Discovering that the other side is not really so loathesome
Here’s a lovely essay from Michael Rubens, a former producer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. For years, Rubens job was to produce segments in which Daily Show correspondents interview and make fun of people with far-out views, mostly on the far right:
So imagine how irksome it was to have to deal with persons like that on a constant basis and discover that those persons, in person, generally weren’t loathsome persons after all. In fact, to my great consternation and disappointment, I often liked them.
Rubens describes a series of tea partiers, rapture-believers, and state representatives who push gun rights and squash gay rights. He hated what they stood for and wanted to find them despicable, but after working with them he found them to be as nice as anyone on his own side. Even the spokeswoman for the hate-spewing Westboro Baptist Church, turned out to be “warm and affable and lovely.” Here’s Rubens conclusion:
What I’m hoping the lesson is: People are complex and can hold different views and still be moral actors — essentially the message that Jon Stewart talked about during his Rally for Sanity. Maybe you already grasp that concept, because you have good friends or loving relatives with beliefs that are wildly divergent from your own. But I tend to think my experience is more typical: I lived in a little bubble surrounded by people who think more or less like me. And when I considered people with opposing viewpoints I would turn into a fabulist, concocting an entire narrative of who they were and what they were like — and what they were like was yucko. Because I was not really interacting with them. I just thought I was, because, hey, look, there they are on the TV, or there’s that guy’s post in the comments section. But that stuff doesn’t count. Meeting people counts. Talking counts.
So yes, I love to loathe people, but my “Daily Show” experience complicated all that and sort of spoiled my fun. When I’m exposed to views that I dislike, I try to remind myself of the human being behind those views and to cut that person some slack. I hope that they would do the same. I think we should all fight hard for what we believe in, but I’d like to put in a request for some general slack cutting – especially as we move deeper into what is sure to be a very heated campaign season.
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Advice for Democrats and Republicans
I did a short video interview with The Economist, which is turning out to be the most tweeted thing I’ve done in a while. People seem to be interested primarily in the answers I gave when the interviewer, Roger McShane, asked me for specific advice for Obama and Romney. Normally I’m careful not to offer specific campaign advice. Political strategy is a game I know nothing about. All I can do is comment on when and why candidates connect, or fail to connect, with the moral concerns of various groups. So here’s what I said:
Q: How should the Democrats change their message to appeal to a broader base? How should Barack Obama change his message?
A: …The Democrats tend to focus too much on messaging and framing, as though if they can construct the perfect message vehicle, put it up into message space and send it out, it’s going to go into people’s ears, turn a key, like lock-and-key, and get the message across. That’s not the way persuasion works. You have to trust the messenger. Persuasion is not done very well directly. But if you use more indirect means… The bottom line is that if they trust you, they’re more likely to listen to you. And the Right, and especially businessmen… if the business community doesn’t trust Obama, doesn’t trust the Democrats, then when he makes an argument — and there’s some merit to the argument he’s making [in the “you didn’t build that” speech] — they don’t follow the argument carefully and try to understand its logic; they go right for what’s wrong with it.
…So if i had to give advice to the Democrats, it would be: stop focusing so much on how do you message each particular issue, policy, or rule, and think much more about the long term. What does the party stand for, what does it mean to be a liberal in the 21st century?
Q: Is there anything that Republicans should be doing differently?
A: I think the Republicans got their message straight in the 1980s, but… I think the Republicans have become too rigid, and too hard-hearted [in contrast to Ronald Reagan, who was often flexible.] George W. Bush tried to promote compassionate conservatism, I don’t think that really flew. But Mitt Romney really comes across as cold and uncaring. If you’re going to talk about capitalism, well, its weak spot is that it creates losers and victims. And if a governing party doesn’t care about those people at all, well, that’s going to alienate a lot of people. And frankly I think it’s the wrong position to take.
Just to be clear: I love capitalism, and I think that anyone who cares about the poor should love it too. It’s capitalism that generated such vast wealth in the West over the last 250 years that almost everybody was lifted out of poverty, and now capitalism is working its magic by cutting poverty at lightening speed in East Asia and South Asia. But come on, Republicans, read Charles Dickens. We can do better than that. Tell us how you’re going to protect workers from abuse, and protect the public from harmful externalities. Celebrate capitalism, but show us that you’re at least aware that it can cause massive suffering and environmental damage on its path to massive public benefit.
McShane then asked me what is unique about America that generates such high levels of political polarization. I mentioned some of the usual suspects, plus one that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, but have been thinking about recently. I talked about how the Founding Fathers set up our governing institutions to pit factions against factions, and to seek out balance between competing interests and institutions. They expected that there would be many cross-cutting divisions, such as the states vs. the federal government, and the three branches of government against each other. But in recent decades, the Left-Right divide has risen to such prominence that it suppresses all other divisions, and that is bad news for a tribal species such as ours:
Our moral psychology makes us very adept at having shifting teams and coalitions, and that can be healthy,* when you’ve got lots of cross-cutting divisions. And the founders of this country knew that. Unfortunately, all those cross-cutting divisions have been wiped away, and there’s just one giant chasm, one giant fault line, and all the institutions of government are lining up along that line. And so everything gets paralyzed, and within each [institution] you get more demonization, more hatred across the line.
Here’s the 7 minute video:
*note: I got the idea that it can be healthy to have multiple competing divisions and identities from an excellent book on our tribal psychology: Us and Them, by David Berreby.
Read MoreHow 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!
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