Review: Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground

Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground by Kurt Gray
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a disappointment. I am reasonably confident that we can all see (and feel) the social/moral outrage currently dividing much of America and I was really hoping this work my provide some understanding and potentially a way to mitigate it. Yeah … probably not a realistic expectation; however, even worse, significant parts were completely undermined by my own experience and understanding of the human psyche and social mind. After a reasonable start, the author tries to make the case that humans didn’t evolve as apex predators (completely ignoring the actual definition of apex predator) arguing that if we go back in time far enough, we were obviously not predators … news flash … take ANY predatory organism on the planet and go back far enough and you will find an ancestor that was not a predator, so that is a pretty silly hill to die on … but the need here is because his entire premise is based upon the idea that evolution only accretes and never eliminates (a theory of evolution that is not supported). Okay … so ever worse … if humans are not apex predators … we much be prey? Yeah … No … Not really. But it only gets worse … because “as prey” we must have obviously adopted survival strategies common To prey … such as social groups designed to “dilute” the zone so that predators are over whelmed by too many targets … yeah … it doesn’t actually work that way either … 1) that specific strategies requires a rate of reproduction that out-paces predation, which, given human juvenile timeframes, birthrates and survival stats, doesn’t seem like a good argument and 2) social grouping are common even among apex predators … such as orcas … so there are other reasons for this that are likely to be a better fit to our human evolution. This whole line of reasoning completely undermined part 1 and I almost abandoned the book at that point.

It gets a little better with Part 2 and the author’s examination of harm … while I believe this is still too simplistic an answer that would be better described by using the term “threat [or harm]” it was close enough to get the general idea and more or less seems to be a good fit … especially the idea that, in general, our moral mind, or sense of morality, is founded on the perception of [potential] harm against the individual [or group in which the individual is a member]. What is missing is the how and why this is the mechanism, that determines/encourages social conformity (order vs chaos to improve survivability of the social unit) AND “othering” (briefly discussion without any indication or acknowledgment that ejection from the social group means that the moral mind no longer applies). There was elements that were good and useful, but they are generally hidden by imprecise language and/or outright misrepresentations of organizational dynamics.

Part 3 was the best part of the work and could easily stand on its own. The basic premise here is that facts don’t really matter because human nature isn’t really optimized for facts, but for story telling. This is almost an intuitive observation … if still overly simplified. The best way to counter moral outrage is to share stories from both sides … in other words, to re-humanize opponents (because the first step of justification for violence against an opponent is to dehumanize them). This does help turn down the temperature, but if does’t persuade (then again … the whole author continually emphasizes that the purpose here is NOT persuasion.

The chapters and sections in this work are …

Introduction - Swerve: The Power of Harm
Chapter 1 War: Is Understanding Betrayal?

PART 1: Human Nature - Myth 1 The Myth of Human Nature: We Evolved as Apex Predators
Chapter 2 Prey: The New Human Nature
Chapter 3 Social: The Rise of Morality
Chapter 4 Dangerous: Ignoring Our Obvious Safety

PART 2 Our Moral Mind - Myth 2 of the Moral Mind: There are No Harmless Wrongs
Chapter 5 Legacy: A Recent History of Harm
Chapter 6 Intuitive: The New Harm
Chapter 7 Vulnerability: Explaining Political Differences
Chapter 8 Blame: Moral Typecasting
Chapter 9 Suffering: Self-Focused Victimhood

PART 3 Bridging Moral Divides - Myth 3 Facts Bridge Divides
Chapter 10 Understanding: Telling Stories of Harm
Chapter 11: Hope: Opening Up

Epilogue Humility: Always Learning

Some of the other points that really got my attention (regardless of whether or not I agreed with them) are:

(view spoiler)[

Deep in our minds, every fight about morality comes down to one thing: competing perceptions of harm. We get outraged at people when they deny our assumptions about what causes suffering and when they reject our views of victimhood.

