Al Owski’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

“But authority should not be confused with power. Even among chimpanzees, where dominance hierarchies are indeed about raw power and the ability to inflict violence, the alpha male performs some socially beneficial functions, such as taking on the "control role." He resolves some disputes and suppresses much of the violent conflict that erupts when there is no clear alpha male.”

“The urge to respect hierarchical relationships is so deep that many languages encode it directly. In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they'll address someone using the respectful form (vous) familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn't embed status into verb conjugations, embed it elsewhere.”

“Human life is a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation. If we play our cards right, we can work with others to enlarge the pie that we ultimately share. Hunters work together to bring down large prey that nobody could catch alone. Neighbors watch each other's houses and loan each other tools. Coworkers cover each other's shifts.”

“We humans are obviously just such a species. Trivers proposed that we evolved a set of moral emotions that make us play "tit for tat." We're usually nice to people when we first meet them. But after that we're selective: we cooperate with those who have been nice to us, and we shun those who took advantage of us.”

“In 1991, Shweder wrote… "Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality... and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous "backcloth" to our world. We are multiple from the start" ”

“We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals. And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours.”

“The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. But at the same time, it offers a valuable perspective from which we can understand and critique some of the ugly parts of secular societies. For example, why are many of us bothered by rampant materialism?”

“I could see beauty in a moral code that emphasized self-control, resistance to temptation, cultivation of one's higher, nobler self, and negation of the self's desires. I could see the dark side of this ethic too: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority…can be ostracized and treated cruelly.”

“A dictum of cultural psychology is that "culture and psyche make each other up." In other words, you can't study the mind while ignoring culture… because minds function only once they've been filled out by a particular culture. And you can't study culture while ignoring psychology…because social practices and institutions…are shaped by concepts and desires rooted deep within the human mind…”

“I concluded by warning that the worship of reason…sometimes found in philosophical and scientific circles, is a delusion. It is an example of faith in something that does not exist. I urged instead a more intuitionist approach to morality and moral education, one that is more humble about the abilities of individuals, and more attuned to the contexts and social systems that enable people to think and act well.”