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You are here: Home / Archives for Jonathan Haidt

Reading Last Year and This Year

January 12, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week for me, and not in a good way. 
 
It was probably RSV that took down the first three days of it in a torrent of congestion and runny nose, until I felt my old self begin to return on Thursday, only to discover while heading out for necessities, that the rapid thaw had burst two pipes in our carriage house (which holds both car and office) so I ended up spending all of my relief mopping, moving, drying and hoping that my plumber would come to the rescue.
 
By Friday I was tired, back to recovering and not yet relieved again, but Andrew the unflappable pipe fixer had come and gone and it now appears that I’ll finally be getting rid of the old computer equipment that’s been gathering out there because I never got around to removing “the sensitive bits” before it’s composting until now.
 
If all of this has to happen, it might as well be in this dangling participle of a week, lodged between a culmination of sorts (on Christmas) and a new beginning (today, on New Years). While I was casting about for a headline image this morning, it seemed to me that the one above is either about capturing the last or the first light, and therefore, just that kind of inbetweeness. (Photographer Sasha Elage gets my thanks for it.) 
 
In a similar vein, this is also a time of year for looking back on some of its high points and maybe anticipating some new ones. I covered some of the songs that held my ear in 2022 last week, and today it’s a short dash through things I’ve read that have left their mark on me this year and might do the same for you.
 
However, before turning to my short list of books, essays and stories, a observation about the current state of our literacy (more generally) from, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s Secretary of State is 100 years old now and looking a bit like Stephen Hawking while he retreats into his business suit at gatherings, but God-Bless-Him the man is still raising concerns and speaking out about them given his undiminished sense of public duty. It’s remarkable, but also invaluable—especially because so few of our “public figures” work up the gumption to do so today.

Henry Kissinger as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.

Above everything, Kissinger is concerned that our culture is losing the academic-and-life-long commitments to “deep literacy” that its road warriors seemed to have earlier in his career. That is: To know what our greatest minds are thinking about, to be able to talk about those things too, and most importantly, to discern the most telling insights in this cultural conversation and apply them to how we live and work, govern ourselves and interact with strangers. He believes that there used to be more public-spirited individuals with a deep understanding of history, world affairs and human interaction (from literature, among other sources) who were prepared to lead their communities or countries.

 
Kissinger fears we are losing the farm teams and even the starting benches of leadership that our civilization once depended on because the men and women who are drawn to public service no longer bring “the deep literacy” that our colleges and universities once fostered. There are lots of reasons for this of course, including an emphasis on “vocational” education (or only-study-now-what-you-can-get-paid-to-do-later) and on the STEM disciplines (given remarkable advances in science and technology and the high-paying jobs that accompany them). 
 
But Kissinger cites two other culprits, both related to the growing dominance of electronic communication today. Increasingly, “we gain what we know” from pictures or tweets instead of from reading about something (anythng) in any greater depth. A constant barrage of brief impressions has caused us to have shorter attention spans and made us less likely to take any kind of dive (let alone a deep one) into complicated subject matter. Kissinger fears that our leaders and “the educated strata” in our societies that once produced their brain trusts are becoming increasingly “less literate,” with consequences that we can unfortunately see all around us.
 
It’s a point that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made this year in an Atlantic article called “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anticipating Kissinger’s alarm, this article was already “one of the year’s best reads” and the subject of my Divided We Fall post six months ago. Haidt argues that social media, and its appeal to emotion instead of reason, has increased our civic illiteracy, making it harder to safeguard the institutions and commitments we profess to hold in common. While, like many of you, I was briefly heartened by the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the coming year is likely to remind those of us in the US (with our new Congress) and elsewhere (given widening conflicts and fresh horrors) just how fleeting that “good news” really was. 
 
Today’s undermining of literacy is not somebody else’s problem. I know only too well how much “easier” it is for me to scroll through photo or video-sharing sites or watch “what Netflix recommends for me next” than to commit to a lengthy essay or a new book. So I sense the cognitive degrading in and around me too, a lassitude that the pandemic and other travails has only amplified, and I actively try to vote against it—although not as much as I’d like. 
 
