I've just finished Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind. I highlighted a lot of things and Amazon saved my highlights at my account. From there I copied them into EverNote on the iPad which syncs with EverNote on the laptop where I'm writing this. That book might be theoretical for some, but for me it reads like a manual for how to be in your community and why and how to run for selectman. I spent some time down at the post office (we don't have mail delivery here) at the peak time between when the mail hits the boxes (around 10am) and when the P.O. closes(11:30 on Saturday). People just tell you all about themselves. This week I will make a couple of early morning stops at the Depot, park among the pickup trucks, see how bad the coffee is, give out a few flyers.

Here are a few highlights from the Haidt book:

• an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error
• People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
• the social order is a moral order.
• the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it.
• We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.
• intuitions (including emotional responses) are a kind of cognition. They’re just not a kind of reasoning.
• Moral judgment is not a purely cerebral affair in which we weigh concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It’s a kind of rapid, automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away from various things
• the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.
• Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
• Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.
• Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships
• “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”
• Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation.
• For Americans born before 1950, you can activate their Durkheimian higher nature by saying just two words: “Ask not.”
• Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights.
• trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball. You’ve got to broaden the inquiry.
• The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people.