Jonathan Haidt I | Why is there Political Division?

[Music] [Music] [Music] John thank you very much for the opportunity to talk here in your home city not for the first time but this time on camera and you now have a tremendous standing in terms of your commentary on public life and politics the relationship between culture and the way in which the public square plays out and also what's happening in our universities but before we begin to talk about those things can you just tell us a little bit about your own personal professional journey and your understanding of the relationships between a functioning society and the institutions it creates that's certainly Jonathan pleasure to be here talking with you about these things I think as will come out our conversation there are a lot of processes and trends that are affecting democracies and and the possibilities of public life in a lot of the Western democracies and then in the english-speaking countries in particular we have a lot in common nowadays in fact I'm kind of used to traveling around you know throughout my life I love to travel and usually I have to kind of apologize for my country or apologize if you know people have all kinds of accusations and why are things so insane in your country and now it's it's a lot more fun traveling around because we're all in it together and things are going haywire everywhere it seems it everywhere meaning in the Western democracies so my own my own journey to this point is is I guess a bit of an odd one which is that I started off as a very very stereotypical you know sort of American left-leaning you know I'm Jewish from the suburbs of New York City I went to Yale and Ivy League school I ran a gun control group I always voted Democratic because I still do but I was very much on on one team and as the polarization in our country was heating up in the 1990s it really the left and right in this country of course I've never been fond of each other but the research on how they feel about each other shows that they really began to get more hostile in the 90s and then after 2000 that split accelerated so as I was doing research and grad at school and then as an assistant professor on how morality varies across cultures I worked in India and Brazil I began seeing that that left and right in America were becoming increasingly like different cultures with a different different religion different US Constitution different laws of environmental science I mean we're really becoming almost two separate worlds and so I began after John Kerry lost to George W Bush in 2004 I thought George deputy was a terrible candidate terrible president and I thought the Democrats should have won both elections and so in 2004 I decided to change my research over from looking at how cultures vary to looking at how left and right vary and my explicit go elections a explicit my personal reason for doing that was because I couldn't stand I just couldn't stand it the way the Democrats talked about morality they had no clue what it was about they seemed to think that politics is about promising people a bill that will give them more money there are bills better for you and like no politics of the national level is more like religion you have to have sacred values that you're calling people to you're creating a community so I started studying politics as a form of religion or culture and that led me to write the righteous mind my book that came out in 2012 and as I was writing that while I started off hoping to help the Democrats I committed myself to really understanding conservatives from the inside I wasn't just gonna write platitudes I really wanted to read conservative materials I treated almost like an anthropological assignment let me understand what they think they're up to I subscribe to National Review I watch conservative television and what I discovered was the basic inside of John Stuart Mill which is that you can't really know your own side of an argument until you know the other side and all of us are so incomplete and so blinded by our team loyalties that we can't understand the truth unless we engage with people who challenge it and so by the end of the book I didn't become a conservative but I basically stepped off the team I just said you know there's to understand what's going on it blinds you if you're on a team there are good ideas all over and so I just became a sort of a non partisan moderate John Stuart Mill's quite to that effect is actually very strong isn't it I mean more or less says if you can't if you haven't understood the other perspective no matter how passionately you hold your own that's right it's actually pretty useful he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that his reasons may be good and no one may have been able to disprove them here I'm beginning to paraphrase but if he does not know what the other side's reasons are then he can have no confidence that he has gotten it right himself and even says it's not enough that those ideas should be brought to you by your teacher who does not believe them himself you must hear them from people who honestly hold them who believe in those ideas and so this is one of the problems that were we're having it has at least in America as all of our institutions purify and those universities are they lean left they're very good reasons for that that's always going to be the case but as they've gone ever more left and there aren't really conservatives available to act as teachers students are not able to get a full understanding of politics and this damages our our civic life it prepares the students poorly to go into government service love to come back to the two broad issues there and perhaps to treat them one after the other sort of the political scene and the way we debate and then secondly what's happening to prepare the next generation because you're face to face in the universities before we do it seems to me given your background and as I watch the extraordinary fascination globally with what Jordan Peterson saying he's a clinical psychologist of course that psychologies become the new font of you like the new driving force for establishing morality in the way we interact with the world that's supplanting philosophy and theology to some extent well let's I'm not sure I'd agree that it's it's we're now the guide to morale that's something I've argued with Sam Harris about