Jonathan Haidt Describes Today’s Conservatives and Liberals

I've closely followed the writings of Jonathan Haidt. His conclusions are closely tied to scientific findings. He crosscuts the current American political divide. He is hopeful that we will find our way as a country.

In this recent article at The Atlantic, "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions: The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics," Haidt explains what has gone wrong with many of those who consider themselves to be liberals and conservatives. What they have in common is authoritarianism populism:

Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

The key quote from the passage above: "Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.” This is a modern version of MLK's classic advice that is scorned by many modern day "liberals": "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Why has this beautiful sentiment become so difficult today?

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How this Grand Experiment Might End

I'm tempted to close my eyes, flip through a dictionary and put my finger on a random word. That single word will be my next Facebook post. I suspect that this single word, no matter what it is, will be enough to trigger a political argument between vocal representatives of the two prominent political teams hurling factually spurious darts and arrows at each other, neither of these teams stopping to consider why people on the other side say those "disagreeable" things. Neither of them will want to take the time to put forth any effort to put the other side's best foot forward before responding. Neither of them will feel compelled to treat members of the other "team" like the human beings they are. Many of them will feel reluctance to ever say the following three magic words, "I don't know." The participants will be oblivious to the fact that many of their own self-evident "truths" are rickety, distorted within the comfy social warmth of their team's moral/political matrix.

I often feel like I'm trapped in the Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where all it took was a few random flickering lights to cause suspicions to ignite, leading neighbors to hate each other and physically attack each other. This episode of Twilight Zone, like so many other excellent episodes, was written by Rod Serling, who ended the show by reading this passage:

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

Fast forward to a 2016 TED talk featuring moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who stated:

We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that.So this is why you can't win a political argument. If you're debating something, you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works.

Why do so many of us treat opportunity to communicate online with each other like a vicious game when our country's existence is at stake?

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Rule #1: Take Time to Say Hello to Strangers

Over the past couple of decades, I've become eager to say hello to people I don't know, but it wasn't always this way. I'm most definitely an introvert and it was easy to walk on by.  Through trial and error, though, I've learned that you have no idea who that person is, the one you are passing on the street. It might be a person with a fantastic story. For instance, when my kids were young, I often walked past a man at my kids' grade school, merely saying hello. It was months later that I learned that he was a Grammy Award winning jazz piano player who toured the world.

About 20 years ago, at a Christmastime event at the home of a neighbor of my former family-in-law my father-in-law asked me, "Erich, have you met James Watson yet?" I hadn't. That night, while most of the neighbors sang Christmas carols, I had the opportunity to discuss the double helix with the co-discoverer of DNA.

There's all kinds of interesting people all around you. Most of them don't send you any clues to their accomplishments, not until you say hello and strike up a conversation.  You will miss out on some of the best parts of life if you don't take the time to say hello to strangers.

Sixteen years ago, in April, 2004, I took the time to get to know a woman who walked her two dogs (Cara Mia and Bobinskion) up and down my street every day. The woman's name was Bisia and it turned out that she was a Polish Countess who had an unusual story, a heroic story based on her life in Poland during World War II. She was 85-years old when I sat down to interview her for the Flora Place neighborhood newsletter. At that time, Bisa was married to her 95 year old husband, Isham. They have both passed away since I interviewed with her. After I wrote up her story, I noticed that the local PBS station had produced a feature on her too. I've embedded that link below.

I wrote this 15 years ago and rediscovered it today. I'd like to once again share her story. I hope you enjoy this.

The Countess of Flora Place

Originally Published April, 2004

Each of us might not have ended up living on Flora Place.  Life offers many paths to many other places.  I, for instance, grew up in St. Louis County and learned of this beautiful street through friends. My personal path to becoming a Flora Place resident, then, was not surprising.

For others, though, the journey followed convoluted and precarious paths.  One such person is Bisia Reavis, who has lived with her husband Isham at 4122 Flora Place since 1958.  As one of the most prominent dog-walkers on the street, Bisia is virtually an institution.  Always ready with her kind smile and encouraging words, she is generally accompanied on her walks by Cara Mia (a Doberman) and Bobinski (“Bo,” a Poodle).

The current editor of this newsletter has decided to begin a series of articles highlighting the stories some of our many interesting neighbors. Bisia was kind enough to share her journey from Poland to Flora Place as the first article in this series.

Formerly known as Countess Elizbieta Krasicka, Bisia was the youngest of six children born in 1921 to Count August from Siecin Krasicki and Countess Isabella from Granow Wodzicka.  The family lived at the Castle at Lesko, in Poland (present day Ukraine) tucked along the Carpathian Mountains.  The sprawling estate stretched to the borders of both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The bright red family coat of arms is the symbol of a lineage of nobility stretching back to 1540.  Bisia’s story involves many ancillary episodes.  Her Grandfather Stanislaw traveled to Mexico to serve as one of Maximillian’s officers in the 1860’s.   Her uncle, the Archbishop of Krakow, ordained Pope John-Paul II.

Bisia was 17 when war broke out in September, 1939. The Germans and Soviets quickly decided that the San River (which flowed through the family garden) would serve as their contentious line of demarcation.

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Bill McKibben: COVID-19 Is Presenting Us With an Opportunity to Reconceptualize Our Social Lives

It's awkward to discuss silver linings while so many people are suffering and when things might get much worse before they become better. That said, COVID-19 appears to be presenting us with an opportunity to reboot how we should be interacting with each other. Bill McKibben discusses this opportunity at Yale365:

[As Society Reopens], we might actually find ourselves embracing gregariousness. In truth, we began social distancing a long time ago. First came the move to the suburbs: In the postwar years, America spent the bulk of its prosperity on the task of building bigger houses farther apart from each other. This caused environmental woes — all those big houses to heat and cool and migrate between — but it also meant that we simply ran into each other less. The average size of a new house has doubled since 1970, even as the number of people living in it has steadily shrunk — the average density of most recent housing developments is about two people per acre, down from about 10 persons per acre for cities, suburbs, and towns in 1920. Between 1974 and 1994 the fraction of Americans who said they frequently visited with their neighbors fell from almost a third to barely a fifth. That number has kept dropping, now less because of suburbanization than because of screens: If you look at teenagers, for instance, a wild behavioral shift is noticeable beginning about 2012 when the numbers of Americans with a smartphone passed the 50 percent mark. The number of young people who got together with their friends in person every day dropped by 40 percent from 2010 to 2015, a curve that seems to be accelerating according to Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.

Photo by Erich Vieth

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New Study: Noise Impairs Productivity

Finding from new study from the University of Chicago:, "Noise, Cognitive Function, and Worker Productivity":

As the developing world continues to become more urban and industrial, noise pollution is destined to spread even further. Between 2001 and 2015, the number of cars per person in India tripled, and this growth shows no signs of slowing (Government of India 2017). While this should be celebrated as a sign of progress, it will undoubtedly bring with it even more noise pollution. The results in this paper suggest this is a policy problem that warrants both further research and policy makers’ attention. This paper presents evidence that an increase of 10 dB inhibits cognitive function and that this results in a decrease in productivity of approximately 5%.

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