Jonathan Haidt urges that we escape moral righteousness

In this lecture on TED, Jonathan Haidt discusses his approach, which involves "five foundations of morality." Haidt also explains that, in our attempts to better understand morality, too many of us are trapped in a non-ending cycle in which "everybody thinks they are right." We are in need of humility, and the best way to get moral humility is to escape moral righteousness by striving to step out of the struggle. We need to see that liberals and conservatives both have something to offer to the conversation of change versus stability. I've written repeatedly and glowingly about Haidt's approach to morality. You can find earlier DI posts regarding Haidt's approach to morality here and here.

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World leaders shun George W. Bush

What does it mean when people all around are shaking each others' hands but not yours?  I know that this video is widely available (I saw it on Huffpo), but it is a potent non-verbal message that bears on the foreign policy damage done by President Bush. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Y_ncOVlDw&eurl=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/[/youtube]

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Turn off your TV to be happy

Sociologists at the University of Maryland have concluded that “unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as very happy spend more time reading and socializing.” The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research. The study was based on 30-years worth of national…

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Gay Marriage

I wrote this originally in 2004, upon the passage of an antigay measure in Missouri.  With the passage of Prop 8 in California, I thought it would be worth reposting here.

You may have heard. Missouri has become the first state in the union to establish a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. More will follow, of course, but it’s something to be the first.

I live here. This is my state.

Shame on us.

This was not, however, unexpected. Did anyone actually believe Americans, especially in the middle of the country, are ready, en masse, to embrace such a substantial change in attitude toward an institution that extends back to the murkiness of prehistory?

Prehistory. Genesis notwithstanding, I make that claim based on the fact that we have no documentary evidence that at a given moment Marriage was invented. It’s something homo sapiens brought with it into the historical period, which is really only that part of time in which we have had writing. Writing that survived, to be more specific. For all we know there may be a cache of stone tablets or whatever yet undiscovered extending that time backward reliably by a century or millennia or more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the historical era has lasted (reliably) for ten thousand years. We can quibble over certain dates, but we’ve got evidence suggesting that humans have lived in organized social groups for at least that long, which suggests that we’ve been doing so for a …

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Striving to live in the moment

Information swirls about that it disorients us and even paralyzes us, and not just during elections. Those of us who systematically try to stay well-informed are especially vulnerable. Media outlets are always working hard to steal our attention with all of those new products and stories and they do a great job of it. Television is especially good at hypnotizing us with constant scene changes, including a nonstop parade of bright shiny shallow-minded things. Because of this special power of television to mindlessly consume us, I’ve warned that it is critically important to pull the plug on television. “Just say “no” to TV. Do it for your country.” Even those of us who are able to pull ourselves away from television are subjected to a constant stream of distractions ranging from work pressures, home repairs social obligations and numerous flavors of interruptions. These distractions often yank me away from things I consider important, things (including my children) that are often right in front of my nose. In fact, if I had to sum up my biggest frustration in life, it’s that I end up doing far too many things I don’t really enjoy in order to do the things I treasure. Quite often, though, we are contributors to our problem. For instance, we end up choosing to do non-important urgent-seeming things instead of spending time on things we truly consider important. How could that be? This issue was well-described by Steven Covey, who illustrated the problem with a 2 by 2 matrix of the types of tasks we face. The two variables are importance and urgency. All of us readily attend to those things that are both important and urgent and all of us ignore those things that are not important and not urgent. We struggle, though, when it comes to prioritizing the two remaining types of tasks Many of us all-too-willingly attend to those tasks that are urgent but not important, ignoring those things that are important but not urgent. Recognizing this problem is the first step toward solving it.

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