Righteous Minds and Right Stuff
My research projects last year took me in some unexpected directions, and while most of those directions led through JSTOR and other online repositories of academic papers, I also picked up some really interesting books. Here are a few that stood out for me. None of them are new releases, some are more obscure than others, but each of them gave me some new perspective or way of thinking about the world.
The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt
This thoughtful and engaging book was recommended to me by my mother, and is, in turn, my number one recommendation for any American who survived the 2016 presidential campaign. One of the things that made this election so distressing, for me and many others, was the experience of seeing people whom we like and respect — or love as family members — espouse views completely at odds with our own moral principles. It’s one thing to see a real-life jerk revealed to also be a jerk on social media. It’s quite another to see people whom we know from personal experience to be decent human beings aggressively disrespect the rights and values of others. In recent weeks, Facebook friends who say nice things about me in real life have also declared that people who think like I do are “morally bankrupt,” “crazy,” “dishonest,” and “intolerant of disagreement.” (If you can’t tell from this where I stand on the political spectrum, that’s by design — these phrases are thrown out on both sides.)
Confronted with this dissonance, we may feel we have no choice but to discount our personal experience: “Well, he seemed like a nice guy, but clearly he’s either a) morally bankrupt or b) an imbecile.” This is personally unsatisfying and politically unproductive, serving only to harden the divisions that made the past year so exhausting. The Righteous Mind, which is subtitled, “Why good people are divided by politics and religion,” marshals a wealth of evidence to support a third hypothesis: “This nice guy has slightly different moral priorities than I do.” Haidt argues that liberals emphasize certain moral foundations (compassion for others; protecting others from oppression) while conservatives also place great weight on values associated with social order, hierarchy, and tradition. This is, of course, a simplistic summary of a 500-page book that is packed with research and insights. But it hints at a key takeaway: that moral human beings engaged in the monumentally complex task of building a just and stable society can disagree with each other in good faith.
Bonus: You can learn more about your own moral foundations, and take part in ongoing research into moral psychology, at yourmorals.org. Follow Jonathan Haidt on Twitter @JonHaidt.
The Hidden Brain, by Shankar Vedantam
I came across this book via Maria Popova’s wonderful blog Brain Pickings; her own summary of it is a great read in its own right. As Popova observes, The Hidden Brain includes excellent discussions of unconscious bias in the politically salient realms of race and gender, but it’s not limited to those realms. One fascinating chapter explores the case of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, an investment banking firm that had offices on the 88th and 89th floors of the World Trade Center’s South Tower on September 11, 2001. Of the 67 Keefe, Bruyette & Woods employees who died in the terror attacks of that day, all but one of them worked on the 89th floor. The discussion of why some employees escaped and others didn’t is a great case study for anyone who is involved in emergency management — or who, like me, has wondered how they themselves would respond in an unfolding disaster scenario.
Bonus: Check out the Hidden Brain podcast at NPR for more case studies and research into unconscious bias, and follow on Twitter @hiddenbrain.
Yeager: An Autobiography, by General Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos
I picked up Yeager last year with the specific purpose of comparing it to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. I had not read either book before, and both of them were hugely entertaining. But even though Wolfe claimed to be animated by the “psychological mystery” of what drives men (and he was only interested in men) to take on the risks of flying, Yeager gave me far more insight into what it means to be a pilot.
To be fair, I don’t think Wolfe gets credit for the nuance with which he uses the phrase “the right stuff.” In his book, it refers less to a magical quality of pilots than to their magical way of thinking — a psychological defense mechanism that allows them to perform their risky jobs with an illusion of control, believing that they’re too smart, too talented, too charmed to succumb to the mistakes that killed their poor dead friends. In Wolfe’s example (which should ring true to any pilot who has ever shaken their head over an NTSB report):
“After dinner one night they mentioned that the departed had been a good man but was inexperienced, and when the malfunction in the controls had put him in that bad corner, he didn’t know how to get out of it. Every wife wanted to cry out: ‘Well, my God! The machine broke! What makes any of you think you would have come out of it any better!’ Yet intuitively Jane and the rest of them knew that it wasn’t right even to suggest that. . . . It seemed not only wrong but dangerous to challenge a young pilot’s confidence by posing the question.”
Yet Wolfe might have gotten a little caught up in his own hero-worship, and Hollywood certainly did, to the point that “the right stuff” became lodged in the popular imagination with none of its original ironic shading. So it was gratifying to see Yeager, self-aggrandizing as he is, debunk the notion that pilots possess some ineffable quality that earns us admission to the righteous zone of the sky. It wasn’t his swagger that made Yeager the world’s best test pilot; it was the fact that he learned his machines inside and out, and flew as much as he could.
