Book Review: The Righteous Mind

Context

This book helps explain the fundamentally moral, intuitive, emotional, biased and unconscious nature of humans dealing with politics. Existing evidence indicates that our minds are basically “narrowly moralistic and intolerant” when dealing with political matters. Political issues are now routinely weaponized by moralizing them. This tends to reduce conscious reasoning and gives more control to our far more powerful unconscious minds. That tends to make politics more irrational than if issues had not been weaponized. The matter of morality in politics, how to think about it and how to deal with it is arguably urgent and rapidly becoming more important.

Book review

Johnathan Haidt’s 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, argues that politics is largely a matter of moral thinking and judgment, most of which (~99%) is unconscious for most people most of the time. 2012 Haidt is a social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He wrote The Righteous Mind to “at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.” He explains: “My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with awe, wonder, and curiosity.”

Given the increasing rancor in American politics since Haidt wrote in 2012, it appears that his goal is not being met. In view of America’s increasing political polarization, Haidt clearly has his work cut out for him.

To find answers, Haidt focuses on the inherent moralistic, self-righteous nature of human cognition and thinking about politics and religion. Through the ages, there were three basic conceptions of the roles of reason (conscious reasoning) and passion (unconscious intuition, emotion, morality, bias, self identity, tribe identity, etc.) in human thinking and behavior. Plato (~428-348 BC) argued that reason dominated in intellectual elites called “philosophers”, but that average people were mostly controlled by their passions. David Hume (1711-1776) argued that reason or conscious thinking was nothing more than a slave to human passions. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) argued that reason and passions were about equal in their influence.

According to Haidt, the debate is over: “Hume was right. The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. . . . . intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first.”

Our intuitive (unconscious) morals and judgments tend to be more subjective, personal and emotional than objective and rational (conscious). Haidt points out that we are designed by evolution to be “narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” That leads to self-righteousness and the associated hostility and distrust of other points of views that the trait generates. Regarding the divisiveness of politics, Haidt asserts that “our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife.”

Our unconscious “moral intuitions (i.e., judgments) arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.” Initial intuitions driving later reasoning exemplifies some of our many unconscious cognitive biases, e.g., ideologically-based motivated reasoning, which distorts both facts we become aware of and the common sense we apply to the reality we think we see.

The book’s central metaphor “is that the mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”

Haidt observes that there are two different sets of morals and rhetorical styles that tend to characterize liberals and conservatives: “Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory.”

The problem: On reading The Righteous Mind, the depth and breadth of problem for politics becomes uncomfortably clear for anyone hoping to ever find a way to at least partially rationalize politics. Haidt sums it up nicely: “Western philosophy has been worshiping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. . . . I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality, and at some point somebody comes along to knock the idol off its pedestal. . . . . We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. . . . . The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. . . . . We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”

In other words, conscious reason (the rider) serves unconscious intuition and that’s the powerful but intolerant and moralistic beast that Haidt calls the elephant.

Two additional observations merit mention. First, Haidt points out that “traits can be innate without being hardwired or universal. The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth . . . . But not a single chapter . . . . consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. . . . Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. . . . . ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”

Second, Haidt asserts that Hume “went too far” by arguing that reason is merely a “slave” of the passions. He argues that although intuition dominates, it is “neither dumb nor despotic” and it “can be shaped by reasoning.” He likens the situation as one of a lawyer (the rider) and a client (the elephant). Sometimes the lawyer can talk the client out of doing something dumb, sometimes not. The elephant may be a big, powerful beast, but it’s not stupid and it can learn. Haidt’s assertion that we “will always be cursed by moralistic strife” is his personal moral judgment that our intuitive, righteous nature is a curse, not a blessing or a source of wisdom. In this regard, his instinct is closer to Plato’s moral judgment about how things ought to be than Hume or Jefferson. Or, at least that’s how I read it.

Questions: Does Haidt’s portrayal of the interplay between unconscious intuition and morals and conscious reason seem reasonable? Is it possible that a society can partly tame the elephant and shift some mental power to the rider in hopes of at least partially rationalizing politics compared to what it is now?

Original Biopolitics and Bionews post: August 29, 2016; DP posts: 3/16/19, 4/9/20