Are Religious Conservatives the Real Free-riders?

[robinturner]

Evolutionary psychologists are currently trying to find a theory that explains moral behaviour in evolutionary terms. This is hardly surprising, since evolutionary psychologists try to explain everything in evolutionary terms, but it is turning up some interesting ideas. I recently read Jonathan Haidt's article "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion," which gives a good overview of evolutionary accounts of morality combined with the author's own theories about religion. One contradiction he grapples with is that we think of contractual societies (individualistic, pluralistic and tolerant) as promoting happiness, while at an individual level, "religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people." Of course you can have religious beliefs in a contractual society, but the kind of society that religious conservatives would like to see is much closer to what Haidt calls a "beehive society" or what is elsewhere known as a collectivist culture. Such cultures value unity of belief and conformity to preset social roles over individual desires.

Most of the research on happiness shows that societies with an individualist rather than a collectivist culture are, on the whole, happier. Contrary to popular belief, people in Western Europe or North America are happier than people in economically comparable Far Eastern societies like Japan or South Korea - see Ahuvia's article "Individualism/Collectivism and Cultures of Happiness" (Journal of Happiness Studies, 3:4). On the other hand, if Haidt is correct, conservative individuals within liberal societies may be happier than average, despite the fact that if their values were accepted by the whole society, everyone would be less happy.

This leads me to another point that Haidt touches on, the free-rider problem. Some evolutionary psychologists posit morality (or "pro-social behaviour") as an adaptive mechanism which enables certain groups to enhance their survival potential. The problem with this is that some animals in the group will exploit this by reaping the benefits of pro-social behaviour without actually engaging in that behaviour themselves - free-riders, in other words. (Incidentally, the free-rider problem is one reason why Dawkins rejects the idea of group selection, but as Haidt argues, he does not have a very strong case, and it looks like Kropotkin got it more-or-less right over a hundred years ago.)

The popular view of free-riders is of dirty hippies, "welfare queens" and other scapegoats. But while religious conservatives look like good members of society - they work, give to charity and (reluctantly) pay taxes - it could be that they are the real free-riders. The particular beliefs they hold enable them to enjoy aspects of the good life Haidt mentions, such as health and happiness. But if their relentless attempts to remodel society were to succeed and everyone were to be a religious conservative, then the result might well be a net drop in happiness. Calvin's Geneva wasn't exactly a merry place.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

You're right that happiness is a difficult concept to pin down. The research I refer to tends to use the term "subject well-being", which amounts more-or-less to how happy people think they are. Ed Diener, who pioneered SWB research has a good FAQ (http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~ediener/faq.htm). There's some cross-cultural data on the World Database of Happiness (http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/).