Are our genes in the saddle riding mankind?

I have been posting examples of us thinking with our brains, not our minds. Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, suggests that our brain's morality is rooted in our genes.

The arresting image Haidt gives for our sense of morality is that it's like a rational rider on top of an intuitive elephant. The rider can sometimes nudge the elephant one way or the other, but no one should be in any doubt that the elephant is making the important moves. In fact, the main job of the rider is to come up with post-hoc justifications for where the elephant winds up. We rationalise what our gut tells us. This is true no matter how intelligent we are........ 

Haidt wants us to understand that our moral instincts are inherently judgmental: being moral makes us moralistic. Much of the book is devoted to the experimental evidence that shows how often moral judgment is a case of us v them rather than right v wrong. In Haidt's terms, morality "binds and blinds". It binds us to the group and blinds us to the point of view of outsiders.
David Runciman in a review of Haidt's book in The Guardian

I have been reading To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild. I am reminded how stupid the first World War was. Many of the most influential people in the build up to the war came off very badly as a result of the war. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires all fell, and an entire generation of the young men who formed the officer class in most of Europe -- the sons of the aristocracy and affluent -- was decimated. The political and military leadership of Europe largely failed to understand the deadly nature of the war that they were letting loose and the destruction that the war would wreak on their country and its social order.

It seems to me that we better learn how to more accurately predict the results of the actions we contemplate as nations, and that we more effectively tame our instincts with that knowledge or we will harness our increasing power to our still greater destruction.