LIBERALS

'Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitray barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. For example, the urge to help the inner-city poor led to programs in the 1960s that reduced the value of marriage, increased out-of-wedlock births, and weakened African American families. The urge to empower studets by giving them the right to sue their teachers and schools in the 1970s has eroded authority and moral capital in schools, creating disorderly environments that harm the poor above all. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity. Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.

On issue after issues, it's as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really  does need their help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such "reforms" may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.361. 

SOCIETY & MORALITY

'Religions are moral exoskeletons. If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions that work primarily on the elephant to influence your behavior. But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to reply somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie - Durkheim's word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order. (It means, literally, "normlessness."). We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago. 

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don't really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever know at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.313. 

AWE

'Awe acts like a kind of reset button: it makes people forget themselves and their petty concerns. Awe opens people to new possibilities, values, and directions in life.' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.264. 

HUMANKIND

'We humans have a dual nature - we are selfish primates who long to be part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.'
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.255. 

CHIMPANZEES

'It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.' 

Michael Tomasello in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.237.  

HUMANKIND

'Human beings are the giraffes of altruism. We're one-of-a-kind freaks of nature who occasionally - even if rarely - can be as selfless and team-spirited as bees. If your moral ideal is the person who devotes her life to serving strangers, well then, OK - such people are so rare that we send film crews out to record them for the evening news. But if you focus, as Darwin did, on the behavior in groups of people who know each other and share goals and values, then our ability to work together, divide labor, help each other, and function as a team is so all-pervasive that we don't even notice it.' You'll never see the headline. "Forty-five Unrelated College Students Work Together Cooperatively and for No Pay, to Prepare for Opening Night of Romeo and Juliet."'

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.230.  

THE BRAIN

'The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter - be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality - consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.'  

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.152.  

SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

'...each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position she or he already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some of the individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).' 

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, p.105.