How to understand one third of all political arguments
I came across this (tongue in cheek) lament about the hypocrisy of the other side, on Volokh Conspiracy (but it’s floating around the internet):
Why is the other side of the debates I’m on always so hypocritical? They always jump on what my side says, and yet they willfully ignore all the faults on their own side. Let’s be honest about the double standard: The other side gets away with stuff that my side would never get away with. It’s just like the other side to be so deceitful: They’re always looking to score any advantage they can. People like that drive me crazy, and it seems like most of the people on the other side are just like that.
It’s a perfect distillation of the main point of Ch. 4 of The Righteous Mind (and ch. 4 of The Happiness Hypothesis). But blogs being blogs, people then set out to debate it. One commenter offered the perfect summation of what happens in maybe a third of all arguments about things that Obama (or any president) does:
It isn’t just a matter of each side claiming that the other side is hypocritical, and you have to figure out which (or both). The following often happens:
1) Right criticizes Obama for doing X
2) Left (correctly) points out that Bush did X, and Right didn’t care then
3) Right (correctly) points out that Left cared when Bush did X, but don’t now.
Of course, the same happens in reverse with the Left initiating the first complaint. Essentially, both sides are actually admitting hypocrisy, but for some reason they only care that the other side is hypocritical. This is a truly horrible form of discussion, and a neutral observer does not need to think hard to figure out which side is “right,” because both sides are wrong.
Amen. It is indeed striking that the response to the charge of hypocrisy is rarely apology, it’s usually “but, but, but… you do it too.” That’s what you’d expect if we all carry around in our heads a little inner press secretary, or inner lawyer.
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Update: By amazing coincidence, Ramesh Ponnuru published yesterday a much more extensive and deeply insightful version of the “they’re all hypocrites” rant. His (tongue in cheek) rant should be required reading for all citizens. (hat tip to Independent Whig, below)
Update #2: By even more amazing coincidence, A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times Dispatch, wrote an essay similar to Ponnuru’s the day before his was published. This one’s called “The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win”. (Hat tip to Brian Keegan, below)
Read MoreI retract my Republican-Party-Bad post
I recently wrote a blog post titled “Conservatives good, Republican party bad.” There was quite a lot of reader push back, from left, center, and especially right. These readers have convinced me that my argument in the post was wrong, and that it was not very “Haidtian” of me to declare one side to be “bad” without a great deal of research, including efforts to solicit counterarguments. I seem to have gotten “carried away” by my liberal inclinations, as SanPete put it. I hope readers will at least allow me to turn this into a useful exercise in which I examine the episode from the perspective of The Righteous Mind.
First, as to why I wrote the post: I had just appeared on the Tavis Smiley show, and to prepare for it I had read Smiley and West’s new book “The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto.” The book includes many accounts of people in desperate straits, people who had worked all their lives and now, through no fault of their own, were out of a job and therefore out of health insurance, and in default on their mortgages. It’s heart-wrenching stuff, but I was particularly open to Smiley’s point of view because I was about to go on his show and talk with him, so the “social persuasion link” and the “reasoned persuasion link” of the social intuitionist model were working in tandem. I had stronger feelings of empathy than I normally would have.
The day before my talk with Smiley was taped (April 29) I read the Edsall column. I’ve talked with Edsall several times, and have a working relationship with him, so there too, I’m particularly open to being persuaded by him. And he was citing evidence on empathy collected on YourMorals.org – my research website – as analyzed by my friend and colleague Ravi Iyer. That same day I read the Mann and Ornstein essay in the Washington Post. I assumed (erroneously) that Ornstein was a conservative because he was at AEI, which gave the seemingly bipartisan team of Mann and Ornstein far more credibility in my eyes. So it all came together for me on that day – the feelings of sympathy for the poor and anger at Republican hard-heartedness, which put me into a “can I believe it” mindset, along with a powerful statement from what I thought was a bipartisan team saying that the Republican Party was the problem in Washington, which gave me permission to believe. I could feel my elephant and rider shuffling over to the left. The day after the Smiley interview aired (May 8), I wrote the blog post.
The reader reaction was swift, constructive, and (with the exception of one repeat-commenter) civil. Ben and SanPete pointed out that I was reading Cantor’s remarks in the most uncharitable way, whereas Cantor’s basic point — about the value of having “everyone in,” having everyone contributing even a token amount, is similar to one I made myself in a NYT essay about the value of “all pulling on the same rope” as a way of getting people to “share the spoils” of their joint effort. James Wagner, Tom, and The Independent Whig all pointed out that the Republican stance on “no new taxes” is very much a principled stance, once you understand their decades-long frustration with leaders in both parties who negotiate grand bargains, including spending cuts, but the cuts end up not happening, so spending keeps rising, government keeps growing, and bankruptcy looms ever closer. (I have been persuaded about the fiscal and moral damage done by our entitlement binge by Yuval Levin). So desperate measures, such as drawing a bright line at zero, are indeed backed up by a moral passion which I can respect. You really see that passion in Whig, backed up by a consequentialist analysis of what happens when one side keeps “caring” and spending.
