Day 13

 I spent almost all day today reading the book Bart recommend “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion” by Jonathan Haidt. 

Barts theory is that if I can Intellectually understand the evolution airy biology that led to the tribal way of thinking we have currently in politics and religion I may be able to empathize and ultimately replace my anger with understanding for Christian fundamentalists. 

The book suggests that moral judgments don’t arise from any type of rational reflection, but instead gut feelings buried deep inside the subconscious. The divisions that we see in the world in terms of ideology and religion are due to the fact that different people have different internal moral foundations, which come in 6 different flavors.

These flavors are:

• Care/Harm
• Fairness/Cheating
• Loyalty/Betrayal/Ingroup
• Authority/Subversion
• Sanctity/Degradation/Purity
• Liberty/Oppression

Liberals seem to focus primarily on two of these while conservatives on all five. I know I would score myself very high on care, fairness and liberty. Moderate on loyalty (low patriotism high family) . Low on authority and purity. Before judging my self evaluation realize these words are the academic definition and not the common definition (this is a dense book). 

Each of these groups can then find a different aspect of the specific foundation as important. For example on the fairness foundation, people on the left might view equality as its chief outcome. While on the right, people might view proportionality or being rewarded according to what each contributes as the desired outcome.

The first two sections were very long and dry. It probably took me eight hours of reading today to get through them. It’s mostly the science and studies of the theory of morality and ethics combined with history lessons and sociology lessons of studies of different cultures. It’s super interesting but it’s pretty dry. Except the morality questions he uses such as… is a person is wrong if I’m private they own a chicken, kill the chicken, fuck the body and then cook and eat the chicken. I’m excited for tomorrow when I start the third and final section on putting it all together to understand why politics and religion have become so tribal. 

My laptop and sunglasses both died today (laptop won’t power on and my glasses broke)