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Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion (2012)

by Jonathan Haidt(Favorite Author)

4.03 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1846141818 (ISBN13: 9781846141812)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Allen Lane

review 1: I felt this book was vastly over-simplistic and relied too much on anecdote and stereotype as evidence. I disagreed with quite a lot in it, but in a very engaging sort of way. It was fun and interesting to disagree with. It covers some of the same ground as The Better Angels of our Nature and Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), but wasn't as enjoyable as either of those. I'm open to the idea that I liked it less because I disagreed with it and ultimately liked what he had to say about understanding our political and moral "opposites" as people with views that are as deeply-held and based in morality as our own.
review 2: This is a great book to help open-minded people understand the different worldviews held by progressives, libertarians, and conservatives. It... more makes the point that there is a genetic underpinning to these views. That being the case, all three have a role to play in the success of the human species. The author builds his case on the shoulders of previous researchers such as: “Richard Shweder and his colleagues found three major clusters of moral themes, which they called the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. Each one is based on a different idea about what a person really is.The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and preferences as they see fit, and so societies develop moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice, which allow people to coexist peacefully without interfering too much in each other's projects. This is the dominant ethic in individualistic societies. But as soon as you step outside of Western secular society, you hear people talking in two additional moral languages. The ethic of community is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, members of larger entities such as families, teams, armies, companies, tribes, and nations. These larger entities are more than the sum of the people who compose them; they are real, they matter, and they must be protected. People have an obligation to play their assigned roles in these entities. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as duty, hierarchy, respect, reputation, and patriotism. In such societies, the Western insistence that people should design their own lives and pursue their own goals seems selfish and dangerous—a sure way to weaken the social fabric and destroy the institutions and collective entities upon which everyone depends.The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted. People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground... Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity's baser instincts.”The author developed an innate ("organized in advance of experience") framework for morality with five dimensions or foundations:"• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore's dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.”After further study, the author modified the framework: "My colleagues and I revised Moral Foundations Theory to do a better job of explaining intuitions about liberty and fairness:• We added the Liberty/oppression foundation, which makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination. It triggers an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies and tyrants. This foundation supports the egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism of the left, as well as the don't-tread-on-me and give-me-liberty antigovernment anger of libertarians and some conservatives.• We modified the Fairness foundation to make it focus more strongly on proportionality. The Fairness foundation begins with the psychology of reciprocal altruism, but its duties expanded once humans created gossiping and punitive moral communities. Most people have a deep intuitive concern for the law of karma—they want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to their deeds.”Using this framework, the author is able to distinguish progressives, libertarians, and conservatives on the basis of how important each of the foundations is to them. The Liberal Moral MatrixMost sacred value: Care for victims of oppressionImportant foundations: Care, Liberty, FairnessThe Libertarian Moral MatrixMost sacred value: Individual libertyImportant foundations: Liberty and FairnessThe Social Conservative Moral Matrix Most sacred value: Preserve the institutions and traditions that sustain a moral communityAll foundations are equally important: Care, Liberty, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.“People don't adopt their ideologies at random, or by soaking up whatever ideas are around them. People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals. They tend to develop certain 'characteristic adaptations' and 'life narratives' that make them resonate — unconsciously and intuitively — with the grand narratives told by political movements on the left (such as the liberal progress narrative). People whose genes give them brains with the opposite settings are predisposed, for the same reasons, to resonate with the grand narratives of the right (such as the Reagan narrative).Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it's difficult — perhaps impossible — to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix."“Can partisans even understand the story told by the other side? The obstacles to empathy are not symmetrical. If the left builds its moral matrices on a smaller number of moral foundations, then there is no foundation used by the left that is not also used by the right. Even though conservatives score slightly lower on measures of empathy and may therefore be less moved by a story about suffering and oppression, they can still recognize that it is awful to be kept in chains.But when liberals try to understand the Reagan narrative, they have a harder time. When I speak to liberal audiences about the three 'binding' foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don't just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbojumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.”“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense. There is not a big margin for error; many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit. If you don't value moral capital, then you won't foster values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that increase it.”“If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.The philosopher Bertrand Russell saw this same dynamic at work throughout Western intellectual history: 'From 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.' Russell then explained why both sides are partially right, using terms that are about as close a match to moral capital as I could ever hope to find:'It is clear that each party to this dispute—as to all that persist through long periods of time—is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.'” less

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Reviews (see all)

lopez

Um. Haidt had too much to say, and said it too soon. One thing that didn't work is that there's too much of the ivory tower perspective - yes, Haidt & co. went to the 'ordinary people' to do some of the research, but they didn't really see us. Haidt should've taken a sabbatical to mull this all over first and then written it in a MacDonald's in Iowa, to gain some real perspective on the subject.Another problem is that the book is structured like a lecture course, outlined formally, w/ intro. paragraphs, supporting arguments, conclusions... I got to the point where I was wishing there were review questions at the end of each chapter. An assigned syllabus of related readings would have been helpful, too. Other perspectives to read while studying the book, that is, not additional readings as we can glean from the bibliography.Most importantly, I could not find answers to my questions on the subject. I admit I did not digest every paragraph, but I already knew (from other evolutionary psychology & related books, and from literature, and from life) all that I did understand from his text here. And I still am baffled by much of "moral" human behavior.I did love his other book, and look forward to his next. I do sorta hope is next is a more coherent visit to the themes of this one.

nick

There is lots of good information and some interesting ideas in this book. But I perceive so many negative points in how the information is presented. My instinct tells me to rate it one star. My reason tells me that I could rate it two stars. My second level of reasoning (reasoning on my initial reasoning) leads to rate it with one star. I wonder: What would be the conclusion of a study on the book from the perspective of a propaganda analyst?

Autumn

Interesting, made me think and look at my own morals

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