as to whether psychology can tell you what is right but in terms of who are the people what are the fields that we're looking to for guidance I do agree that the humanities which is supposed to be or traditionally was the field of reflection on the human condition and what it is to be human and human relationships and and you know there's a good reason that we all read Shakespeare and are in our high school education the humanities I agree have withdrawn and become less relevant and at the same time psychology has become more relevant and I think that on the humanities side I mean humanity there a variety of humanities and in philosophy there's still some very good work being written that it's accessible and important but I think literary studies has retreated to more a more sort of ideological identity focused you know the if you look on the web pages of many people in the literature language media studies that it does tend to be identity focused work is the most common area so I think that becomes less relevant to people who don't have those specific identity concerns at the same time psychology went through this wonderful Renaissance with positive psychology where Marty Seligman in 1999 he was president of the American Psychological Association said you know what in psychology we have if there's something wrong with you we got it covered but if you're not having trouble in life if you just want to know how to live a happier better life we actually don't have much to say and so I've been involved with positive psychology from the very beginning and so I think psychology has sort of made itself much more relevant up to everyday life and to into people who you know as salesmen put it we can take you from negative eight to zero but we didn't have much to take you from zero to positive and now we do and so that's why I do think that many more more people are turning to psychology the other line that's been great is evolutionary psychology we have people like Steven Pinker who are some of the best writers in the world taking an evolutionary perspective on human nature it can't tell you what you ought to do but boy is it helpful for figuring out why things go wrong or why we can't have this or that particular utopia so yeah we with the premise of your question you've talked about the impoverishment of the public debate and dialogue and you know the moral a sort of content of it and are we in danger of reducing it to questions to simple questions of do no harm and know your rights let's see the so there's been a lot written on moral vocabulary and it's and it's impoverishment I like to think about encompassing systems and so if you're within a particular religious community and you have all these books you can refer to and you have a specialized moral vocabulary and especially if you have stories we think in stories we think in narratives so when everybody shares a sort of common history and common religion you can have very ornate rich powerful moral concepts as Christian denominations do as Orthodox Jews do but when you have a lot more diversity and secularism does not as much in common and moral terms get reduced down to the the minimum set you need which is okay I'm not gonna judge you and your private life you don't judge me but I won't hurt you you don't hurt me if we make contracts you honor your contracts all on our mind so you do in commercial hubs you do tend to get more oddly reducing down to the minimum necessary for different people to live together and that's great that opens up possibilities for for diversity you I mean you know Amsterdam in the 17th century or New York or London I mean these are the great commercial and then they become intellectual hubs too so there can be something good about this thin morality but if the whole country has this thin morality and not a sense of what holds it together and it has diversity then you can it can become unbalanced where the the forces is sort of pulling you apart are not countered by the forces pulling you together so I do think that as our nation's become diverse secular liberal democracies which it's a kind of country that I'm very fond of I think that's good but as they become ever more that way we need to do more work to think about the forces pulling us into to have a kind of common canopy some common set of understandings about who we are what we're doing within which we can disagree peacefully and constructively yeah it strikes me that there's a lot of power in some of the narratives that were once central to our civilization love your neighbor do unto others as you would have them do unto you the story of the Good Samaritan as you say I think it looks a bit thin sometimes now we wonder what we can go back to where we might draw a moral compass from and in Australia we've got a royal commission of inquiry into the banks and other financial institutions and what was revealing I think is that Trust is broken down very badly because a lot of people in very powerful positions have behaved in a way that is not acceptable there were codes once sort of quite deeply embedded I think in our culture which are now often forgotten at least sometimes decried actually demonized in the name of scrubbing out our past I think the what we're seeing in many many countries is a decline of trust in each other but especially in government and so it varies I think in Scandinavian countries it hasn't dropped as much but the the the drop in trust is big in in the United States and in many perhaps most countries nowadays and I think there's at least two reasons for this one is the rise of the internet and social media means that whatever was happening before much was hidden we didn't know about it so it may not it may be that we're not getting any maybe that our governments are no less dysfunctional and no less corrupt or more corrupt I should say but it's just that now we all know about it and it's not just that we know about it we know about things that aren't even true or well maybe we're more likely to hear such things so I think one of the reasons that so many democracies are having trouble at the same time is because of the very rapid recent rise of social media and the discovery of how various moral and political entrepreneurs can use it to hurt whichever side they want to as part of it but I do think there's also there's also a change in in leadership and moral leadership what I