Whig also linked to a point-by-point response to Mann and Ornstein that shows –as usual – the necessity in these complex matters of hearing from an advocate on the other side. One can make a case that the Democrats are the problem, or at least that the two sides are equally at fault for the dysfunction.
I’m not saying that both sides are necessarily equal; centrism doesn’t commit me to splitting the difference, or saying that both sides are always partially right in any dispute. But centrism does commit me to listening carefully to arguments from both sides, and taking my own biases into account, before trying to render any verdict. I didn’t do that. And my knowledge base as a social psychologist would give me no special skills in rendering such a verdict even if I were to put in the time. As James Wagner put it (in a separate email):
“you’re more of a descriptive than a prescriptive guy: I really want to urge you to stay more firmly with your competitive advantage, which is providing information and synthesis that the left and right can both hear well on why we act the way we do. You’re so incredibly good at that, and it’s exceedingly rare. Quite afield from current (or old) event analysis, which is not your bailiwick, which my brother-in-law does better than you.”
Point granted, chastisement accepted.
Well, even if I was wrong to write the original post, at least I can claim that I was wrong for reasons that can be explained by The Righteous Mind. And I hope this episode has an inspiring ending in that the entire debate was carried out so civilly, often with acknowledgment of points on the other side, and with such attention to making claims supported by evidence, that it did in the end change my mind. I never said reason is impotent. I just said that we’re bad at using it by ourselves to find the truth.From page 90:
We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.
Thanks to you all, for making this blog a reasoning social system.
jon
Read MoreWorking with Tribal Minds
Arnold Kling has a fabulous essay in The American today. Kling, a libertarian economist, read The Righteous Mind closely and has understood it perfectly. He accepts the idea that our tribal minds make it hard for us to reason well, and then he tries to figure out what we can do to improve matters. Here is a brief summary of the essay, in Kling’s own words:
What I take away from Haidt is the hypothesis that our capacity to think about moral and social problems evolved from an ability to rationalize our actions. Thus, our capacity to rationalize our moral and political beliefs is much greater than we realize; conversely, our capacity for detached reasoning about moral and political issues is much less than we realize. The fact that we rationalize more readily than we reason helps to sustain political polarization.
Political polarization is unfortunate for at least two reasons. First, there are some issues, notably the unsustainable fiscal path of the budget of the United States going forward, which require compromise.
Second, the environment for political discourse is very unpleasant. Rather than try to engage in constructive argument, partisans make the most uncharitable interpretations possible of what their opponents intend.
In the remainder of this essay, I propose some techniques to check this tendency toward extreme partisanship. I think that adoption of these would improve the atmosphere for political debate.
The first is to take opposing points of view at face value, rather than attempt to analyze them away reductively. A second proposal is to police your own side, meaning that one should attempt, contrary to instinct, to examine more critically the views of one’s allies than the views of one’s opponents. The third proposal is to “scramble the teams” by creating situations in which people of differing political views must work together to achieve a goal requiring cooperative effort.
I agree with Kling’s three proposals. I think one can accept my thesis that one’s opponents arguments are generally post-hoc rationalizations, while still accepting that these rationalizations offer moral arguments that your own side should try to understand. As for policing one’s own side: I think this would help each side in the long run, by helping it to make better arguments that might appeal to non-partisans. It’s very hard to do, especially in the thick of battle. But any team that allows terrible arguments to go unchallenged routinely discredits itself in the eyes of outsiders. Scrambling the teams is the best idea of all. At CivilPolitics.org, we believe that strengthening interpersonal relationships is among the best ways to open minds and improve political civility.
Thank you Mr. Kling!
Read MoreAre lib and con Yin and Yang?
In ch. 12 of The Righteous Mind I argue that left and right are like Yin and Yang — both see different threats, push in different directions, and protect different things that matter, and that are at risk of getting trampled by the other side.
There’s an extraordinarily good and civil debate going on about my claim in the reviews of my book at Amazon.com.
It starts with a review by a conservative reader, The Independent Whig, who loves the book but argues that conservatism is already balanced — among all 6 foundations — so they don’t need liberals to provide more balance. (See Independent Whig’s full blog here.)
Two other readers–James Wagner (liberal) and SanPete (center-left?)–then go on to discuss and debate the question. This is one of the most thoughtful, respectful, and helpful discussions I’ve seen about political psychology anywhere on the internet. I’ll just post my responses to the discussion below, but please do see the discussion to see how the arguments develop.
