He has the rare insight, for a member of his class, that the debate is not about why a healthy and sane globalism is being overtaken by a virulent nationalism. Rather, he says, we have to explain why globalism is attractive to anyone -- it cuts against several very normal moral senses.
It's a good piece, although as usual Haidt strikes me as wrong about some important aspects of things. Still, he is wrong with an open mind that is trying to grasp the other side's position. That's worth something.
Rather than tell you what I think is wrong, though, I'll leave the matter open in case you want to discuss it in the comments.
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Try as he might, he just can't bring himself to believe that non-elite citizens are full partners in a nation with hopes, goals, and aspirations. At the bottom of his arguments, he believes we are little robots with bad programming. If he can just find the right button to push, all will be well with the plan.
He certainly believes that moral issues often come down to material circumstances. His argument about the shift in moral trajectories over the last 20 years is almost Marxist: as societies grew more prosperous, they also grew more free and equal. He doesn't really examine the idea that maybe that's not inevitable. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that America won the Cold War, and was the dominant power during this period.
If so, it's not just the case that patriotism can be a good. It's that some patriotisms are better, and others are not as good. Values are important and worth fighting about, not materially determined questions of which we have little control.
I think Haidt puts things as well as he can and still get heard by leftist academics. He challenges orthodoxy in meaningful ways, and that's far better than pretty much anyone else who deals in the social sciences does these days.
Now, a bunch of us need to go get Ph.D.s and pick up that conversation. One man can't do everything.
It's hard to get into that guild -- and expensive, both in time and money.
I had not noticed you posted this before I posted on it myself. I like Haidt, even though he never does quite get things like nationalism right. He's much better than most. I had missed what you picked up, that the nations that have gotten more prosperous, more open, and freer over the last decades have done so in a particular context. It is not an experiment in a vacuum, and I will remember that. Those nations moved in a direction which is largely the American direction (not entirely) suggesting that American patriotism - or as I think, Anglospheric patriotism - is not entirely of a piece with the others.
I think that's right. Anglospheric patriotism, and not European -- even the French didn't have the same effects when they were an influential nation, and the Belgians were terrible.
Grim: Tell me about it! By "us" here I just meant the millions who are roughly on our side of things. Somewhere we have to convince more of us, in that broad sense, to get into those fields. As you, Stephen, and AVI have noted, it won't do to just have honest globalists / liberals fight our battles.
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