Interview: Jonathan Haidt on left vs right

Why are Dennis Skinner and George Osborne locked in enmity? The answer, according to Jonathan Haidt, lies beyond the obvious partisan explanation, and reaches back into humanity’s first nature. Haidt is a professor of moral and social psychology at the University of West of West Virginia, who has written a compelling book, The Righteous Mind, which argues that politics is determined by evolutionary biology and what he terms ‘Moral Foundations Theory’. In a little over 300 pages of incisive prose, Haidt presents a theory that explains why politics is always personal.

His research shows that our high-minded ideals are mere spontaneous gut-reactions, a primeval hangover from our less evolved forebears. He says that intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second. We rationalise in retrospect to justify our impulses. Morality, then, is a social construct. Haidt explains how humans build moral systems on six core foundations: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.