Marc Parry reviews Jonathan Haidt's new book, which offers a partial explanation:
Humans are 90-percent chimp, but also 10-percent bee—evolved to bind together for the good of the hive. A big part of Haidt's moral narrative is faith. He lays out the case that religion is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people into groups and enabling those units to better compete against other groups. Through faith, humans developed the "psychology of sacredness," the notion that "some people, objects, days, words, values, and ideas are special, set apart, untouchable, and pure." If people revere the same sacred objects, he writes, they can trust one another and cooperate toward larger goals. But morality also blinds them to arguments from beyond their group.
The Dish previously covered Haidt's theory about our the six innate moral foundations. His theory has helped Rod Dreher understand why liberals and conservatives often talk past each other:
If you wish to persuade people who disagree with you, and who do not understand or intuit the rules of rational discourse and argumentation — and that’s very many people these days, on the left and the right, as many of us will have experienced — you need to understand how they think. It seems to me that this is all Haidt is saying. … [There] is a temptation intellectually-oriented people have: an urge to interpret the world as an expression of syllogism, theory, idealism, rationality. In fact, intuition and emotion are far more important than we prefer to think — especially in an era in psychological history that privileges intuition and emotion.
The Dish 