notes on a duality
for my project type studies, i’ve been reading a lot of Jonathan Haidt; his book The Righteous Mind, fifteen papers he was a coauthor on, two articles responding to his ideas… it’s been a bit of a slog, but i’ve come back with some treasures. here’s one.
The Righteous Mind advocates for many dualities: the dual cognition model, individual and collective moralities, american liberals and conservatives, and yin and yang: “any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent.”(1)
the papers include many other dualities, mostly variations on the dual cognition model. they’re hard to summarize, but many shared a theme of connecting fast, hot, exciting affect to intuitive cognition, and slow, cold, exacting logic to rational cognition. (2)
i recently responded to a question about the nature of hot takes, which reminded me of the hotness and coldness of dual cognition.
is a hot take hot in terms of temperature, or in terms of spiciness?
i don’t see it as about persuasion; persuasion is a cool, slow process. it can’t be mundane; its require a kick to get attention, which seems to be the point. their heat provokes heated responses in a kind of feedback loop.
when takes leave their contextual frame they may get unintentionally hot but i doubt most don’t know when they aren’t stoking flames. if one is being novel then they can hedge their statements to cool them down. over time everything gets cooler and more accepted (or below acknowledgment), but life will always be subjective enough that hot takes won’t go extinct.
more recently, after a debasing social interaction, i thought about the difficult importance of keeping cool, and was again reminded of this model — in a moment of connection with an admired stranger, i felt flush and made intuitive leaps. i was swept up in the heat of the moment, not thinking critically or taking a moment to chill.
there is an importance difference of degrees within hot and cold, as being cold and being cool are not the same thing. there is an interrelational dynamic between hot and cold that can be simplified to a spectrum. to be cool is not cold, which is excess distance; it’s to not show heat. you have to be warm to the context, at the edge of the flame, so that your optics are cool. sometimes its a bonus to trigger a flare up in others.
what other metaphors come to mind? coldhearted, cold shoulder, cold shower; hotheaded, hot and heavy, hot contraband… it seems like the natural fecundity of this duality reflects and validates its neurology reality.
i am often surprised how often words are used analogously across contexts and through levels of complexity. maybe i shouldn’t be. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson discuss how abstract thought starts with connections made between embodied experience and analogous but distinct contexts. as Haidt describes purity:
… we come to equate purity and cleanliness with goodness in the physical domain. We learn from experience that pure substances are quickly contaminated (e.g., by mold, dust, or insects) when not guarded and that once contaminated, it is often difficult to purify them again. these experiences in the physical world then form the basis (in many cultures) of conceptual schemes about moral purity — for example, that children start off in a state of purity and innocence but can be corrupted. (3)
these extensions span subconscious affect and sensation to experiences of archetypal resonance, a great chain of epistemology. i hope to use it to my advantage the next time temperature analogies come to mind.
(1) Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind. Vintage Books (New York), 2012; p. 343.
(2) these are also known as system 1 vs 2, heuristic vs systematic, and are similar to Iain McGilchrist’s master and his emissary, Robert Anton Wilson’s thinker and knower, and Jordan Peterson’s chaos and order.
(3) Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment” from Psychological Review, 2001, Vol 108, No 4, 814–834; p. 825
