Ch. 4: Vote for Me (Here's Why)
Posted: Tue Dec 10, 2019 3:28 pm
Ch. 4: Vote for Me (Here's Why)
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I believe Ant was making this case for a long time and mostly to deaf ears. I still want to make a counterargument, but not sure how I would put it.It’s the idea that reasoning is our most noble attribute, one that makes us like the gods (for Plato) or that brings us beyond the “delusion” of believing in gods (for the New Atheists).
This is sort of the takeaway in Haidt's other book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Money and fame don't make us happy (although lacking money would be a hindrance). Haidt argues that much of our happiness comes from social relationships, being part of a community. This makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, since we evolved under conditions in which humans lived in small groups.. . . each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
And I think the structure of his argument is very logical and clear and builds up as he goes along. He's a good teacher.geo wrote:I think this chapter is when Haidt's ideas are really starting to come into focus.
Blaise Pascal wasn't on board with supreme reason: “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." Religion also typically claims a power beyond reason, which would be faith. Perhaps since science has remade the world, and the method of science is associated with reason, what Haidt says is true. But it's hard for me to completely accept the generalization.This was a bit of a surprise. Haidt suggests that "worship" of reason is "one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history."
I believe Ant was making this case for a long time and mostly to deaf ears. I still want to make a counterargument, but not sure how I would put it.
So in this book, he adds to the value of our groupish nature in claiming that not only will we be happier, but our political discourse will become more reasoned only through sitting down with well-intentioned people and hashing out our views. This reminds me of the intent behind Better Angels, which you might have heard of. It's a red-blue reconciliation movement. I read an article about it that confirmed that meetings of reds and blues result in civil discussion. However, there is such significant self-selection (i.e., these are folks willing to come to the table) that the writer wondered if the movement can have a wide effect.And then this:
This is sort of the takeaway in Haidt's other book, The Happiness Hypothesis. Money and fame don't make us happy (although lacking money would be a hindrance). Haidt argues that much of our happiness comes from social relationships, being part of a community. This makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, since we evolved under conditions in which humans lived in small groups.. . . each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
As such, in the modern world, when we are socially isolated, we are more unhappy and selfish than when we are part of a group. So what does that say about individualistic societies? Have we moved too far along this course? Should we try to become more sociocentric?
I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any individual's ability to reason.
To me the answer is obviously yes, but I am not very good at actually doing it. My elephant is a loner, and my rider is telling the elephant to quit being such a jerk.geo wrote: Haidt argues that much of our happiness comes from social relationships, being part of a community. This makes sense from an evolutionary psychology perspective, since we evolved under conditions in which humans lived in small groups.
As such, in the modern world, when we are socially isolated, we are more unhappy and selfish than when we are part of a group. So what does that say about individualistic societies? Have we moved too far along this course? Should we try to become more sociocentric?
I want to frame the post and hang it on the wall. It captures the yin and yang of our social being. I can understand the attraction of achieving a separate social space to the person who is webbed in by all sorts of prescriptions for behaving. Once that freedom is obtained, the sense of loss may set in. It might be parallel to the Inuit hunter who can't help wanting to adopt technology that gives him better food security, but finds that leads to loss of cultural identity.Harry Marks wrote: The way I put this together is in terms of opportunity. Given the skills for negotiating everyday conflict in a non-abrasive way that doesn't rely on dominance and aggression, people can make each other pretty happy. Life is win-win-win if we learn to get past our instincts for win-lose thinking formed by dominance. So we need to cultivate the skills of being sociocentric without the primordial structure on which traditional sociocentric organization rested.
You can read a novelist's intuitive decoding of this in Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart".
I think I will steal "finding the sharp edges of cooperation annoying." It captures the dilemmas wonderfully well.DWill wrote: I want to frame the post and hang it on the wall. It captures the yin and yang of our social being.
We're coming out of our cocoons and finding the sharp edges of cooperation annoying.
I had thought that your previous teaching had been in schools serving mostly families from the upper income levels. Now, apparently conditions are different for you. Not that wealthy parents translate all the time to mentally healthy kids, but that circumstance has to constitute a leg up. I hope you have supportive colleagues and administrators. My teaching experience is scant; I didn't continue with it but have huge respect for teachers. One of the most negative features for me was feelings of isolation, the classroom feeling like a separate box. It seemed that education should have been a more cooperative thing.Harry Marks wrote: I am obsessing on this stuff lately because I am discovering how distorted my students' emotional lives are by what educators call "trauma" which includes a wide range of stressful events from having parents imprisoned for crime or deported to having parents constantly criticizing them and shaming and belittling them. At first I thought the numbers were manageable, like one in 10 had disabling levels of trauma, but now I am thinking it is more like one in four who cannot put together the work habits to do a normal amount of learning because their nervous systems are raw from conflict at home.
Thanks for the supportive words. I have indeed moved from "easy" teaching, where students were selected and usually pretty motivated, to typical American students who, as you say, don't want to study much. We constantly battle the inertia of students who are caught up in social drama, computerized gaming, and ubiquitous entertainment, and the day is past when the stories of history could be imagined to be their main window on a wider world.DWill wrote: I had thought that your previous teaching had been in schools serving mostly families from the upper income levels. Now, apparently conditions are different for you. Not that wealthy parents translate all the time to mentally healthy kids, but that circumstance has to constitute a leg up. I hope you have supportive colleagues and administrators.
Yes, a big part of the success some schools have had with an adapted curriculum involves finding points of engagement and then bringing in the math and the writing skills as a side aspect of learning about what the student cares about. It turns out that is a less affordable model than simply providing kids with a lot of support, involving what we might call a "social worker" to get them to build the inner strength to get over their barriers.DWill wrote:Whether such a lack is more the fault of the culture, of the parents, or of the education system itself, no idea, but it's a shame to leave school without having found some independent interest to follow for its own sake. I wasn't even a good student in high school, but I did read a lot off the books, so to speak.
This is about as far as I got in the book on first reading it, many years ago. I am trying to pay special attention to this theme, and I will have more comments about it for the next chapter, which I have now finished. But I have to say I am really dissatisfied with Haidt's treatment of it, so far at least. I get that it makes important context for his big message, that most of the world has a wider range of dimensions of moral intuition, but I think he ends up neglecting weighty issues in cultural anthropology to set out this context.geo wrote:Should we try to become more sociocentric?