mean is that the there were older wasp ideas so I'm as I said I'm Jewish my grandparents came to America around 1905 from Russia and Poland and and Americans of that of their generation especially my parents growing up in the 1940s and 50s wanted to assimilate to the wasp ideal and while my parents couldn't join the country could the wasp Country Club in Scarsdale you know there were obstacles like that but they weren't big obstacles as my father puts it the economy was booming it was wide open if you had the goods if you had the ideas if you if you had the work you'd be successful so there was a kind of a of a wasp culture that whatever its whatever its faults they did have ideals of leadership that have been gradually replaced I think David Brooks and some other people have really commented on what happens when leadership or I should say achievement of high status is it shifts over to doing really really well on tests and so in American many other countries we have an aristocracy based on test performance that got you into the top schools and then the top graduate schools or law programs and when when honor honors means I did best on the test as opposed to a sense of honor it may be yeah I don't know what data we could find us but it may be that many of our leaders just don't have the same notions of Honor that they that they used to do you think perhaps there is a sense in which the idea of truth has changed watered down perhaps even been abandoned that you talk about ideals he talked about honor he talked about the things that in many ways our culture would once have seen as being integral to the character that's necessary to leadership perhaps has been washed out of the system so what you've now got is a sort of moral relativism that says I feel this way or that way therefore it must be therefore it is very subjective it's what's very lacking in there I think there a few different things going on going on there in the phenomena that you're talking about nobody's really a relativist nobody acts as though is that there's no true the off and no one so nobody's really relative is that's the first thing the second thing is I think there is as part of growing diversity and sensitivity which is a good thing there's a hesitancy reluctance to criticise others and so that could end up being a good thing if everybody is from the same culture at the extremes you can get a kind of a desire for it you know Sharia in the Muslim tradition or Orthodox Jews or conservative I mean conservative Christian groups you do have communities that are so homogeneous they want a kind of a moral law to regulate everything and so diversity breaks that up that could be a good thing but what we end up with is the risk of the Tower of Babel that is that when when there is no overarching canopy there is no set of shared narratives we lose a moral vocabulary that that that can that can sort of bind us and constrain us and then people have the sense of what emile durkheim called anomie so the great sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote a lot about and know me a know me normlessness it's the state of affairs when there is no clear set of rules for how to behave some people might think oh well this is freedom I mean a religious community would be so binding and constraining I want none of those rules I want freedom but anomie breeds suicide and a feeling of meaninglessness and hopelessness so so I think that might be what you're you're pointing to that I think people have a sense that a sense of anomie suicide rates are going up in America for young people and in Australia and drug addiction I don't if you're having the same sorry that's right anxiety depression suicide self-harm are going up rapidly for young people we don't know exactly why this is social media is a part of it we don't fully understand it it really is just since 2011 or 2012 strangely that these rates are going up so fast so something is happening where the sort of the basic what meaning superstructure architecture is you could say crumbling or you could say changing I don't know but it's it can be unnerving to many people yeah part of the reason that I'm keen to talk to people like you is to try and get a better handle on how we have got to where we've got to and where we might go because of that problem I'm the father your father I've just become a grandfather what's at Alicia's young Australians the research is really quite staggering they don't feel that they will have the same opportunities in life that their parents and grandparents had and and as I say the numbers are really the dangerous quite compelling and it's really very concerning they're worried about what we're leaving them but to come to the two-streams that that up to the first of them sort of public life and what's happening here in this country you have a remarkable writer David Brooks and I sometimes have the opportunity to follow his opinion from the other side of the pond which is what we tend to call the Pacific and he wrote in The New York Times opinion piece in January this year how democracies perish and he said this everybody agrees society is in a bad way we might have our different takes on whites in a bad way or how to fix it but everyone seems to agree on that much at least but what exactly is the main cause of the badness some people emphasize economic issues a simultaneous concentration of wealth at the top and the stagnation in the middle has Dee legitimized the system people like me David Brooks writes emphasizes emphasized cultural issues if you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy you're going to end up with a society that is atomized distrustful and divided it is concerning yes yes David Brooks is one of the most perceptive commentators we have in this country and I think as a person who by temperament is we not clear whether he's on the left or the right please familiar with arguments from all sides he's always had his finger on on the the the the social threads the social fabric so I think he as he says he is he's on the side of people put more emphasis on the social changes I am to economic factors matter but they matter overwhelmingly through how they affect our psychology and our perceptions of each other and of the legitimacy of society what I mean is that as societies get wealthier it's true that wealthy countries are happier than normal if the countries that's