Jonathan Haidt has decided that, seeing as lunch is on the FT, we should treat ourselves to some caviar. But he has one prerequisite. “As long as it’s not Russian. We’ll make sure it’s not Russian.”
It seems appropriate that Haidt, a social psychologist known for the theory that moral intuitions are more important than conscious reasoning when it comes to decision-making and political orientation, should want to determine the moral implications of his lunch before ordering it. Still, given how much he appears to want the caviar, his commitment to living by his own principles is impressive.
Haidt — pronounced “height”, not “hate” — has devoted much of his career as an academic, writer and public intellectual to trying to get people on opposing ends of the political spectrum to understand one another despite their moral, and therefore political, differences. His willingness to engage thoughtfully in debates often characterised by tribalism and virtue-signalling has helped him win considerable influence — Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos have both recommended his most recent essay. But Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, is not without his detractors. To his critics, he falsely equates the excesses of the progressivist activism of the left with the disregard for truth, science or the democratic process of some on the right; they accuse him of “bothsidesism”.
“Guilty as charged,” the 58-year-old says without hesitation, putting his elbows on the marble table and interlocking his fingers. He wears a checked shirt, slightly open at the neck, tucked neatly into a pair of dark jeans, with some hiking shoes to complete the relaxed-professor look. “I’m a committed ‘bothsidesist’, because I think unless you look from multiple perspectives you can’t understand anything complex. As a centrist committed to liberalism as a process, I will always look from both sides before I make a judgment.”
We are sitting at a corner table in Sadelle’s, a buzzy all-day-brunch spot in SoHo, New York, that serves the kind of traditional eastern European Jewish food found in delis all over the city, though in rather more lavish fashion. We are still trying to find out whether the caviar is or isn’t Russian.
The third staff member we try to solicit this information from seems to think he’s been sent over to sell us the full “caviar service” — prices ranging from $325 to $850. Haidt politely declines: he would just, still, really like to know where it comes from. After being told that it comes from a sturgeon, he cracks: “We’re assuming it’s not Russian?” “Great question,” says the waiter, who disappears before returning with reassuring news: it’s from the East Coast. (The news later turns out to have been fake. The caviar is French.)
I ask Haidt whether he wouldn’t like something alcoholic to wash it down, but he says he’ll stick to New York City tap water — known, after all, as “the champagne of tap water” — because otherwise he’ll “lose the rest of the day for thinking”. But I should drink if I feel like it, he tells me. I lie, saying I don’t. Haidt is a serious person. And this is to be a serious lunch.
On the morning of the crisp, sunny April day I am meeting him, a long essay that Haidt has been working on for three months, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, has been published in The Atlantic. In the essay, which he calls “the most important thing I’ve ever written”, Haidt argues that social media is having a devastating impact on society. He invokes the parable of the Tower of Babel, in which God, “offended by the hubris of humanity”, makes the people unable to communicate.
“Our institutions are malfunctioning because of the way that social media amplifies performance and moralism and mob dynamics, which brings the normal process of dissent to a grinding halt,” he tells me.
Haidt, conspicuously, does not use the term “cancel”, but does talk about social media having armed us with “darts”, which he describes as “attempt[s] to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance or tribal loyalties”. These darts cause “pain but no fatalities”, yet are enough to have had a chilling effect on discourse. He criticises both left and right in the essay, but “it was the “younger progressive activists who did most of the shooting”, he writes, giving institutions a “chronic fear of getting darted”, thus making them “stupider”.
While some feel Haidt focuses too much of his fire on the left, he has only ever voted Democrat. “I cannot imagine voting Republican because the Republican party has completely lost all sense of constitutional responsibility and has lost all touch with conservatism. I have a lot of respect for liberalism, but there’s a lot of illiberalism on the left, and I have a lot of respect for conservatism, but there’s not much conservatism left on the right,” he says.
In his bestselling 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt lays out the “moral foundations theory”, arguing that a set of core moral foundations — which we might think of as “political taste buds” — can help explain our differences. Liberals build their “moral matrices” on care, fairness and liberty; conservatives add three other important foundations: loyalty, authority and sanctity.
I ask whether, in an age of rightwing populism and puritanical leftism, this theory still makes sense. Absolutely, he says. The radicals may have the most impact — “Both sides are intensely motivated by moral passions, passions which should frighten true liberals and true conservatives” — but they are in the minority.
Haidt calls his new essay a “précis” of his next book, one he wasn’t meant to be writing. Indeed, he had already started work on a different book, “Three Stories About Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life”, and has a contract to write it. But he has put that on hold for now because of how dangerous he considers the current moment. “Capitalism is extremely important, but that’s more a matter of the next several decades . . . American democracy is in such a perilous state, we don’t have much time — we have to start acting very quickly,” he says, raising his dark eyebrows. “We all got fooled by the 1990s . . . We got fooled into thinking that liberal democracy is easy and natural. It’s not — it’s hard and it’s unnatural. And so we need to start taking it seriously.”
We have finally been brought our food, and Haidt shows me how to tackle the potato latkes. On top of these piping hot fritters we spread a thick layer of sour cream, then an equally thick layer of applesauce. It shouldn’t work, but it does: a heady mix of saltiness, fattiness, sweetness and carbiness. For our next latke we swap applesauce for caviar — the bubbles burst in the mouth, melting with the cream, briny and luxurious.
I put it to Haidt that the Babel analogy seems to presuppose a time when there was some kind of unity of knowledge, which has surely never been the case. “I know that there never was a golden age in which we all loved each other and spoke the same language,” he clarifies. “But there’s a difference between normal divisions of conflict and hatred, versus the complete insanity that we’re going through now, in which companies and states are at war with each other . . . There is a qualitative difference.”
