Jonathan Haidt: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m still a little confused as to how this fits in with your other views. I think we know people on the left were keener to close the schools or keep the schools closed. That was a bad thing. They seem to have such bad values by your standards, but you identify with the values of the left. Why is it you think they have better values, and then these bad values when it comes to parenting? No, I don’t identify with the values of the left. I was always on the left when I was younger, and I was always a Democrat. But once I wrote The Righteous Mind, when I finished chapter 8 . . . It was so upsetting to me that George W. Bush won two elections that I thought he shouldn’t win because I thought that the Democratic candidates couldn’t speak about morality. So, I was going to do this writing to explain to the left what they’re missing. Like a lot of books — George Lakoff — there are many people who’ve been writing books for the left, to shake them and say, “Look at what you’re missing. Stop talking this way. ” By the time I wrote chapter 7 and 8 of The Righteous Mind and really committed to understanding conservatives and libertarians, I realized, wow, there’s a lot of wisdom from all three perspectives: liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Since then, I’ve been a centrist, and then, since 2015, since we had essentially a cultural revolution on campus — very similar psychologically to the Chinese Cultural Revolution — since we had this incredible liberalism coming from the left on campus, and we had this incredible illiberalism coming from the right, which brought Donald Trump to office, which brought the Unite the Right rally to Charlottesville. We’re now in a time where the potential pathologies of the left have been supercharged by social media. I hope we’ll get to that. The potential pathologies of the right have been supercharged by social media and other things. My community is those who are center left to center right and libertarians. These are the people who, I think, are still sane and are still noticeably aligned with the idea of a liberal democracy. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from reading the Bible?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.