Finally got around to completing Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. Not a review, but some snippets. More as a record for reference. I had blogged earlier here and here.
Mind is not a black slate at birth. Haidt quotes Gary Marcus
The initial organisation of the brain does not rely that much on experience... Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises... Built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organised in advance of experience.
There are six foundational elements/dimensions of morality (or six systems of moral intuition)
1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating or reciprocity/cheating
3. In-group loyalty/betrayal
4.Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation
6. Liberty/oppression
However, in their moral calculus, while conservatives use all six elements, liberals use only three - the first two, and the last element above. Therefore in any society the moral differences are about loyalty, authority, and sanctity (or purity).
This is what the Zen teacher Seng-Ts'an said,
If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.
Liberals crave for openness and new experiences. Conservatives are exactly the opposite. Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing views. Closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views.
Social Entropy - order tends to decay over time
Our righteous minds were designed to
- Unite us into teams
- Divide us against other teams
- Blind us to the truth
We cannot go about our work in the world with the attitude that we are right and they are wrong, because everyone thinks they are right and the others are wrong. So to engage successfully with the world, we need to get out of the morality matrix or our self-righteousness.
Eastern religions avoid the binary view of the world. Instead, it talks about the co-existence of opposites - the Yin-Yang, Shiva-Vishnu-Brahma trinity etc.
Some takeaways from an interview with RSA:
1. Democracies suffer from atleast two problems. One, they create factions. Two, they promote short-sightedness. The Federalist Papers number 10 discusses how factions are bothered only about defeating each other, don't care about the social good, and can kill democracies.
The leaders in democracies face skewed incentives. They have little incentive to engage with problems which are likely to manifest only years ahead. Politicians are not rewarded for spending money for the future!
This problem cannot be fixed with electorate's education and literacy, but can be fixed only with institutions and policies. We need a system where political leaders should be explicitly mandated to solve long-term problems. One where the government's main job is framed as that of risk protection, to put in place the money and talent for contingencies which are unlikely to ever materialise.
2. Social media is a threat to democracy, in so far as it amplifies democracies' weaknesses more than it amplifies its strengths. Social media has emerged as an "outrage media", a wild-west where outrageous lies travels much faster than robust truths. Social media amplifies the trend that Mark Twain pointed to, "Bad news travels around the world by the time good news puts its boots on!"
3. Even before the age of social media, the importance of story-telling or narrative was well known. People connect with narratives and stories. Social media helps people package ideas around narratives and disseminate far and wide. Further the nature of the platform allows fringe theories to easily get propagated and gain traction.
Haidt refers to 2009-12 as the period when the Tower of Babel fell. God said, "Let's go down and confound their language so that they don't understand each other".
Human reasoning does not take place in a logical world based on facts, instead it takes place in an emotional world based on stories. We don't write them. But we imbibe these stories. We may not be even able to tell them. When we hear a story which sounds familiar, we tag it as true.
4. There is a need to recapture the digital public square in the age of social media. Nobody can get away by throwing acid or stabbing people in a public square. But in case of social media, people hurl the vilest abuses and use despicable language and do that repeatedly at virtually no cost. There is a massive negative externality problem.
There is a need to have some kind of identity verification. Nobody should be allowed to create hundreds of fake identities and go about disseminating abuses and falsehoods. No democracy can survive with such a platform.
5. The conventional left-right divide has been transforming into a globalist-nationalist divide. The globalists are knowledge workers who favour openness. The nationalists are rural, real economy workers and more parochial.
The problem is amplified by the fact that the universities and the mainstream media are dominated by globalists. These thought leaders and opinion makers show contempt for the nationalists and consider them stupid. Some among these thought leaders are experts.
What makes it even worse is that experts often get it wrong. This is understandable given that on public issues there are rarely any right answers or solutions. But experts don't have the epistemological humility to acknowledge their limitations. We should follow the experts, but only as an input into the decision-making process.
6. The distinction between idealism and signalling. On issues, most people engage on social media platforms less for reasons of idealism and more for reasons of signalling to their audiences their support for that issue. They do it out of some form of a duty to be supporting their group, an in-group loyalty.
In such cases, activists cannot win over their opponents through anger. Anger only reinforces the us Vs them mentality and widens the alienation. Examples from history show that activists who have succeeded have been those who have appealed to people's nobler instincts with messages of love and inclusion, and not by spewing anger and demonising the opponents.
7. The fragility of the Generation Z. They are not adequately prepared for democracy. They are too much protected.
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