Something about the Haidt conversation, particularly my point about Haidt’s neoconservatism and Yuval’s appeal to Adam Smith and Burke brought me back to Derb’s Islam piece and something I wrote in the Weekly Standard (in a review of Charles Murray’s book) a few years ago. This is a long post so I’ll put most of it below the fold. Derb writes:

The exceptionalism belongs to us, to the West. We are dynamic and creative; we are fired by curiosity to inquire into the natural order; we are driven by imagination to set off and explore remote places; our culture progresses through developmental stages, each building on the last: Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical… Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment… Romanesque, Gothic, Perpendicular… Classical, Romantic, Modern… City-state, empire, feudalism, monarchy, constitutionalism…
We are the exception: civilization-wise, stasis and aridity are the rule, not just in Islam, but everywhere. Halfway through his monumental History of China (1882), Demetrius Boulger broke off from the long catalog of border wars and palace plots to offer this illuminating apology to his readers:
It might be more instructive to trace the growth of thought among the masses, or to indicate the progress of civil and political freedom; yet not only do the materials not exist for such a task, but those we possess all tend to show that there has been no growth to describe, no progress to be indicated during these comparatively recent centuries. It is the peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese history that the people and their institutions have remained practically unchanged … from a very early period. Even the introduction of a foreign element has not tended to disturb the established order of things. The supreme ruler preserves the same attributes and discharges the same functions; the governing classes are chosen in the same manner; the people are bound in the same state of servitude, and enjoy the same practical liberty; all is now as it was. Neither under the Tangs nor the Sungs, undeer the Yuans or the Mings [i.e. from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries — these are the names of Chinese dynasties] was there any change in national character or in political institutions to be noted or chronicled. … This condition of things may be disappointing to those who pride themselves in tracing the origin of constitutions and the growth of civil rights, and who would have a history of China the history of the Chinese people … the fact is undoubted that there is no history of the Chinese people, apart from that of their country, to be recorded. The national institutions and character were formed, and had attained in all essentials to their present state, more than 2,000 years ago.
Boulger was wrong, too: far from being the “peculiar and distinguishing characteristic of Chinese history,” this stasis, this aridity, can be seen in all civilizations, except our own. It is the normal state of affairs. The ancient Egyptians and Persians, the Maurya and Gupta dynasties of India; the Japanese; the Mesoamerican civilizations, the old Mesopotamian empires — there was not a lick of progress in any of them across their entire existences, compared with what happened in any hundred years of European civilization. (Tennyson’s soldier didn’t even ask for a hundred: “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”)

And here’s a passage from my review:

AS ONE MIGHT SUSPECT, “Human Excellence”[*] is not a normal book. Any review must leave out far more than it includes. Murray has thought long and hard on questions most of us would consider exciting grist for a conversation with a group of polymaths but too difficult to extend any further than the available supply of scotch and the imponderability of the issues involved allow. For example, Murray makes the obvious observation–in retrospect–that art is in fact more difficult than science because, while scientific experimentation often involves blind luck or rote repetition (stumble on the right ingredients, and Eureka!), art requires sustained creativity and judgment from beginning to end. No coasting allowed.
Still, if I may make one observation that will probably not be made anywhere else: This is an astoundingly neoconservative book. Back in the days before the left transmuted the word “neoconservative” to mean war-mongering Jew, a prevailing understanding of the term was that it referred to a certain group of intellectuals who imported the sociological method to conservatism. What made, say, the Public Interest a neoconservative magazine was that it attacked issues of public policy with social science–then the lingua franca of the serious left–in order to reach conservative conclusions. Hence, one of the main criticisms of neoconservatism from the right was that it did not work enough from first principles. It had to prove everything that earlier generations thought self-evident. Neocons were too concerned with immanentizing and not concerned enough with the eschaton, to mangle a phrase from Eric Voegelin. Indeed, even the benefits of religion could not be taken on faith. The neocons had to prove that believing in God tended to keep societies more orderly, families more intact, and children more successful.
Well, here we have “Human Accomplishment,” a book written by an avowed libertarian that, quite literally, puts all of humanity through the algorithmic wringer. What comes out the other end? Unsurprisingly, the rediscovery of what conservatives had said all along: The combination of the West’s indebtedness to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome set the foundations for an exceptional civilization that, in turn, created the Enlightenment and, eventually, the United States of America. The postmodernists and critical theorists, who shriek that the edifice created by these many giants should be dismantled, are taking sledgehammers to the very platforms from which they shriek.

And Yuval writes:

I think, in other words, that the different moral emphases of liberals and conservatives have more to do with our assumptions about human nature and justice than with differently developed or evolved natural moral faculties, and I think Haidt’s division of these ways of thinking into five distinct and comparable axes (harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity) along which people are ranked therefore obscures more than it reveals.
But that may surely be my own set of professional blinders at play, and in any case his book is well worth reading.

I think Yuval’s points are good ones, and like I said, I’m not yet fully persuaded by what I’ve seen from Haidt — which in fairness is very little. But perhaps what Yuval describes as “professional blinders” are really the biases of someone who finds reducing the enormous complex of metaphysical, moral and philosophical components of Western civilization and, civilization generally, to a social scientific enterprise less than wholly appealing or persuasive. I share that bias, for the record. Any accounting of the measure of man that approaches comprehensiveness (and that’s all we can do, approach it) must have a social scientific component to it. But that component is merely necessary but not sufficient. It will also have to include the poetry of man as well. The lyrics matter, but unless you can account for the music too, you’ll always fall short.

Western civilization is a special tune, for the reasons Derb mentions and with the evidence that Charles Murray aggregates. But that’s not the full story.

Just a late Friday thought. Don’t hold me to it.

* Bizarrely, I am only noticing three years later that I mis-identified the name of Charles’ book in that sentence. Somehow it got past the editors and myself. Weird.