The Psychology Of Self Righteousness

Krista Tippett in conversation with Jonathan Haidt:  from  'On Being'.

The surprising 'psychology behind morality' is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research.

While the talk was really interesting, I'm putting here a few points which stand alone also seemed interesting enough.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s School of Business. He’s the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

“When it comes to moral judgments,” he says, “we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.”

"Psychologically,  people who identify as conservative tend to like order and predictability, whereas people who identify as liberal, they like variety and diversity. 

I have one study where we have dots moving around on a screen. Conservatives like the images where the dots are moving around more in lockstep with each other. Liberals like it when it’s all chaotic and random."

Tippett:  So a premise is that morality “binds and blinds.”

Haidt: This is the one I’m most excited about. This is the one that I feel unlocks so many of our hardest problems.

Jonathan Haidt describes five primary moral foundations that are held across individuals and cultures. People who are liberal and conservative, he says, value two of these in common, compassion and fairness. But conservatives simultaneously juggle three other moral values — of loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Tippett: And you also point out that when you talk about intuition, that our behavior is not primarily consciously driven. And that’s the same thing that Buddha said, and it’s the same thing that St. Paul said, and Moses and all of these people.

Haidt: One thing that you find in most of the great wisdom traditions is the idea that reality as we see it is an illusion. It’s a veil, it blinds us, and enlightenment is taking down the veil, seeing things as they are, transcending dualities. 

When you get people to actually understand each other, and they let down their guard, and they learn something new, and they see humanity in someone that they disliked or hated or demonized before, that’s really thrilling. And that, I think, is one of the most important emotional tools we have to foster civility. 

Haidt: from what I’ve learned, here are a few pointers. One is, what I was saying earlier about how our reasoning is driven by our intuitions, our gut feelings, our emotions, that’s just why you cannot reason somebody to — once there’s a conflict, you can’t use reason to change their mind. So don’t even try the direct route, which is, “Let’s just discuss it.”

Once you accept that, then you say, well, OK, what does change reasoning? And now relationships become absolutely crucial. This is why it’s so hard to influence people just by putting a message up into message space.

Haidt: Diversity is generally divisive, and it has to be managed. There is some interesting research showing that when you celebrate diversity and point it out, you split people, but if you drown it in a sea of commonality, then it’s not a problem. So anything you can do to emphasize how similar we all are is good. Anything you can do that celebrates — “Look at how different we are.” — that tends to make it harder to have any group cohesion and trust.

Tippett: Drowning things in commonality can also make everything superficial. Right?

Haidt: Well, what do you want? Do you want authenticity, or do you want peace and harmony?

Tippett: I don’t want to have to choose between the two.

Haidt: I think you might.

Tippett: you’re really talking as a social psychologist about “conservative” and “liberal” as two ways of being human.

Haidt: That’s right, these are psychological traits. That’s right. There are dimensions. So openness to experience is the main psychological trait that has been found to correlate with the left-right dimension. 

We’ve got a lot of sociology working against us here. Part of becoming more modern and individualistic is that we make our life choices based on what we like, what appeals to us. 

Well, it’s freedom. The more you are free and have the resources and have a society based on markets and businesses that will cater to what you want, and those are generally good things — well, if people choose where to live and who to associate with, they get ever more segregated.

Tippett: So progress leads to incivility.

Haidt: Of a sort, but again, progress leads to peacefulness, non-violence — but also to being shut off from each other, yes.

Jonathan Haidt has written this: “To live virtuously as individuals and societies, we must understand how our minds are built. We must find ways to overcome our natural self-righteousness. We must respect and even learn from those whose morality differs from our own.”

The Evolution of Medicine

While I've done lots of reading on the 'Mind - Body Connect', this podcast kind of took it to a whole different level.

It's a conversation between Krista and three others working in the field.

1) Dr Mark Hyman, a pioneer in functional medicine, founder and director of the UltraWellness Center, and a best selling author
2) Dr James Gordon a professor in Psychiatry and an expert in using mind body medicine to heal depression, anxiety and psychological trauma and
3) Dr Penny George, a philanthropist of integrative medicine, who converted after she experienced cancer in mid-life.

I've put in lines from the conversation, which were telling the basic story, interspersed by some actual conversation. It's kind of long, but it's an area which touches every one of us, and deepened awareness could help us implement in small ways right away, for ourselves, our families and anyone willing to listen :)

Opening remarks from all four:

MS. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: A transformation of medicine is underway — a transition from a science of treating disease to a science of health. Part of the integrity and depth of all of your work is also that you — it’s grounded, actually, for each of you, also in an experience of a health crisis.

DR. MARK HYMAN: I think one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last 30 years is that food isn’t just energy, that it’s actually information that actually provides instructions in a literally minute-to-minute, bite-by-bite basis to everything that’s going on in your body.

DR. PENNY GEORGE: The standard of care really looked at me as a body part, and a disease, and it was clear to me even then that I was so much more than that. And what I found was it was the experience of taking charge of my own return to well-being, more than just health. And I ended up at a place that was so much better than where I had been before I started that I thought, everybody should have access to this.

