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Deborah Halber, The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases: Episodic, not particularly satisfying account of the use of the internet, and slightly more centralized recordkeeping, to identify previously unidentified bodies, of which there are an astonishing amount in America. There are some successes; there’d be more if more jurisdictions put their data in the various systems that have evolved to track missing and unidentified people. What this book really reminded me was that people are generally the same no matter what they like to do: Halber’s partial accounts of flame wars, sock puppetry, BNF activities that led to accusations of wrongdoing (including a guy who monetized his fannish fame by getting hired for a federal project to improve identifications, which I think is great), etc. could have come from media fandom or really any other subculture online.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: Haidt has a pretty good response to any criticism, which is that it comes from the critic’s precommitments/moral tastes based in genes as guided in their expression by environment, but oh well. There are several big ideas here (presented as a business book with lots of repetition), including that there are six “flavors” of morality, of which liberals use only three (care/harm, fairness, liberty/oppression), while conservatives use all six at different levels (fairness to them means proportionality, plus sanctity, respect/authority, and loyalty). Haidt suggests that liberals have particular trouble understanding conservatives because those three considerations don’t even seem moral to them. Haidt also argues in favor of group selection as one way in which natural selection operates, not just individual selection (the dominant account for decades), suggesting that it’s the best way to explain why certain aspects of human behavior seem group-promoting rather than individual-promoting (e.g., willingness to die in battle for one’s group).
It was a provocative but frustrating book, in part because Haidt seemed unwilling to acknowledge the deepness of the divides even while talking about them. For example, he discussed flagburning as an issue where one “side” sees nothing special about the flag while the other sees it as sacred. But I’ve never heard of an instance of flagburning where the burner’s position was “this flag is meaningless.” (One of Haidt's survey questions asks about a woman who uses a flag as a cleaning rag, but it's a hypothetical.) To the contrary, both the burner and the people who support the burner’s free speech right to burn despite the offense it gives understand quite well that the burner isn’t trying to stay warm. The sides agree on the meaning of the flag, but not on the acceptable implications of that meaning. Authority/subversion isn’t just an axis of morality that goes only in one positive direction—it’s possible for people to believe that subversion is justified and even good. I don’t need to be convinced that the flag has meaning—that’s not where I disagree with those who would ban flagburning.
Another version of this: Haidt makes some brief historical and European references, but treats liberalism/conservatism as genetically based while drawing all his examples from contemporary American politics. “Conservatives are predisposed against change” and “liberals are predisposed towards change” is a weak enough thesis that it doesn’t really do much to help explain our current mess; on the other side it’s hard to derive a genetic basis for opposing Obamacare or opposing teacher’s unions specifically. Or for explaining how cultures and politics change; I'm willing to accept his weak thesis without thinking it has any implications for policy. This difficulty making the leap from genetics to policy comes out particularly at the end of the book, where Haidt suggests that we should all try to understand each other better so that we can get along (but doesn’t have much advice for gay people about how that should work with people who think they’re destroying the country) and also says conservatives are right about markets being good at getting (some) incentives right and therefore health insurance is bad. See, because you don’t pay for the full costs of your routine care, you don’t comparison shop and so health care costs keep rising. Setting aside the ways in which this is a weird description of seeking health care in the US and ignores the credence good character of healthcare that makes comparison shopping quite difficult, it perfectly encapsulates Haidt’s complete American-centricness as he advances his universalist thesis.
Don’t even get me started on his experience in India where the “silent wives” initially freaked him out, but then he got to know people—he doesn’t say whether any of them were wives—and realized that their system had upsides and positive values as well as downsides, which I’m sure it does but I would have appreciated examples instead of platitudes about how the powerful have obligations in these systems too, notwithstanding that they sometimes abuse their power. This is a book about conflict that doesn’t really have violence in it, because Haidt wants us to approve of imposing sanctions on moral misbehavior, but I don’t think he wants us to face the question of whether beating someone up for violating community norms (including norms I endorse, like “don’t cheat people”) is a good idea. Basically, Haidt really likes some features of “red” morality (cf. Cahn & Carbone’s Red Families v. Blue Families and Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood), but can’t bring himself to say what those other authors, also sympathetic to conservatives without agreeing with them, do: red morality only works if people can’t opt out of it. This means that if things go wrong—if you marry a man who beats you, if you get pregnant while unmarried—you must suffer to protect others. Conservatives identify other victims of blue morality, and some I will concede; the point is that, while Haidt says we should try to get along because we’re all stuck here for a while, morality also requires punishing deviants (which he acknowledges elsewhere, but not in his celebration of understanding the other's point of view), and you have to face up to who the deviants are and what will happen to them in any moral system.