As well as the impending downfall of liberal democracy, what concerns Haidt most about social media is its impact on young teenagers. He cites data showing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm suddenly surging in the early 2010s, and “correlational and experimental studies” suggesting a link with the use of the platforms.
So what is to be done — do we need government intervention? Haidt, reluctantly, thinks we do. He does not believe in more content moderation, but does think children should not be allowed on to these platforms until they are 16, and that companies should be held responsible for enforcing this. He also thinks social media companies should have to carry out user verification in a similar manner to the way banks do know-your-customer checks.
But there are simpler, non-governmental interventions that could help too. “If everybody would just cut their social media use by 50 per cent, they would generally be happier and our problem would be ameliorated because the whole thing is built on us contributing content.”
I later email Haidt to ask his thoughts on Elon Musk buying Twitter — could this be a good thing for free speech? Haidt tells me people are “barking up the wrong tree” by focusing on this: the problem with the platform is not the content but the “enhanced virality” that spreads it, rewarding the inflammatory, the false and the stupid. Serial tweeter Musk, it strikes me, is unlikely to help with that.
After our latkes, we move on to smoked sable — black cod — and bagels, which have arrived on a three-tiered stand, the fish at the top, the bagels at the bottom, with a plate of sliced cucumber, tomatoes, capers and dill in the middle.
This is just the kind of food that Haidt would have every Sunday for breakfast as a child growing up in the well-to-do town of Scarsdale in upstate New York, though the fish would have been lox (smoked salmon). It’s a tradition that Haidt, who became an atheist not long after his bar mitzvah, also continues with his 15-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, feeling that it’s important for them to have a sense of their Jewish identity, as well as their Korean one — his wife, an artist, is Korean-American.
Haidt says he had a conventional Jewish-American upbringing — his parents were both the first generation born in the US; all four of his grandparents were born in Russia and eastern Europe — and felt “completely assimilated” into American culture. I ask whether his disdain for caviar from Russia has anything to do with his grandparents having fled from there, or whether it’s more about Vladimir Putin’s bloody war on Ukraine. It’s the latter, as well as having grown up during the cold war, with “the real recognition that the Soviet Union could end life on earth at any moment”.
After graduating from Yale, where he majored in philosophy, Haidt switched to psychology, with a particular focus on morality. He wrote his PhD thesis in 1992 on “Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?” at the University of Pennsylvania, before teaching for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. In 2006, he published his first book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, on “how to construct a life of virtue, happiness, fulfilment, and meaning”.
I point out that his work appears to have become more pessimistic over the years. “Oh yeah, there’s been a trajectory,” he says, drawing a downward line in the air with a finger. “I’m a generally optimistic person by nature . . . I love being a professor, I love the life of the mind, I love universities. I was extremely happy until around 2014 . . . That’s when our trajectory as a society really darkens, that’s when mental health begins to plummet, that’s when the mobs begin to build.”
I suggest that the idea that 2014 is when everything suddenly changed so irrevocably might be too neat, pointing out that many of the troubling trends he is referring to — such as increasing polarisation — predate that year and even the advent of social media itself. “A parameter can change and change, but nothing changes on the surface . . . then you reach a certain temperature and suddenly everything melts,” he says — “2014-2015 is when that really happened.” This was the academic year, he says, when university administrators started presenting professors with lists of “microaggressions” and when students began demanding “trigger warnings” and other emotional protections.
These developments became the motivation for writing The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored with lawyer and free-speech campaigner Greg Lukianoff. Published in 2018, their book argued that a belief system they called “safetyism” — “a culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger” — was leaving young people ill-prepared for the harsh realities of life and threatening fundamental liberal values such as free speech and free inquiry.
“Should we have . . . absolute free speech for anyone to say anything at any time? No!” he says. “But [should it be that] if someone has evidence contrary to the favoured position, that they can or should say so? Yes, we must have that.”
Being a brunch-only restaurant, Sadelle’s doesn’t really do desserts and so, having followed our latkes, caviar and sable bagels with a salad, we have both ordered a coffee.
Despite all the negatives that our current brand of social-justice activism might bring, couldn’t some goodness come from it too, I ask? “I think it’s unclear,” he says. “In universities, we’re all supposed to praise activism all the time . . . But if you’re part of a group that . . . suppresses dissent, then . . . most of the things you push for are going to make things worse.”
He cups his coffee mug tightly with both hands. “I don’t think activism is inherently good or bad. Activism from a group that is structurally smart — that is, it welcomes dissent and criticism and it adapts, like the civil rights movement in the ’50s and ’60s — is . . . in general a net good to society, and that’s the essential role of the left.”
I attempt, again, to bring us to a point of optimism. Does he feel western society is progressing in at least some ways? He shakes his head vigorously. “No. I think we’re regressing . . . We developed these institutions that made us live way above our design specifications . . . but we’ve taken them for granted, we’ve left them to decay, and now I think we might be at that moment in cartoons where you’ve run off the cliff but you haven’t fallen yet.”
Before I have the chance to respond to this gloomy prognosis, he suddenly offers up a tiny, unexpected glimmer of hope.
“That might be where we are — please say ‘might’ . . . I totally acknowledge that it’s almost impossible to predict the future and I love Phil Tetlock’s work on prediction,” he says, referring to the psychologist who found that the prediction skills of “experts” are about as good as those of a chimpanzee. “I grant that I’m probably wrong in these predictions but I think it’s my job to put them out there and shake people and get them to see things.”
Jemima Kelly is an FT columnist
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