So with that somewhat sobering preface, allow me to share my other favorite “reads” of the year and hopefully an occasion or two for you to cast your own votes for “deeper literacy” over easier diversions.

(photo by Leo Berne)

2 MORE ESSAYS AND ONE STORY
 
– Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” in The New Yorker, June 8, 2022. I have one of you to thank for this one (“Happy New Year, Tedd!”) This essay is about private property versus the land as well as the other privileges and freedoms that we still hold “in common.” It turns on the author’s visit to the farming community of Lawton in rural England where the common resources that everyone depends on have somehow resisted the private interests that keep wanting to gobble them up. 

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

It’s imagination that we need now in places like the unclaimed oceans and polar regions, the Amazon and Congo River basins, the rainforests and coral reefs, and where the water flows down the Colorado and towards an American desert that tries to sustain more people than it ever expected.
 
– Lucas Mann, “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That is Really About My Own Shit,” at Hobartpulp.com, August 16, 2022. From its title, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with “making the world a better place” at the humanities end of the pool. Well I wouldn’t have found out either if I hadn’t already been thinking about Brad Pitt’s screen persona and the impact that seeing somebody like him over and over might have on an even mildly susceptible person.

Pitt has never chosen to not be Brad Pitt in the image on-screen. Even as he’s taken strange, anti-careerist roles, earned that character-actor-trapped-in-a-leading-man cliché, each performance comes attached to the promise of Brad Pitt’s body. He may have done a wacky Irish Traveler accent in Snatch, but he was still a boxer, and there was a slow-motion break in the movie’s frantic comedy to watch him pull off his shirt. It’s almost as if he’s set himself a lifelong artistic challenge — I can believably be anybody, even when I look like this. Or there’s that lingering, glorious possibility that he hasn’t considered his body enough to wonder whether it’s a gift or a hindrance. Or maybe it’s a moral decision, honoring what has always been the money-maker, refusing to take on that greatest and easiest bit of artifice, the physical kind, even in a profession all about playing pretend.

By getting an imprint like this into the right author’s head, great literature (and this comes close) can change the way that you see the world. Mann confronts the shame of his personal cravings around food, his tendency to be overweight, and his desire that his new daughter be free of these burdens in the shadow of Pitt’s treating food like another accessory to his preternatural good looks. Above even Mann’s powers of observation and serious writing chops, this autobiographical tour-de-force is about how “what we see” might never stop affecting “who we are” once “it gets under our skin.”
 
“Watching Brad Pitt Eat” is another cautionary note in an era that’s full to the gills with damaging, media-driven impressions, and not just the ones that are made on vulnerable, 13-year-old girls (although in my post next week, called Watching in 2022, one of my favorites was a advertisement for Dove soap that showed “the nearly parental effect” that Instagram or TikTok can have when it’s urging these same 13-year olds to strive for greater beauty.)
 
– Alyssa Harad, “To Live in the Ending,” in Kenyon Review, July-August, 2022.
 
When you live in a time that can feel almost apocalyptic you deeply appreciate new ways to frame “the imminent threats” you’re constantly facing. In gorgeous “braids” of storytelling, Harad manages to do just this by weaving several endings in her own life with the “end times” stories that echo around her in order to make more manageable sense out of the harrowing times in which we live.  For example, the voice of an environmentalist that she’s followed:

offers a way to think about the end of the world not as a singular explosive event—something true only from the long view of geological time—but as a Chinese box or a matryoshka doll. In a time of climate emergency we live in a series of nested crises. When we emerge from one, the larger one is always there waiting for us. And inside the big troubles—the global rise of fascism, a kleptocratic presidency, white supremacist police violence, concentration camps on our southern border, a pandemic—the smaller crises of ordinary human life continue—a broken heart, a sick child, the rent falling due—all of it framed, structured, intensified, and continually interrupted by the ongoing alarm of the climate crisis.

So how does nesting these crises cushion their blows? Because doing so allows us to acknowledge the occasional victories that occur within them and, when that happens, to feel their respites (if only briefly). 
 