a big effect but as each country gets wealthier it doesn't necessarily get any happier because we don't really notice absolute levels of material prosperity or anything else we notice changes we notice how we're doing compared to others we notice how we're doing compared to ourselves in the past and so the post-war year in the late 20th century was a boom time for for our Western democracies economically for the most part and there was a sense of expansion a sense of hope and just as you can kind of get like a compound interest thing going where you know hope reads hope and the future is gonna be brighter when that turns around it can it can sort of contract pretty quickly and I think David and and conservatives tend to be more aware of what is lost of how things used to be and so I too am generally on the side of saying if you look at the world material prosperity think they're still going great for most people in the world but something's going wrong with the Western democracies we are losing our sense of trust hope optimism trust in each other the sense that we can solve our problems I don't know what's happening in Australia but it's in this country the ability of the Congress to actually solve any problem just keep I mean we thought it couldn't get any worse a few years ago and now it's worse so we are in a time of skepticism and and hopelessness many of us about the future of this country well now to tease that out a bit because I agree with you I'm sure these issues I had hard social but perhaps in a slightly different way to the one that you've just expressed not to deny that but to look at it another way you could say that Camelot is over for the West in the sense that those booming economic times have come to an end and in fact most Western countries now face massive problems not just a career right the budgetary problems our debt coming at us in unfunded liabilities for most of the European countries of course they also face a demographic cliff so the population the number of tax players collapses at the same time as the entitlement costs go through the roof we have enormous geopolitical and strategic issues confronting us around the world since that collapse of the Iron Curtain we've had a sort of unipolar world order led by you know America that now looks to be giving way to a more 19th century multipole the world we have environmental issues really big issues confronting us what's the point of all of this it's it's surely that as you've written extensively on the subject of how human beings have over time learnt that cooperation and pulling together is the way to get things done build a better life I guess resolve problems if I'm not putting words in your mouth we seemed at once to face a mountain of serious problems that need really serious careful rational reasoned thinking where data and evidence are important but were more factionalized more atomized and more emotional than we've been for a very long time there's a real problem here there is when you put it that way you compound my sense of pessimism but whenever I go too deep into pessimism I always hear the voice of Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley and a few other intellectuals especially libertarians who say you know what people have always thought this intellectuals have always thought this and then things just keep getting better and the more serious problems get the more people try to work on them and solutions are found that you could not have anticipated so while I see very little reason to be hopeful now that things will improve in the way we govern ourselves and in America in the next few years I wouldn't quite say that I wouldn't say that you know the Western democracy you know it we you know are that we are run is over and yes we face huge problems and I don't see us addressing them but yet somehow 50 years from now we probably will have something is going to happen that we you can't you know of course it could be something horrible it could be a nuclear war who knows but I'm just saying for all the pessimism that I might be agreeing with you on here in our interview I also wouldn't I would not bet against America or the West it's always been a losing bet in the past maybe the odds are closer to 50/50 now than they were in the past but I certainly would not count us out I'll leave it at that well I'd respond by saying the very reason that I've came to talk to you is that I think you're pointing the way to some answers and doing something about it so wicked okay all right so you know what let's talk about that what would it take to have a turnaround so we have we have a variety of trends that are not looking hopeful and there's no sign that we have the capacity in our public in our public lives in our government to address these trends at least in my country I was just in Scandinavia a year or two ago and it was just so amazing to see these countries in which when they have a problem they convene people to work on it and they come up with a solution and then they implement the solutions Wow why can't we have this and we can't we can't have that in America in the coming decade or two I would bet so what are we going to do well we have to rethink how we address problems I think we have to kick as much off the federal plate as possible give it back to the states our state governments are not as paralyzed we have to find ways to find ways to bring private industry and to solve more problems now up until a year or two ago I was always saying you know I think like Silicon Valley could you know could find ways to for people to take care of their health needs without even have to go to a hospital like you know we could there's all kinds of things we can do without even doctors we don't trust Silicon Valley as much now as we did a year or two ago unfortunately but that would be an example of ways to take problems off of the federal plate and get them solved elsewhere then we really have to look at what's happening to education which in child rearing because for all our problems now the next generation that is the kids being raised now the kids in college now are even less prepared to engage in the democratic of debate and dialogue with people they disagree with so it's sort of like you know one of these things like be like a Harry Houdini escape you know where okay he's got all these problems and he's locked in a he's handcuffed