Conservatives have found Haidt’s conclusions congenial, free of the condescension and tendentious research that characterize so much of this Science. It’s disappointing to learn that many of his findings are drawn from a highly self-selected sample of participants. Haidt hosts a website called YourMorals.org, where 250,000 web surfers have come to fill out questionnaires about their personal views and habits. A collection of a quarter of a million people is a sample so large that it’s not properly a sample. And the self-selection problem is unavoidable. For one thing, respondents are restricted to people who have a computer and are willing to surf the Internet until they stumble across Haidt’s website. Studies show that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to fill in Internet questionnaires for an hour or more, and those who don’t. The second kind of people—eminently rational, typically busy, possessing a life—will be left out.The real problem with Haidt’s psychopunditry is that it shares with other kinds of determinism a depressing moral impoverishment. Haidt’s own centrism is an artifact of his Science. If the appeal of one idea versus another is explained by a man’s biology (interacting with a few environmental factors) rather than its content, there’s really not much to argue about. Politics is drained of the meaning that human beings have always sought from it. Haidt criticizes his peers for using psychology to “explain away” conservatism, and good for him. Unfortunately, he wants to explain away liberalism too, so that our politics is no longer understood as a clash of interests and well-developed ideas but an altercation between two psychological and evolutionary types.
This may be one benefit to this new era we’re entering: The latest, most cutting-edge punditry may do away with punditry altogether.
This presents a dilemma for Christians on opposite sides of political issues, who need to both remain faithful to their theological/moral/political beliefs and to love other Christians who disagree about those very charged issues. It’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. And the worst thing that can be done, I think, is to keep using the term “culture wars” against people who disagree with your politics while, in the same breath, claiming you are tired of fighting. I don’t mean to pick on Rachel here, because she is a lovely person who is doing much worth admiring. I get what she’s trying to say, and I have even made these same arguments in the past. But in a post like this, she is taking a fairly clear political position: that evangelical political opposition to gay marriage is wrong. She opposes Amendment One. I agree with that position, but I can’t deny that it is a position, and that it puts me on a “side” of the “culture war.” (Similarly, Matt cannot convincingly claim he’s “not much of a culture warrior” when a significant amount of his work is devoted to energizing a conservative Christian worldview that has political dimensions he cares about passionately.)For the evangelicals who more to the left, I think it’s better to be honest about that than to try to make the typical liberal move of framing your own position as non-political while blaming the reactionaries for being so mean and political.
About all I can do is confess that while I myself devoured classics in my teens and 20s – even 30s, come to think of it – I now read contemporary fiction almost exclusively. I feel ambivalent about this evolution, but between reviewing, blurbing occasionally, and keeping up with what’s out there on general principle I don’t often get around to touching base with the literary canon. When I have tried to, say, reread a Dostoevsky novel, I’ve discovered that I don’t have the patience any longer – for the long philosophical digressions, for example. I bet I’m not alone in this reduced tolerance for the stylistic traditions of the past.
To sever our experience of wilderness from our use of technology now seems to me an unnatural act, shortsighted and unimaginative. No one appreciates a ringing cell phone while they float on a muddy river through western badlands or stand in the saddle between two massive mountain ranges, but short of such rude interruptions of heavenly moments, technology has a mysterious way, at times, of providing the perfect contrast, the happy counterpoint to scenes and experiences and settings that are easy to take for granted or grow numb to. Along with harmony, contrast is one of the two great rules of art. It wakes the senses, jars the tired mind, breaks up routines that threaten to grow mechanical. If you don’t believe me, try it. Travel to that secluded spot you keep returning to, the one where you go to leave the world behind, and turn on some music, play a movie, capture a passing thought and send it onward, out of the forest, out into society, and then wait, while the wind blows and the treetops sway and the clouds pile up a mile above your head, for someone, some faraway stranger, to reply. Even when we’re alone, we’re not alone, this proves, and in the deepest heart of every wilderness lurks a miracle, often, the human mind.
Perhaps the most incisive part of Michael Lewis’ book “Boomerang” is when he observes that Americans have become obsessed with getting something for nothing, spotlighting California as the example of this taken to an extreme, as various propositions over the years have reduced tax revenues while other propositions have increased the obligations of the state to provide services for its citizens. The recent announcement by Governor Jerry Brown that the state’s deficit will be $16 billion instead of the forecasted $9 billion just underscores how ridiculous this imbalanced mindset has become. The fact that this is viewed as a spending problem is even more pathological.Drive any road in America now, and chances are you will be faced with decay — failing bridge expansion joints, potholes, crumbling shoulders, faded paint, and sporadic lighting. In some cases, streetlights have been taken out of entire towns in an effort to save money. Yet, in aggregate, Americans are spending $25 billion more on new tires, broken axles, and alignment problems than previously, more than any tax increase for proper roads would cost. We are truly paying for our cheapness.
In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition.
In 2005, Flickr had far and away the best social connection and discovery tools on the Internet. Remember, back then Facebook was still very much a fledgling service, one that didn’t even let you upload pictures other than the one in your profile. Yahoo, meanwhile, had existing internal social products, like Address Book and Messenger. Social was clearly the future. What Yahoo wanted, however, wasn’t the future. It was to re-fight an old battle from the past. It was to beat Google.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SncapPrTusA?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187] The next 2.5 minutes of your life will be spent watching Bruce Lee play table tennis. With nunchuks.
(P.S. My follow-up tweet to this post.)
Brogrammer culture celebrates frat house values, youth over experience and men over women. In the war for hiring great talent, the companies that embrace this culture rather than reject it will lose. That’s a good thing.
If I understand the teaching of the New Testament on this matter, I understand the role of the Christian as that of being neither a conservative nor an anarchist, but a subversive agent… We do not spend enough of our energies training undercover agents.