Johnathan Haidt is so rare as to possibly be unique:  a Yale-trained social psychologist who can actually see how the university has become so left wing that it is blind to ordinary truths.  For example, in his latest piece, he has to explain that patriotism is not the same thing as racism.

Nationalists see patriotism as a virtue; they think their country and its culture are unique and worth preserving. This is a real moral commitment, not a pose to cover up racist bigotry…. Nationalists feel a bond with their country, and they believe that this bond imposes moral obligations both ways: Citizens have a duty to love and serve their country, and governments are duty bound to protect their own people. Governments should place their citizens interests above the interests of people in other countries.

There is nothing necessarily racist or base about this arrangement or social contract. Having a shared sense of identity, norms, and history generally promotes trust…. Societies with high trust, or high social capital, produce many beneficial outcomes for their citizens: lower crime rates, lower transaction costs for businesses, higher levels of prosperity, and a propensity toward generosity, among others.

In other words, patriotism is not just a virtue, it’s a rational virtue.  A shared patriotism leads to trust.  High trust among the members of a society leads to lower rates of crime, and greater shared prosperity.  We should want to live in a country that we all love, and whose moral order we want to defend and preserve.  It is good for everybody.

As refreshing as it is to see even one professor who can recognize this, it is to be expected that starting from Yale, he didn’t get all the way there.  For example, Haidt offers something that looks like a qualified defense of one of Marx’s major claims: that moral values are materially determined.

As nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways….  Nearly all of the countries are now far wealthier than they were in the 1980s, and many made a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the interim. How did these momentous changes affect their values?…

Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.

If that’s right, then the shift would have happened no matter what political forms were ‘on top of’ this increasing prosperity: a Soviet Union would have led the world to greater freedom as well, had they won the Cold War and presided over the peace and prosperity to follow.

This argument is plainly wrong. Communism’s track record at wealth creation could mean that the greater prosperity never occurred at all.  But even if it had, the reason these arcs pointed toward “secular rational” values and “emancipative values” is clearly that it was the United States of America and not the USSR that was the dominant moral and physical power after the Cold War.

People get new values not because their material circumstances change, but the same way they get most anything else:  from other people.  Values “rub off,” as everyone knows.  You learned your first values by what you were taught by your family, and then modified them by what you learned from your peers.  This goes on throughout life.  Thus, it makes a great deal of difference whom you’re rubbing up against.  For twenty years after the Cold War, states who wanted greater access to markets and prosperity were rubbing up against the United States of America.  That makes a big difference.

It also means that not all patriotisms are equal.  American patriotism is better, in this way, than Soviet patriotism.  All patriotisms give rise to the goods that Haidt mentions, but some patriotisms are good for humanity in general to “rub against,” and others are not.
For that reason, it makes rational sense to care who your neighbors are, and how strong your borders are.  Your nation is going to be rubbing up against your neighbors and learning values from them.  Especially if there are weak borders, their moral values are going to rub off in ways that change your society’s moral order.  If you bring these neighbors into your society, the effect will be greater still.

Of the current immigration crisis, Haidt says:

Islam asks adherents to live in ways that can make assimilation into secular egalitarian Western societies more difficult compared to other groups…. Muslims don’t just observe different customs in their private lives; they often request and receive accommodations in law and policy from their host countries, particularly in matters related to gender.

This is well-traveled ground for us here at CounterJihad.  Stop and notice, though, that once again Haidt is taking these moral values to be all equivalent.  Why wouldn’t they be equally good moral systems, if morality is determined by material conditions such as wealth, or whether you grow plants or make machines to earn money?  The clash with Islam isn’t over anything deep, such as whether women deserve equal rights.  It’s over the mere fact that we disagree about some things (such as whether women deserve equal rights!).  It doesn’t matter which way the conflict is resolved, as long as it is resolved.  Furthermore, of course it will be resolved because immigration brings more closely shared material conditions.

Not so.  Just as some patriotisms are better than others, some moral codes are better than others.  It is reasonable, and rational, to take steps to make sure we are ‘rubbing up against’ the kind of moral codes that will improve our society rather than otherwise.  Assuming for a moment that there really is something morally important about women having equal rights, it is actively immoral to take steps that will lead to the degradation of that equality.  Assuming for a moment that there really is something morally important about freedom of conscience, it makes no sense to admit a large number of people who believe that apostasy is rightly punished.  Since we know that mass immigration will shift our society away from our fundamental values, of course we oppose mass immigration.  We oppose it especially from cultures whose values will shift our country away from what is fundamentally right.

Haidt is to be praised for having come halfway when so few start on the road at all.  There is still more road in front of him, if he wants to follow it.