and you know and now we're gonna light this rope on fire so he only has you know a short amount of time before you can get out but but I think that we will we will find ways we will find ways to change education I think the mental health crisis is so severe the rising rates of depression anxiety and suicide are so severe that I think they're gonna cause some major rethinking so I don't know what's gonna give but I think that we will find solutions to some of these problems can I take that then some of the things that I think you said one observation you made was and I think you said it was partly related to the fact that one side of politics ie the left and the line of thinking that goes with what we call the progressive left I think you'd call it the liberal left in this world and your aim is I try to stay we're way from the word liberal yeah because it has a special meaning has all kinds of good connotations and it's come to mean just left in America so let's say progressive and left not liberal okay well where I was where I was seeking to get to was that you made the observation that it wasn't until you were well educated and well into your academic life and so forth and you've talked a bit about that a moment ago that you came to understand because you sat down and decided you were going to understand other perspectives which leads me to a couple of things I'd love you to Pat out a bit more firstly surely in in terms of everything that you and I saying is going to be important to finding our way forward you'll never get good public policy out of a bad debate that's right so a debate depends on a lot of things a commitment to evidence to reason to respecting the other person you know the old adage which was I think Voltaire's biographer wasn't an American woman in the 30 summarizing his views I might disagree with you but I'll defend to the death your right to say it he must hear himself but yes implies two things I firstly the other person's work has right have dignity standing they should be able to put they views and ask their questions without being personally attacked and secondly the issue on the table ought to be the issue on the table not the other person not the person they put it there respectful debate evidence-based seems to be critical of this and you've done a lot of thinking around that and in terms of trying to understand what you call I think a moral palate so the left tends to say that the right lacks compassion the right tends to say that the left is unrealistic or naive but you've actually found in your research something quite different and quite revealing well so my research on moral foundations theory which grows out of richard shweder x' work in anthropology originally and then it's work I did with my colleagues at Uwe rösler org what we find is that is that people on the Left tend to prioritize issues of care and compassion that's the number one moral foundation and then also everybody cares about fairness but on the left especially fairness as equality has a special ring whereas on the right equality of outcome is of no importance the quality of opportunity is important for everybody but a proportionality tends to be more what the right means by fairness so if you don't do the crime do the time if some of you do some wrong you need to be punished there's a kind of proportionality and then the big difference though is that people on the social with social conservatives not libertarians but social conservatives also value group loyalty respect for authority and tradition and a sense of sanctity or purity again everybody understands these personally but they've sort of the public philosophy the governing philosophy of the left is based more and more on care and compassion for the vulnerable and on the right is based more on sort of group cohesion protecting the group make America great defend our borders build a wall restore tradition those sorts of things and you know that's actually great I mean it's good that's like a real yin yang sort of thing that you want to have the left tends to drive forward the rights revolutions you know I I thought that I thought that we'd gotten you know full full rights for women over the previous decades you know be since the rights revolutions of the 60s I thought things were going pretty well but then you learn well actually there was a lot more sexual harassment than we realized and that's always pushed by the left but at the same time the left tends to pursue policies that at least nowadays that will pit groups against each other and that I think can can from it it can make it more difficult to can make it more difficult to run institutions nowadays there's variety of problems with the way that identity politics is pursued you have to have identity politics but there are different formats of it all I'm saying is this little portrait of the left and the right it means that they should be together in one system you need a yin and the yang pushing in different directions the problem is that human beings are so good at tribalism that us versus them that there's a certain let's say parameter setting a certain level of conflict which is ideal and if you ramp it up too much it becomes it becomes really destructive for example intramural sports competitions if you have teams of University and they divided up into sports teams and they play each other they don't hate each other a little rivalry is actually good and it makes them love their in-group more and it makes them not really hate the out-group more so a little rivalry is good it stimulates effort it's more fun but if you ramp it up too high you get English soccer hooligans you get people actually want to smash the skulls of the other people with a pipe and that's where we are in American politics at least again not for the majority of people but for those who are really active it's getting more there hasn't been much physical violence yet but we're moving that way this is this tribalism that you talk of we see it in the data in Australia you've got more people now identifying as right-wing self-identifying and more people identifying as left-wing inclined in the middle and the middle is declining that's right and yet your work again very powerfully point to the need for us all to understand our shared humanity yeah that's right that's right so that's one of the one of the actually sources of hope that I have is that