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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- Partisan Incomprehension. “You didn’t build that” edition. | Praxtime - […] me leave you with a quote from a nice article I found via Haidt where Michael Rubens, who produced…
I do not buy this. My ethos is dictated by having read “The Ethics of Rhetoric” by Richard Weaver as an undergraduate. There are legitimate arguments, certainly. But lying about the administration under which a plant in your town closed is beyond the pale. