Why do people in practically all parts of the world find it so hard to get along? Why, for God’s sake, won’t the other side listen to reason?
In a new book,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Allen Lane, 448 pages), the highly influential American psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that it’s because human beings were not designed to listen to reason. Drawing on the findings of ethnography and evolutionary theory as well as from his own research in experimental psychology, Haidt has established from people’s answers to moral questions and from their brain activation patterns that people reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve already decided.
Haidt explains in his widely acclaimed book that the problem isn’t that people don’t reason—it’s just that their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not that of their adversaries. He says that reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding people to wisdom, but more like lawyers or press secretaries who justify their client’s acts and judgments to others. This is why politics and religion are two of the most vexing and divisive topics in human life, he says.
“My goal in this book,” Haidt explains, “is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity. We are downright lucky that we evolved [our] complex moral psychology that allowed our species to burst out of the forests and savannas and into the delights, comforts, and extraordinary peacefulness of modern societies in just a few thousand years. My hope is that this book will make conversations about morality, politics, and religion more common, more civil, and more fun, even in mixed company.”
Read an excerpt from Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind in the Moyers & Company website!Read an interview of Jonathan Haidt by Bill Moyers on the contentious culture of the United StatesRead William Saletan’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind in The New York Times!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jonathan Haidt is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a visiting professor of business ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and his research focuses on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures and political ideology. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001 and is the author of
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, a book that examines ten “great ideas” dating from antiquity and their continued relevance to the happy life.
OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:In “Reconsiderations,” an essay adapted from his introduction to the forthcoming third edition of the
Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, linguist Ben Zimmer pays homage to Peter Mark Roget’s classic
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in the face of the literary cliché that bashes the thesaurus as a book that’s best left alone. “No matter how tempting the metaphor, though, words are not people,” says Zimmer. “We cannot run genetic tests on them to determine their degrees of kinship, and a thesaurus is not a pedigree chart. We can, nonetheless, look to it as a guidebook to help us travel around the semantic space of our shared lexicon, grasping both the similarities that bond words together and the nuances that differentiate them.”
Read Ben Zimmer’s “Reconsiderations,” in Lapham’s Quarterly now!
In “How to have a conversation,” an article that came out in the March 9, 2012 issue of the
Financial Times Magazine, its executive comment editor John McDermott ponders how people can be taught to talk to each other again now that conversation has become a dying art, struck down by text, e-mail, and messaging. “What makes a good conversationalist has changed little over the years,” McDermott says. “The basics remain the same as when Cicero became the first scholar to write down some rules…: “Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.”
Read John McDermott’s “How to have a conversation” in the Financial Times Magazine now!
