I’ve followed Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt closely for many years (as you can see by searching for his name at DI). He is the author of several excellent books, including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt’s thought process crosscuts the prevailing two wings of political thought in the United States. In this extended interview with Joe Rogan, Haidt dissects many topics, including identity politics. He urges that this phrase encompasses two separate approaches, “Common Enemy Politics” and “Common Humanity.”

Haidt also distinguishes between two prevalent types of conversations, two types of “games” being played that often make conversations frustrating. Many of us insist upon playing the “truth seeking game,” while others play a game that assumes a Manichean battle where A) no one gains except at the expense of someone else, B) where people are not seen as individuals but a members of groups, and C) you can tell who someone is merely by their appearance. Much of the fruitless dialogue on social media and elsewhere makes a lot more sense once we realize that these two approaches have virtually nothing in common–they serve entirely different purposes. Just because we exchange words does not mean we are, in any meaningful way, communicating.

I’m strongly in agreement with Haidt’s analysis.

Haidt’s distinction parallels David Sloan Wilson’s distinction between science-oriented “factual realism” and group-survival-oriented “practical realism.”

In addition to embedding the video of the interview, I invested some time to create a transcript of several sections of this interview, from about Min. 33 – 55. I have cleaned up the wording to omit throat-clearings and false starts, but I have worked hard to be true to the substance of the conversation.

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Haidt – Rogan Interview

33:18
JH: You have to look at different games being played. Yale was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it was constantly blowing my mind when I took my first economics course. It was like wow, here’s a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply. I never learned to think that way, where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. A good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives. That makes you smart. That’s what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story, and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups, and it’s a zero-sum game. So if the bad groups have more, it’s because they took it from the good groups, so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups. Bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. That might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever, but you know we live in an era in which we’ve discovered that that the pie can be grown a million-fold. So to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.

34:22
JR: In your book, you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing.

JH: Yeah. The idea of a micro aggression really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. He talks about this concept of microaggressions. There are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. One is that explicit racism has clearly gone down–by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West—but there could still be subtle or veiled a racism.

37:27
JR It’s ultimately for everyone’s sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos. It would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. It would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like this is just who you are you’re just a person. No one cares. What a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all.

JH: Beautifully put.

JR: How does that get through?

38:01
JH: We were getting there, okay? That’s what the twentieth century was. We were shaped by the late 20th century. The late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can’t eat here because you’re Black and so that changed in 1964-65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down. But we still had social [discrimination] and it used to be that if you were gay that was something humiliating. It had to be hidden. If you look at where we were in 1960 or ’63, when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000, the progress is fantastic on every front, so that’s all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.

And to your point about wouldn’t be great if there was none of this, we just treated people like people? Okay, yeah that was the 20th century idea: let’s get past these tribal identifications. What is so alarming to me now is that on campus–it began on campus but it’s spreading elsewhere–and again not everywhere on campus–it’s mostly in the Grievance Studies departments, they’re teaching students the opposite. They’re teaching students: Don’t treat everyone like a person. People are their identities and you can tell somebody’s identity by looking at people, so you know if they’re good or bad. This, I think, is the opposite of progress.

39:35
JR: The differences between us are really fascinating, the difference is between men and women, I think are some of the more interesting explanations for human behavior, and not meaning that people must be defined by their gender, defined by their sex, and but it is interesting when you look at these gigantic groups. Why certain people tend to gravitate towards certain occupations or certain types of behavior or certain hobbies. It is really fascinating.

JH: 40:05 Yeah, that’s right. And if we were playing the truth-seeking game–if all we cared
about is trying to understand things–we would do the research and we’d figure out what do people like? Do left-handers versus right-handers have different preferences? Probably not as far as I know. Do boys and girls have different preferences? Yeah they’re really big. Do men and women enjoy different things? Yeah, so we could say our goal is to create a free society. This is what the word “liberal” traditionally meant: A society in which people are free to construct a life that they want to live. And so if you’re born one race or another, that should not in any way be a limitation. And in the 20th century, we made a lot of progress towards that ideal.

40:45
JR: You keep saying we DID, meaning that you’re implying that it ended. The progress hit a wall.

40:53
JH: Yeah, I shouldn’t imply that, because overall I think the trends are unstoppable. I don’t want to say that things are reversed. I agree.

In chapter 3 of The Coddling [of the American Mind], Greg [Lukianoff] and I look at identity politics. There’s all these loaded terms. If somebody says social justice warrior, [they think they] know a lot about them. We don’t do any of that. We say there are people on campus who are very focused on identity issues and on injustices based on identity, and that’s great. There’s a lot to be concerned about and they’re right to do that. Now, how do they do that? There’s two different ways.

You can either do what we call common enemy identity politics, where you say life is a battle between good groups and evil groups. Let’s divide people by race, you know, straight versus everyone else. Men versus all the other genders and white versus everybody else. So you look at the straight white men. They’re the problem. All the other groups must unite to fight the straight white man. That’s one of the core ideas of “intersectionality.” What we say in the book is that this leads to eternal conflict.

Much better is an identity politics based on common humanity. We don’t say to hell with identity politics. We say you have to have identity politics until you have perfect justice and equality. You have to have a way for groups to organize to push back on things to demand justice. That’s fine, But you do it by first emphasizing common humanity. That’s what Martin Luther King did. That’s what Pauli Murray did. That’s what Nelson Mandela did. This wonderful woman, Pauli Murray . . . she was a gay, black, possibly trans civil rights leader in beginning the 40s . . . She says, when my opponents draw a small circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. I shall shout for the rights of all mankind. And this is, again, what Martin Luther King did. He’s relentlessly appealing to our white brothers and sisters. He’s using the language of American. Of Christianity. Start by saying what we have in common and then people’s hearts are open. We’re within a community. Now we can talk about our difficulties. So it’s the rise of common enemy identity politics on campus in the Grievance Studies departments, especially, that I think is an alarming trend.

