiety, impious, profan*, gross, repuls*, sick, promiscu*, lewd, adulter*, debauche, defile, tramp, prostitut*, unchaste, wanton, profligate, filth*, trashy, obscen*, lax, taint, stain, tarnish, debase, desecrat*, wicked, blemish, exploitat*, pervert, wretched (from Appendix D of Graham, Haidt, Nosek “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations”)

This "definition" tilts towards the conservative moral viewpoint on sacredness, but could be used to recognize some of what the liberal moral viewpoint holds sacred. Moral belief results in moral behavior—or the belief that one should try to behave in that moral way. The conservative moral viewpoint holds with modesty, integrity, holiness, and wholesomeness and not with sexual behaviors deemed immoral. This "definition" would capture the sacralization of nature, but as far as I can tell, Haidt et al do not ask the sorts of questions that would capture what the liberal moral viewpoint holds sacred in their surveys about morality. It seems pretty clear to me, for instance, that the liberal moral viewpoint holds that we exploit, tarnish, taint, trash, and defile pure, pristine, humble, holy ground when we pollute the environment. Sounds like a good fit. But Moral Foundation Theory does not (yet) capture that.

I read this interview and it is clear he understands sacralization as a human trait, and one those of the liberal viewpoint engage. He talks about the left sacralizing victims’ groups—and uses it as an example of how violating the “group think” on those issues gets one tossed “out of the tribe.” 

BILL MOYERS: What's the Democratic liberal left equivalent of the tax pledge, no new taxes, the group think on one issue that, if you violate it gets you thrown out of the tribe?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Right, well, it's touchy to talk about, but basically I think the new left, the commitment that was made in the '60s, was toward victim groups. So it was civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. Now these were all incredibly important battles that had to be fought. And again, follow the sacredness. If you sacralize these groups, it makes you, it binds you together to fight for them.

So the sacralization had to happen, the sacralization of victim groups had to happen to bring the left together to fight what was a truly altruistic and heroic battle. And they won, and things are now better in this country because of that. But, follow the sacredness. Once you've sacralized something, you become blind to evidence.

So evidence about, let's say, how welfare was working, or any other social policy that many of these social policies would backfire. But you can't see it because you've sacralized a group. Anything that seems to be helping that group, anything our group says is going to help them, you go with. So both sides are blind to evidence around their sacred commitments.

I love what he has to say about “follow the sacredness:”

JONATHAN HAIDT: The idea of sacredness, the idea of sacralizing something. What I see as an academic, and as a philosophy major as an undergrad, is there are a lot of people in the academic world that sac- they think, oh, you know, no sacred cows. We shouldn't sacralize anything.

But they sacralize reason itself, as though reason is this noble attribute, reason is our highest nature. And if we could just reason, we will solve our problems. All right, that sounds good on paper. But given all the stuff I just told you about what psychologists have discovered about reason, reasoning is not good at finding the truth. Conscious verbal reasoning is really good at confirming.

We’re really good lawyers. So what this means is that if you sacralize reason itself, you are first of all wrong about it. And as I say in the book, follow the sacredness. Wherever people sacralize something, there you will find ignorance, blindness to the truth, and resistance to evidence.

And yet, I see no evidence that his moral foundation theory captures these actual moral attitudes—or the resulting moral behaviors. He calls these ideas sacralized, and they are clearly liberal moral viewpoint sacralizations, but his theory actually has them coming out as not holding much with the sanctity/degradation foundation, not because of the way it is defined, necessarily, but what questions are asked to "capture" that foundation. Limited to conservative moral viewpoint offenses surrounding religion and sexuality.

It just seems so problematic to talk about liberals not “scoring” high on the sanctity/degradation scale and all these studies on how they don’t feel disgust the way conservatives do. It gives them a pass on a basic expression of human morality for no good reason—they clearly engage that foundation, they clearly experience the human emotion of disgust, they just engage it all in a different way than conservatives. I think the theory tries to place this, as those of the liberal moral viewpoint do, under care/harm, but notice he doesn’t talk about “follow the care/harm foundation.” It just isn’t sufficient to capture the real level of dogmatism and blindness these sorts of sacralized beliefs create.

Failing to capture the reality here means it is hard to talk about what those of the liberal moral viewpoint do sacralize. It is hard to point out that things like the sacralization of the environment, which conservatives are completely aware of, is a fundamental piece of the popular resistance to climate change theory. As a narrative, climate change just fits too neatly in with the liberal moral viewpoint, and conservatives are suspicious: it justifies regulations on behavior that fit with the liberal sacralization of nature.

Other than oil industry executives and other financially interested parties, what matters at a moral level for those of the conservative moral viewpoint isn’t whether or not climate change is true, though they are deeply suspicious of liberal-moral-viewpoint scientists. What matters is to deny that nature is sacred, the need at a fundamental level to deny the sacralization of nature they sense, and to avoid the over-reach they perceive coming if that new "victim" is successfully sacralized. But to try to engage someone with the liberal moral viewpoint on this probably won’t hit the mark: they are unlikely to recognize the way they sacralize nature, since most don’t use that language to describe what they are doing. They use language that engages the care/harm moral foundation, but what they have done functionally is sacralize. Conservatives get that at an intuitive level. Liberals stick to their plausible deniability.