The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Disagree on Politics and Religion

We had most members of the book club join us for this topical and timely discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind:Why Good People Disagree on Politics and Religion. The book had so many provocative features we jumped around in our discussions, and still covered a lot of ground.

The book is broken into three logical sections, each building on the previous. The first section introduces the elephant and rider metaphor: the rider can influence the direction of the elephant of our emotions, but can’t control them.

The next discussed how political proclivities can be reflected by a combination of measuring personal interest on 6 spectra: Care–Harm; Liberty–Oppression; Fairness–Cheating; Loyalty–Betrayal; Authority–Subversion; and Sanctity–Degradation. Conservatives find all six metrics important; liberals are more influenced by the first three, to the exclusion of the latter three.

Some members were skeptical of the characterizations that make up a "righteous mind", putting human thinking and behavior into these six silos reduces the incredibly complex and infinitely more variable human being onto a chart. But this is the nature of science: you have to measure what you want to quantify.

The final section discussed human groupishness. We are mostly chimps, pursuing self-interests first, but partly bees, a part of a community greater than we can be on our own. These communities can be national (affecting ‘loyalty’ and ‘authority’), as well as groups closer to home. We talked about our own “hives”. All found family to be primary, but other hives included local social hives, professional, and church.

At our book club meeting, one person argued against the Dawkins view that sanctity and religion are mere evolutionary coping mechanisms for establishing a moral order within human society with degradation and suppression often the result. The early Christian church behaved in ways that severely reduced their chance of survival as an institution, based on faith, not to establish a moral order. Another posed the question, "to what degree must you believe the supernatural of the ‘sacred’ in order to have faith as guide in life?" I offered the explanation that it’s the struggle in pondering this question that matters.

Most members agreed that this book helped to understand why different people think differently about the same set of facts. We also talked about the distinction between evolving political positions and 'flip flopping'. Evolution is defensible, but switching based on polls alone deserves the scorn usually heaped on anyone whose political position changes.