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A review by lpm100
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
challenging
informative
medium-paced
5.0
Book Review
The Righteous Mind
5/5 stars
"Thought-provoking words from intellectual practical conservative"
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters
-315 pages of prose, 26.25 pps/chapter
-663 point citations; ≈2.1/page
-≈504 references in Bibliography
-excellent index
It's a good thing that I'm one of those people that believes in finishing a book, because I would have to say that the most interesting chapters came in Part 3 of the book.
My last few books on Evolutionary Psychology had really shattered my faith in the field, but this book helped me renew it
Many pop psychology books quote the same experiments and make the same observations, just in different orders and with different emphases. So, if you had facts A/b/C(!) in the first book, then the second one might have c/B(!)/a, and bingo!
You've got a new book!
For Parts I&II, there is overlap in that way.
Also, as par for the course:
1. Plenty of experiments that illustrate some point in an interesting way, but that may have zero external validity (p.181);
2. Lots of data is gathered by survey, and the first page of any Statistics book is that surveys are not reliable data because of self-selection.
Author talks about these effects and he doesn't bother to quantify (not in a single one of these 663 point citations that make up the book). Does this effect make people 1% more likely to do something? 50%? 200%?
And, even given that, if the values are statistically significant, are they practically significant?
*******
The takeaway messages that I get from this book are that:
1. The human tribalism (Democrats v. Republicans / Confucianists v. Legalists/etc) is something like a side effect gone awry of the evolutionary benefits of living in tribes.
2. Similarly to the way that knowing that human beings have five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami) doesn't allow you to work forward to predict Indian/Chinese/etc cuisine..... knowing that you can break people's moral foundations down onto 6 axes is really just so much stamp collecting that doesn't tell you what moral position they may take. But you can always offer enough ex post facto explanations to make you happy.
And it seems to be a special case that shows up generally in the field of Evolutionary Psychology: you can explain anything you want, but going forward and making predictions is another kettle of fish entirely (hence my boredom with books on this field).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. When Einstein came up with special relativity, I think he went on record as saying that all of the pieces were already there and it was just a matter of time before somebody put them together. And that he was fortuitously that someone.
I am reading in a variety of books over and over again that:
a. (p.213) Phenotype can correspond to other intellectual structures just by accident. If foxes bred for tameness can have white patches of fur and curly tails after 9 generations....... Then why couldn't it be that lower IQ, criminal impulses, and short time horizons correspond to African phenotypes?
b. (p.214) Group selection really is/can be a thing. If individual selection is not the best way to create chickens that lay the most eggs, but instead selecting *groups* of chickens that produce the most eggs..... Couldn't it be that there is group selection on certain races of people? (Say, ones that were bred on plantations? Or ones that spent centuries in European ghettos before the Jewish Emancipation?)
The human genome is very cheap to sequence in its entirety for any given human being.
All the tools are there to bring us to some extremely uncomfortable conclusions about race in the United States (as well as elsewhere).
2. This book answers a lot of my questions about my religious journey in the past 10 years (into Orthodox Judaism). People in these communities don't behave religiously with respect to interpersonal interactions-- although they might never think of consuming cholov stam dairy. But, someone would be a fool to think that this religion was useful in that way; this version of Judaism is primarily about the community relations of an ETHNICITY of people. Providence and Jewish law play only a supporting/secondary/optional role to that.
3. (p.305). It is ironic that liberals accept Darwinian evolution and reject intelligent design with respect to Biology. But, they reject natural evolution with respect to allowing markets to generate services and putting their faith in intelligent design by the government.
4. Maybe these observations are just so much trivia. Ultimately, societies die and it's just the nature of the thing: it's not like some voice of reason can convince us to disagree more constructively. In the same way that even if you convince a patient to eat healthy every day of his life, he will still die. So, too, for societies.
*******
Otherwise, the book has a lot of resonances to ones that were written MANY years ago that I myself have read:
1. Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." System 1 and System 2.
2. Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink." Visceral reactions to things based on System 1 evaluations.
3. Jonah Lehrer', "How We Decide." Emotion and reason do not operate on two separate tracks.
4. Chabris and Simons,"The Invisible Gorilla." Different types of mind blindness when engaged in tasks.
5. Richard Nisbett, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why." Self-explanatory.
6. Cochran/Harpending "The 10,000 Year Explosion." Human evolution has accelerated exponentially in the last 10,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution.
