In my research for my Historical novel, my first true attempt to write a novel, which I confess I have yet to share because I have yet to gather up the courage to do so. After all, I am highly concerned that it may not be worth sharing--I need to polish it much much more. I found this article from the American History Magazine, which I would like to share.
American History Interviews Psychologist Jonathan Haidt
By Stephen L. Petranek
Jonathan Haidt (pronounced "height") spent 16 years as a professor
at the University of Virginia studying morality, emotions, happiness,
awe and virtue. He recently became the Thomas Cooley Professor of
Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Haidt uses moral psychology to understand America's extreme partisanship
and polarization. His latest book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is a New York Times
best seller. He argues that humans can "respect, and even learn from
those whose morality differs from our own," as a positive leap towards
reducing animosity and divisions in society.
Why do you argue we'll stay polarized as a society until we try to understand the opposing side's moral point of view?
If you have only your own morality to go on, and that morality is shared
by the people around you, you'll be certain that you are right. Moral
claims come to feel as objectively true as the claims of physics and
math. It's really hard to step out of your "moral matrix." (I use the
term "matrix" as in the movie, The Matrix, which is about
consensual hallucination.) Moral psychology, anthropology and history
can all help people see that their particular morality is just one
branch of a large tree with other branches. Knowing that can open the
way to understanding and even respecting those who differ from us.
This is where my temper is as much as a 'problem', which I am back to working on. Unfortunately, with this menopause, I confess, my temper management has become very complicated, indeed.
How can one find out about another person's morality?
You could go live among another group, but I believe it is possible to
do it just by reading. I went through about a year where I was obsessed
by Roman history. It came about because I was taking a car trip and I
looked in the library for books on tape, and they had Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It was like listening to a soap opera. The stories were so fascinating
that I just started reading everything I could. This is not equivalent
to living in ancient Rome for a year, but a good historian, like a good
novelist, can help us see and feel what it would be like to live in a
different era, a different moral matrix.
Which I have found can be highly complicated, if not down right impossible. After all, all to often when you are asking a person questions about what they believe. They answer you as if you are questioning their beliefs, so instead of answering your question--They start telling you what you should believe.
What determines our politics? How do we become liberal, conservative or libertarian?
For most people, their environment plays a larger role than their genes.
So for example, if you raise someone in central Wyoming instead of
Greenwich Village, that is going to explain a lot more about their adult
personality than their heritable temperament. But for people who
inherit a temperament that is very high on a trait called "openness to
experience," they are going to find themselves more attracted to liberal
ideas. Political ideology turns out to be as heritable as most other
personality traits—about a third of the variance among people result
from genetics.
Good question, Excellent question--his theory sounds interesting.
Why do people join movements?
Politics is more like religion than it is like shopping, and I think
that Democrats have not understood that as well as Republicans. Morality
binds and blinds people. Republicans since Reagan have had a clear and
emotionally compelling narrative about American history that starts with
the founding fathers and individual liberty, the near loss of liberty
to the creeping welfare-liberal-nanny state, and the heroic restoration
of freedom and capitalism courtesy of the Republican Party. The
Democrats have tended to talk too much about specific programs such as
Social Security, student loans and Medicare. It's not clear how these
programs connect back to the long arc of American history, or how they
tell a story about who we are and where we're going.
Personally, I am a firm believer that people join movements, because we Humans are Social Animals, some more Social than other. Personally, I tend to be more private than social.
So government intervention to promote racial and gender equality was doomed to create a backlash?
Distrust of centralized power is one of the oldest, most important
sensibilities in our history. The idea that the federal government
should only be used as a last resort is a very deep, very American idea.
But the Southern states had failed spectacularly to address the civil
rights problems, so a federal response became necessary. But I think the
left drew too strong a lesson from it, that the federal government can
and should be used as a first resort to address many other issues, from
abortion to gay rights. Once the federal government is seen as an
instrument wielded by one side, the other side is going to hate it and
distrust it and want to starve it. This, I think, is the back story to
the Tea Party revolt of 2009. It's a blend of libertarians and social
conservatives, but they make common cause in their long-simmering anger
at what they see as an overgrown federal government that has too often
been used to advance liberal policies like affirmative action and
environmental regulations.
