“Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. Fifty-three people were killed and more than 7,000 buildings were torched. Much of the mayhem was carried live; news cameras tracked the action from helicopters circling overhead. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace.

King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catchphrase more often said for laughs than as a serious plea for mutual understanding. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.

The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. As he stumbled through his television interview, fighting back tears and often repeating himself, he found these words: “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.”

This book is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.

*

I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to “do” morality, just as it’s designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

The word righteous comes from the old Norse word rettviss and the old English word rihtwis, both of which mean “just, upright, virtuous.” This meaning has been carried into the modern English words righteous and righteousness, although nowadays those words have strong religious connotations because they are usually used to translate the Hebrew word tzedek. Tzedek is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, often used to describe people who act in accordance with God’s wishes, but it is also an attribute of God and of God’s judgment of people (which is often harsh but always thought to be just).

The linkage of righteousness and judgmentalism is captured in some modern definitions of righteous, such as “arising from an outraged sense of justice, morality, or fair play.” The link also appears in the term self-righteous, which means “convinced of one’s own righteousness, especially in contrast with the actions and beliefs of others; narrowly moralistic and intolerant.” I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society. When I was a teenager I wished for world peace, but now I yearn for a world in which competing ideologies are kept in balance, systems of accountability keep us all from getting away with too much, and fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means. Not a very romantic wish, but one that we might actually achieve.

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In 2011, Zócalo established an annual book prize to honor writers who grapple with questions of community in a particularly illuminating and original manner. Our first winner was journalist Peter Lovenheim for In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time. Last year, sociologist Richard Sennett won for Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation.

Last week, we presented our three finalists for 2013. Today, we announce the winner of the $5,000 third annual Zócalo Book Prize: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt for The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

We’re confident that our book judges were objective and impartial in picking the winner, but if they were guilty of blinkered biases and personal passions—well, that would make their choice all the more appropriate. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt argues that our morals and beliefs are far less reason-based than many of us would like to think. We often come to a conclusion first and then think up the reasons for it next; as a result, we misjudge people who feel differently. If we can take responsibility for breaking out of our righteous mindsets, we just might be able to understand and get along with one another better.

Since we fancy ourselves an organization that tries to promote thinking outside the hive, we’re very pleased with the choice of our judges. Haidt has been a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business since 2011. For 16 years before that, he was at the University of Virginia, where he conducted much of the research that became The Righteous Mind. Haidt’s research examines what he calls the “intuitive foundations of morality” and how they play out in different places and cultures.

On Friday, May 3, Haidt will visit Zócalo to deliver a lecture: “Can Americans Learn to Reconcile Politics and Reason?” at MOCA Grand Avenue. See more details on the award ceremony, sponsored by Southern California Gas Company, here.

Zócalo recently got in touch with Haidt to ask him some questions about his work:

Q. You write that we’re not easily persuaded by reason, but of course you employ reason to demonstrate that. Please discuss!

A. Well, I’m not using reason alone. I structured the book carefully to make it an example of intuitionism in action. I used a lot of metaphor. I used emotionally compelling stories. I tried to make myself likeable. And then I gave the evidence. I’m not saying we’re incapable of reason. I’m saying that as individuals we’re terrible at reasoning for ourselves, because of the confirmation bias. But if others give us evidence that disconfirms our beliefs—and if we’re emotionally open to those people—then we can change our minds and improve our thinking.

Q. Which misunderstandings of your book have been most frustrating?

A. The most disappointing reactions are from philosophers who simply hate reductionism, even when it’s paired with emergentism. Some people in the humanities just hate the idea that complicated things, deep aspects of our humanity, might be explicable even in part by genetics or neuroscience. What disappoints me is that I see my book as an example of what E.O. Wilson calls “consilience.” The heroes of my book are Charles Darwin and Emile Durkheim. I love going down into material processes, and also up into symbolic meaning systems and social processes. That’s how you develop a complete understanding of something like morality, which can’t be understood at a single level of analysis.

Q. You talk in your work about group cohesion. One form of cohesion that is often discussed is national loyalty versus more universal loyalty to humanity. What are your own moral views on whether Americans should care more about Americans than people of other nations?

A. Liberals are often wary of patriotism because it seems to exclude others and perhaps even threaten them. Yet social psychologists have long known that increasing love of one’s in-group does not necessarily bring with it increased hostility to out-groups. Playing sports makes you love and trust your teammates, without hating the other players. Adam Smith observed that “the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principal attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding.” It’s good for people to love their own spouse more than other spouses and to love their own country more than other countries.

Q. There are joiners like the 1930s fascists or communists who remained blind to all faults on their own side, and then there are loners like George Orwell, who seemed extraordinarily immune to some of the moral and logical blindness common to human beings. What characterizes the clear-eyed person who can see the truth in front of his nose from the person who can’t?

A. One of the three principles of moral psychology that I present in the book is “morality binds and blinds.” Some people do this with more gusto than others. Some people crave the security and moral certainty that comes with joining a group that is engaged in ideological battles. Orwell, somehow, didn’t just join the left and go blind. I don’t know if the reason is to be found in his personality—perhaps he was more secure or more of a loner—or whether it is to be found in some of his idiosyncratic profile of experiences. A deeply disillusioning experience can snap one out of a dream, as happened with Orwell during the Spanish Civil War. Then again, Robert Frost defined a liberal as a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. So Orwell might be an example of the true liberal—not just a partisan, but a true descendent of the Enlightenment, which many leftists are not.

Q. Thomas Jefferson founded your longtime place of employment, the University of Virginia, and his musings on human nature make it into your book. Give us some thoughts on the man.

A. Back in 1999, Jefferson was on almost every list of the greatest people of the second millennium. At UVA, everyone is a member of his cult. I revered him, and I often felt as though I worked directly for him. Of course, he was also a hypocrite. While I worked at UVA, the genetic analyses were released proving once and for all that he had fathered children with Sally Hemmings. And yet, near the end of his life, he preferred to spend his money on more books and more wine, rather than on freeing his slaves, as George Washington had done. But that’s one of the points of my book—that our behavior is governed by forces largely separate from our lofty reasoning. His words were divine. His deeds were those of a normal man of his time.

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