these identity focused movements I think they were necessary they're addressing real concerns and I'm hopeful that now that they've some have gotten to such degrees of excess that there was widespread revulsion at them as was a Steve Bannon said you know his Trump's advisor right when populist he's basically said you know if the more the Democrats talk about identity the more we win because you know most people are members of an identity group but that doesn't mean that they buy that kind of identity politics it actually turns off their we know a lot of black people are turned off by being treated like you know you are your race and same for members of every other identity group so I think that at some point the next generation is gonna look at all this stuff and they've been written in this country they're raised with such mixing you know like you know my son so my wife is korean-american like our kids are you know visibly biracial my son goes to a selective school here in New York City where most of the kids are Asian and they tell all kinds of you know ethnic jokes Asian jokes the Asians make five minutes so they're gonna think that the the passion the anger of the older people on these issues is kind of ridiculous and pointless so I'm hopefully at some point will burn itself out and either the kids now or their kids at some point will get past it and will be able to actually just work on problems rather than trying to get into a quasi-religious issue of you know we're you know we are absolutely right and you're evil and we're gonna destroy you yeah before we come to the kids I recently was talking to a fellow account a good friend from very much the left-wing perspective he served in our federal parliament for a long time and he was talking about this business of identity politics and bemoaning what had done to his own political movement because he said once we're about universalism our objective was to look after the the oppressed the weak to ensure that all Australians were treated as Australians that's part of the Australian family now we're creating new elites and in fact we've moved away from much of our commitment to just a basic social psychology here is that we are a tribal species we're really really good at doing us-versus-them and it takes special conditions to turn that off and I think the general trend in late 20th century was very good at turning now they have the benefit our parents or grandparents they had the benefit of having fought this tremendous war against the ultimate evil and nothing brings people together like war so the late 20th century was excellent on this and I think we're losing touch with that but the basic social psychology for our tribal species means we need to pay attention every chance we get to highlight commonalities to say we are the same we are one we have these differences but they are subsumed under larger larger things we have in common the more we do that the more we can address the concerns that many on the Left have about exclusion and racism etc whereas the more we the more we go down this line of good and evil one group is good one group is evil and this is what many of the intellectual movements in the Academy are now about is students are taught to see everything in terms of binaries and when you do that you're you're playing up our tendency to do binary or black and white or all-or-nothing thinking and it doesn't lead to any place good we were talking the other day with Jordan Peterson and one of these very conversations and recounting that it was Sultanate and in the darkness of the Gulag Archipelago prison he wrote that the dividing line between good and evil ultimately lies somewhere across every human heart and one of the great things that seems to me that is required in this standoff we've got at the moment between our tribes quite apart from us understanding our shared humanity again would be a good dose of humility perhaps on all of our parts that's right it's very easy to it's easy to preach absolutely we are prone to self-righteousness one of the themes of my first book the the happiness hypothesis and there of the righteous mind was that evolution designed us for hypocrisy evolution designed us to always look good and virtuous to others while being able to lie even to ourselves so it's very hard to preach and teach moral humility but I think we can set up conditions that pull for it more or less and the more that people on the other side are strangers strangers who are blamed for the country's problems the harder it's going to be to be morally both and so I don't know if this is happening to you in Australia I imagine it is here people used to be mixed up we had racial segregation but by class and by politics people lived somewhat near each other and what's been happening increasingly with rising prosperity and rising choice is self-segregation by class certainly which is very destructive but also by politics my former student Matt Motel has analysed large-scale data sets when somebody moves from point A to point B on average if they're on the left on average they're moving to a place with more coffee shops and fewer gun stores whereas if they're on the right it's the opposite so as as as the other side becomes further away and increasingly demonized then yes this moral humility becomes harder and harder one one suggestion I have and so at a heterodox Academy an organisation that that I co-founded with some other professors we developed we develop a program called the open mind program if you people go to open mind platform org they can find a program that basically draws on this social psychology that we've been talking about helps people understand why is it so hard for us to understand each other what goes wrong what why are we all subject to confirmation bias tribalism blindness so there are some educational projects that may work we have some evidence so far that it does help people to understand the other side so I'm hopeful that as the as the psychological and educational communities turn their attention to this which is I think one of the great challenges of the 21st century we may make some progress one of the things that I noticed had 19 years in the federal parliament in Australia and I've been out around 10 years I'm sure the two weren't related but the great financial crisis sort of occurred about the time I left and I think it opened up a lot