their wills of separate inheritances for the children of their previous marriages.
Alternative linkages between a relational model and a resource or set of social roles define how cultures differ from one another. The members of one society may allow land to be bartered or sold, and be shocked to learn of another society that does the same with brides—or vice versa. In one culture, a woman’s sexuality may fall under the Authority of the males in her family; in another, she is free to share it with her lover in a Communal relationship; in still another, she may barter it for an equivalent favor without stigma, an example of Equality Matching. In some societies, a killing must be avenged by the victim’s kinsmen (Equality Matching); in others, it may be compensated with a wergild (Market Pricing); in still others, it is punished by the state (Authority Ranking).
A recognition that someone belongs to a different culture can mitigate, to some extent, the outrage ordinarily triggered by the violation of a relational model. Such violations can even be a source of humor, as in old comedies in which a hapless immigrant or rural bumpkin haggles over the price of a train ticket, grazes his sheep in a public park, or offers to settle a debt by betrothing his daughter in marriage. The formula is reversed in Borat, in which the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen pokes fun at the willingness of culturally sensitive Americans to tolerate the outrageous behavior of an obnoxious immigrant in their midst. Tolerance may run out, however, when a violation breaches a sacred value, as when immigrants to Western countries practice female genital cutting, honor killings, or the sale of underage brides, and when Westerners disrespect the prophet Muhammad by depicting him in novels, satirizing him in editorial cartoons, or allowing schoolchildren to name a teddy bear after him.
Differences in the deployment of relational models also define political ideologies.188 Fascism, feudalism, theocracy, and other atavistic ideologies are based on the primal relational models of Communal Sharing and Authority Ranking. The interests of an individual are submerged within a community (fascist comes from an Italian word for “bundle”), and the community is dominated by a military, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical hierarchy. Communism envisioned a Communal Sharing of resources (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”), an Equality Matching of the means of production, and an Authority Ranking of political control (in theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat; in practice, a nomenklatura of commissars under a charismatic dictator). A kind of populist socialism seeks Equality Matching for life’s necessities, such as land, medicine, education, and child care. At the other pole of the continuum, libertarians would allow people to negotiate virtually any resource under Market Pricing, including organs, babies, medical care, sexuality, and education.
Tucked in between these poles is the familiar liberal-conservative continuum. In several surveys, Haidt has shown that liberals believe that morality is a matter of preventing harm and enforcing fairness (the values that line up with Shweder’s Autonomy and Fiske’s Equality Matching). Conservatives give equal weight to all five foundations, including In-group Loyalty (values such as stability, tradition, and patriotism), Purity/Sanctity (values such as propriety, decency, and religious observance), and Authority/Respect (values such as respect for authority, deference to God, acknowledgment of gender roles, and military obedience).189 The American culture war, with its clashes over taxes, medical insurance, welfare, gay marriage, abortion, the size of the military, the teaching of evolution, profanity in the media, and the separation of church and state, is fought in large part over different conceptions of the legitimate moral concerns of the state. Haidt notes that the ideologues at each pole are apt to view their opposite number as amoral, whereas in fact the moral circuitry in all of their brains is burning just as brightly, while filled with different conceptions of what morality comprises.
Before spelling out the connections between moral psychology and violence, let me use the theory of relational models to resolve a psychological puzzle that has been left hanging from earlier chapters. Many moral advances have taken the form of a shift in sensibilities that made an action seem more ridiculous than sinful, such as dueling, bullfighting, and jingoistic war. And many effective social critics, such as Swift, Johnson, Voltaire, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Tom Lehrer, and George Carlin have been smart-ass comedians rather than thundering prophets. What in our psychology allows the joke to be mightier than the sword?
Humor works by confronting an audience