"The Psychologists Take Power"

"In spite of the grandiosity of Skinner’s vision for humanity, he could not plausibly claim to be a moral expert. It is only more recently that the claims of psychologists to moral expertise have come to be taken seriously. Contributing to their new aura of authority has been their association with neuroscience, with its claims to illuminate the distinct neural pathways taken by our thoughts and judgments...

[But] An understanding of the neural correlates of reasoning can tell us nothing about whether the outcome of this reasoning is justified. It is not the neuroscience but rather our considered moral judgments that do all the evaluative work in telling us which mental processes we should trust and which we should not... Rather than adhering to the moral view that we should maximize “utility”—or satisfaction of wants—[psychologists] are adopting the more minimal, Hobbesian view that our first priority should be to avoid conflict. This minimalist moral worldview is, again, simply presupposed; it is not defended through argument and cannot be substantiated simply by an appeal to scientific facts. And its implications are not altogether appealing...

a thorough distrust of rapid, emotional responses might well leave human beings without a moral compass sufficiently strong to guide them through times of crisis, when our judgment is most severely challenged, or to compete with powerful nonmoral motivations... From the Hoffman report and supporting documents we learn that following the attacks of September 11, in December 2001 the APA adopted an emergency “Resolution on Terrorism” to encourage collaborations that would help psychologists fight terrorism. Entirely understandably, many academics at this time wanted to help to ensure that such a devastating atrocity could not occur again. The APA resolution resulted in a meeting, in December 2001, at the home of Martin Seligman of “an international group of sixteen distinguished professors and intelligence personnel” to discuss responses to Islamic extremism...

More recently, in an essay in The Atlantic, coauthored with Greg Lukianoff and entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” he recommended that students use therapies derived from cognitive behavioral therapy to foster personal resilience. Such resilience is needed, they argue, to combat the culture of victimhood that appears to them to lie at the basis of campus protests over racism and sexism. In an interview, Haidt elaborated:

With each passing year, racial diversity and gender diversity, I believe, while still important, should become lower priorities, and with each passing year political diversity becomes more and more important."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/the-psychologists-take-power/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202.8.16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Here's the thing - I strongly recommend Haidt's book (though not the portion where he veers into evolutionary theory) because I found hugely useful ideas about the development of value systems that inform moral worlds and the way that we reason, and the ways that different groups can develop conflicting viewpoints mostly because they aren't actually arguing about the same thing. It's one of those books that provides tools for understanding complicated human moments.

But it's super useful to read this and think about the limits of these studies and the assumptions that are baked in to the interpretations and the limits of using science (with our current tools and scopes of what is "science" and what isn't) for defining truth and outside-of-truth.

FB: "No psychologist has yet developed a method that can be substituted for moral reflection and reasoning, for employing our own intuitions and principles, weighing them against one another and judging as best we can. This is necessary labor for all of us. We cannot delegate it to higher authorities or replace it with handbooks. Humanly created suffering will continue to demand of us not simply new “technologies of behavior” but genuine moral understanding."