When we look at our moral psychology, the picture is surprisingly simple. Deep down, we all have the same moral cognition. We all have a harm-based moral mind. Harm is the master key that unlocks understanding across the messiness of human moral judgment.

The key point is that perceptions of harm on both sides are sincere, even if they don’t immediately make sense to you. It is tempting to dismiss someone’s feelings of threat as misguided or exaggerated, but studies show that our moral convictions are underlain by genuinely perceived harms.

Comparing politics to war motivates people to donate to campaigns, but it is terrible for democracy, because democracy requires us to cooperate and compromise for the good of the country.

The destruction narrative spells trouble for democracy. If you believe that your opponents are trying to destroy democracy, then you might think the only way to save your democracy is to resort to antidemocratic practices yourself, including illegal gerrymandering, restricting free speech, and forcing gridlock to hurt the other party.

Evolution always builds on top of preexisting mental structures rather than replacing them.

We stand at the very top of the food pyramid. We hunt any animal we please, and no animal hunts us in return. Scholars argue that we are apex predators because of the unique abilities of our body and brain.

There is no doubt that today’s modern humans are apex predators, and that our hominid ancestors were capable of brutal violence and calculated aggression. However, our hominid ancestors were not apex predators.

Morality is the most fundamental of human social contracts. Morality is a set of norms (expectations about behavior) shared by a group. These norms revolve around encouraging cooperation and kindness and discouraging selfishness and aggression.

Moral outrage is the psychological tool that motivates people to punish wrongdoers, even at cost or risk to themselves. It is a “commitment device,” something that commits people to punishment, even though trying to punish someone can be dangerous.

Alexis de Tocqueville, argues that as societies enjoy more economic and moral progress, people get more frustrated at injustices. Tocqueville understood the subjectivity surrounding which acts are judged as “injustices,” and that these judgments hinge on people’s reference points.

This theory partitions our moral mind into five different psychological rooms, two used by both liberals and conservatives (care/harm, fairness), and three used only by conservatives (loyalty, authority, purity).

The whole idea of harmless wrongs argues that—psychologically speaking—people are willing to condemn an act as immoral while also genuinely seeing it as harmless. In other words, in people’s minds there should be a clean break between what people see as harmful and what they see as wrong.

There are two ways to connect harm with virtues. The first is to recognize that virtues outline ways of acting that prevent salient harms in society. … The second way that a harm-based mind understands the importance of virtues is that virtues compensate for harm.

To help reduce this complexity, we have developed a suite of heuristics, also called rules of thumb or cognitive shortcuts, that help us make sense of the world.

Moral typecasting is the intuitive urge to see people as either 100 percent villains and 0 percent victims or 0 percent villains and 100 percent victims. This all-or-nothing division of pain and blame allows us to feel righteous when we excuse the misdeeds of those who suffer or ignore the suffering of those who have harmed others.

When people think about the mind of God, they anchor on themselves. God may be ultimately unknowable, but this ambiguity paradoxically breeds confidence that His convictions are your convictions. People’s moral egocentrism also convinces them that millions of others share their political opinions, sometimes leading to disaster.

But there is a more charitable interpretation of why victimhood is so often invoked on social media. The social distance and anonymity of the internet makes it harder to understand other people. In-person conversations allow for small talk that establishes common ground, allowing people to bond over their common love of music or their common dislike of the weather. On the anonymous internet, this initial connection and common ground is hard to find, especially when people immediately start arguing about politics.

Facts fail to foster respect in political discussions because our moral beliefs are based on intuitions of harm, not objective evidence. Our moral convictions are founded not on statistics but on feelings of threat.

The process of dehumanization starts when you see the other side as fundamentally different from yourself, especially as concerns their minds and morals. Encountering differences is not necessarily bad and can even be exciting, but they can also set the stage for feelings of superiority—and perceptions of inferiority—once conflict arises.

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I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#Outraged #NetGalley.

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