Political & Elections

winchester · Guru

RE: The Righteous Mind

winchester · Guru

Hope that's great question, but I'm afraid it's one that Haidt does not really delve into, so if that's a burning question for you then I think you might be a bit frustrated by not finding a direct answer to it in Haidt's work.

But with that said, if you do read the book I still think you'll have enough "aha" moments to make it worth your while.

hope · Guru

Cool. When I get more te I will look it up. I am curious why some people become more conservative as they age (churchill's famous maxim), and others don't!

hope · Guru

Ok time to fess up , winchester! Are you haidt?? Your son?? A relation?? Tell us the cause of your fascination!!!

winchester · Guru

Nope, I am not Haidt. Nor am I a relation.

He's a much better writer than I am, on many levels and by practically any measure. And he's much more even handed and less partisan than I am. It's why he is writing popular books like "The Happiness Hypothesis" and "The Righteous Mind" and is in demand on the lecture circuit and I'm just another schmo in online political discussions.

Many people have a favorite author, or book. For instance, I know of people for whom Witness, by Whittaker Chambers is pivotal to their thinking.

Haidt's work just seems to resonate with me in that way, and with my style of thinking.

When I first moved to the DC area, where I still live, there was an ad on the radio for a car dealership that said "Once you decide to be the best, all the other decisions are easy." I tend to look for that first thing, that guiding principle, or philosophy, which makes all the other decisions easy, or which helps me to understand things. Before I stumbled across Haidt I'd concentrated my reading in the history of political ideas, with historians like Carl Becker, Forest McDonald, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon S. Wood. Haidt's work, in my estimatation, seemed to be looking for the same thing they all are; first principles; the guide star ideas that make all the other decisions easy. And his findings seemed compatible with all of theirs.

Haidt's work then opened the door to the work of other social scientists, like Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) who are coming to many of the same conclusions that Haidt is about what really makes us tick e.g., intution comes first, followed by reason. Reason evloved to serve intuition).

All of them, the historians and the social scientists, are after the same sort of thing; an understanding of what makes us who we are. Haidt does the best job of showing the relationship between both sides of the story - psychology and philosophy, or political world view. And if you read his work, not just in a cursory way, but to really understand it, it does fit very well with the things we all observe in politics and in political discussions and even political history at least as far back as The Enlightenment, and arguably much farther back than that.

We talk past each other. We think we "get it" and the other side doesn't. The reason for that is that we DON'T understand, at a fundamental level, what really makes us tick. That applies to ourselves every bit as much as it applies to those on the other side. If we had a better understanding of why we are the way we are, and why we believe what we believe, then we'd have a much better chance of understanding and communicating, and there'd be a better chance of decreasing the size of the political divide, if only just a little.

I honestly believe that the review of The Righteous Mind in today's New York Times is correct in saying that Haidt has made "a landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself." It is a Rosetta Stone for unlocking the mystery of the political divide, and maybe even for building a few bridges across it.

-- Edited by winchester on Sunday 25th of March 2012 08:36:19 PM

-- Edited by winchester on Sunday 25th of March 2012 08:38:15 PM

winchester · Guru

Number six on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list in its first week of publication, "The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" is "a landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself. "

The quote above is from a review in today's New York Times entitled Why Won't They Listen? . Here are the first few paragraphs of the review:

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.