Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
"Our ideas" are only partly our ideas. Most of our ideas are abbreviations or residues of the thought of other people, of our teachers (in the broadest sense of the term) and of our teachers' teachers; they are abbreviations and residues of the thought of the past.
Leo Strauss: "Political Philosophy and History"
Why repurpose quotes from my Expositions page. One obvious reason is that they are germane to the subject matter of Haidt's two works being considered here. How do our minds work? Why do they work the way they do? Are we making good use of our minds? Can we improve how our minds work and what we find worthy of thought?
We will begin with Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Then eventually, depending on the quantity and depth of detours inspired by The Righteous Mind, we will get going on The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
Mindfulness
I say "We will begin..." Yet, it is I who begin these highly praised and challenging Haidt readings at the recommendation of a former classmate and roommate, college travel companion, and forever close friend. Thank you, Steve. We'll converse again soon over bourbon, beer, or Bordeaux.
What do I mean by detours? An example would be my first detour inspired by Haidt -- Antonio R. Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. It is an unread paperback that has gathered dust on my bookshelves for more than a decade. Haidt referred to it early (page 39 of his 500+ page book). This detour will slow my reading of The Righteous Mind but hopefully enrich it, because I am now reading Haidt and Damasio in parallel. The excursion seems fruitful so far.
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza: Tractatus Politicus (1676)
Spinoza, eh, Mr. Haidt? Excellent choice for an opening quote to your examination of mind and righteousness.
Since at its core Haidt's book plans "to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible" (xviii), and that (civilized) people express their morality largely through politics and religion, Spinoza is a great jumping off point. Who better to get us started than the Jewish-Dutch-Portuguese philosopher, rationalist, biblical scholar and critic, and personification of dialectical thinking on the origins of ethics and morality. A fundamental question often comes to mind when trying to interpret and analyze Spinoza's oeuvre: God or Nature? Mr. Haidt seems to hint that he will not appeal to a god or religion as some type of authority for our mind's inner workings, but that he will objectively examine religion's effects along with other influences on how and what we think. We shall see.
Ponder this personal favorite Spinoza passage. There is so much to unpack!
Now we showed in the Appendix to Part I., that Nature does not work with an end in view. For the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature, acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists. For we have shown, that by the same necessity of its nature, whereby it exists, it likewise works (I. xvi.). The reason or cause why God or nature exists, and the reason why he acts, are one and the same. Therefore, as he does not exist for the sake of an end, so neither does he act for the sake of an end; of his existence and of his action there is neither origin nor end. Wherefore, a cause which is called final is nothing else but human desire, in so far as it is considered as the origin or cause of anything.
-- Baruch Spinoza: Ethics (Preface to "Part IV: Of Human Bondage, or of the Strength of the Emotions")
We won't dive further into Spinoza's God-or-Nature metaphysics, an intricate and difficult philosophy that got 23 year old Baruch excommunicated by his Portuguese-Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656. Not now anyway. But we can at least acknowledge that Spinoza is one of "our teachers' teachers" whose "residue of thought" must be somewhat foundational for Haidt, compelling his investigations about the strength of emotions and the effect of religion on our righteous political positions, inspiring his search for the reasons behind our reasoning -- reasoning that we largely overestimate as purely rational. Why else would Haidt give Spinoza the honor of an epigraph.
To be continued and emended...
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