The rolling flow of Harad’s narrative allows us to experience what she means by this: the epiphany of blue flowers in a dying lakebed or of the heroism of a public defender who works “within but against a violent system, quietly, in an obscurity that makes the work possible, trading purity for efficacy, jimmying open the places where the edges don’t quite come together, to make room for a few more people to breathe.”

Shadow & light packets.

BOOKS
 
– I have piles of unread books, but not a finished one that’s worth sharing since I extolled the virtues of a slim volume about effective writing and a short memoir by “one of our great innovators in modern autobiographical writing” over the summer. In a post called The Relaxing Curiosity That Is Also August, I have more to say about Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Several Short Sentences About Writing” and Margot Jefferson’s “Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir.” (Both of them are still sending me reminders.) You’ll find quotes, links to reviews and other impressions that I had about them in that post.
 
– I follow the second half of the year-in-books quite closely, in particular the National Book Award finalists and longlist for American writers, the same winnowing down for the Booker Prize given to a book that’s written in English this year, and the “notable” and “best” books according to book editors at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other literary arbiters. I do it because I want to know what I should be reading next.
 
One compilation of note came via a daily post from the publishing industry—a kind of compilation of compilations for the year’s fiction and non-fiction books and “the 10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” when the categories are combined. This is how Publisher’s Lunch (yes, it conveniently drops at lunchtime everyday) describes the operation of this remarkable annual service: 

Below as usual are our top 10s for the year — based on 61 ‘votes’ from a variety of highly selective lists from critics and reviewers, award nominees, bookseller and librarian picks, book club selections and more.

(“And more!”) You see, they’re aiming to measure quality here, not the quantity of books sold. So in the coming year, if you’re looking for a book to read that comes highly recommended by (apparently) all the right people, their “10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” are as follows:
 
1. Trust, Hernan Diaz
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
3. Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
4. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
An Immense World, Ed Yong
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
8. Babel, R.F. Kuang
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews.

 
(I am at a loss as to why there are 11 books on their top 10 list. It must be the “ties” at #8 that are responsible.)

– And last but hardly least, here are the 3 books that I’m currently standing-in-line to take out of my local library. One I was after long before I saw the list above (Ed Yong’s “Immense World” about the infinite varieties of living experience that are flourishing around us but that we know so little about). 
 
A second is also on the list, but I only got interested in it after the buzz from delighted readers I trust gradually became so deafening that I felt like I’d be missing out otherwise (Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” about the origin story of video games and how friendships can sometimes be “as complicated, perplexing and rewarding as a great love story.”)
 
Finally, a book that came to my attention outside of any list (Claire Keegan’s “Foster,” set in rural Ireland and full of the rich details of daily life, but composed with an artfulness that promises to linger and gnaw. What I know of the plot—about a temporarily-loved girl—has  shown me more than enough about why this just might be true.) 
 
If these three live up to their evangelists, I may be writing to you about them here in coming months too.
 
In the meantime, to you and your loved ones, I wish you all the best in the coming year. Keep in touch and may the wind be at our backs in the months ahead.

This post was adapted from my January 1, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning, Daily Preparation, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: "deep literacy", 10 Very Best Books of 2022 Overall, Alyssa Harad, books stories and essays in 2022, civic illiteracy, Claire Keegan, Ed Yong, Eula Bliss, Gabrielle Zevin, Henry Kissinger, Jonathan Haidt, Lucas Mann, Margot Jefferson, Publisher's Lunch, Verlyn Klinkenborg

Divided We Fall

May 29, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s a kind of truism for a democracy like ours:  When we’re divided we fall.
 
We’re not at that precipice, but it sure feels closer. In my feelings about how likely the danger really is today, I’m grateful to have traveled around this country and to have spent time in places like Missouri and Wisconsin so that I know such places as more than fly-over country and their inhabitants as people who are not that different from me. 
 
In an important recent essay that we’ll get to in a minute, Jonathan Haidt describes these folks (who are, in fact, most Americans), as “the exhausted majority,” tired to the point of retirement of all the noisy damage from the progressive and MAGA extremes that tend to monopolize our airways and screen time. I remember meeting many of these same people when I was just a kid. Back then, they were called “the silent majority,” and while they might have seemed more prominent in places like the Mid-West, I think that’s just because they weren’t so easily obscured by the “always on” self-promotion that blares from media centers on the Coasts and from a few big cities in the middle.
 