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[Response from Haidt]:
This is among the best, most constructive and civil discussions of politics I’ve ever seen on the internet. In briefest form, my responses to the discussion are:
1)Yin/Yang: I do mean it exactly as SanPete puts it, and I got the idea from the yin/yang nature of the openness dimension. It’s the idea expressed in the Mill quote in ch. 12: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.” Independent-Whig is right that conservatism is, in theory, more balanced. And this is why Jesse Graham and I have found that liberals have more difficulty understanding conservatives than vice versa. But in practice, no side can be so balanced that it is able to push both ways and get the balance right. As long as there is partisan conflict, each side is going to circle the wagons and push against the other side. And that is generally good: it’s like a cybernetic control system where you need a force pushing both ways. If all you ever have is Buckley’s conservatives standing athawart history yelling “stop,” then conservatives don’t end up making the changes that are needed to respond to changing circumstances, and to address the needs of the powerless, who generally to get shut out and shut down unless someone is looking out for them.
2) On why I focus my message mostly on liberals: SanPete got it exactly right: “this book is largely based on Haidt’s own experience and reflections, and since he was a liberal reacting against his own mistakes, and the mistakes he see in his profession dominated by liberals, that’s the primary perspective of the book.” This is exactly right. This is what I’ve been thinking and arguing for years. I hardly ever get the chance to meet or talk to conservatives.
3) On what liberals should do: I agree with James Wagner that liberals can “change their spots.” I think it’s hard for any particular individual to do so. But I do hope that American liberals, as a tribe, will do so. Indeed, the reason I seem so hard on liberals is that I think they changed their spots in the 1960s and 1970s in a bad way – the turn to the “New Left” led the left away from the morality of most Americans and into some positions that I think are hard to justify, morally. If we think of liberalism as a tradition stretching back to the 18th century, then I am a liberal. I want liberals to change their spots BACK to a configuration more in harmony with their grand tradition. I am confident that this will happen as the baby boomers age out of the population. I think that libertarians and conservatives all have a piece of the grand liberal tradition, and the left needs to read writers from these groups to re-discover many great ideas that they lost touch with in the 1960s.
4) On whether there is some best or correct balance: No. When nations or tribes face constant threats of attack, the liberal configuration would lead a group to get wiped out pretty quickly, so in those environments, more “binding” moralities are more adaptive. But in times of peace and prosperity, I do think human flourishing is best served by a shift in the liberal direction – thinning out the reliance on the binding foundations. I see societies as being like ecosystems, constantly in flux. There’s no obvious best setting, and we argue, as a society, over what our morals should be in each era. This is good and healthy – no one side can simply think about it and get the answer right, because each side is so limited by its confirmation biases. It can become unhealthy when we begin to demonize each other. My highest hope for the book is that it will facilitate healthier, less demonizing debates, such as this one.
Thank you!
Read MoreWhy we can’t resolve to be more civil
Here’s a riotously funny clip from The Daily Show in which a journalist who heads “The Civility Project” is asked about a column she wrote calling the Tea Partiers “economic terrorists.” Isn’t that just a little bit uncivil, asks John Oliver? No, she says, as her inner press secretary (the rider) kicks into action to find justifications for the moral judgment made by her automatic intuitions (the elephant). She doesn’t realize her own flagrant hypocrisy.
The clip illustrates two of the three main principles of The Righteous Mind:
1) “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Harrop’s reasoning is so clearly devoted to justification, not truth-seeking. She even recommends just telling the Tea Partiers directly that their “name calling is not making them sound intelligent,” but doesn’t grasp the irony when Oliver says that to her directly. You can’t change people’s minds with reasons if their intuitions point the other way.
2) “Morality binds and blinds.” Harrop is such a partisan liberal that she can’t think clearly. She can’t see what’s happening, either with the Tea Partiers or during her own interview with Oliver.
This is why we at CivilPolitics.org do not endorse civility pledges. Pledges are made by riders, and they have no effect on behavior. We endorse more indirect methods and institutional changes to change the “path” that the elephant is traveling.
Ideological Diversity Matters More than the Usual Kinds (with Ratigan)
[For those of you getting my RSS feed: I’ll soon start writing real blog posts about politics. For now I’m making videos accessible through my blog]
Dylan Ratigan and I talked about how to get people out of their righteous certainty. He used the metaphor of people being asleep (certain that they know) and awake (awakened to the true state of affairs, in which they realize how blind and arrogant they were before). He also said that good social networks are the key to waking up. I agreed enthusiastically because what he said matches so perfectly with what I wrote about the confirmation bias (in ch. 4), and how the only cure for the confirmation bias is other people, with different beliefs, who can look for evidence to disconfirm your beliefs. Our conversation then turned to the value of diversity, and how it is really intellectual and ideological diversity that matters — that can wake people up — whereas when people talk about diversity they usually just mean racial, gender, and ethnic diversity without any regard for whether these “diverse” people think differently. I was so pleased to have the opportunity to talk about the importance of ideological diversity, which I have argued would improve the quality of thinking and research in the social sciences.