Jonathan Haidt on Finding Happiness During the Pandemic

If you’ve been here a while, you know that I’ve found a lot of comfort in the writings and lectures of Professor Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist from New York University. More than anyone else, he has helped me to understand my own reaction to both affirming and challenging information and he’s given me the tools to think critically about both.

One of the major challenges to building a Strong Town today is the dysfunctional discourse that permeates our public life. Haidt’s work, particularly The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, was critical for helping me see outside of my own moral matrix, allowing me to work productively with people of different moral frameworks.

I think this is a critical skill we all need. I wrote about this in Chapter 10 of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity:

What is different today from what our ancestors would have experienced is the unnaturally filtered and curated interactions we have with those of a different moral framework. Cities have historically had people of both liberal and conservative dispositions; in such places it would have been impossible not to intimately know someone with whom one politically disagreed. Today such moral isolation is easy, perhaps even the default.

It’s my contention that cities need both mind-sets to solve problems and thrive. Hierarchy without compassion for individual suffering quickly becomes tyranny. The liberal framework is critical to helping us understand where existing social structures create harm, and pushing society to update, sometimes even completely reimagine, those structures.

Yet, a society without a certain level of structure becomes chaotic, the destabilization creating deep psychological anxiety and tension. When conservatives advocate for certain institutions and traditions, they are—as Haidt has suggested—rightly pointing out that “you don’t help the bees by destroying the hive.”

The deep irony of the post-war development experiment is that it was largely a liberal-initiated destruction of the hive, wrapped in the language of both nationalism and justice, that has now grown to be sacred to conservatives. Untangling that gordian knot of culture is going to require deep intention, and huge doses of empathy, by those who grasp the urgency of the situation.

Haidt recently gave an online lecture about growing—as individuals and as organizations—during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a quick listen and I found it a helpful framing all Strong Towns advocates can benefit from.

And if you enjoy that, watch the video Our Contentious Culture, which we’ve watched and discussed as a team here at Strong Towns multiple times. It’s a helpful primer for anyone wanting to become more effective in working across difference (and, in my opinion, we all should want that, especially now).

Cover image via Unsplash.

---

---