of fishes in the West we refused to own what we'd done to ourselves and to our children and so everyone retreated to high ground I'm not going to pay the price for picking fixing up this mess and in a sense we all then because we don't tackle it logically but the it does strike me that it's much harder now to have a robust debate so I think a robust debate a robe civil square where there can be plenty of shouting and yelling and screaming in a sense of you're like if it's non personal we ought to be passionate about ideas we ought to be prepared to have a real go on the things that we think matter and you know how we're going to prioritize them the problem is when it becomes personal and so the level of relating is you're wrong because I hate you almost yes the you know you look back at the correspondence somebody just sent me today somebody sent me a line from Thomas Paine the essayist the time of the American Revolution wrote common sense a letter that he wrote to George Washington with incredibly nasty accusations but that was actually private it was a private correspondence I think politics has always been personal it's it's always had a nasty edge to it I think what's different is that is that the nature of communication if it's one person to one person it's between them or maybe it's in the parliament or the Congress it's a few people to a few people but if the communication is really not I I'm really I'm not really talking to you I don't actually care about you I'm talking at you because 20,000 people are watching and they're gonna judge me based on what I say and how I treat you so I would never treat you with compassion because I'll be crucified for it so I think that there's certain systemic settings that have changed and of course we barely mentioned it but obviously social media really coming in since about 2009 I mean Facebook opens up to the world in 2006 I think it is most people don't really have it until 2009 2010 so this this hyper connected the the nature of communication and political communication especially has really been transformed just in the last eight years and this is why I think one of the reasons one of the many reasons why I think seems so dark and confusing it's as though it's as though we're in an ecosystem or the complex ecosystem that's been evolving over millions of years and suddenly like you know God reaches down and he turns up the amount of oxygen from 20% to 80% let's just see what happens and you know things are going haywire all kinds of species are growing and dying so we've had some major parameter changes to the nature of our social and political interactions just in the last eight years and we're still adapting to it and again that that's one of these I'm hopeful is that whoever bad that is whatever bad effects it hasn't had it's so recent that we don't know how we're going to adapt to it and we probably will find some ways to adapt to it well let's come to that because you interact with young people so I think it was Edmund Burke I said you know life's a contract between the dead living and the unborn we've been the beneficiaries people of yours and my generation we stand on the shoulders of giants really who have given us so much to be thankful for in terms of that material well-being and security of freedoms what are we passing on are we equipping given that it's not going as well as we'd like the next generation a to cope B to turn it around so what's happening in our universities and for our young people so the your quote from Burke that is the essential conservative insight that really got me when I was learning about conservatism Burke's insight that it's that if a man I forgot how he puts it but if you trade on the private stock of his own knowledge just what little he knows is nothing compared to all that's been learned in the past and that struck me as deeply wizened deeply true and because people are prone to manias and following cult leaders were prone to running off you know the Simpsons as a TV show The Simpsons is a great character at catching this aspect of people we can be incredibly stupid when you put us together in a mob and so having some constraints based on tradition religion the past generally leads to good results revolutions that are truly revolutionary throwing off the past I guess I think they have a perfect record of being complete disasters I'm not sure but I would certainly and with Thomas soul I'm contrasting the American Revolution French Revolution and saying a more balanced philosophy versus a more radical throw out the past you know rename the months redo the calendar you know change the family that's a really really bad idea it's your quote from Burke about how it's a contract between these generations yeah my guess is not as much now it's it's no it's not seen as much by young people as that there is a tendency to now to judge people by what we have present ISM just as ethnocentrism means we judge everybody bout our cultural standards and if they don't meet our cultural standards they're terrible we hate them and now we have present ISM we're judging everybody in our culture by today's standards and so if you made a joke in the 80s that is not appropriate for today you could be in big trouble and to go even further back you know the people who wrote the US Constitution many of them had slaves therefore we can't I mean I was there gradations but but I do think that we are we are in danger of losing that conservative insight that there is something to be gained by drawing on the past and having it evolved slowly and this actually can bring us to something we haven't really talked about which is globalization we mentioned it briefly there are those who think that our problems stem mostly from economic factors to extent that globalization matters and it does matter a lot of ways I'd say one of the reasons it matters is because it led to so much change so quickly and that has been deeply deeply upsetting many of these changes rationalization of production systems allowing the work to go to where there's lower cost labor all sorts of things that make sense to economists if they simply had come in at 1/2 or 1/4 the speed that they did I think things would have gone much better now of course we would have given up on some economic growth so I can't say that I wish that they had gone more slowly but the social effects would have been quite digestible