the righteous mind jonathan haidt review

These theories show the continuing appeal of scientism-the modern belief that scientific inquiry can enable us to resolve conflicts and dilemmas in contexts where traditional sources of wisdom and practical knowledge seem to have failed.

That has in no way dented the popularity of such theories, and it is now evolutionary psychology that is being presented as a guide for the politically perplexed. Not for the first time, grand theories of social evolution proved to be useless as guides to events. A crisis in Russian history, the Soviet collapse eventuated as a result of a series of contingencies-a defeat in Afghanistan, a loss of control in Poland-and resulted in an authoritarian regime that Solzhenitsyn could approve rather than anything resembling Western-style liberal government. In fact, the events that brought down the Soviet regime-a development that few Sovietologists believed to be within the bounds of realistic possibility-had very little to do with any universal trends of political evolution. Liberals and conservatives could be found everywhere, contending against one another in a slow, often interrupted, but in the end irresistible evolution toward liberal democracy. Like many in the academy and the media, the expert was assuming that the political polarities of Western democracies existed in every society. The conversation was enlightening not for anything the expert told me about the Soviet Union-though he had vastly greater factual knowledge than I did-but rather for what it showed about the limitations of the Western mind at the time. It was around that time that I stopped listening to Sovietologists. Had he not asserted freedom of conscience against the state? And was not this freedom a core value of liberalism? My interlocutor was adamant: Solzhenitsyn had to be understood as part of a developing liberal culture. Even on the basis of those of his writings that had been published in the West up to that time, he looked to me more like a latter-day disciple of Dostoyevsky, opposing the Soviet system out of a belief in the uniqueness of Russia and its deep difference from the West. Certainly Solzhenitsyn was anti-totalitarian, but that did not make him any sort of liberal. We ended up discussing Solzhenitsyn, and the expert expounded the view that the writer illustrated the emergence of liberal values in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism. Sometime in the early 1970s I had an illuminating conversation with an expert on Soviet affairs.

The righteous mind jonathan haidt review