7. Michael Shermer "The Believing Brain." The human brain as a hair trigger detection device heavily weighted toward false positives. Religion is the ultimate creation/attribution of agency to explain random events.
8. Thomas Sowell "A Conflict of Visions." Human beings have either a "constrained" or "unconstrained" vision of reality.
9. Thomas Sowell "Race and Culture." He brings up the concept of cultural capital, which.
This particular book adds the least value for people who are regular readers of books that talk about human perception (like the present reviewer) and the most value in its expansion on the interface between genes, environment and civilization.
*******
Many of these experiments I've read in other books.
1. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex injury In decision-making.
2. Julie and Mark are the brother and sister who decided to experience sex (along with several other "harmless taboo" stories).
3. The horse and rider metaphor to illustrate the conflict between reason and emotion.
4. Affect primacy. Affective priming. (And that funnels into "implicit bias."). First principle of moral psychology: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
5. Necker cube. Muller-Lyer illusion.
Verdict: Recommended at more than the price of $10. It's a keeper.
Good quotes
- (p.75) "The social world is Glauconian. Appearance is usually far more important than reality."
-(p.216) "....74,000 years ago.... We know that almost all humans were killed off at some point during this time... every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks."
-(p.257) "...in other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship."
-(xii) "People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.... This is one of those books."
-(p.272) "If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it. ... But if you take a Durkheimian and Darwinian approach to morality, you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years."
-(p.207) "....a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things."
Chapter Synopses:
1. Attempts to determine whether or not morality is innate, rational (self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm), or empirical (from childhood learning).
2. (Has the perfume of Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" about it.) Who is in control here? The heart or the head? Attempts to disambiguate between three competing theories. Sociobiology is renamed as "evolutionary psychology." Yes, we know that decisions are an emotion before they are a reason. Judgement≠justification.
3. Expansion of the first half of the concept that: Intuitions come first. Strategic reasoning second. Time can temper the preference for intuitive reasoning over strategic reasoning. (Everyone has been told to "sleep on it.")
4. Expansion of the second half of the fact that intuitions come first strategic reasoning second.
Part II
5. Western (autonomous) morality versus Eastern (sociopentric) morality. Ethics of: autonomy, community, divinity. Very much a recapitulation of the Nisbett book.
6. Restatement of the second principle of moral psychology: there's more to morality than harm and fairness. First approximation is that there is: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
7. (The extremely bizarre case of Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes.) And innateness is defined as: "Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises..... Built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." Sacredness and disgust are codependent (because something can only be discussing the further you take it from sacredness)
8. Author goes into debunking group selection, and he suggests that altruism, tribalism and cooperativeness are vestigial qualities from the time that human beings really did live in small bands where everyone was related.
Part III
9. Some furtive attempts at squaring the circle of sociobiology/eusociality between colonial insects and that of human beings. Maybe the key to group selection is a shared defensible nest, which is allowed because shared intentionality allows human beings to "construct nests that are vast and ornate, yet weightless and portable" (=metaphor for human society). Upshot: i. Major transitions produce superorganisms; ii. Shared intentionality generates moral matrices; iii. Genes and cultures coevolve; iv. Evolution can be fast.
10. "The hive hypothesis." Human being is 90% chimp and 10% bee. Under certain conditions (think of goose-stepping military units/ people having an ecstatic religious experience/ Haredim all dressed like a bunch of penguins).
11. A more nuanced and expansive look at religion--especially as a way to put to bed some of the screechiness of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists (Dawkins/ Dennett/Harris Hitchens). It is something a lot more complicated than just believing in a god/gods. (p.267): "The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people."
12. Further good thoughts about the codependency of liberal/conservative schools of thought (yin and yang). Brief discussion of good points from either side. Restatement of the 6 philosophical underpinnings of both schools of thought. Diversity is not a categorically good thing. It is a very good way to reduce social capital.