had they come in slowly but because so many people were rendered obsolete so much into so much dislocation of jobs and factories and and and the usefulness of education so I think globalization with its very rapid changes has certainly contributed to the sense of anomie we don't know which way is up everything's falling apart so so again the conservative concern for the speed of change I think is helpful right well interesting to I think just to reflect that I think sometimes one of the things that's overlooked is that we learn personally from our own history you know you burn your hand on the toaster when your kid you don't do it again we're unwise I think to forget the lessons of history one of them actually lies I think in this ruthless pursuit of equality equality of opportunity and great thing enforced equality of outcomes history shows us it's a disaster that's right that you're better off going for freedom and justice and fairness and then you get a high degree of equality but if you go for equality you'll tend to lose the other things and it doesn't sound attractive but history shows us that's what happens in the same way that history's taught us that if we put our hand on the toaster it hurts that's right I spent three months in in Asia in 2015 I spent a few weeks in Shanghai and I was just stunned to learn that there was a period where everybody was paid the same salary didn't matter what you did everybody this was the salary for work and one thing I can say from from studying morality within social psychology is that the deep psychology of fairness has two components one is proportionality it's given to us by what we call equity theory which is we we really keep track of the ratio of everybody's inputs to outputs and when somebody is getting more than they put in we resent them we gossip about them we want them to fail so there's there's proportionality is very very powerful and then the other is called procedural fairness or procedural justice we want people who treat it properly they should be treated with respect they should be treated by a system that is not partial not biased against them and so that social justice often is improving procedures so that they are just that's great that is fairness that is progress to extent that some elements of social justice now at least an American I assume it's in Australia too the focus on numerical equality of outcomes even when there are gigantic differences in the pipeline now there also there's so many differences in the pipeline by class by race by gender some of those might have to do with discrimination further back some of those in terms of gender sometimes those are because of different choices men and women enjoy different things they make different choices but we have to pay attention to what's the cause of it we can't just say look a group is underrepresented therefore there is a systemic problem that must be fixed and this is one of the problems I think that the left has is that when they pursue that and they pursue a quality of outcomes when there's not a quality of inputs many people find that to be unfair and I think working-class morality in particular in this country at least working-class people often have a real sense of proportionality and resent sometimes they'll resent the heavy-handed methods to attain equality of outcomes so it's anyway I'll leave it at that I think it's very valuable thinking let's come now there too we spend a lot of time talking which I thoroughly enjoy but can't keep you forever the the issue of preparing young people for their own sakes their own lives but also because they have to take our society forward and they in turn one day I'll have to wonder what they're passing on to their children I know you've got a what sounds like it's going to be a very interesting book coming up on that but before you do you've already said a lot about this along with a lot of others Frank ferdy's written a book called what's happening in our universities we in fact failing young people by trying to wrap them in cotton wool and and and creating a situation where they don't develop the resilience they need you know you have warnings microaggression warnings trigger warnings safe places platform denying which is the very antithesis of allowing freedom of speech orally which is line of defense when we want to defend all our other freedoms are we doing the right thing by our young people well I just got this in the mail today this is the proofs of my next book the coddling of the American mind the title was made up originally by an editor at the Atlantic it's a very catchy title the subtitle is really much more what the book is about which is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure Wow I'm under strict instructions from the publisher to not talk about this until it comes out on September 4th so I'm not going to answer your question except to say that in general I think Frank Brady has some very good insights what's going on and that in general when we we often feel that we want to do things to help people but people need to learn from experience and we often prevent children from learning from experience and when we do that we harm them so that's a general principle that I will be talking a lot about after September 4th well John we look forward to the release of that book try and make certain if I can do anything to help I'll certainly try and make certain that it's widely read in Australia and we look forward to a planned visit I hope to come in July of 2019 well we look forward to it very much and what you have to say here is so relevant for us as well with part of that english-speaking world that's grappling with all of these things to me it is astonishing to learn that of the 43 universities in my own country only one imposes no restrictions on speech other than the law of the land and something needs to be done about it let's see what we can do in 2019 thank you Johnson Fletcher [Music] you [Music]

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 58,172

Keywords: Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Haidt and John Anderson, The Righteous Mind, Moral Foundations theory, Conservatism, Cultural narratives, Identity Politics, Left-wing Politics, Political Debate, Progressivism, Social Psychology, Universities

Id: ISlBeD6BJWw

Length: 53min 12sec (3192 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018