The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (Amazon // Goodreads)

This book was recommended to me by a friend who had to witness me complaining about all the New Atheist genre books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion.  I read it over my winter break and as you can see, I have procrastinated greatly on writing this review, mainly because I was intimidated by how many things I had to say and all the notes I took while reading it. I thought I would have to spare a good three hours to get through everything I wanted to talk about. 

But I am on spring break now, and I can dedicate a good block of my time to finishing this, and then actually getting the book back to its owner (who has been surprisingly kind about letting me keep the book for this long). I am also using a new application I found called Writer’s Block which blocks me from using my computer until I reach my word count goal. 

My general thoughts on the book are positive but still somewhat ambivalent. I liked it. I enjoyed reading it for the most part. It was intellectually stimulating and raised some questions I hadn’t asked myself before. The writing strikes a nice balance between simplicity and complexity as Haidt works with a lot of scientific data and terminology, and he does a good job of getting his point across and synthesizing his findings. He has organized the chapters and sections really well, and he refreshes the reader’s memory in each chapter with formal conclusions at the end, and small referrals throughout the section. There is a lot going on in the book however, and although the main text is understandable, a considerable amount of contextual information is in the last hundred pages of footnotes which made the reading a chore. I couldn’t read a full page without at least three footnotes and going to the back of the book every other paragraph to see what he was leaving out or what he was referencing. 

Now… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and the hyper analysis that was bound to happen when I read a book like this. 

“I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.”

This is a statement from Haidt’s introduction. The beautiful thing that happened when I was reading this book is that I went to a religious retreat (which I will write about in detail in a separate post) and quite a few of the themes that were explored in this book were paralleled in our religious discussion (such a nice God given coincidence). We explicitly talked about self-righteousness and what leads us to have a strong need for it. It’s really not a foundational part of being human. It has other roots. As far as I have been convinced. 

“Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.”

“Specific rules may vary across cultures [… but] children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.”

“When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just social convention.”

“It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’”

“Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divide the empire into eastern and western halves.”

“Do people believe in human rights because such right actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theory just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?”

“Yet the result of the separation [between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body] was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning /requires/ the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better: when one co-emperor is knocked out and the other tries to rule the empire by himself, he’s not up to the task.”

Jefferson’s model requires an in-depth analysis of the idea of co-emperors. Or two leaders in any situation having equal power. 

“So Hume’s model fits these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.”

“Moral reasoning was just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgements people had already made.”

My main question throughout the book was, don’t we need initial reasoning to have the gut reaction? Haidt touches on genetics as a blueprint for some of our reasoning, but he doesn’t clarify if he thinks our gut reactions mean that there is a pan-human morality built into everyone. Do people innately have a sense of what is right and what is wrong in its most basic form? And if yes, they do, then what does that say about morality’s universality?

“I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning.”

“We maker first judgements rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgements.”

I agree, but I think this makes it sound like people never question their own beliefs. While it is easier to just keep on believing what we already believe in, I think it’s also not that hard to always be conscious of our thoughts and beliefs, and continue questioning them. And people do this. Increasingly so – we are becoming more curious, more open, more doubtful. We are forced to confront our beliefs and habits as we live in an immensely integrated world with people who are different from us. 

“Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to emphasize across a moral divide.”

“The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolves to serve the elephant.”

One thing I hated about this book: this analogy. It made no sense, it still makes no sense, and it was used almost every other paragraph. Haidt is very proud of it, but oh man. 

“Deontologists talk abut high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. But Greene had a hunch that gut feelings were what often drove people to make deontological judgments, whereas utilitarian judgements were more cool and calculating.”

“Glaucon’s thought experiment implies that people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught – especially the damage to their reputations. Glaucon says he will not be satisfied until Socrates can prove that a just man with a bad reputation is happier than an unjust man who is widely thought to be good.”

Food for thought – I immediately thought about Quran (4:135) "O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah , even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, Allah is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed Allah is ever, with what you do, Acquainted." Yes, sometimes it’s unpopular to be just, sometimes it challenges the status quo and those in power, sometimes it’s dangerous, but people still do it. People still stand up for justice, people who are demonized and blacklisted, they stand up for what’s right, and they are happy. 

“What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn  those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg. Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are Glauconian.”

I don’t know which school I fit into yet. I don’t think I ascribe to either of them fully enough. 

“But when people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.”

This, I think, shows why a very fundamentally beneficial part of religions and belief systems with gods that are omniscient and all-seeing. Even when we are inclined to do something wrong that no person might see, we are still aware that God sees everything, and that we’ll have to own up to that action and answer for it. 

“[…] accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than be right.”

I think this is extremely crucial in religious questioning. When I started questioning my own beliefs, I knew I would do this, so I tried to approach my beliefs similarly to how I would approach a scientific hypothesis. Approach with the intent to disprove, and if it cannot be disproven, it stands. You move on to the next hypothesis and so on. Nobody likes to be wrong, but with something as important as belief, I think we have to be counterintuitive. We have to think slowly and critically.

“People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession – your child, almost – and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.” 

This is what higher institutions of learning try to teach us right? They encourage us to challenge our own beliefs, grow and adapt and improve. I wonder when the right age to begin this kind of training is most appropriate. Should we begin questioning norms and traditions earlier?

“Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.”

“We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decree in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.”

&&&

Some other things I got out of this book:
1. Hang out with people who are different from you and who don’t share all your beliefs and opinions. There is growth in challenge. 
2. Most information can be twisted and presented as to make sense for all sides of an argument.  Thus, it’s essential for us to try to be as objective and unbiased as possible when approaching issues we care about. We tend to look for information that confirms what we already believe in but being aware that this is our natural inclination is the first step in avoiding it in the future.
3. Hierarchies aren’t inherently bad and exploitative but can exist harmoniously when there are certain expectations and responsibilities on all parties. Haidt says such hierarchies are similar to a parent-child relationship rather than a dictator-fearful underlings relationship. 
4. There are five main foundations that politicians use to connect to us. Left-wing morality only uses two of these, care and fairness, while right-wing morality encompasses all five, including the loyalty, authority, and sanctity foundations. We don’t know the full impact of this however, because despite having more ways to connect to the voters, right wingers remain somewhat equally tied to the left wingers in support (though Haidt believes that if left wingers start connecting to voters on more foundations it will help them get ahead).
5. There are people who think morality, altruism and generosity are mistakes. This is not news, I have written about Rand here before. Haidt argues that morality is the key to understanding humanity. And he argues this point well. 
6. New Atheists think religion costs us, but it’s actually one of the most persevering ways to solve the problem of fueling cooperation among people without kinship. 
7. Liberalism tries to change too many things too quickly all at once and it is one of the reasons why it has failed to create a stable governing philosophy. Conservatism does a better job of preserving moral capital but fails to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. The idea is that we need both to have a steadily improving and healthy state. Moderation is best indeed. 

And that concludes this 2000-word monster of a post. Thanks for sticking around, if you have, that is, and see you on the next book review slash opinion piece (or maybe vignette).