Vocabulary:
consilience
moral matrix
moral entropy
bonding capital
bridging capital
Prophet Mani (and Manicheanism)
moral monist
multilevel selection
The Righteous Mind
5/5 stars
"Thought-provoking words from intellectual practical conservative"
*******
Of the book:
-12 chapters
-315 pages of prose, 26.25 pps/chapter
-663 point citations; ≈2.1/page
-≈504 references in Bibliography
-excellent index
It's a good thing that I'm one of those people that believes in finishing a book, because I would have to say that the most interesting chapters came in Part 3 of the book.
My last few books on Evolutionary Psychology had really shattered my faith in the field, but this book helped me renew it
Many pop psychology books quote the same experiments and make the same observations, just in different orders and with different emphases. So, if you had facts A/b/C(!) in the first book, then the second one might have c/B(!)/a, and bingo!
You've got a new book!
For Parts I&II, there is overlap in that way.
Also, as par for the course:
1. Plenty of experiments that illustrate some point in an interesting way, but that may have zero external validity (p.181);
2. Lots of data is gathered by survey, and the first page of any Statistics book is that surveys are not reliable data because of self-selection.
Author talks about these effects and he doesn't bother to quantify (not in a single one of these 663 point citations that make up the book). Does this effect make people 1% more likely to do something? 50%? 200%?
And, even given that, if the values are statistically significant, are they practically significant?
*******
The takeaway messages that I get from this book are that:
1. The human tribalism (Democrats v. Republicans / Confucianists v. Legalists/etc) is something like a side effect gone awry of the evolutionary benefits of living in tribes.
2. Similarly to the way that knowing that human beings have five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami) doesn't allow you to work forward to predict Indian/Chinese/etc cuisine..... knowing that you can break people's moral foundations down onto 6 axes is really just so much stamp collecting that doesn't tell you what moral position they may take. But you can always offer enough ex post facto explanations to make you happy.
And it seems to be a special case that shows up generally in the field of Evolutionary Psychology: you can explain anything you want, but going forward and making predictions is another kettle of fish entirely (hence my boredom with books on this field).
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. When Einstein came up with special relativity, I think he went on record as saying that all of the pieces were already there and it was just a matter of time before somebody put them together. And that he was fortuitously that someone.
I am reading in a variety of books over and over again that:
a. (p.213) Phenotype can correspond to other intellectual structures just by accident. If foxes bred for tameness can have white patches of fur and curly tails after 9 generations....... Then why couldn't it be that lower IQ, criminal impulses, and short time horizons correspond to African phenotypes?
b. (p.214) Group selection really is/can be a thing. If individual selection is not the best way to create chickens that lay the most eggs, but instead selecting *groups* of chickens that produce the most eggs..... Couldn't it be that there is group selection on certain races of people? (Say, ones that were bred on plantations? Or ones that spent centuries in European ghettos before the Jewish Emancipation?)
The human genome is very cheap to sequence in its entirety for any given human being.
All the tools are there to bring us to some extremely uncomfortable conclusions about race in the United States (as well as elsewhere).
2. This book answers a lot of my questions about my religious journey in the past 10 years (into Orthodox Judaism). People in these communities don't behave religiously with respect to interpersonal interactions-- although they might never think of consuming cholov stam dairy. But, someone would be a fool to think that this religion was useful in that way; this version of Judaism is primarily about the community relations of an ETHNICITY of people. Providence and Jewish law play only a supporting/secondary/optional role to that.
3. (p.305). It is ironic that liberals accept Darwinian evolution and reject intelligent design with respect to Biology. But, they reject natural evolution with respect to allowing markets to generate services and putting their faith in intelligent design by the government.
4. Maybe these observations are just so much trivia. Ultimately, societies die and it's just the nature of the thing: it's not like some voice of reason can convince us to disagree more constructively. In the same way that even if you convince a patient to eat healthy every day of his life, he will still die. So, too, for societies.
*******
Otherwise, the book has a lot of resonances to ones that were written MANY years ago that I myself have read:
1. Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow." System 1 and System 2.
2. Malcolm Gladwell, "Blink." Visceral reactions to things based on System 1 evaluations.
3. Jonah Lehrer', "How We Decide." Emotion and reason do not operate on two separate tracks.
4. Chabris and Simons,"The Invisible Gorilla." Different types of mind blindness when engaged in tasks.
5. Richard Nisbett, "The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why." Self-explanatory.
6. Cochran/Harpending "The 10,000 Year Explosion." Human evolution has accelerated exponentially in the last 10,000 years. Gene-culture coevolution.
