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It wasn’t a conclusion he thought he’d come to. When he was a young graduate student, Jonathan Haidt presumed that “liberal” was pretty much a synonym for “reasonable,” if not for “obvious.” Now, as he writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, he has found that liberals have limited moral vision. One that is, I’d say, therefore certainly less reasonable than conservatism’s, and for the vast majority of people in the world far from obvious.

In the days when Haidt began his work in psychology in the 1980s, the work of Lawrence Kohlberg still dominated. Kohlberg theorized that children go through stages of moral development, culminating in a “post-conventional” attitude that questions social norms and revises them to accord with higher principles of justice. In other words, the mature, morally developed person is a liberal.

Kohlberg’s theory was a comforting one for the liberalism that was for many decades in the middle of the twentieth century our ruling ideology, but as it turns out he was wrong about our moral nature. Haidt tells the story of his intellectual awakening. Now a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania he studied the moral systems of primitive cultures and did research in Brazil, and eventually India. He became more and more convinced that our morality flows from our emotional reactions rather than reasoned responses.

It’s not that we’re irrational. We’re largely intuitive, with analysis and reason-giving mostly justifying beliefs we’ve already accepted as true. Reason functions less as a scientist drawing inferences from experiments and more as a lawyer who argues on behalf of the truth of our beliefs—or as a PR agent out to sell our moral intuitions to others, and perhaps even to ourselves. As Haidt argues at some length, our largely intuitive approach to moral reality is very much a part of our evolved nature as social animals. We should not regret that we feel first and think second. It’s the way we’re wired—and for the most part it works well.

Needless to say, Haidt’s basic claim that our moral outlooks are largely intuitive rather than reasoned refutes the standard liberal presumption that conservatives are motivated by subrational emotions (“fear,” for example) while liberals are “reasonable.” One of the main thrusts of The Righteous Mind is that people tend to be liberal or conservative because they have different emotional responses to the same social realities. And not just different. He concludes that conservatives are sensitive to things that liberals have difficulty seeing.

This fact became clear to Haidt when he did the research for his doctoral dissertation. He developed stories designed to bring out moral responses. One involved a family who ate their dog after it had died of natural causes. Another had a woman using an old American flag as a cleaning rag. Still another story described a man having sex with a chicken, which he later eats.

These stories are meant to evoke taboo responses, and when he interviewed working-class people in a McDonald’s in West Philadelphia, that’s what he got. People immediately said that doing these sorts of things is wrong, and when Haidt pushed them for reasons why, they would often be shocked that he imagined reasons are necessary. People just don’t do those things!

Haidt asked the same questions to students at the University of Pennsylvania, and the results were quite different. Yes, they experienced feelings of disgust, but for the most part they set these feeling aside and judged the actions to be morally permissible. After hearing the chicken story, one Penn student said, “It’s perverted, but if it’s done in private, it’s his right.” It may be ugly, but as long as nobody else is harmed and no one’s rights are violated, it’s OK.

The people who live in West Philadelphia are not insensitive to concerns about harming others or violating rights, but Haidt found that they remain loyal to their strong emotional responses. The flag represents our country, and it’s not something simply to use as one wishes. Certain sexual acts defile us, even when done in private without harming anyone. Meanwhile, the Penn students actively suppress these emotional responses and focus on a narrower range of concerns: avoiding harming others, not oppressing others, and empowering those who are disadvantaged.

To explain this difference, Haidt offers an analogy to our capacity for taste: “The righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors.” Our innate moral intuitions fall into six categories or “foundations”: care, freedom, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity. Care, freedom, and fairness tend to focus on individuals. We see someone suffering, and our care taste bud is stimulated. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity focus on social realities. They are what Haidt calls “binding” foundations, because they unify people into social groups. No individual is harmed when someone uses the flag as a cleaning rag, but doing so involves a symbolic disregard for the moral value of patriotic loyalty.

The people Haidt interviewed in the McDonald’s “tasted” all six moral concerns, individual and social. To shift the analogy, they see with both eyes which Haidt argues at some length employs the full range of our evolved capacity for moral emotion.

It’s taste buds sensitive to the social dimension—concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity—that identify one as conservative in America today. And religion strongly engages the social dimension, which is why religious believers are now seen more and more as pillars of American conservatism.

Seeing with the social as well as with the individual eye, as it were, unites American conservatives with the vast majority of human beings who in all known cultures place a great deal of importance on the “binding” foundations. All known cultures, that is, except the subculture of people who grow up in Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic societies, WEIRD societies, as Haidt calls them.

This subculture, the liberal subculture that formed Haidt in his childhood and throughout most of his education, produces people like the Penn undergraduates who say that it’s alright to have sex with chickens as long as nobody is harmed. They are statistically weird, “outliers,” as social scientists say. Unlike the vast majority of humanity, they’ve been socialized to disregard their emotional responses when faced with offenses to loyalty, authority, and sanctity. They’re blinded in the moral eye that sees the social valences of moral situations.

It’s this difference in the scope of moral concerns that underlies the deep and bitter divisions running through American public life. People who respond so differently to reality can’t argue and debate. Too much separates them, and politics does indeed become a culture war by other means.

But Haidt does not level blame equally, which is why The Righteous Mind has important political implications. Because conservatives see out of both eyes, they see that contemporary liberalism, however misguided, is engaged in a morally serious response to contemporary reality. Conservatives are also concerned about care, freedom, and fairness, and this allows them to debate with liberals about how best to respond to poverty, for example, and to recognize the dangers posed to our civil liberties. However, seeing with only one eye, liberals can’t see that conservatives and their concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity are morally serious.

They are, in fact, often actively hostile. Haidt reports, “When I speak to liberal audiences about the three ‘binding foundations’—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral.”

Struck by these aggressive, angry responses, he designed a study to test how liberals view conservatives as compared to how conservatives view liberals. Liberals were to answer questions as they imagined a conservative would, while conservatives did the opposite. The results? Liberals, especially those who described themselves as very liberal, couldn’t accurately depict conservative views, while conservatives could describe liberal views. As I have said elsewhere, the liberal subculture is not just WEIRD, it is parochial.

Haidt quotes a particularly telling tirade by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice: “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.”

Few liberals are as intemperate as Feingold, and few liberal publications are as openly aggressive as the Village Voice, but Haidt’s research suggests an inconvenient truth about our divided country. The ill-tempered rancor stems in large part from the moral myopia of liberals. They have a great deal of difficulty grasping the “binding” moral concerns that engage American conservatives, especially when those concerns are heightened and given shape by religion. And their response to this difficulty has been to summarily dismiss those who see with two eyes. Those of us who are concerned about loyalty, authority, and sanctity are subject to rhetorical extermination: We’re denounced as “not mainstream.”

And not just American conservatives. Liberals tend to be unable to muster much respect for the moral outlook of billions and billions of people throughout the globe whose traditional societies train them to use both eyes. Hence, for example, the Obama administration’s desire to make the advancement of homosexual rights part of our foreign policy. It’s just the latest part of the WEIRD subculture’s effort to expand the influence of it’s individualistic ethic.

Thus the profound problem we face. Liberalism is blind in one eye—yet it insists on the superiority of its vision and its supreme right to rule. It cannot see half the things a governing philosophy must see, and claims that those who see both halves are thereby unqualified to govern.