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: Haidt has a pretty good response to any criticism, which is that it comes from the critic’s precommitments/moral tastes based in genes as guided in their expression by environment, but oh well. There are several big ideas here (presented as a business book with lots of repetition), including that there are six “flavors” of morality, of which liberals use only three (care/harm, fairness, liberty/oppression), while conservatives use all six at different levels (fairness to them means proportionality, plus sanctity, respect/authority, and loyalty). Haidt suggests that liberals have particular trouble understanding conservatives because those three considerations don’t even seem moral to them. Haidt also argues in favor of group selection as one way in which natural selection operates, not just individual selection (the dominant account for decades), suggesting that it’s the best way to explain why certain aspects of human behavior seem group-promoting rather than individual-promoting (e.g., willingness to die in battle for one’s group).
It was a provocative but frustrating book, in part because Haidt seemed unwilling to acknowledge the deepness of the divides even while talking about them. For example, he discussed flagburning as an issue where one “side” sees nothing special about the flag while the other sees it as sacred. But I’ve never heard of an instance of flagburning where the burner’s position was “this flag is meaningless.” (One of Haidt's survey questions asks about a woman who uses a flag as a cleaning rag, but it's a hypothetical.) To the contrary, both the burner and the people who support the burner’s free speech right to burn despite the offense it gives understand quite well that the burner isn’t trying to stay warm. The sides agree on the meaning of the flag, but not on the acceptable implications of that meaning. Authority/subversion isn’t just an axis of morality that goes only in one positive direction—it’s possible for people to believe that subversion is justified and even good. I don’t need to be convinced that the flag has meaning—that’s not where I disagree with those who would ban flagburning.
Another version of this: Haidt makes some brief historical and European references, but treats liberalism/conservatism as genetically based while drawing all his examples from contemporary American politics. “Conservatives are predisposed against change” and “liberals are predisposed towards change” is a weak enough thesis that it doesn’t really do much to help explain our current mess; on the other side it’s hard to derive a genetic basis for opposing Obamacare or opposing teacher’s unions specifically. Or for explaining how cultures and politics change; I'm willing to accept his weak thesis without thinking it has any implications for policy. This difficulty making the leap from genetics to policy comes out particularly at the end of the book, where Haidt suggests that we should all try to understand each other better so that we can get along (but doesn’t have much advice for gay people about how that should work with people who think they’re destroying the country) and also says conservatives are right about markets being good at getting (some) incentives right and therefore health insurance is bad. See, because you don’t pay for the full costs of your routine care, you don’t comparison shop and so health care costs keep rising. Setting aside the ways in which this is a weird description of seeking health care in the US and ignores the credence good character of healthcare that makes comparison shopping quite difficult, it perfectly encapsulates Haidt’s complete American-centricness as he advances his universalist thesis.
Don’t even get me started on his experience in India where the “silent wives” initially freaked him out, but then he got to know people—he doesn’t say whether any of them were wives—and realized that their system had upsides and positive values as well as downsides, which I’m sure it does but I would have appreciated examples instead of platitudes about how the powerful have obligations in these systems too, notwithstanding that they sometimes abuse their power. This is a book about conflict that doesn’t really have violence in it, because Haidt wants us to approve of imposing sanctions on moral misbehavior, but I don’t think he wants us to face the question of whether beating someone up for violating community norms (including norms I endorse, like “don’t cheat people”) is a good idea. Basically, Haidt really likes some features of “red” morality (cf. Cahn & Carbone’s Red Families v. Blue Families and Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood), but can’t bring himself to say what those other authors, also sympathetic to conservatives without agreeing with them, do: red morality only works if people can’t opt out of it. This means that if things go wrong—if you marry a man who beats you, if you get pregnant while unmarried—you must suffer to protect others. Conservatives identify other victims of blue morality, and some I will concede; the point is that, while Haidt says we should try to get along because we’re all stuck here for a while, morality also requires punishing deviants (which he acknowledges elsewhere, but not in his celebration of understanding the other's point of view), and you have to face up to who the deviants are and what will happen to them in any moral system.
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