I know that these Americans are everywhere because I’ve come to know many of the “silent and exhausted” as my neighbors in what otherwise seems like the bluest of blue cities. They’re here, they vote, they’re concerned, involved and a check on even Philadelphia’s excesses. Indeed, it’s the volume, the sanity and the decency of America’s vast waistline that keeps our feet (as a nation) on the ground and our head a lot clearer than it would otherwise be.

We’d be closer to the precipice without them. At their best, they operate like an anchor against our worst political impulses.
 

It’s the volume, sanity and decency of America’s vast waistline that keeps our feet (as a nation) on the ground and our head a lot clearer than it would otherwise be. 

 
Some of my closest encounters with “just plain citizens” have happened in jury rooms. As a lawyer, I’m always surprised when I get accepted onto a jury (I recall a time when my profession was an immediate disqualifier) but now I get on panels routinely and, once I do, I try to melt into the crowd, someone whose expertise is a resource instead of an excuse for having a weightier point of view. From inside that room, I’ve been repeatedly reminded of what our forebears in English jurisprudence had discovered about juries: their power to project a community’s values and good sense onto a set of circumstances—in other words, to figure out “what happened” and “what society should do about it” by demonstrating their collective wisdom. 
 
Serving as a juror has become one way to remind myself about the arrogance and elitism of professional classes and experts that think they “know better,” and it’s always been a rejuvenating way to re-involve myself in my community (“Jury Duty Is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have”). Wearing a juror badge a few years back also got me thinking about another civic commitment that can bind instead of divide us from most other Americans, namely thinking (in the sense of deliberating) about the dollars-and-cents investments that we make in our local, state and federal governments when we pay our taxes (something discussed in last week’s post “I Could Turn Myself Into a Tax Deduction (or Then Again, Maybe Not)”) Don’t I want to make wise, as opposed to mindless investments in my country, and aren’t those investment decisions worth talking about with others who are making them too? 

There’s another area where we’ve lost but could easily recover our sense of community. The personal and financial burdens of America’s war-making would almost certainly be borne more equally—and at least some of our foreign wars might not be fought at all—if instead of being waged by a proxy army of “volunteers” with few other options, our military ranks were comprised of everyone’s children via a “universal” draft. Without that common investment, wars in places like Afghanistan are simply abstractions for too many until we’re confronted with a debacle like the evacuation of Kabul last summer. (In this regard, you might want to check out Andrew Bacevich’s Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.)  These are all places where Americans are meeting today—or could be meeting—across their divides.
 
Greater participation in civic commonalities like jury duty, tax paying, war-making and avoiding would all help to bind our communities together. National disasters can too. I’m thinking about the ways that “regular” people came together in ways that neither government nor governmental authorities (like FEMA or the CDC) could manage in the wake of 9/11 or the recent pandemic. In the later, the essential workers that we celebrated as heroes were regular folks who weren’t tweeting about their accomplishments or sacrifices, they were simply showing up to some very hard jobs day after day. (As I’ve mentioned here before, Rebecca Solnit writes magnificently about the everyday people who did the same after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and similar catastrophes in A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster.)  

These are places where Americans are meeting today—or could be meeting—across their divides.
 

But while regular/silent/exhausted/essential/middle Americans are surely a corrective in a democracy like ours, they may not be able to produce enough “spontaneous and timely” action to keep us from the precipice that we still seem to be heading towards. It’s out of that concern that Haidt, a social and moral psychologist at NYU, wrote an excellent article in the April 2022 issue of The Atlantic called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” You need to read it, because no summary of it that I can give here will do it justice. (If you confront a paywall in your efforts to do so let me know and I’ll get you a copy.) You also need to read it because despite its look-twice-at-it title, Haidt makes his argument for confronting our stupidity astutely and methodically, because perhaps more than any other critical observer, Haidt has been struggling to explain and then reduce our values-driven polarization since his ground-breaking The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion almost ten years ago. 

