Chris Anderson: So, Jon, this feels scary.
Jonathan Haidt: Yeah.
It feels like the world is in a place that we haven't seen for a long time.
People don't just disagree in the way that we're familiar with.
The left-right political divide.
There are much deeper differences afoot.
What on earth is going on and how did we get here?
Jonathan Haidt: This is different.
There's a much more apocalyptic sort of feeling.
Survey research by Pew Research shows
that the degree to which we feel that the other side is not just --
we just don't dislike them, we strongly dislike them,
and we think that they are a threat to the nation.
Those numbers have been going up and up, and are over 50 percent now on both sides.
People are scared because it feels like this is different than before.
It's much more intense.
Whenever I look at any sort of social puzzle,
I always just apply the three basic principles of moral psychology,
and I think they'll help us here.
So the first thing that you have to always keep in mind
when you're thinking about politics,
is that we're tribal.
We evolved for tribalism.
One of the simplest and greatest insights into human social nature
is the bedouin proverb:
me against my brother,
me and my brother against our cousin,
my and my brother and cousins against the stranger.
And so that tribalism allowed us to create large societies
and to come together in order to compete with others.
That brought us out of the jungle and out of small groups,
but it means that we have internal conflict.
And the question you have to look at
is what aspects of our society are making that more bitter,
and what are calming them down.
CA: That's a very dark proverb.
You're saying that that's actually
baked into most people's mental wiring at some level.
JH: Oh yeah, absolutely.
This is just a basic aspect of human social cognition.
But we can also live together really peacefully
and we've invented all kinds of fun ways of, like, playing war.
I mean, sports, politics --
these are all ways that we get to exercise this tribal nature
without actually hurting anyone.
We're actually also very good at trade and exploration and meeting new people.
So you have to see our tribalism as something that goes up or down.
It's not like we're doomed to always be fighting each other,
but we'll never have world peace.
CA: The size of that tribe can shrink or expand.
JH: Right.
CA: The size of what we consider us
and what we consider other or them
can change.
And some people believe
that that process could continue indefinitely.
JH: That's right.
CA: And that we were indeed expanding the sense of tribe for a while.
JH: So this is, I think,
where we're getting at what's possibly the new left-right distinction.
I mean, the left-right as we've all inherited it,
comes out of the, you know, labor versus capital distinction,
and the working class, Marks --
But I think what we're seeing now increasingly
is a divide in all the Western democracies
between the people who want to stop at nation,
the people who are more parochial --
I don't mean that in a bad way --
people who have much more of a sense of being rooted,
they care about their town, their community, and their nation.
And then those who are antiparochial
and who --
Whenever I get confused, I just think of the John Lennon song "Imagine."
"Imagine there's no countries. Nothing to kill or die for."
And so these are the people who want more global governance,
they don't like nation states, they don't like borders.
You see this all over Europe as well.
There's a great metaphor guy -- actually, his name is Shakespeare --
writing ten years ago in Britain.
He had a metaphor:
"Are we drawbridge-uppers or drawbridge-downers?"
And Britain is divided 52-48 on that point.
And America is divided on that point, too.
CA: Hmm. And so --
those of us who grew up with The Beatles and that sort of hippie philosophy
of dreaming of a more connected world --
and it felt so idealistic, and how could anyone think badly about that?
What you're saying is that actually
millions of people today feel that that isn't just silly,
it's actually dangerous and wrong, and they're scared of it.
JH: I think the big issue, especially in Europe, but also here,
is the issue of immigration.
And I think this is where we have to look very carefully
at the social science about diversity and immigration.
Once something becomes politicized,
one it becomes something that the left loves, and the right --
then even the social scientists can't think straight about it.
Now, diversity is good in a lot of ways.
It clearly creates more innovation,
the American economy has grown enormously from it.
Diversity and immigration do a lot of good things,
but what the globalists, I think, don't see,
what they don't want to see,
is that ethnic diversity cuts social capital and trust.
There's a very important study by Robert Putnam,
the author of "Bowling alone,"
looking at social capital databases.
And basically, the more people feel that they are the same,
the more they trust each other,
the more they can have a redistributionist welfare state.
Scandinavian countries are so wonderful
because they have this legacy of being small, homogenous countries.
And that leads to a set of progressive welfare state --
a set of progressive left-leaning values,
which says, "Drawbridge down! The world is a great place.
People in Syria are suffering. We must welcome them in."
And it's a beautiful thing.
But if --
and I was in Sweden this summer --
if the discourse in Sweden is fairly politically correct,
and they can't talk about the downsides,
you end up bringing a lot of people in,
that's going to cut social capital, it makes it hard to have a welfare state
and they might end up, as we have in America,
with a racially divided -- visibly racially divided society.
So this is all very uncomfortable to talk about.
But I think this is the thing -- especially in Europe, and for us, too --
we need to be looking at.
CA: You're saying that people of reason,
people who would consider themselves not racists,
but moral, upstanding people,
have a rationale that says,
"Look, humans are just too different."
We're in danger of overloading our sense of what humans are capable of
by mixing people who are too different.
JH: Yes, but I can make it much more palatable
by saying it's not necessarily about race.
It's about culture.
And so there's wonderful work
by a political scientist named Karen Stenner,
who shows that when people have a sense
that we are all united, we're all the same,
there are many people who have a predisposition to authoritarianism.
Those people aren't particularly racist
when they feel there's no threat to our social and moral order.
