Patriotism and Piety—Not for Conservatives Only
Did you hear the one about the guy who says: “We should respect conservative political values just as much as liberal, because no one has the whole truth. And I know that for sure, so I don’t need consider other points of view.” Pretty funny, huh? Wait, it gets better.
“Moral judgments are based on intuition much more than reason,” the guy says. “But I’m going to use reason to explain why I’m increasingly sympathetic to conservative views—even though my own theory suggests that all my arguments are actually after-the-fact rationalization for some change in my intuitions, which I can never really understand.”
The guy slays me! Too bad I recently had surgery and it hurts so much to laugh.
But seriously, folks:
Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling new book, The Righteous Mind, is built on exactly these contradictions. The reformed pundit—“I used to be part of the liberal academic tyranny but no more”— is now a fixture in mass media, insisting that his or her bold new perspective will “bring us together.”