Episode 27: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion, by Jonathan Haidt
A Book ‘Review‘
I’m four book reviews behind, because it turns out I read books far faster than I write about them. But let’s try and catch up, shall we?
Anyone who has read the Deborah Tannen book “Please Understand Me” will hear echoes of it in this book. Tannen’s book, to massively boil it down, asserted that men and women are similar in some ways in how they communicate, and sharply different in other ways, and failure to perceive and accommodate those points of fundamental difference is the root cause of a lot of miscommunication and conflict in relationships.
Haidt’s book, massively boiled down, argues the same couple things, but with “liberals” and “conservatives” taking the place of “men” and “women”; i.e., liberals and conservatives are similar in some ways in how they communicate, and sharply different in other ways, and failure to perceive and accommodate those points of fundamental difference is the root cause of a lot of miscommunication and conflict. But his analysis is impressively rooted in sociology and moral psychology, and he’s particularly interested in the application of these fields to politics. It’s a very, very good book, and if you have more than a superficial interest in politics, I strongly suggest that you read it.
Let’s do the grades, then I’ll pick a few highlights from the book:
Readability: A
Ideas: A++
Conciseness: A-
Overall grade: A
Here are some of the key ideas in the book:
People conceive of themselves as highly rational beings whose decisionmaking is driven by a rational weighing of factors, and who only occasionally let their emotions get the best of them. This is exactly backwards. In fact, people make most of their decisions fairly instantaneously through emotion-driven unconscious pattern recognition/stereotyping, and then use their rational mind to invent post-hoc rationalizations for whatever their “gut” came up with.
Haidt’s metaphor for this is “the rider and the elephant”. The rider likes to think he’s in control and that the elephant serves him, but in fact the elephant is going to go where it wants, and the rider is really there to serve the elephant, not the other way around. He quotes some interesting social science experiments that substantiate his framing.
Why this matters for politics: if you want to change someone’s mind, you have to target the elephant, not the rider. A logical argument, no matter how correct, will go nowhere if accepting it requires violating or relinquishing people’s emotions or intuitions about an issue.
Conscious reasoning functions like a White House press secretary who will justify any position taken by the President. When we consider a position we want to believe, we implicitly ask the question “Can I believe it?”, but when we consider a position we *don’t* want to believe, we implicitly ask the question “Must I believe it?”. We will almost always arrive at “yes” for the first question, and “no” for the second.
Combine this with the inclination of people to be groupish rather than selfish in moral and political matters, and you’ve built the psychological foundation for why most people most of the time will simply follow whatever the leaders of a group are saying about an issue, even if what those leaders are saying is the literal opposite of what they were saying a week ago.
Why this matters for politics: (a) who you pick as leaders of your group is really, really, REALLY important, and (b) while it may be harder than you think to change individual minds, in some ways it may be easier than you think to change minds at scale, under the right conditions.
People are innately wired to have a moral psychology, and that wiring has several dimensions:
Care/Harm: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable young.
Fairness/cheating: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of creating cooperation without exploitation.
Loyalty/betrayal: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions.
Authority/subversion: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships within a social hierarchy.
Sanctity/degradation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of surviving in a world of pathogens, parasites, and unreliable food quality.
Liberty/oppression: evolved as a mechanism to prevent or overthrow bullies and tyrants.
An important difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals value the care/harm and fairness/cheating dimensions far more than loyalty/degradation, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation, and somewhat more than liberty/oppression. Conservatives value the dimensions more evenly, but are nevertheless weighted more toward loyalty/degradation, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression. Haidt does a deep dive into a range of social science research substantiating this.
Why this matters for politics: If you value care/harm far more than authority/subversion, defunding the police makes total sense. If you value care/harm far more than sanctity/degradation, you’ll be perfectly comfortable doing things like allowing open-air drug markets. And if you value fairness/cheating far more than liberty/oppression, mandates to force changes in behavior will seem like a perfectly acceptable choice over what will feel like namby-pamby incentives. So will massively redistributive economic policies. Understanding this is key for conservatives, because arguments about authority, sanctity, or liberty are more likely to fall flat with liberals, yet that is the approach conservatives typically take when pushing back on liberal policy choices.
People are both selfish and groupish; under normal conditions, they are primarily selfish. But under certain conditions, a “hive switch” can be flipped, and people will become more like bees in a hive, subordinating their independent selves for the good of a group. This can happen in benign circumstances, like team sports or raves, and it can happen in more serious circumstances, like in combat or in mobs.
Why this matters for politics: many of the most impactful politicians, whether they were ultimately judged by history to be good or bad, were/are skilled at flipping the hive switch in people. It is a source of tremendous political power.
Religion is best understood not as an arbitrary set of beliefs about supernatural agents, but rather as a social binding agent that, by creating a simple mechanism to flip the hive switch, conferred significant evolutionary benefits on the groups that employed it.
Why this matters for politics: You can read a lot of pieces pointing out that people are becoming less religious over time, but are they really? Having read this book, I would argue that all that’s happening is that people are trading the old binding agents (Christianity, Judaism, etc.) for new binding agents (examples: political parties, single policy issues like climate, housing, or abortion). For conservatives, if we’re to have any success in promoting conservative policy, we need to be cognizant of this. Almost no one in history ever gave up their religion because someone came along and made a really compelling logical argument to do so.
I’d also suggest that these new binding agents, which are still evolving and don’t have the strength of centuries of tradition the way the old binding agents do, are intrinsically weaker, and therefore lead many people to feel more isolated and less socially bound. But because we evolved to be strongly tied to groups, and that evolution has been particularly strong since the development of agriculture and urban civilization, feeling less socially bound will lead to a lot of psychological stress, and I would posit that that’s a contributing factor to the rise in drug use, suicide, etc.
Perhaps the most important idea, which comes at the end of the book, is that liberals and conservatives are like yin and yang, and stability and happiness will be maximized when these are in balance. Were it up to me, there would be 50 purple states and 435 purple Congressional districts- we would have much saner politics and much better policies in that world. But when conservatives dominate without any meaningful participation from liberals, as in Alabama or Mississippi, what you get is a culture with too much authority and not enough care or fairness, and that is reflected in the fact that people aren’t exactly beating down the doors to move to Alabama or Mississippi. But when liberals dominate, without any meaningful participation from conservatives, what you get is San Francisco: a functionally ungovernable, increasingly anarchic mess. And it’s not just San Francisco anymore; it’s spreading throughout the state, with the result that California has lost population for 3 years in a row now, and lots more people are considering leaving.
California needs its balance back, so we can get back to having the kind of smart governance that built California into a global powerhouse. But that will mean becoming competitive as a party here, and “The Righteous Mind” highlights a lot of things for conservatives to think about, if in fact we’re ever going to change enough minds to become competitive again.
That’s a project I’m excited to work on.
Excellent points and thought provoking.