But if you prime them experimentally
by thinking we're coming apart, people are getting more different,
then they get more racist, homophobic, they want to kick out the deviants.
So it's in part that you get an authoritarian reaction.
The left, following through the Leninist line, the John Lennon line,
does things that create an authoritarian reaction.
So we're certainly seeing that in America with the ultraright.
We saw it in Britain, we're seeing that all over Europe.
But the more positive part of that
is that I think the localists, or the nationalists are actually right.
That if you emphasize our cultural similarity,
then race doesn't actually matter very much.
So an assimilationist approach to immigration
removes a lot of these problems.
And if you value having a generous welfare state,
you've got to emphasize that we're all the same.
CA: OK, so rising immigration and fears about that
are one of the causes of the current divide.
What are other causes?
JH: The next principle of moral psychology
is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
And you've probably heard the term "motivated reasoning"
or "confirmation bias."
So there's some really interesting work
on how our high intelligence and our verbal abilities
might have evolved not to help us find out the truth,
but to help us manipulate each other, defend a reputation.
We're really, really good at justifying ourselves.
And if you bring group interests into account,
so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team,
you know, if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong,
we just can't accept that.
And so this is why you can't win a political argument.
If you're debating something,
you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence.
Because that's not the way reasoning works.
And so, now give us the Internet.
Give us Google.
You know, "I heard that Barack Obama was born in Kenya,
let me Google that.
Oh my God! 10 million hits! Look, he was!"
CA: So this is an unpleasant surprise to a lot of people.
The social media has often been framed by technooptimists
as this great connecting force that would bring people together.
And there have been some unexpected countereffects to that.
JH: That's right. And that's why I'm very enamored
of sort of ying-yang views of human nature and left-right.
That each side is right about certain things,
but then it goes blind to other things.
And so the left generally believes that human nature is good,
bring people together, knock down the walls and all will be well.
The right -- social conservatives, not libertarians --
social conservatives generally believe
people can be greedy and sexual and selfish,
and we need regulation, and we need restrictions.
So yeah, if you knock down all the walls --
a lot of people communicate all over the world --
you get a lot of porn and a lot of racism.
CA: So help us understand.
These principles of human nature have been with us forever.
What's changed that's deepened this feeling of division?
JH: You have to see six to 10 different threads all coming together.
I'll just list a couple of them.
So in America -- actually, in America and Europe --
one of the biggest ones is World War II.
There's interesting research from Joe Henrich and others
that if your country was at war,
especially when you were young,
then we test you 30 years later in a commons dilemma,
or a prisoner's dilemma,
you're more cooperative.
Because of our tribal nature, if you're --
You know, my parents were teenagers during World War II
and, you know, they would go out looking for scraps of aluminum,
to help the war effort.
I mean, everybody pulled together.
And so then these people go on,
they rise up through business and government,
they take leadership positions.
They're really good at compromise and cooperation.
They all retire by the 90's.
So we're left with baby-boomers by the end of the 90's.
And their youth was spent fighting each other within each country,
1968 and afterwards.
So the loss of the World War II generation,
the greatest generation, is huge.
So that's one.
Another in America is the purification of the two parties.
There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.
So the mid-20th century, that was really bipartisan.
But because of a variety of factors that started things moving
by the 90's we had purified liberal party and conservative party.
And so now the people in those parties really are different.
And now we really don't want our children to marry them,
which in the 60's didn't matter very much.
So the purification of the parties.
Third is the Internet.
And as I said,
it's just the most amazing stimulant for post hoc reasoning and demonization.
CA: The tone of what's happening on the Internet now is quite troubling.
I just did a quick search on Twitter about the election
and saw two tweets next to each other.
One against a picture of a sort of racist graffiti.
"This is disgusting,
Ugliness in this country, brought to us by #Trump."
And then the next one is:
"Crooked Hillary dedication page. Disgusting!"
So this idea of disgust is troubling to me.
Because you can have an argument or a disagreement about something,
you can get angry at someone.
Disgust, I've heard you say, takes things to a much deeper level.
JH: That's right. Disgust is different.
Anger, you know -- I have kids, they fight 10 times a day,
and they love each other 30 times a day.
You just go back and forth. You get angry, you're not angry.
But disgust is different.
Disgust paints the person as being subhuman, monstrous,
deformed -- morally deformed.
Disgust is like indelible ink.
There's research from John Gottman on marital therapy.
If you look at the faces,
if one of the couple shows disgust or contempt,
that's a predictor that they're going to get divorced soon.
Whereas if they show anger, that actually doesn't predict anything.
Because if you deal with anger well, it actually is good.
So this election is different.
Donald Trump personally uses the word "disgust" a lot.
He's very germ-sensitive, so disgust does matter a lot.
More for him, that is something unique to him,
but as we demonize each other more,
and again, through the Manichaean worldview,
the idea that the world is a battle between good and evil,
as this has been ramping up,
we're likely not just to say they're wrong or I don't like them,
but we say they're evil, they're satanic,
they're disgusting, they're revolting.
And then we want nothing to do with them.
And that's why I think we see --
We're seeing it, for example, on campus.
Now we're seeing more the urge to keep people off campus.
Silence them, keep them away.
I'm afraid that this whole generation of young people,
if their introduction to politics involves a lot of disgust,
they're not going to want to be involved in politics,
as they get older.
CA: So how do we deal with that?
Disgust. How do you defuse disgust?
JH: