Our institutions are malfunctioning
“Our institutions are malfunctioning because of the way that social media amplifies performance and moralism and mob dynamics, which brings the normal process of dissent to a grinding halt,”
“Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” in The Atlantic. In the essay, which he /Jonathan Haidt/ calls “the most important thing I’ve ever written”, Haidt argues that social media is having a devastating impact on society.
He invokes the parable of the Tower of Babel, in which God, “offended by the hubris of humanity”, makes the people unable to communicate.
“I cannot imagine voting Republican because the Republican party has completely lost all sense of constitutional responsibility and has lost all touch with conservatism. I have a lot of respect for liberalism, but there’s a lot of illiberalism on the left, and I have a lot of respect for conservatism, but there’s not much conservatism left on the right,” he says.
In his bestselling 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt lays out the “moral foundations theory”, arguing that a set of core moral foundations — which we might think of as “political taste buds” — can help explain our differences. Liberals build their “moral matrices” on care, fairness and liberty; conservatives add three other important foundations: loyalty, authority and sanctity.
Jemima Kelly FT 29 April 2020
Jemima Kelly writes for FT Alphaville. She was previously a reporter at Reuters, where she mainly wrote about the foreign exchange market, cryptocurrencies and fintech. She has also written for The Economist.
She is now one of my Gurus.
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