Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions
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 first connected with Haidt in 2012, after I wrote a blog post for Commentary based on an interview in which Haidt discussed his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. “It’s extremely easy to spot the weak arguments, hypocrisy, and double standards of those with whom I disagree,” I wrote. “It’s much harder to see them in myself.” I then posed a series of questions: How open are we to persuasion, to new evidence, and to holding up our views to refinement and revision? How do we react when our arguments seem to be falling apart? And what steps can we take to ensure that we don’t insulate ourselves to the point that we are indifferent to facts that challenge our worldview?
Those questions were right in the wheelhouse of Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He wrote me an encouraging note after my article was published; two years later, we met in person for the first time.
Haidt’s writing and interviews, and our conversations, have clarified for me why we are so tempted to surround ourselves with only like-minded people and caricature those with whom we disagree. He has helped me understand why intellectual honesty is so elusive, why our divisions run so deep, and what steps we need to take to overcome the antipathy that characterizes so much of modern politics. He is also a model of what it means to be a public intellectual.
[Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell: The dark psychology of social networks]
Over the years, our acquaintance has grown into a friendship, and I trust Haidt to make sense of the times in which we live. So in the midst of this deeply unsettled moment in American life, when we’re dealing with both polarization and a pandemic, I reached out to him.
IBEGAN 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
