The Righteous Mind

6/5 stars! A wonderful, enlightening look at moral psychology and how it explains religious and political divides, especially those in the US.

I had low expectations for this book's explanatory power, but I reckoned it would be interesting to read anyway. But no! It really does explain things! Very convincingly! A lot of Haidt's interpretations of experimental psychology really resonated with my life experiences (n=1).

The main crux of the argument is that our moral sense evolved to have six dominant “tastes”: a taste for Care/harm, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, Sanctity/degradation, and Liberty/oppression. If you're very WEIRD (Western educated industrialized rich and democratic) and left-leaning, then you only really “taste” two of them - care and fairness - and kinda throw out the rest (e.g. authority is just a means to oppression and not something to be intrinsically valued; it's OK to sacrifice overall liberty if it protects disadvantaged groups). If you're more conservative (on the US political spectrum), then you taste all six, fairly equally. If you're NOT WEIRD, then you taste all six, also fairly equally.

This was so interesting! And YES, I THINK IT'S TRUE.

Haidt talks about how his work in Orissa, India, helped him to wake up to non-WEIRD more-than-just-those-2 moral tastes. And YES, I remember that the only time I really emotionally understood the more communal/social, less individualistic, morality that prizes respect for authority and loyalty to your in-group was the wonderful Hindi movie, Virasat (ugh, I need to fix my blog pics). Virasat is a moral fable that pits “Western individualism” against “Eastern communalism”. I mean, lots of Hindi films did and do that, but Virasat was the first that opened my eyes to the moral failings of Western individualism and the, well, righteousness of “dharma” (i.e. your role/duty).

I loved, actually, how Haidt also centralized these moral philosophical distinctions in the Enlightenment, when individualism exploded into the Western consciousness as a dominant cultural force - a force more morally powerful than family ties, the Church's moral authority, and so on. Sometimes it's funny to realize your highly specific, individual thoughts are actually the product of centuries of philosophical debate and cultural groove-making. Or, in other words, sacred values are man-made and culturally agreed-upon!

This also helpfully explained my blindness (and liberals' collective blindness), as I've found it harder and harder to understand conservative Republicans in the US (especially in the age of Trump). “Why would ANYONE choose to be Republican?” I would often ask myself. I tried listening to the Intelligence Squared podcast debate, Do liberals hold the moral high ground? But even with David Brooks articulating conservative POVs pretty well, I nodded in agreement MUCH more with the liberal side (led by Howard Dean, who made some great points also about the #MeToo movement and current LGBT political issues as a culture-wide renegotiation of gender). But this book! It made me understand! Not only did I better understand WHY some people are conservative (they have the six tastes!), but it helped me understand why I couldn't understand them (liberals are actually worse at understanding conservative viewpoints than vice-versa!).

Another thing I've ALSO often wondered about is, “Why am I a Democrat?” As they say, my earliest memories are of liberal issues. I was a tiny conscientious Democrat at age 10 - reading 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Planet, wearing my “color blind” t-shirt (with cartoon kids of different races holding hands), and participating in Amnesty International letter-writing campaigns to release political prisoners. I mean. I was 13 MAX. WTF was I doing?! My parents, fwiw, were and are not liberals. No one in my family is. SO WHAT HAPPENED?! Where did my political beliefs - which were always so strong - come from!?!

This book even covered that! I was actually most skeptical of this section initially - where experimental psych research demonstrated genetic pre-dispositions, e.g., on threat sensitivity (conservatives are skittish; sorry, conservatives) and novelty seeking (liberals like weird stuff), but especially how initial (formative!) experiences along the 6-taste spectrum can start you on a motivated reasoning/confirmation bias until you find yourself, as an adult, firmly entrenched in a political team. (This also made me super interested in people who switch political teams as adults - e.g. Christopher Hitchens, or this person I met at a book club recently. I'd LOVE to learn more about that journey, since you're changing your in-group!)

Anyway, I would place this book somewhere between Big Gods (which wonderfully explained religion in an evolutionary psych way) and The Unwinding (about America's slow, horrible decline into political polarization). Oh yeah, and I forgot: yes, it really is all Newt Gingrich's fault. SHAME ON YOU, NEWT!!!