I think because Haidt doesn’t really engage a whole range of possible objections from other disciplinary and epistemological perspectives, and in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of Steven Pinker sets up some straw men when he does engage with countering perspectives. I was especially struck at the frustration of my colleagues who work on evolutionary biology, who were annoyed with Haidt’s understanding of evolution, competition, and similar topics.

I think if you look for a book the whole campus can discuss, it’s either got to be a book that has a kind of generosity towards multiple perspectives, methods and so on, or it has to be a book that is picking a fight that many different disciplines respect and are willing to engage with. A book that purports to be about a wide-ranging perspective but that is relentlessly and somewhat ungenerously favoring a particular disciplinary perspective is going to feel somewhat ill-chosen much of the time, unless that’s part of a series of readings that cycle through similar books or readings from other disciplines.

I don’t know. Is it snobbish, for example, if a Catholic finds desecration of a sanctified host to be deeply offensive? If you’re working for an organization or company that you really believe in, and the newly appointed CEO or head is seriously incompetent, is it snobbish to feel that this incompetence is both objectionable and dangerous?

But nothing is simple–that’s the problem. So I would say that you may have a point that intermingled with genuine, warranted anger at genuine violations of real norms and reasonable expectations, there may also be a kind of attachment to much more class-bound forms of protocol.

Let’s take yesterday’s testimony. There’s a reason why the FBI should not be under the direct command of the President of the United States. The FBI’s powers and responsibilities position it between the executive and judicial branch. Its powers are easily abused in ways that profoundly violate the nation’s highest laws and most deeply held principles. For the same reasons, however, the FBI should not be completely and utterly autonomous from any executive oversight, and the President should remain the authority of last resort to decide whether the FBI is upholding its responsibilities in a responsible way.

These are not “manners” about which one could be snobbish. They are hard-won principles that we as a society arrived at after a number of very real, grave abuses in the past.

So Paul Ryan’s defense of the President, basically the equivalent of saying the POTUS didn’t know that you use the outer fork for eating your salad, is really weak. This is not a silly little custom, any more than the insistence that our military is under the control of elected civilians is.

But there are other examples where your observation may be more valid or useful.

I’m still not sure how I’d feel in this hypothetical, but I do know my initial reaction was strikingly less visceral than my reaction to Trump, despite Kanye being a very likely highly-ill-suited candidate—just in ways that appeal more to my lefty/progressive sensibilities.

Also, I think Haidt missed that there’s a lot of purity issues on the left about food.

Ultimately I think he’s a cautionary tale about not wanting to be a pundit too badly–there is a lot of stuff that could lead to raising further questions, to exploration, to open-endedness, that he is quick to close down and package as a kind of letter of application to join the legion of talking heads.