essential reading from @www.bugbeardispatch.com on the scholars “rushing to launder the reputation not just of Christianity, but of Christian nationalism itself” now that (hmm!) those advancing Christian nationalist politics are in power
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Do you have a gift link to this piece? A friend of mine tried to talk me up about Haidt's 2012 book and I was ... skeptical of its relevance to the current moment.
I had planned to read the book and I think this might be a good companion to that!
I'm pretty critical of Haidt, but my understanding is that Haidt's earlier work is more reasonable than his later divergence into cancel culture and anti-woke bullshit. The Righteous Mind is sort of where things start to turn; the first 2/3 of the book is great and then it goes off the rails.
Ultimately, I think Haidt's moral foundations theory might be decent as a purely descriptive theory - people basing their overall ethics on different combinations/weights of values isn't that weird. But I always felt like he wanted it to be normative too, like saying "all ethics are valid."
Moral Foundations is like Positive Psychology — a theory that’s useful in the right contexts and in the right hands, but very easily overapplied and weaponized
worse, this effort to reputation-launder Christian nationalism seems perfectly geared to appeal to the liberal defenders of fascism—by focusing on tedious “debate” and vague “mutual understanding” rather than the material consequences of their political project that are already evident all around us
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Should not laugh but im weak. I like a pun
I had planned to read the book and I think this might be a good companion to that!