In his Atlantic essay, Haidt’s argues that the confluence of social media platforms and trends in our politics have brought us closer to the edge as a cohesive nation than we have been since the Civil War. Because I’ve not seen this urgency expressed so simply, straightforwardly and elegantly before, I’ll highlight a couple of pieces of “evidence” that he cites (because they made better sense to me when viewed in his wider context), but I won’t attempt to summarize the entire waterfront that he covers here.

We all need to struggle against the stupidity that increasingly confronts us in our daily attempts to make sense of it all. His argument (which includes proposed “solutions,” that are brilliant in their modesty, nuance and precision) may be the perfect place to start.

The social media megaphone with some of its tokens of our current “stupidity,”
according to Haidt.

The childlike innocence of emojis that express our approval or disapproval, our “liking” and then retweeting or “sharing” what we like, all appear to be pretty benign, at least at first. But given the state of our politics in, say, 2011, these simple emotional messages on social media were anything but when they dropped, unannounced, into our lives.
 
I remember something about the state of our affairs 10 years ago. For one thing, while the Great Recession had happened in 2008 and 2009, for many businesses (including this family’s) its most challenging consequences were only felt years later, from 2011 on. At the same time, the US was still mired in two wars—first Afghanistan and then Iraq—and the political divisiveness around Bush-era decision-making in those wars and, to a somewhat lesser extent, from FEMA’s bungling after Katrina in New Orleans, had failed to produce a new consensus around Obama’s presidency, as we were soon to discover in the awkward launch of “Obamacare” in March of 2010 and the rise of the Tea Party in the mid-term elections of 2012.
 
Into this increasingly turbulent political landscape, a couple of seemingly modest, “user-friendly” innovations were introduced on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps it took a social psychologist like Haidt to recognize how efficiently “emojis, likes, retweets and shares” divided the world between “good” and “bad” and how effectively they amplified the morally-charged and highly-emotional judgments of a very small group of political partisans for the first time in the history of communication.
 
In other words, something entirely without precedent in human social, cultural, political and psychological experience had happened, and only now are we identifying the root causes as we confront the damage that’s been done in the intervening years by the Far Left and Far Right. 
 
The first thing that Haidt’s essay managed to crystallize for me was how small groups of highly motivated people at both ends of the spectrum succeeded in polarizing the entire political debate by additional orders of magnitude, and the kind of narcissism that drove these small numbers of people when they had the opportunity to exert their influence over almost everybody else. 
 
My second revelation was how vulnerable we are when it comes to governing ourselves given the foundations that are essential to cohesive decision-making in a democracy like ours, particularly when we’re confronted with the rise of new technologies and global conflicts that are likely to present further challenges of an existential nature to “our way of life.”  
 
These arguments about manipulation and urgency of the moment are why we should all care about this. Let’s consider Haidt’s words in these regards.
 
Around 2011, a small group of people who aspired to be “thought leaders” saw the self-promotional value of new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter: 

they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand[s]—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will. 

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time [actually] connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation…the intensification of viral dynamics. [the italics are mine]

With “like,” “re-tweet” and “share” buttons fully deployed, the social media platforms developed algorithms that could put in front of each user the kind of content that could generate her “like” or encourage him to immediately “share” what he’d seen with others. The social scientists who guided the design of these algorithms soon had research in hand which proved that the posts that triggered emotions—especially anger directed at perceived enemies—are the posts that are most likely to be shared. Helping to prove his “they’re making us stupider” thesis, Haidt notes:

One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the ‘Retweet’ button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, ‘We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.

As Haidt goes on to explain: “[t]he newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves” given the expedited ways we could now endorse an inflammatory message and spread it around. The question, of course, is whether our democratic institutions and our on-going conversations as citizens are resilient enough to survive this kind of barrage.

According to Haidt, the pied pipers who lead this destructively stupid parade are drawn from of a very small number—less than 15%—of America’s population. 

The ‘Hidden Tribes’ study by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the ‘devoted conservatives,’ comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the ‘progressive activists,’ comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. 

