A few interesting emails re my early post on Jonathan Haidt’s study. First, from my Voegelin guy:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,
I hope that this doesn’t sound like carping, but Voegelin would cringe at your characterization. In fact, Voegelin sees religion as a kind of secondary phenomenon.
Voegelin is interested in investigating the structure of consciousness which, in turn, is representative of the structure of reality as a whole. And by looking at the historical texts that symbolize consciousness, and the range of conscious experience, this permits him/us to make certain scientific statements regarding the structure of consciousness, and the relations between experience and symbolization. The key concept is the desire for transcendence as the “driving force,” if you will, with religion as just one of a number of historical and structural representations. Most students of Voegelin, especially conservatives, never get beyond his treatise on Science, Politics and Gnosticism to his later work on consciousness. His posthumous work, unfinished, is entirely devoted to this issue, and virtually nothing at all on religion as such.
Of course, most of us use the term religion as shorthand for something far more expansive, but Voegelin was very precise in his terminology.

Me: I plead guilty. I haven’t gotten too much beyond Science, Politics and Gnosticism, though I have read a bit more than that. And boy were my lips tired! What I was getting at was the idea that the structure of consciousness, according to Voegelin (or rather, to my limited understanding of Voegelin) remains fixed, the content of these categories gets filled with different things in different eras and ages. I’d expand on that, but I think I’d better quit while I’m behind.

And from a science guy:

Jonah:
Your comment on Haidt’s ideas being “a classically neoconservative piece of social science” are dead on. This sounds VERY reminiscent of what Fukyama discussed in Trust or James Q. Wilson elaborated at length on in The Moral Sense as well as his whole body of work in criminology. These “neoconservative” ideas are creeping into the academic mainstream as well, despite the noisy post-modernist stuff that generally gets noted in places like Phi Beta Cons. Wilson’s “broken windows” model, for example, has found a place in the study of socioeconomic health disparities, where it inspired a look at how socialization and social capital produce both SES and health, and hence were counfouding factors unaccounted for in earlier work on the issue, resulting in inflated causal estimates of the impact of socioeconomics on health status. The new model undercuts some of the earlier marxist-type ideas of why disparities arise.