Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Jonathan Haidt - The Righteous Mind
For national book lover's day, I give you my most beloved book.
Like moral reasoning itself, The Righteous Mind is as simple as it is complicated.
Simple, because it covers what we already know to be true to be less divisive: We must find common ground, understand our beliefs are not founded in logic, and recognize the confirmation bias we each use to prove our beliefs to ourselves.
Complicated because the psychological and anthropological depth Haidt reaches to break down how our religious and political beliefs are built and entrenched atop an initial emotional reaction anchored early in life. It's the classical system 1 & 2 thinking of how our brains make us decide before we can decide.
Morality has never favored correctness on the evolutionary scale. It's favored conviction. Over here in the WEIRD world we see morality one way whereas in more collectivistic cultures the scale seems alien.
Like all things, morality can be measured on a matrix, valanced particularly on care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.
The moral matrix helps explain the partisan political imbalance. The more liberal are higher on care and fairness while lower on loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The more conservative are more standard and across the board about the six morals. That liberals sacralize equality while conservatives sacralize liberty partially explains our nation's unmendable rift.
We are conditional hive creatures, mirroring and empathizing with others only when they conform to our moral matrix than when violating it.
Religion on the other hand is a result of a brain fine-tuned for threat detection, seeing ourselves in nature to such a degree that over thousands of years, several species-level revolutions and dozens of iterations how we've evolved from animists to idolatrists to polytheists to monolatrists to monotheists. Genes favor group cohesion, group cohesion is bolstered by accountability, and before the world was understood, accountability - and by the same token morality - was best moderated via existence of a punitive deity.
Right your mind with The Righteous Mind.