Summer Reading And More

It is 2024 ...

One fine summer day in the Pacific Northwest, 2024

The Righteous Mind

It was the second Jonathan Haidt book I read this year (I wrote about my reading of his other book in an earlier post). I couldn’t have picked a more appropriate time—in the summer of this election year—to read it.

Haidt begins the book with a quote from the appeal made by Rodney King in 1992, “Can we all get along?” … (W)e’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

Seriously. We are all stuck here and why can’t we just all get along?

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Righteous - “rihtwis” (old English word) meaning “just, upright, virtuous”. Self-righteous - “convinced of one’s own righteousness, in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.”

I first heard the word righteous in church, so it always had a religious connotation to me. It remained somewhat abstract for me despite its appearance in numerous sermons and hymns.

According to Haidt, we are born to be righteous without knowing what we should be righteous about, and knowing what to be righteous about has to be learned. He then quickly changed his angle from righteousness to morality.

Haidt believes (backed by years of survey research on the subject) that there are six foundations of morality - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. To appeal to an average person, the more foundations a message touches, the better chance it will succeed. How does this relate to the politics in our country? The political left leans primarily on the first three (and in the area of fairness, are ready to trade proportional fairness with equality) whereas the right uses all six.

Note to self - This is why people tend to vote Republican, despite the implication in real life.

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An interesting story from the book, is the elephant and rider metaphor (which appeared first in his The Happiness Hypothesis).

The human mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant. The rider—our conscious reasoning—is smart and logical, and can be “taught”. The elephant—our mental processes occur mostly outside of awareness—is viscera (and dumb) but governs most of our behavior, hence powerful in deciding whether we learn or don’t learn.

The rider’s job is to serve the elephant. It is the elephant’s PR team, its press secretary. Reasoning and googling can take the elephant to wherever it wants to go.

The elephant is intuition—that “gut” feeling we all experience from time to time. It is our intuition that drives moral psychology most of the time, not strategic reasoning. We’ve already made up our minds (although we didn’t know it) before our search for reasoning began.

Note to self - To win an argument, talk to the elephant, never argue with the rider. Use elephants to steer elephants and elephants to appeal to elephants—this is where empathy plus compassion can go a long way.

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Morality binds but also blinds. Humans are 90% chimp—at the individual level. We are selfish and competitive hypocrites. The other 10% are bee—at the group level. We can be cooperative and cohesive and work for the good of our group. So look at us, we bind ourselves into political/religious teams that share moral narratives, but we are blind to alternative moral worlds. Hence, the “us vs. them” and the tribalism.

Interestingly, Corporation, the word came from the Latin word corpus for body. So a corporation is a superorganism.

Note to self - Hm, for a corporation to succeed, its creator/leader needs to master how to manage (manipulate?) the selfish and competitive individuals with their motivation of working for the good of the company.

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Other interesting tidbits:

• Reputation wins over truth and we are unconsciously obsessed with what others think of us.

• We lean toward people we like and admire and seek support from them to help us make up (or change) our minds.

• Gary Marcus (neuroscientist): Nature provides a first draft—organized in advance of experience; and experience (nurture) revises, then completes the book.

• David Hume (philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist): We work hard at reasoning, not in search of truth but in support of our emotional reactions (moral judgment), so reasoning became “the slave of the passions”. When passion dies, reasoning loses its desire and we go into ruin.

• WEIRD = Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic.

• Psychopaths reason but don’t feel; babies feel but don’t reason.

A Commencement Worth Listening

Summer is also the season of commencement speeches. I came upon Roger Federer’s commencement speech at Dartmouth this June and it was one of the best (and most down-to-earth) commencement speeches I have heard.

He gave three lessons to the graduates -

Effortless is a myth.

It’s only a point.

Life is bigger than the court.

I took away more though -

It takes a lot of hard work when no one is watching, to look effortless in front of a crowd.

When you are playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. it frees you to fully commit to the next point, and the next point after that.

Whatever game you play in life, you are going to lose a point, a match, a season, a job. You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments, that is the sign of a champion.

Football coach Buddy Teevenns: “ … be a great football player when it is football time, a great student when it’s academic time, and a great person all the time.”

Leaving a familiar world behind and finding new ones is incredibly, deeply, and wonderfully exciting.

But, the biggest point I took away -

“Retired, the word is awful so I chose ‘I graduated from tennis’—finished one big thing and I’m moving onto the next, and figuring out what’s next… and it is okay to not know what the next thing is”

Okay, I graduated from the corporate world. I like how it sounds! 😊

Pines of Rome

I was listening to a “Summertime” playlist (by Apple) while walking the community trail, thoroughly enjoying the wildflowers. And Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome came on.

Pines of Rome is a 4-movement tone poem (completed in 1924). Respighi wrote programmatic notes describing each scene: The Pines of the Villa Borghese; Pines Near a Catacomb; The Pines of the Janiculum; and The Pines of the Appian Way. The setting of the music goes back in time—children playing in the contemporary city at the beginning to grown men in uniform marching in the time of the Roman Republic at the conclusion, with the middle part dedicated to the Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings, endings, and transitions that has two faces, one looking forward and the other backward in time.

The first time I listened to Pines of Rome was also the first time I listened to music through a stereo headset, back when I was still a teenager and the music was played on a 1/4” tape recorder/player. My uncle, Mom’s youngest brother, was also there to experiment with the new gadget with me and I can still see his face lit up with the humongous headset over his head, raising his thumb and shouting “AWESOME” 砰砰响! (I had to hush him repeatedly because Mom was giving piano lessons in the same room.)

Here is the last two minutes of the last movement (The Appian Way) from a live performance at the Summer Festivals in Quebec - Can you (in your mind) see the Roman army marching down?

Below is the edited excerpt from the Disney film Fantasia 2000, the soundtrack by the Chicago Symphony with James Levine at the podium. I highly recommend the full-length movie, preferably in an IMAX theater or your home theater with the latest visual and sound technologies :).

And finally, the complete work performed by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert.

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