I know I'm late to
the party, but Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind,
published in 2012, is the most important books I've read in 2017.
Haidt's assertion
that "anyone who values truth should stop
worshipping reason" (page 104) neatly summarizes the book's first part. What he means by this is that we don't make
judgements based on reason. Instead, we have a feeling about things, and we use
reason to justify that feeling. Our reason is like a press secretary: Their job
it is to come up with justifications for whichever statements and decisions the
president has made, no matter how nonsensical they are. In this metaphor, the
president is our subconscious gut feeling.
We're therefore
unlikely to arrive at the truth by relying on reason alone, because reason will
just confirm what we've felt all along. However, if we put individuals together
the right way, they can use their reasoning power to disconfirm each other's claims.
Finding the truth therefore must be a social enterprise, and one manifestation
of such an enterprise is Science. Democracy would ideally be another one.
The second part of
the book is about moral dimensions, or what Haidt calls Moral Foundations Theory. Many people, and especially those on the liberal end of the political
spectrum, think there are only two moral rules: Don't harm others and don't
cheat.
However, there are others too: Be loyal! Respect authority! Honor! Sanctity! Those additional
dimensions have in common that their emphasis on self-control over
self-expression and on duty over rights is likely to benefit families and groups
rather than individuals. Ignoring those additional dimensions will
results in an incomplete picture of morality and of how society works.
Conservatives as well as many non-Western cultures value those moral dimensions
more highly than do liberals, hence the conservative focus on "family
values". Liberals put themselves at an electoral disadvantage by dismissing
those dimensions.
I'm not convinced by
Haidt's arguments regarding group selection, which is the theory that natural
selection acts not only on individuals but also on groups. He tiptoes around
the subject, but ultimately suggests that group selection is the most likely explanation
for most aspects of human morality. This is problematic.
First of all,
evolutionary theory indicates that group selection is only possible under
implausibly narrow conditions that are unlikely to ever be met in reality.
Haidt doesn't address this issue.
Secondly, his
assertion that group selection is necessary to explain many aspects of morality
is unconvincing. For example, that we feel moral outrage toward bullies can
adequately be explained by individual selection. Allowing others to bully you
isn't going to improve your fitness in the evolutionary sense. It's simply not
necessary to resort to groups selection to explain this.
However, Haidt's
views on group selection are a relatively minor issue as the rest of the book
holds up no matter how morality arose in the first place. I recommend The Righteous Mind to anyone who wants to
understand why people on the other end of the political spectrum, but also in
other cultures, have such wildly divergent opinions on moral issues. I'm also
looking forward to the forthcoming The Coddling of the American Mind,
which will likely expand on his somewhat controversial essay from 2015. This time, I
won't wait five years to read it.