JR: Another thing that’s alarming to me is the redefining of terms like sexism and racism. Or that sexism against men is impossible. Racism against white people is impossible. They’re redefining that these prejudices only exist if you’re coming from a position of power. That’s really weird. It also it opens up the door to treating people as an other. Literally, the people that are the victims of racism are now using racism against other people and feeling justified because of it and in having a bunch of people that will agree with them that this is in fact not racism. That this is pushing back on white privilege and saying all these different weird things. They feel really comfortable in saying these openly racist generalizing things about white people or about white men or about, you know, fill in the blank. Whatever group that you’re attacking. And it’s really strange. It’s really strange to see,

44:22
JH: But again it makes sense if you look at the different games. If you’re at a university and you
think you’re playing the truth game–and philosophers are great at this. They’re always unpacking terms and so you might try to define racism or any sort of ism and a common-sense view would be an expression of hostility or resentment or limitation on a group based on their identity. But that’s if you’re playing the truth-seeking game. If you’re playing the politics game or the warfare game, you want to define the terms to give your side maximum advantage

There’s a wonderful social psychologist named Phil Tetlock at Penn at Wharton. He talks about these different mindsets we get into. One of them he calls the “intuitive prosecutor.” If my goal as a scholar is to prosecute my enemies and maximally convict them and I am always trying to defend seven different identity groups against the straight white men–they’re the accused–I want to define my terms to make it maximally easy to convict. So I’m going to say racism and microaggressions. It doesn’t matter what the intent was all that matters is the impact. All that matters of what the person felt. That way, as long as
someone’s offended, I get to charge you with a crime. On racism, you can say, as you know–a lot of kids are learning in high school that these days– racism is prejudice plus power so, by definition, a black person or a gay person, or whatever, cannot be racist or whatever other term, because they don’t have power, regardless of their social class.

46:00

JR: It’s actually being taught? . . .

JH: Yeah. It’s not just that it’s offensive and obviously hypocritical. It’s that it’s crippling. Can you imagine?
. . . Can you imagine giving your daughter a cloak of invulnerability where you say, “You put this on now. You get to attack others, but no one can touch you.” This is going to warp their development. Power corrupts and even moral or rhetorical power corrupts as well.

JR: How is this being taught? . . .

JH: Because the goal is not truth. The goal is victory over racism, let’s say. If that’s the case, you’re going to focus on educating kids about their white privilege. That’s what a lot of these privilege exercises are. You line kids up by their privilege and you and your goal is to make the straight white boys feel bad
about their privilege and therefore talk less, take up less space. . . .

49:44
I think it’s helpful to always try to look at it from the other person’s point of view, to listen to their arguments. So for example when you and I go into any social encounter it never occurs to me that something’s going to come up and someone’s going to call me a kike, let’s say, because I’m Jewish. It just it never crosses my mind that someone’s going to humiliate me because I’m Jewish. But if you’re Black, even if you’re in a very tolerant society, at some point someone is going to make an assumption. It might happen.

All I’m saying is there are certain things we don’t have to think about, whereas if we were black or other identities or visibly gay there would be the risk of spoiling of a social interaction. So I’m totally comfortable saying we should be telling our kids about this. But what follows from it? Should we therefore be telling kids, “Judge people based on their appearance”? “Be suspicious of people based on their race and gender”? That’s where I get off the bus. That’s where I say now we’re really hurting kids. We should be turning down the moralism and we’re turning it up.

52:22
We are evolving as a society. We’re getting less sexist and racist, and so our threshold for what counts as sexist noise is going down. That’s a good thing that should happen. If you lower the threshold faster than the reality changes, then you make progress, but yet people feel worse and worse. So I think that’s part of what’s happening on campus. The loudest protests tend to happen at the most progressive schools. It’s places like Middlebury and Yale and Berkeley. If you bring in a diverse student body and we’re all trying to diversify–every school I know of is trying very hard to create a very diverse student body–so if we do that and we bring people in and we give them a common humanity approach, it’s going to work great. Diversity, if you handle it well, can confer many benefits.

But if you handle it wrong–if you try to make people see race and other groups more, and if you attach moral valence as to it, and if you give them a lot of the stuff that they get in the grievance studies courses, they’re going to be angry. Of course they’re going to feel that people hate them. It’s a terrible thing to bring people into a university and to teach them “You know what? This institution is white supremacist. People have implicit bias against you. Wherever you go, people are going to hate you.” This is a really bad thing to do to create an open trusting inclusive diverse environment

JR: The right thing to do would be to emphasize how foolish racism really is and about how damaging it is not just to our culture but to you as an individual, to look at people in that way and not open your heart in your mind to all these different races. . . .

55:07
JH: The late 20th century was incredibly positive. I think young people are losing touch with some of the hard-won lessons of the past, so I’m not going to say we have to just accept whatever morality is here. I still am ultimately liberal in the sense that what I dream of is a society in which people are free to create lives that they want to live, and they’re not forced to do things. They’re not chained. There’s a minimum of conflict and we make room for each other. If we’re going to have a diverse society, we’ve really got to be tolerant and make room for each other.

That’s my dream. I think in the last five or ten years we’ve gotten really far from that. My first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, was about ten ancient ideas. One is that we’re too judgmental. Judge not lest ye be judged. But I think the new version of that, if there was a 21st century Jesus, he’d say “Judge a lot more. Judge all the time. Judge harshly. Don’t give anyone the benefit the doubt and don’t let anyone judge you. That is not going to be a recipe for a functioning society. So no, I do not accept this aspect of 21st century morality.