DR. JAMES GORDON: We’re looking to create the opportunity for people to heal themselves and to create that environment...and that’s what we do.

Dr Hyman:

I realized that I sort of reached the limit of what actually we could do with the kind of thinking we have in medicine. And I was invited to hear a talk by a guy named Jeffrey Bland, who’s a nutritional biochemist who worked with Linus Pauling, and he was a big thinker. He was a systems thinker. And he painted a picture of medicine that was completely different than what I learned in medical school, which was not disease-based, but based on systems thinking. 

And I said, either this guy’s crazy or he’s a genius, and I have to figure it out.

So I started to just imbibe everything I could about this, and try it on myself, and try it on my patients. And I kept seeing miracles in my patients, that people are getting better from things that I never would have imagined.

And it’s as big of a paradigm shift as the Earth is not flat, Earth is not the center of the universe. It’s huge. And it’s basically dismantling our concepts of disease as we speak, and yet it’s completely absent from most medical institutions and thinking in medical schools.

So as we’re beginning to shift out of it, we have to sort of reorganize our thinking, and it’s tough. It’s tough.

Krista: What are the ingredients for creating a healthy humans?

DR. GORDON: 

I think what’s important also is that we’re really going back to what’s basic to all the great, ancient systems of healing. Now we have the modern science so that we can test more accurately for these imbalances, but understanding exactly what Mark is talking about, about the basic functions, this takes us back to Hippocratic medicine……Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, it’s all there. 

And I think one of the things that’s crucial in this transformation, though, is the transformation in consciousness. 

And, with that change in consciousness, it becomes possible to use all the modalities, but even more important, you become open to seeing the incredible power that each of us has for healing, and to creating the context, whether it’s a small group or a whole community, in which people can come together to heal themselves. And to me, that’s the most fundamental and the most difficult shift to happen…

…more than that. Altruism, for example, the doing for others has tremendous physical benefits......we should probably prescribe that for people.

DR. HYMAN: Yeah. It stimulates the same receptors in the brain as sugar 

MS. TIPPETT: Wow.

Hyman -

I think that one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last 30 years is that food isn’t just energy, that it’s actually information that actually provides instructions in a literally minute-to-minute, bite-by-bite basis to everything that’s going on in your body. So, literally, you change your gene expression with every bite.  And we don’t, in medicine, know how to use food as medicine. 

We use drugs, we use surgery, but we have no insight that food is connected to health in most cases. And yet it’s the most powerful drug, and it works faster, better, and cheaper than any drug on the planet. I mean, I’ve had people change their diets in three days, they got off 50 units of insulin. There’s no drug that can do that. People have autoimmune disease, they can be pain-free in weeks simply changing their diet and that — and get off very expensive medications. 

MS. TIPPETT: I’d like to talk a little bit about spirituality, which has been, certainly, a suspect word in science or medicine. But it is also, certainly in medicine, inescapable, right? So let’s talk a little bit about the words we can put around the integrity and the validity and the substance that this thing called spiritual life — which has as many interpretations as there are people — how this is part of this new vision, this new consciousness about illness and healing.

Penny, you wrote some really beautiful things about this, that “serious illness or disability is as much a spiritual crisis as a physical one,” and that healing is sometimes possible on a spiritual level, even if it is not always possible on a physical level.

DR. HYMAN: when you think about what happens in that space with a doctor and a patient, or a healer and a patient, it’s a very sacred moment.

MS. TIPPETT: It is. I mean, I was going to say I feel like doctors are godlike figures. And there is a sacred trust, and we trust what doctors tell us, whether we should or not because they have this …

DR. HYMAN: Yeah. I mean, there’s that aspect of it, but from my point of view as a physician, when I’m in a room with someone, and they open their heart, and open their soul, and tell their story, that’s a sacred moment. That doesn’t happen in real life, right?

We are privileged to be able to be in that sacred space with someone, where you can say anything and talk about anything, and be in that little window where magic happens. And doctors don’t talk about it, they don’t think about it, but if they let themselves feel that, it’s powerful. 

Dr GORDON: Number two is that the work of healing is the work of transformation at its base, where you’re not just treating symptoms. It is all about spiritual transformation, and that’s, potentially, what comes to people. Another important aspect is that when — what I have seen, whether the illnesses manifest in a physical way or a psychological way, that the sense of meaning and purpose and connection to something beyond ourselves is critical to healing, almost always, and even in the most dire situations.

DR. GORDON: The experience is so deep. As Mark said, it’s a sacred experience. So we just happen to be people working in a number of different cultures, and they’re our teachers. I think it goes as deeply as each human being is willing to let it go.

DR. GORDON: And I think, the other thing is people are afraid. They’re afraid of looking at themselves. And that’s why all of our work is more challenging than perhaps it should look like it should be. 

...people will come and they’ll say, “Well, I want to learn the techniques, but I really don’t want to work on myself.”

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. And I think what you just said — spiritual life is that place where we work on ourselves.

