Peter Wehner
The Atlantic
[abridged]
Over the past decade, no one has added more to my understanding of how we think about, discuss, and debate politics and religion than Jonathan Haidt.
I began the interview by asking Haidt to reflect on what COVID-19 is revealing about American society, whether it would draw us closer together or push us farther apart, and how we might leverage this moment into greater social solidarity and cohesion. The best way to approach this question, he replied, is to look at the trajectory of American democracy over the past decade and a half or so.
Around 2008, Haidt became increasingly concerned by how politically polarized America was becoming, and polarization has only worsened over the past dozen years. “I’ve gotten more and more alarmed every year since then,” he told me, “and there are several trends that are very disturbing,” including the rise of “affective polarization,” or the mutual dislike and hate each political side feels for the other. “When there’s so much hatred, a democracy can’t work right,” he said. “You can’t get compromise. You get exactly the situation that the Founders feared, that [James] Madison wrote about in ‘Federalist 10,’ which is faction, which is people care more about defeating the other side than they do about the common good.”
For some time now, Haidt has been saying that if current trends continue, the United States may somehow come apart—but he always adds that trends never continue forever. Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse; you can’t just extrapolate from the present. “When the COVID-19 crisis hit, at first I was very optimistic that no matter how bad things get, there’s a real chance this could throw us off of the downward trajectory we were on,” he said. “There’s a real chance that this could be the reset button. So that’s the framework that I bring to all of my thinking about the implications of this crisis for the country, that we were headed in a very bad direction and a lot is going to change. And so I am more hopeful now than I was before—but that isn’t saying much.”
Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think. “And when you look at the people who are loudest on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.”
But Haidt pointed out that several surveys, including one in April by More in Common, show that the pandemic is having the sort of unifying effect that major crises tend to have. Feelings toward Donald Trump are almost perfectly polarized, as one would expect. But on other important questions, there’s not that much polarization. For example, 90 percent of Americans believe that “we’re all in it together,” compared to just 63 percent in the fall of 2018. The share of Americans who describe the country as “unified” has grown from 4 percent in 2018 to 32 percent today, while the percentage of Americans who regard the country as “very divided” has dropped from 62 percent to just 22 percent. Other polls show that the divide between Republicans and Democrats on social-distancing measures isn’t all that large.
“When we look at the stories of moral beauty versus moral depravity, it certainly seems like there are far more stories of moral beauty out there than moral depravity,” Haidt said. “So what I think is happening is that the most politically active Americans are just incorporating this into their preexisting culture war, but most Americans seem to be having a surge of common sentiment, of prosocial feeling. We are all going through similar experiences at the same time, which has hardly ever happened before. So I’m still hopeful.”
Hopeful, but not naive. After all, historically pandemics have tended to split societies apart rather than bring them together, since they combine isolation with fear of others. And then you add Trump to the mix.
I asked Haidt how a country can unify in the face of a pandemic with a president like Trump, who is so intentionally divisive. He answered, as he often answers questions of this sort, by first making an observation about human nature.
People are very good at pursuing their self-interest, Haidt said, but they’re also able to forget their narrow self-interest and merge into larger groups. “Yet they are very wary about being exploited,” he added, “so we’re always looking for signs that the leader is sincere, is not a self-aggrandizer, is not exploiting us.” Leaders who create a sense that we’re all in this together and show moral leadership can help us overcome our differences and unite us.
Not so the 45th president. “The psychologists I spoke to before Trump was elected overwhelmingly said that the diagnosis they would make based on what they saw is narcissistic personality disorder,” Haidt said. “And I think we’ve seen that continuously since his election, that he tends to make everything about him. And so that is pretty much the opposite of ethical leadership, where it needs to be about the team and our shared interest. I don’t see much of a chance of us really coming together and overcoming our differences before the election. Or, basically, as long as Trump is in office.”
So what is Haidt hoping for? The political equivalent of Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Haidt put it this way: “Since we already see signs that most Americans are exhausted by this culture war, [my hope is] that this year or into next year will be kind of a pit of despair or a pit of darkness—and then we’ll emerge from it.”
He continued, “I need to read up on how the religious wars ended in Europe, but my second- or thirdhand understanding is that it wasn’t that Europeans reached some profoundly enlightened view; they just got exhausted, and they realized, you know, we’ve got to stop this. And so that is actually my main source of hope, that things are so bad now and the fact that we can’t even confront a pandemic because of our polarization. We can’t share facts, we can’t share strategies, we can’t coordinate behavior because of our polarization. I think this will become increasingly clear.”
Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”
Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
Haidt told me the evidence shows us that “when we get what we want, we quickly adapt to that. The satisfaction is very short lived, surprisingly short lived, and we actually get more happiness from making progress towards our goals than we do from achieving them.” He went on to argue that “modernity has given us extraordinary wealth, private rooms, the ability to be alone forever if we want. And what we find, the more we make progress, is a rising spiritual hunger. We’ve seen rising rates of depression gradually since the Second World War. There’s something that’s not quite satisfying about modernity and modern life. I think it all begins to make sense when you understand that we evolve as ultra-social creatures with needs to be part of a tight community. We are relational creatures; we have to have good relations between [ourselves] and others. No man is an island. We can’t really be happy alone. We need good relationships to be happy.”
Haidt said we’re also geared toward productivity—that we get great pleasure from making something happen in the world. “You see this even from babies,” he said. “A baby who discovers that by moving her head she can make a mobile move, it’s thrilling.” So we’ve got to get the right relations between ourselves and others, between ourselves and our work.
“We have to have some sense that we’re making progress, we’re doing something, we’re contributing something, we’re making something.” This matches, Haidt told me, what Freud reportedly said when he was asked about what contributes to good mental health: “Lieben und arbeiten”—love and work.
But there’s one other area Haidt mentioned in the context of happiness: purpose and meaning. “Those who find a way to be part of something larger than themselves, that are part of a noble community that is pursuing some positive and virtuous end—this brings us to the highest levels of human satisfaction, the sense that our lives are meaningful, are worth living. I think religious people, members of an active religious community, have a much easier time of that … And for atheists or secular people, it’s harder. This helps explain one of the common findings in positive psychology, that in general people who are part of a religious community are happier than people who are not.”
Haidt continued: “Of the major ethical theories, I think virtue ethics actually matches human nature the best and I think leads to the happiest life.”
As he was writing The Righteous Mind and discovering how edifying it was to read conservative intellectuals, Haidt said, “I felt like my mind was opening because I was exposed to other viewpoints that I had rejected for my whole life, while there was a rising intensity of the American culture war and it was really affecting my field of social psychology. I began to notice that any discussion about gender or LGBT issues or race, there was within a community of academics, a community of professors, who throughout my career had been able to talk about things—suddenly it was like there was a new force field coming in and it felt like you can’t explore that. You can’t say that. You can’t raise an alternate interpretation of this data set. There’s only one way to interpret this correlation.”
It was, in other words, an approach completely contrary to what his mentor at the University of Chicago had taught him. “This was personally upsetting to me,” he said. “I know we can’t put ideas and hypotheses off-limits. We have to be able to talk about the facts and the data and raise alternate hypotheses.”
So when Haidt, who was then teaching at the University of Virginia, was invited to give a lecture at the annual meeting of social psychologists in 2011, he titled it “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology.” Haidt envisioned a future in which universities would welcome a wider variety of ideas.
“I focused entirely on the quality of our science,” he said. “If we want psychology to be great, we have to work to include alternate ideas because they’re good for us. Because they break us out of our confirmation bias, they break up our orthodoxy and groupthink, and I said we need conservatives in particular in social psychology and I showed that we had only one that I was able to find.”
Out of that talk eventually emerged Heterodox Academy, which was founded in 2015 by Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz. It has become a significant organization, consisting of nearly 4,000 professors, administrators, and students, who are committed to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher education. That commitment qualifies as controversial in today’s academy.
I mentioned to Haidt that in my experience it makes a huge difference if you can establish a respectful and even warm relationship with people with whom you disagree, which allows both individuals to critique the other without feeling that either of you is under attack. When we feel we’re under attack, the armor goes up; the willingness to listen to the perspective of others goes down. If you don’t have a personal relationship with someone, I said, and you try to engage in rigorous debate, particularly in this hyper-polarized political moment, it’s often like shooting BBs against a brick wall. The arguments just bounce off.
Haidt agreed. “The relationship matters more than the message. That’s why a university, especially one that includes a diversity of viewpoints, can be so powerful—because you cultivate these relationships within a community that says our job is not to win, our job is to learn. That’s why the internet and especially Twitter are the worst places for this, because you don’t have relationships and people are trying to show how smart they are. They’re trying to show how devoted they are to their team. So the kind of political engagement, the kind of public square that we get from social media, is generally terrible. And again, that’s why I love universities so much and that’s what it was for me. The times I remember most are when my beliefs were shredded and I was shown new ways to think or given new ways to think.
“Does anyone really think we are going to win people over by insulting them and spouting hatred toward them?” he added. “Or are we going to win them over by listening, one on one, as individuals, human to human, American to American?”
At the conclusion of our interview, I asked Haidt what he hopes to contribute to people’s understanding, what he hopes to convey intellectually and morally to others.
“To help people to step out of their moral matrices and turn down their moral condemnation of their fellow citizens,” he told me. “The lesson from so many ancient traditions, and from social psychology, is that we need to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive. You can’t be hating and learning at the same time.”
For my part, when I think about what Haidt is trying to achieve, my mind goes back to one of the finest speeches in American political history. It was delivered extemporaneously by Robert Kennedy on the evening of April 4, 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Speaking to a shocked and grieving crowd in Indianapolis, Kennedy urged his listeners not to be filled with hatred or distrust.
“What we need in the United States is not division,” Kennedy said. “What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country.”
And then Kennedy said this: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
