An Island of Clarity


As a student of human behavior I have been trying to understand the craziness that is our social and political culture.  So many blatantly false things have been said with great earnestness and an odd assumption of integrity.  The absolutist behavior and mean spiritedness displayed for years has been confounding and dismaying.  What’s going on?

I feel as though I am incrementally getting a handle on our collective dysfunction, yet I’ve wanted a social scientist, someone who actually studies such things and does experiments and collects statistics – you know, science stuff leading to actual facts – to help me with this.

Happily, my pal Brian Muldoon and I were exchanging some emails following one of my essays and he pointed me to a Bill Moyers interview of Jonathan Haidt.  This is the guy I’ve been looking for.  I mean, I’ve wondered how two people can look at the same thing and have such different interpretations and reactions to it.  Turns out, they’re not looking at the same thing and Haidt explains that and lots of other things.

I invite you to watch the interview.  His book was released this week and I’ve just started reading it.  It’s a page turner for behavioral geeks like me.  More about that another time.

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