The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics by Jonathan Haidt

The subtitle of the book is a hint that this is about something that I believe it is not about--it is not about how religion or politics divide us. It is about how conservatives and liberals have different values--which makes sense, right! But how so?

Jonathan Haidt  studies  morality and emotion, and how they vary across cultures. He is also active in positive psychology (the scientific study of human flourishing) and study positive emotions such as  admiration and awe. His research focuses on the moral foundations of politics, and on ways to transcend the politics within politics using principles of moral psychology to think of ways to foster more civility and compromise within politics. Morality, by its very nature, makes it hard to study morality. It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups.

The book describes the 5 moral underpinnings of moral judgments, and finds that progressives and conservatives vary in significant ways in how they value each of the factors. The theory, in brief, is that there are 5 "innate psychological systems form the foundation of intuitive ethics" across all cultures, and that one's political affiliation (conservative vs. liberal) is largely determined by an individual's ranking of the relative importance of each of those systems.

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These systems are:

1. Harm/Care
2. Fairness/Reciprocity
3. Ingroup/Loyalty
4. Authority/Respect
5. Purity/Sanctity

Haidt's observation has been that those who self-identify as liberal tend to value the first two (care, fairness) higher than the other three, while self-identified conservatives place a higher value on the last three. Both liberals and conservatives assign "care" the highest value, but conservatives tend to value "fairness" the lowest while liberals tend to value "purity" the lowest.   Finally, there is a pretty big difference between how conservatives and liberals operationalize the ‘fairness’ pillar when it comes to politics.

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So all of this is very interesting, but the thing that Haidt says about how to fix it is really similar to how you fix rams that are head butting each other—you put them in close quarters with each other and that makes them have to get along.  He argues that when Newt Gingrich became the House Speaker, he changed the way they conducted business in a serious way.  He essentially shortened the voting week to three days, which discouraged House members from moving to Washington DC with their families—so they no longer socialize as couples or families with each other.  They essentially have no contact with each other—they even travel to and from their offices to Congress on different trains—there is a Democratic train and a Republican one.  So they have no opportunity to interact with each other, much less negotiate much needed compromise.  It is no longer a two party system.  It is one party or the other.  And until that is fixed, or we have only one party in power, Haidt hypothesizes that the whole system will remain broken.  This is a very thought-provoking book that I kept in my mind for days after I finished it.