I guess this is the Problem that we are facing with the Environment. After all, the question becomes without Government involvement--Will or Can the Environment become a priority, when there is so much money to be made by continuing to pollute??? If we wait and use Government intervention as a last resort--we might wait until it is too late.
As a self-professed liberal, what did you learn to like about conservatism as you researched the book?
The great insight that I've gotten from conservatism is the need for
constraint, structure and order. Liberals generally resonate to John
Lennon's song "Imagine" ("Imagine there's no countries / it isn't hard
to do / nothing to kill or die for / and no religion too / Imagine all
the people / living life in peace"). But conservatives since Edmund
Burke argue that knocking down all the constraints and traditions will
get you anarchy, not bliss. It's no coincidence that having children
makes people more conservative. Imposing structure, order and clear
consequences has a miraculous effect on the behavior of young children,
whereas reasoning with them, yelling at them or threatening them has
much less effect. That's why I say in the book that I think the great
blind spot of the left is what I call moral capital. You can't create a
society just by fostering more love, trust and empathy. You've got to
build morality into the surrounding institutions, laws and norms. And if
you understand the other side better, you'll tone down the demonizing.
Personally, This is where we Need Both the Conservative and the Liberal. After all, we do need some constraint and tradition, but not all constraint and tradition or else we would still be riding around in horse pulled carriages writing on only paper. Change is growth, without some changes, there would be no growth--yet there is a certain comfort to be found in continuing certain traditions--most especially Holiday Traditions.
How does religion help and hurt American politics?
In the book I argue that religion is a part of our evolutionary
heritage. We evolved minds prone to religiosity because religious groups
were more effective in competition with other groups. That doesn't
necessarily mean war; it means the ability to create a moral community
within which people can trust each other, suppress free-riders and reap
the benefits of cooperation. Research by the anthropologist Richard
Sosis shows that 19th-century American communes organized along
religious lines lasted much longer than communes founded along secular
(usually socialist) principles. Only 6 percent of the secular communes
lasted 20 years, compared to 39 percent of the religious communes.
Religion, like morality, binds people together, but in the process it
blinds them to evidence and arguments that contradict their sacred values. I would just
add that ideologies work like religions. Communism, capitalism,
deconstructionism, egalitarianism, any set of beliefs that is used to
bind people together into a team, to fight other teams, is going to lead
to blindness, intransigence and polarized beliefs.
Personally, I am a firm believer that Religion is being more harmed by politics than visa versa.
Moral Foundations Theory
Haidt is best known for what he dubs "Moral Foundations Theory", which has been reported in publications such as The Atlantic,[4] Boston Globe,[5] and The Huffington Post.[6] It is the basis of his first TED talk.[7]
Moral Foundations Theory considers the way morality varies between cultures
and identifies five (later revised to six)"foundations" that underlie
morality in all societies and individuals. He names them using pairs of
opposites to indicate that they provide continua along which judgments
can be measured.[8] These are:
- Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
- Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their "just deserts".[9][10] (He has also referred to this dimension as Proportionality.)
- Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
- Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
- Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
- Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)
Haidt found that the more politically liberal or left-wing
people are, the more they tend to value care and fairness
(proportionality), and the less they tend to value loyalty, respect for
authority and purity. Conversely, the more conservative or right-wing
people are, the more they tend to value the latter three. Similar
results were found across the political spectrum in other countries.[11]
Haidt has also described the liberal emphasis on care as "one
foundation morality", contrasting with the conservative moral balance.[12][13]
Personally, when I read this I see why we need both Wings In Equal Measure. After all, Care for others and Fairness is just as important as Respect for Authority and purity. The problem arrives when dealing with people like my former supervisor who talked to me as if she had the Authority, not only at work, my entire life as well--No One Has The Right To Tell Any One How They Should Live Their Own Lives--God Did Indeed Give Each and Every Person Free-Will.
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On
August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. In
the 92 years since, the League of Women Voters has worked tirelessly to
educate and mobilize new voters. 