What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: ‘Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.’ In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

In addition to being lethal weapons in their own right, the weaponizing of uncivil discourse is likely to get worse in coming years. New technological advances and bad actors in places like Russia and China who see an upside to themselves in destabilizing America will see to that. 
 

These arguments about manipulation and the urgency of the moment are why we should all care about this.

 
On the new technology side, Haidt reports that “artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation.” (Indeed, in many places it already seems to be doing so.) Moreover, advances in the art of “the deep-fake” will make it more difficult to disbelieve our eyes when we see a deliberately altered and misleading image pop up on our screens. 
 
There will also be implications for America’s ability to “hold its own” in the face of an increasingly hostile world.

We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.

How close do we have to get to the precipice before we’re mobilized to do something about it—not through government necessarily, but as citizens who can speak out and mobilize from our silent/exhausted/essential/ middle, that is, in the voice of our vast majority?

The Piper had taken out the rats before he took out the children.

I led off with an image of the Pied Piper (up top), trailed by his captivated young followers, who were being lured from town by the Piper’s malice after the townspeople had failed to pay him for his earlier work, which was to lead the town’s rats to their eventual demise. 
 
It’s a chilling story, originating in medieval German folkfore, picked up by Goethe in Der Rattenfanger, the Brothers Grimm in a cautionary tale, and Robert Browning in one of his poems. Entranced by the brain-dulling notes of his flute, both the town’s rats and eventually its children are led to their doom. In the process, the Piper becomes a universal bogeyman, “one very grim reaper,” who uses his seductive wiles to administer some very final consequences.
 
His mind-dulling ways seem relevant here too.
 
Whether we are “on social media” or not, millions of us are caught up in the emotionally charged messaging that blares almost constantly from its direction. Just listen for the extremist din around “Roe vs. Wade” this week, or about Clarence Thomas’s or Anthony Fauci’s “lack of objectivity” last week.
 
Today’s pied pipers on the Left and the Right adroitly hook us through our confirmation biases, which are our tendencies to always be on the lookout for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs and ways of understanding all manner of things. It’s a tendency that makes us “stupider,” according to Haidt, because “[t]he most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs” [italics mine]. Unsurprisingly, it’s also the most reliable way to get smarter. 
 
Moreover, the extremists’ self-policing tendencies on social media—their constantly ferreting out deviators from their perceived orthodoxies, whether “woke” or “MAGA” in nature—have a milder, but still perceptible impact on the rest of us too, who gain some easy comfort from affiliating with our perceived tribes. For while these inquisitions to enforce “true beliefs” are most damaging to the small minority of extremists, it’s almost impossible to escape their toxic effects. As Haidt writes: 

People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

In other words, the darts we’re shooting at ourselves to align with our tribal instincts have their own detrimental effects. In Haidt’s parlance, as all this conformity is making us stupider, the internal threats (from tech advances) and external threats (from hostile adversaries) are getting more worrisome.
 

“The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction
with people who don’t share your beliefs.”

 
In a post here from several months back (“The Way Forward Needs Hope Standing With Fear”) I discussed a lesson from Buddhist Pema Chodron, who (at 85) is the principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. With hope as we usually understand it, there is always a fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass, Chodron says. But accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear can liberate you from fear’s constraints, because instead of being tentative or even paralyzed by your alarm about the future, it is possible to generate as much curiosity about your fears as you have about your longings. It’s cultivating your curiosity about what you dread that can loosen fear’s disabling hold.
 
I hope you find, as I did, that Haidt’s essay helps to engage exactly that kind of liberating curiosity. What sometimes appears to be a dead-end today may become a hopeful way forward if our curiosity can enable us to do something about it.

This post was adapted from my May 8, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: America's political divides, America's vast wasteline, Americans getting stupider, civic commonalities, commons of public life, curiosity about people with different views, emojis, exhausted majority, fragile American democracy, Jonathan Haidt, jury duty, likes, paying taxes, retweets, self promoting thought leaders on social media, shares, silent majority, social media, universal military draft

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

July 30, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

  1. The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
  2. On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
  3. If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
  4. Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Continuous Learning Tagged With: Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, moral intuition, morality, religion, righteous, thinking fast and slow, value judgment, values

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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