By Jonathan Haidt
An Ingenious argument for getting along while discussing religion and politics!
Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a moral psychologist, an atheist and leans toward liberalism. However, in this book, he shows just how deeply he understands religion and conservatism from a moral psychology perspective. He basically argues that we need religious people and atheists; liberals and conservatives (the Democratic party AND the Republican party), like yin needs yang, or like two sides of the same coin! He wants people to learn how to listen to groups that do not agree with them, because we are groupish beings and the only way we can evolve healthily is to work together as groups!
Haidt thoroughly expounds the six moral foundations: care vs harm; fairness vs cheating; loyalty vs betrayal; authority vs subversion; sanctity vs degradation; and liberty vs oppression. He delves into why we evolved this way (in theory) and explains with data that the Republican party uses all of the six moral foundations, while the Democratic party tends toward three of the six and leans more heavily on those three (care, fairness and liberty). He wants to encourage constructive conversation across parties.
He also delves into human beings being 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. In other words we are 90% selfish and individualistic, and 10% groupish. (I don’t know where he got those numbers from or why they are not closer to 50/50.) Bees will die for a cause; for their Queen. Chimps tend to survive in much smaller groups looking out for themselves as individuals more than as a group. Human beings are able to form and sustain much larger groups than chimps—to rally around a cause, worship a god, dance passionately around a fire, have transcendental experiences, form corporations—and even die for a cause, under the right circumstances, like bees!
We need to remember that we are part bee in order to get along, especially when discussing religion and politics. We need to understand each other from this groupish perspective which makes sense of why we are so passionately religious or atheistic, and so sure of our political choices, keeping in mind that we are also part of a larger group: a whole society or country, and even a larger world.
This book will encourage you to broaden your understanding of groupishness/group-think, of religion/atheism, and of various political parties. It will help you understand where human ethics evolved from and why they have headed to where they are now, particularly in American politics. This book is not always limited to American stories and statistics though it predominantly aims to help Americans in the current political climate. As an Australian (living in America) myself, I appreciated that the author has travelled and studied other cultures, and even detailed the difference between “liberal” and “libertarian” which was super helpful for my own understanding of politics in the Western world.
This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it to those who care about politics, religion and ethic in particular.