7. Michael Shermer "The Believing Brain." The human brain as a hair trigger detection device heavily weighted toward false positives. Religion is the ultimate creation/attribution of agency to explain random events.
8. Thomas Sowell "A Conflict of Visions." Human beings have either a "constrained" or "unconstrained" vision of reality.
9. Thomas Sowell "Race and Culture." He brings up the concept of cultural capital, which.
This particular book adds the least value for people who are regular readers of books that talk about human perception (like the present reviewer) and the most value in its expansion on the interface between genes, environment and civilization.
*******
Many of these experiments I've read in other books.
1. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex injury In decision-making.
2. Julie and Mark are the brother and sister who decided to experience sex (along with several other "harmless taboo" stories).
3. The horse and rider metaphor to illustrate the conflict between reason and emotion.
4. Affect primacy. Affective priming. (And that funnels into "implicit bias."). First principle of moral psychology: intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
5. Necker cube. Muller-Lyer illusion.
Verdict: Recommended at more than the price of $10. It's a keeper.
Good quotes
- (p.75) "The social world is Glauconian. Appearance is usually far more important than reality."
-(p.216) "....74,000 years ago.... We know that almost all humans were killed off at some point during this time... every person alive today is descended from just a few thousand people who made it through one or more population bottlenecks."
-(p.257) "...in other words, the very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship."
-(xii) "People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.... This is one of those books."
-(p.272) "If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you're bound to misunderstand it. ... But if you take a Durkheimian and Darwinian approach to morality, you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years."
-(p.207) "....a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things."
Chapter Synopses:
1. Attempts to determine whether or not morality is innate, rational (self-constructed by children on the basis of their experiences with harm), or empirical (from childhood learning).
2. (Has the perfume of Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide" about it.) Who is in control here? The heart or the head? Attempts to disambiguate between three competing theories. Sociobiology is renamed as "evolutionary psychology." Yes, we know that decisions are an emotion before they are a reason. Judgement≠justification.
3. Expansion of the first half of the concept that: Intuitions come first. Strategic reasoning second. Time can temper the preference for intuitive reasoning over strategic reasoning. (Everyone has been told to "sleep on it.")
4. Expansion of the second half of the fact that intuitions come first strategic reasoning second.
Part II
5. Western (autonomous) morality versus Eastern (sociopentric) morality. Ethics of: autonomy, community, divinity. Very much a recapitulation of the Nisbett book.
6. Restatement of the second principle of moral psychology: there's more to morality than harm and fairness. First approximation is that there is: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
7. (The extremely bizarre case of Armin Meiwes and Bernd Brandes.) And innateness is defined as: "Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises..... Built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." Sacredness and disgust are codependent (because something can only be discussing the further you take it from sacredness)
8. Author goes into debunking group selection, and he suggests that altruism, tribalism and cooperativeness are vestigial qualities from the time that human beings really did live in small bands where everyone was related.
Part III
9. Some furtive attempts at squaring the circle of sociobiology/eusociality between colonial insects and that of human beings. Maybe the key to group selection is a shared defensible nest, which is allowed because shared intentionality allows human beings to "construct nests that are vast and ornate, yet weightless and portable" (=metaphor for human society). Upshot: i. Major transitions produce superorganisms; ii. Shared intentionality generates moral matrices; iii. Genes and cultures coevolve; iv. Evolution can be fast.
10. "The hive hypothesis." Human being is 90% chimp and 10% bee. Under certain conditions (think of goose-stepping military units/ people having an ecstatic religious experience/ Haredim all dressed like a bunch of penguins).
11. A more nuanced and expansive look at religion--especially as a way to put to bed some of the screechiness of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists (Dawkins/ Dennett/Harris Hitchens). It is something a lot more complicated than just believing in a god/gods. (p.267): "The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It's the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people."
12. Further good thoughts about the codependency of liberal/conservative schools of thought (yin and yang). Brief discussion of good points from either side. Restatement of the 6 philosophical underpinnings of both schools of thought. Diversity is not a categorically good thing. It is a very good way to reduce social capital.
Vocabulary:
consilience
moral matrix
moral entropy
bonding capital
bridging capital
Prophet Mani (and Manicheanism)
moral monist
multilevel selection