Repost: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
Repost: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
"We all get sucked into tribal moral communities."
Hello friends,
Jonathan Haidt is having a bit of a moment due to his recent book The Anxious Generation and I think it is well deserved. With the election looming, I wanted to repost a review of his 2012 book that changed my thinking about why we vote the way we do.
This review was originally published in 2021 but I still find it relevant - please let me know what you think!
Someday I’ll start a review with something other than “I think everyone should read this!” Today is not that day.
I needed this book. I needed these ideas and this level of thinking and research. Jonathan Haidt didn’t get his political ideology from watching YouTube videos on autoplay. He has been doing research, reading, writing, and teaching for decades.
I wish I had read The Righteous Mind when it came out in 2012. And then again 4 years ago. And then again at the beginning of last year. It could have saved me several impassioned arguments with loved ones (and a couple of strangers).
Let’s put the past behind us and get into it.
Published 20121 | 419 pages
Tags: Non-fiction, Psychology, Politics, Philosophy
What’s it about?
I considered posting quote after quote from the book and just calling that my review. Dr. Haidt seems to be pulling from multiple fields and several bodies of research to construct his arguments. The biggest take-away for me is the idea of living in a “moral matrix” where one is convinced that the morals of his or her team are correct and any righteous anger directed at the immoral “other team” is justified. Dr. Haidt, raised in a liberal household, speaks of his moral awakening this way:
Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers’ rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours (emphasis mine).
He goes on to talk about how spending time in India opened his mind to an alternative moral matrix and that upon returning home, “social conservatives no longer seemed so crazy.”
I had escaped from my prior partisan mind-set (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later) and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society. It felt good to be released from partisan anger. And once I was no longer angry, I was no longer committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong. I was able to explore new moral matrices, each one supported by its own intellectual traditions. It felt like a kind of awakening.
Ok, so maybe I will just post quotes. The most important thing for me is that Dr. Haidt is not representing the right or the left. He doesn’t have a dog in that fight, rather his dog is trying to bridge the gap. He’s trying to help each side see the morality in the other. We are so suspicious of the other side and so trusting of our own side that we’ll believe what our side says about the other side, which might be, at best, incomplete.
How did it impact me?
I’ll be thinking about these concepts every time I have a discussion with somebody. Understanding a person’s moral foundations seems so obvious in hindsight. Trying to convince people using reason without taking into account the emotional/intuitive aspects of their moral matrix seems so foolish. And yet, I’ve been doing it all my life.
Since reading, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to test the concepts. Just this past week I tried understanding the reasons why a loved one wouldn’t get vaccinated and I made every effort to see the moral foundation upon which the arguments rested. Let me tell you, it is easier said than done. It’s nice to read a book but it’s going to take real-world practice, ideally face to face, to get better at these conversations.
Any downsides?
I do have a few qualms, one being that I wish Dr. Haidt had more real-world, “the rubber meets the road” data. A lot of his data comes from people answering questionnaires online at yourmorals.org or from interviews. Sure, we can say our morals would compel us to chase down and tackle the guy assaulting the woman behind the dumpster, but how many of us would have the courage to act in that moment? I’m not sure how that data would be collected but imagining your response to a situation could be drastically different than how you’d actually respond.
My other qualm is that I’m starting to feel “morally superior” to everyone who hasn’t “woken up” to the fact that partisan anger is SO DUMB. I find myself feeling more than a bit angry at their partisan anger. This concerns me.
You will like this if…
…you enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's books. I got some serious MG vibes early on, but it soon became apparent that Haidt is in another league.
…you want to engage and have more productive conversations with people on the other side.
…you want to understand your own beliefs and moral foundations better.
…you’re tired of verbal battles that get nowhere.
That’s all for me this week! I’d love to know what delicacies of literature you’ve been tasting lately.
— Kyle
Thanks for being here, I love hearing from readers (whether you agree or disagree). Feel free to leave a comment.
A not-so-brief aside: When I think back on the year 2012 when this book was published, I can’t help but think “Ahhh…simpler times.” Of course, 2012 was fraught with challenges, but politically speaking it was pretty straightforward. Obama, the sitting president, was running against Romney, a boring politician. That race feels like a lifetime ago. I remember thinking Obama was doing a fine job; he certainly wasn’t destroying America and plunging us into socialism the way some folks worried he would. I also remember wanting Romney to win because he was a Republican. I reasoned: “Romney is a good guy, a family man. He has character, he would do an honest job.” I didn’t realize that the same things could have been said for Obama, but since he was a Democrat, he wasn’t on my team. I remember feeling fine when Obama won and Romney lost.
What really infuriated me was 4 years later when Trump, who is pretty much the Anti-Romney, won. That made Romney’s loss really, really upsetting. When I realized the conservative arm of the nation didn’t want a Romney, oh no, they wanted a Trump, I started getting really confused about Republicans and I found myself beginning to lean away from them.
It was refreshing that Haidt, way back in pre-Trump 2012, praised conservative intellectuals as understanding the importance of moral capital, but made it clear that by praising them he was not praising the Republican Party. I strongly believe that the gap between conservative intellectuals and the GOP has only widened in the past 8 years. In my opinion, it’s a gap that has to be intentionally, determinedly, and aggressively shrunk.