MS. TIPPETT: So we’re talking about a shift in consciousness, and an evolutionary shift, and the issues and the clusters of issues are correspondingly complex. But I just want to close, and I’m not actually sure how to form this question. But just to say, as much as we’re talking about health and healing as the point of medicine, there’s also an aspect of this realization that illness is not only inevitable, but that illness also is a gift, right? That illness somehow is part of life’s wholeness, and life’s trajectory, and that it is transformative. 

And, Mark, you’ve said illness tells us things, right? Illness is our teacher. illness as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. So it seems to me that this is also a truth to name as part of this shift in consciousness. 

As you say, in traditional medicine — death was failure. It was defeat, and illness was a problem. So, again, I don’t know what the question is, but I wonder if you would reflect a little bit on that as part of this transformation, and also, again, if there’s anything else you want to say based on what arose here. So, I don’t know, Jim, would you like to start?

DR. GORDON: I’m speechless.

No, I mean, you said it so beautifully. We were just — in working with the Lakota elders, they understand exactly what we’re saying here. They say, in order to heal others — and this is a deep aspect of shamanic healing all over the world — you have to have been through the fire yourself.

Otherwise, you cannot know what it’s like. You cannot know how to help others with the respect and the deep personal knowledge that’s necessary for that. I think it’s really so important going forward. This is not our enemy. Illness is not our enemy. Death is not our enemy. This is part of life, and all of life is our great teacher, if we’re open to it. And the more we are open to it, the more we can be open to helping other people also open themselves.

DR. GEORGE: I would just add to that the idea of, what is the invitation in this illness? Which — you have to be careful, because it’s not to imply, what did you do to cause your illness? But I think there is an invitation in any illness, and part of it is recognizing that life is short. This is not a dress rehearsal. And what is it for you? And, for me, it led to this. I didn’t intend this. This was not a logical conscious thing, but it was like — it unfolded as I sort of became the agent of my own health. And I would wish that for everyone who has any kind of illness, even if it’s not life-threatening, is to see what the invitation is to a fuller life, and greater well-being.

DR. HYMAN: Yeah, I echo what Jim and Penny said but what sort of came up in my feeling, my body, was the sense that we’re dealing with the downstream effects instead of the causes. And it’s the thing that really keeps me up at night — is how do we, as a society, begin to grapple with that? And the only way I can come up with is really to sort of — to begin to create these healing circles, these talking circles, these small groups, the things that Jim does where we rebuild community, and connection, and meaning, and love in communities where people can begin to transform and own their lives and own their communities, and transform the food system, and transform their behaviors, and transform the schools. 

It has to happen, but it can happen not in a big kind of global way. It has to happen very locally, essentially as local as your own kitchen, as local as your workplace, if you’re a part of a school, it can be a very small space that it starts in but, really, it ripples out and it’s really transformational. And everybody in this room has that capacity to create that change in their own life, in their own body, and in their community, and that’s where it really has to start.

The Inner Landscape - John O'Donohue

Irish Poet and Philosopher, late John O'Donahue in conversation hosted by Krista Tippet, from a podcast on 'On Being' 

I tried synopsis, but found I was losing flow. Tried excerpts, was way too long. Settled for a few lines that seemed interesting, and I guess resonated at some level.

John O’Donohue entered seminary at a young age and was a Catholic priest for 19 years. But in the 1980s, he went to Germany to study the philosophy of Hegel. He eventually left the priesthood and devoted himself full-time to meditating and writing on beauty, friendship, and how the visible and the invisible, the material and the spiritual, intertwine in human experience. He is well known for his book 'Anam Cara'

John O’Donohue considered 'beauty as a human calling'

He says:

"Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty, in that sense, is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life"

He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner human landscape and what he called “the invisible world,” constantly intertwining with the external ... and said that landscape wasn’t just matter, but that it was actually alive. and if you go towards it with an open heart and a real, watchful reverence, that you will be absolutely amazed at what it will reveal to you. 

"I think that connecting to the elemental can be a way of coming into rhythm with the universe"

“Possibility is the secret heart of time. On its outer surface, time is vulnerable to transience. In its deeper heart, time is transfiguration. I always think that that’s the secret of change — that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of. And then, sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us, of which we’ve had no inkling

And, when we cross a new threshold, that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. And in our crossing, then, we cross onto new ground, where we just don’t repeat what we’ve been through in the last place we were. And I think there are huge thresholds in every life."

"And I think it’s a critical question, always, for somebody who wants to have a mature, adult, open-ended, good-hearted, critical faith, to conduct the most vigorous and relentless conversation that you can with your own tradition and your own memory"

Ms. Tippett: It was actually in your book that I first realized, and I had never thought about this, that the root — the Greek root for the word “beauty” is related to the word for “calling,” to “kalon” and “kalein.”, how do we pursue that calling, given the limitations, given that a lot of what is around us is not visibly, objectively beautiful and may not be?

Donohue: Now how do we do it? One way, and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself too, and the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture?

But when had you last a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards?

And I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.

Second thing, I think, a question to always ask oneself — who are you reading? Who are you reading? And where are you stretching your own boundaries? Are you repetitive in that?

And you could be surprised what an exciting adventure and homecoming it could become.

For those who might want to listen: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty-aug2017/