Rensberry.com
I really liked this book! I highly encourage all Americans to read this book. It helps keep things in perspective - helps to understand where ideas develop from those who have different opinions than you do. It even helped me understand my own default positions better. In the end, this book does what most other political type books do not - bring people together. Being able to understand the other person's perspective, world paradigm, values, and ethics opens the door to conversation, collaboration, and unity.
In summary, this book describes why people are divided by politics and religion.
What follows will make most sense and be most useful to those who read and understand the book. Here are ideas from the book for my personal reference:
Moral judgements are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong. ... We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgement; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgement.
Moral judgement is a cognitive process, as are all forms of judgement. The crucial distinction is really between two different kinds of cognition: intuition and reasoning. ... Intuition .. describes the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgements and decisions that we all make every day.
Emotions are a kind of information processing. Reason is the servant of the intuitions. Intuitions are a kind of cognition. They're just not a kind of reasoning.
Moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog.
Social and political judgements depend heavily on quick intuitive flashes.
The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider serves the elephant. [If you want to change people's minds, you've got to talk to their elephants].
The elephant (automatic processes) is where most of the action is in moral psychology.
Intuitions can be shaped by reasoning, especially when reasons are embedded in a friendly conversation or an emotionally compelling novel, movie, or news story.
When we see or hear about the things other people do, the elephant begins to lean immediately. The rider, who is always trying to anticipate the elephant's next move, begins looking around for a way to support such a move.
Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it's very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.
The most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
In daily life, we act like intuitive politicians striving to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies.
The rest of the time, accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right.
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
We care a lot about what others think of us.
IQ is by far the biggest predictor of how well people argue, but it predicts only the number of my-side arguments. Smart people make really good lawyers and press secretaries, but they are no better than others at finding reasons on the other side.
The elephant leans, ever so slightly, and the rider gets right to work looking for supporting evidence, and invariably succeeds.
People cheat only up to a point they themselves could no longer find a justification that would preserve their belief in their own honesty.
When [we want to believe something], we ask ourselves, "[Can I believe it]?" Then we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We then have permission to believe.
When [we don't want to believe something], we ask ourselves, "[Must I believe it]?" The we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.
[People care about their groups], whether those be racial, regional, religious, or political. ... Our politics is groupish, not selfish. In moral and political matters we are often goupish, rather than selfish.
Rationalist delusion: the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods or that brings us beyond the "delusion" of believing in gods.
Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason.
The most bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.
We must be wary of any individual's ability to reason. ... If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to dis-confirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate...you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
To produce good behavior, not just good thinking: it is even more important to reject rationalism and embrace intuition-ism.
We are obsessively concerned about what others think of us.
[Conscious reasoning] functions like a [press secretary] who automatically justifies any position taken.
With help from the press secretary, we are able to lie and cheat often, and then cover it up so effectively that we convince even ourselves.
Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach.
WEIRD people: western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic - The WIERDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
Moral pluralism is true descriptively...[the moral domain varies across cultures].
The moral domain is unusually narrow in WEIRD cultures (largely limited to the ethic of autonomy) and broader in most other societies, religious, and conservative moral matrices (including ethics of community and divinity).
Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This is what makes it difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.
Morality is like taste in many ways - [The Righteous Mind Moral Foundations]:
Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (openness to experience).
Conservatives are higher on neophobia (prefer to stick with tried and true)
The process of converting plubribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.
Democrats often pursue policies that promote pluribus at the expense of unum.
We are more likely to mirror and then empathize with others when they have conformed to our moral matrix than when they have violated it.
A leader must construct a [moral matrix] based in some way on the [Authority foundation] (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the [Liberty foundation] (to make sure that subordinates don't feel oppressed, and don't want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the [Loyalty foundation] (response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions).
[Create hive environments]:
[Good leaders create good followers], but followership in a hivish organization is better described as [membership].
Happiness comes from [between]. It comes from getting the right relationships between [yourself and others], [yourself and your work], and [yourself and something larger than yourself].
Sacredness [binds people together], and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.
Gods and religions, in sum, are group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust.
It's [friendships and group activities], carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That's what brings out the best in people.
We humans have an extraordinary ability to care about things beyond ourselves, to circle around those things with other people, and in the process to bind ourselves into teams that can pursue larger projects. That's what religion is all about. And with a few adjustments, it's what politics is about too.
How people adopt ideologies:
Moral matrix leads:
When talking with someone with a different matrix: