THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: WHY GOOD PEOPLE ARE DIVIDED BY POLITICS AND RELIGION

The Righteous Mind is a model of organisation and clarity, divided into three parts beginning with Intuitions Come First, Strategic Reasoning Second. In chapter 1 psychologist Jonathon Haidt asks "Where does morality come from?" Opinion is divided between the nativist answer that it is innate (nature) and the empiricist answer that it is learned and conditioned in childhood (nurture). Culture plays a role also, with western society more attuned to individual rights than "sociocentric cultures" with deeper respect for the community. But here is the punch line: gut feelings drive intellectual reasoning, which is usually "a post hoc fabrication." "We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn [culturally] what…[to]… be righteous about."

Chapter 2, The intuitive dog and its rational tail, is as lucid as the first in highlighting what Ovid called the strange new forces "desire and reason…pulling in opposite directions." Philosophers from Plato to Kant opted for "worshiping reason and distrusting passions" a position that Haidt calls the rationalist delusion [his italics] – "a Pious fantasy" which David Hume knocked off its pedestal with his "philosophically sacrilegious claim that reason …was the servant of passion." This schism is amusingly portrayed in Thomas Jefferson's fictitious dialogue between the head and heart, prompted, some say, by his falling in love with and English beauty, Maria Casway (in Paris of course)! Modern commentators like sociobiologist Edward Wilson and cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker have tended to side with Hume saying that purely rationalist arguments deny their powerful emotive sources. Antonio Damasio underscored this view in what Haidt calls "the emotional nineties" when he showed that damage to certain of the brain's emotional centres did not free patients to enjoy an orderly rational life, rather it left them so unable to function with emotional intelligence that "their lives fell apart." In short, emotion and reason are necessary partners making moral judgment a two-pronged cognitive process. Thus, intuition is the automatic process immediately "seeing that" such a state of affairs exists, whereas reasoning is a secondary process "reasoning why" it should be so. Haidt's simple metaphor is that the reasoning rider rides the intuitive elephant. Describing Dale Carnegie (author of How to win friends and influence people) as the greatest elephant whisperer of all time, Haidt reminds us that one never wins an argument by confrontation or reasoning, only by warmth, being a good listener and seeing the other person's point of view. The nice thing about good psychology is that it is sprinkled with perennial wisdom as in the Buddha's reminder that we "see the faults of others" (we could quote Jesus) but hide our own "as a cunning gambler conceals his dice." Haidt reminds us in Chapter 3 that thinking "is an evolutionarily newer ability, rooted in language" that it is emotion and motivation which really make things happen. [Think of babies who feel but don't reason]. Ultimately this means that we emotional humans are more concerned with reputation than unvarnished truth when it comes to our social survival. Following this excellent foundation, in Chapter 4 (Vote for me. Here's why), we first get into the overtly political domain addressed by the book's subtitle Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Again quoting Plato's brother, Glaucon, Haidt convinces us that "people care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality." That's why politicians (and the public) are obsessed with polls, and why we take refuge in our "in groups" where our reputations are most secure, using our conscious reasoning as a press secretary. By Chapter 5, Beyond WEIRD morality, we are in part II of the book (There's more to morality than harm and fairness). WEIRD stands for White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. This immediately reminds us of all the cultures that are not WEIRD, and not so focused on individual rights, freedom and autonomy. There are other forms of moral truth and other frameworks for "judging people or running a society." So morality is more akin to taste (Chapter 6) and taste receptors recognise loyalty, authority and sanctity, not just fairness and care to avoid harm. With this these five dictums Haidt lays out the moral foundations of politics (Chapter 7) as care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/submission and sanctity/degradation issues. To take just one example: if you consider "one of the greatest unsolved mysteries is how people ever came together to form large cooperative societies …you might take a special interest in the psychology of sacredness. Why do people so readily treat objects (flags, crosses), places (Mecca, a battlefield…), people (saints, heroes) and principles (liberty, fraternity, equality) as though they were of infinite value?" Good question, and we surely know that politicians know how to exploit such "values." If you consider yourself a liberal you are likely strongly wedded to the first two foundations (care and fairness) but consider this: conservatives may have an advantage in being wedded to these two, at least loosely, but also more strongly aligned to the other three (loyalty, authority, sanctity). Haidt has used many polls to plot the relevance liberals and conservatives place on these values. So we come to part III of the book: Morality Binds and Blinds, in which Haidt argues that "morality is the key to understanding humanity" and how "groupishness helped us transcend selfishness." In short, after we evolved from single celled to multi-celled organisms, we began to have shared intentions, and promote group cooperation. Group selection (a much debated issue) became ascendant over individual selection. We are in Haidt's metaphor not only 90% chimp but 10% bee, able to switch to the hive mentality. Emile Durkheim called us Homo duplex – existing at two levels, individual and societal, with the latter able to pull us by "collective effervescence" to a level of group ecstasy and exaltation, thus switching from a profane to a sacred domain. Is it any wonder that religion is a team sport (Chapter 11) and that the religious congregate in "communities.' Haidt dismisses the "New Atheist" community (Dawkins, Dennett et al.,) for their rationalist delusion metaphor that religion is a parasitic meme attacking individual brains. Instead, he says, it was the religious communities that evolved not the individuals and their genes, and in turn, using ritual, solved one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. So to the final chapter which says, perhaps inevitably, that we need to disagree more constructively, fostering both the Yin of liberal wisdom, and the Yang of libertarianism and social conservative wisdom. We should balance the five foundations and be aware (as most of us are) of moral monists. We are not a humanity divided into people who are either good or evil. Rather we are designed for groupish righteousness, "deeply intuitive" creatures (elephants) whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning.