Jonathan Haidt
23 quotes
Biography
Jonathan David Haidt is an American social psychologist and author. He is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business.
"Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason."
"The rider evolved to serve to the elephant."
"Sports is to war as pornography is to sex."
"First, kill all the math classes beyond algebra. Stop wasting so much of our students’ time learning math. It’s not useful, it’s not helpful."
"The lesson Buddha and Marcus Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: "Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it"."
"Gossip and reputation make sure that what comes around - a person who is cruel will find that the others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find others are kind in return. Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life. As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully."
"If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you."
"Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you."
"Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies; on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other side was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness."
"Egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se."
"Religions are moral s. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that […] influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass […] That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for —Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness.") We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few)."
"Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say."
"The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum."
"Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)"
"The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction."
"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 create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual & ideological diversity."
"Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism."
"Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak."
"I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts."
"It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable."
"When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee."
"Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood."
"Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up?"