A review by brennanaphone
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

3.0

I dunno about this one! I can't fault him on any of his research, and his ideas are clear and compelling. It felt like he could have just written this about moral psychology and the way different aspects of our individual minds, cultures/groups, and religious/political affiliations ping us differently and make us ascribe virtue and vice in different ways. I was really interested in that part. But the frame of it felt almost half-baked, like he was sort of addressing liberals to try to get them to see things from a conservative mindset and sort of championing conservatives to conservative readers, which felt odd. Like he was halfway participating in a PR campaign, but he was being really cagey about what he was trying to say and whom he was addressing. I really liked the nitty-gritty parts of the book he explored in relation to our sense of morality arising from instinct, with reason layered on top as a way of justifying that instinct. I just think making it topical undercut the universality of it, especially because talking about the right and left sides of U.S. politics looks way different in 2024 than it did in 2012.