Review: The Righteous Mind

 The Righteous Mind is divided into 3 parts. The first two are at the very least enlightening and gives you plenty to think about, and the last part unfortunately falls into the "bothsidesim" that has aged particularly badly since 2012, which was when the book is written.

The first part is pretty straightforward: humans aren't rational. Our rationality and reasoning abilities are frequently used for post-hoc analysis and self-justification as to why we did the things we were going to do anyway, whether it was reprehensible or moral behavior. This isn't particularly controversial, as anyone who has tried to get a kid to do the right thing will tell you --- the smarter the kid, the more reasons he will come up with as to why what he did was the right thing, irregardless of the actual rightness of the behavior. What's interesting is that what it takes to change people's minds isn't reason, but affection, admiration, and mutual respect:

When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). (pg. 79)

The second part of the book is an exploration of humanity's good behavior. The author uses a phrase - we're 90% Chimp and 10% Bees. The idea here is that chimps don't normally cooperate with each other, and 90% of the time we behave like selfish primates. But then there are some triggers that get us to all bind together into a team or group or religion, and then humans are capable of cooperating to a high degree, like bees. There's a part of the book where Haidt explains the aggressive egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies:

It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!” (pg. 199)

 His theory therefore is that the egalitarian instinct evolved relatively recently. I'm not so sure I buy that. In any case, Haidt points out how you can deliberately trigger the "hive switch" on humans:

Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies. (pg. 277)

This explains, by the way, why corporate programs to increase diversity ironically also increases latent racism --- the training to make people aware of diversity ironically erodes the hive switch and therefore makes the company less cohesive. The reduction of cohesiveness not only makes the company less effective, it also creates a backlash because the people comprising of the company no longer view themselves as part of a whole. People who might otherwise have bought into the human hive now rail against wokeness instead.

Haidt points out then, that the role of religion isn't an accident. It binds communities together in ways that secular shared values do not:

It was things like giving up alcohol and tobacco, fasting for days at a time, conforming to a communal dress code or hairstyle, or cutting ties with outsiders. For religious communes, the effect was perfectly linear: the more sacrifice a commune demanded, the longer it lasted. But Sosis was surprised to discover that demands for sacrifice did not help secular communes. Most of them failed within eight years, and there was no correlation between sacrifice and longevity.31 Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, every member has a right to ask for a cost-benefit analysis, and many refuse to do things that don’t make logical sense. In other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, particularly when those beliefs rest upon the Sanctity foundation.33 (pg. 298)

This is an insightful and probably accurate view of society. You'll read this book nodding along to this part. The final part of the book (and really, the author couldn't help but insert it all over the book) is the note that liberals rely only on the caring portion of human morality, and ignore the other pillars (he calls them tastes) of society. This leads to the conclusion that liberals can't see what conservatives view as important, such as "traditional values" and the view of sacredness.

The problem with this criticism of liberalism is that it completely goes against the past few centuries of human history since the enlightenment in Europe! There was a time when human slavery was viewed as normal. In all traditional societies, women were frequently treated as property. Haidt mentions a time when he visited India and came back with a strong sense of what made Indian tradition strong and how he came away with respect for the traditional cultures and values of that society. He doesn't mention attending a funeral where widows were expected to burn themselves in the cremation pyre of their dead husbands. He doesn't mention the traditions of feet binding in Chinese society. Haidt protests against this by quoting Isaiah Berlin:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false (pg. 367)

But in vain. We all know that fascism is wrong, but it's also very clear that in recent years, that's what the "moral right" has adopted. It seems that after reading this book, I've come to agree with the New Atheists --- that religion is a blight on humanity and if we are to survive we must kill it dead. It's very clear even from the evidence in the real world that the enlightenment-dominant societies are the ones thriving, and the fundamentalist Christian societies (whether it's the Muslim countries in the middle east or the red states in the USA) are the ones doing the most poorly in terms of lifespan, happiness, or even pure economic productivity. It might be that the liberal politicians need to find ways to attract those voters, but if they don't, it's clear to me that if Haidt's theory of group selection was true, the liberal tribes are going to outperform the conservatives by a lot!