“Ever since Tom Wolfe’s book was published, the question I’m asked most often and which always annoys me is whether I think I’ve got ‘the right stuff,’” Yeager wrote. “The question annoys me because it implies that a guy who has ‘the right stuff’ was born that way. I was born with unusually good eyes and coordination. I was mechanically oriented, understood machines easily. My nature was to stay cool in tight spots. Is that ‘the right stuff’? All I know is I worked my tail off to learn how to fly, and worked hard at it all the way.”
Bonus: The Right Stuff, of course. Then, once you’ve absorbed Wolfe’s mythology, consult a history like the excellent American Women and Flight Since 1940 to learn the story of Jerrie Cobb, an exceptional pilot who passed the same physiological tests the Mercury Seven pilots did, but was denied the opportunity to become an astronaut.
Goshawk Squadron, by Derek Robinson
This 1972 novel was gifted to me by my friend Mark after he learned of my newfound interest in the psychological profiles of World War I pilots. And the anti-hero of Goshawk Squadron, Major Stanley Woolley of the Royal Flying Corps, is a psychological profile for the ages. “Callous, sadistic, and a ruthless boozer,” as he is described on the book’s back cover, Woolley is introduced to the reader as an amusing caricature (Woolley: “Ah. Bloody O’Shea. I hate that bastard.” Adjutant, checking his list: “You’ve never even met him”). Over the course of the novel, however, he is revealed to be a much more complex character, who confronts the ugly moral choices of war in a particularly head-on way. It was that challenge to sentimental portrayals of the war hero that made the novel particularly interesting to me, although I also found real poignancy in the flying scenes, which capture not only the elation and beauty of flying, but also the tension and discomfort of it, and the endless stupid ways in which everything can suddenly go to hell.
Bonus: In more obscure World War I reading, I greatly enjoyed Hiram Bingham’s An Explorer in the Air Service, a fascinating first-person account of how the U.S. built up its Air Service between 1917 and 1919.
Black Range Tales, by James A. McKenna
Black Range Tales is one of those books that sat on a shelf in my grandparents’ house for decades without eliciting the slightest interest from me. But I’m really glad I finally made it around to this New Mexico classic, whose author prospected in the Black Range in the 1880s. McKenna is a great storyteller, and his book has long been appreciated for its prose, humor, and historical insights. I enjoyed all of those things, but it was as an environmental record that the book really stuck with me.
Black Range Tales held particular resonance for me because I grew up in the Gila National Forest with a view of the Black Range, far from any neighbors, surrounded by country that McKenna criss-crossed on his various adventures. And I’ve always been elitist about this corner of New Mexico, which has been largely spared the development and visitors that afflict greener, grander parts of the American West. Encountering even a single other person on an all-day hike has a way of spoiling the experience for me, and the Gila is one of those places where one can reliably avoid people for miles and miles at a time, enjoying a more authentic experience of nature than is possible in any national park.
Or so I always thought. But Black Range Tales shattered that illusion with its first-hand description of a Gila that was richer and wilder than any I will ever know. “This evergreen forest is the stamping-ground of an immense number of wild animals that water in the mountain streams and feed on the mast,” McKenna wrote. “Hundreds of beavers dam up the water and by doing so, help to control forest fires, to add to the duck supply, and to stop erosion.” Besides beavers and ducks, McKenna’s Gila was full of tall grass and “game rolling fat,” and grizzly bears, and Apaches. Mine was not, and it was heartbreaking to realize how dramatically McKenna’s “perfect paradise” was transformed in the space of a hundred years.
In The Ocean of Life, author Callum Roberts describes a phenomenon known as shifting baseline syndrome. “Each generation forms its own view of the state of the environment,” he explains. “Younger generations are often dismissive of the tales of old-timers, rejecting their stories in favor of things they have experienced themselves.” The result, Roberts says, is that “we take for granted things that two generations ago would have seemed inconceivable.” I believe that my Gila would have been inconceivable to McKenna, though by the end of his life, he had come to reflect upon the natural world’s vulnerability.
“Looking back to fifty years ago, I have come to the conclusion I was using up more than my share of the natural resources that belong to all the people of the state, but you cannot put an old head on young shoulders, and at that time no laws had as yet been made to save the treasures of the mountain and forest,” he wrote. “But I never killed without good reason nor wasted the bounty of our southwestern mountains.”
Bonus: The lesser known Old West was also the subject of my favorite piece of long-form journalism last year, Kathryn Schulz’s “Citizen Khan,” the endlessly surprising tale of Sheridan, Wyoming’s beloved Afghan tamale vendor.
