Tag Archives: Jonhaidt

TLP watch

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1. Art Carden writes,

how do we understand the political rhetoric and division regarding the migrant caravan? I think Kling’s framework provides a very useful way to understand.

Indeed. The applications of oppressor/oppressed, civilization/barbarism, and liberty/coercion are obvious.

Another application of the three-axes model is that news stories that get “excess play” are ones that produce the sharpest divisions along the axes. I mean, considering the short-attention-span news cycle and the caravan story’s intrinsic (lack of) importance, its prominence and staying power is hard to explain, except that it provides outrage fodder for everybody’s axis.

2. When you have two hours, listen to Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt. Terrific throughout. They fight, but instead of a rude street brawl you get a gentleman’s boxing match. Some of Klein’s jabs are repetitious, but overall I would give them both a lot of points.

I also would note that at one hour, forty-six minutes or so Haidt insists he is not on the right, but then immediately he proceeds to say that human nature is tribal and violent and it’s amazing that we have escaped that thanks to institutions like the rule of law. Spoken like a true civilization-vs.-barbarism conservative. It contrasts so clearly with Klein’s repeated insistence that there is a lot more social injustice in society than we are willing to admit.

I usually try to be modest about the three-axes model and say that it describes rhetorical tools, not fundamental beliefs. But I am tempted in this case to make a stronger claim, which is that Haidt is really deeply attuned to civilization-barbarism and Klein is deeply attuned to oppressor-oppressed.

The academic bubble

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What were the most influential books of the past twenty years? The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a list provided by various academics. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Without doing an exact count, and of course I have only read some of the books myself, I think maybe, maybe one out of every four books in the list is not there because it reinforces leftist ideology. And of course there are zero books that challenge leftist ideology.

So let me try to correct the balance. I think that Haidt’s The Righteous Mind belongs on the list. Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy. Probably Richerson and Boyd Culture and the Evolutionary Process (I have not read it, but I think of Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success is a very important book and that book was influence by Richerson and Boyd, so if you’re talking about influential books, . . .). Something from Steven Pinker, probably The Blank Slate. How about Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Anyway, the main point of this post is that it’s very likely that if you see a book that conforms closely to left-wing orthodoxy, it probably is dramatically over-rated in the academy. Conversely, if you see a book that departs from left-wing orthodoxy, I would be that it is dramatically under-rated in the academy. In a more balanced culture of higher education, Haidt or Pinker would be on more reading lists, while the books listed in the Chronicle would be on fewer.