Here is long a quote from Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis,
“The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. …
Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.
People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge.
Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.”
Here he is in The Righteous Mind,
“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”
Jonathan Haidt often will turn a Psychology of knowledge claim into an Epistemological claim. He makes the claim that reason is a slave of to the passions – a common claim among psychologists studying confirmation bias. But without argument, he turns that into reason ought to be a slave to the passions. This is what he means by the latter quote.
It relates to the first quote in that there is no coherence if reason is not given supremacy. particularly at the psychological level. What happens without reason is a kind of happiness that is not lasting. It cannot last, because what was thought to be a coherent worldview turns out to be meaningless and contradictory upon analysis. One way to try to solve this problem is by going on without analyzing your beliefs, but this too ends up at incoherence because of our nature as rational beings.
Without the supremacy of reason, all worldviews are incoherent and happiness cannot last. If we don’t have coherence at a psychological level, we cannot have coherence at a physical level – our actions will contradict our thoughts. Our contradictory thoughts will imply two different actions both of which cannot be acted upon without actualizing a contradiction, which we cannot do. If we don’t have coherence at either of these two levels, we cannot have coherence at the third level -- the sociological level. There will be wars and fighting because out thoughts and actions contradict that of others. What was formerly seen as progress will regress back once the realization of contradictions with out fellow man occur.
