Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from reading the Bible? The most important thing I’ve learned from reading the Bible? Well, my first reading of it, I was horrified when I was in college. I took it very literally, and that was wrong. So, I didn’t learn much from my first reading long ago, and then I never read it again, but I have gone back to it periodically for stories. I really need to read the New Testament. I’ve read parts of it, but I really need to read the whole thing. What I would say is that every culture needs a set of stories and moral values, moral principles and metaphors so that they can speak to each other, and they can quickly refer to things that have a lot of meanings for the listener. When you read anything from the ancient world, from ancient Greece or Rome, they have this common vocabulary of Homer and of the myths, and they can talk to each other; they can refer to all of that. Western civilization has always had the Bible as that in the last thousand years. I think as a set of stories and metaphors — some of which I draw on — are very evocative. The Babel story. The Job story is very confusing and difficult. I don’t take much from that, but the Babel story really affected me when I reread it, and it’s become a basis of a lot of my current writing. Now, in general, you’ve been critical of identitarianism, people identifying too much with a racial or ethnic group. If you think of young people using concepts from psychology as identity labels — like I’m ADHD, I’m autistic, I’m neurodivergent — what do you think of that trend?…

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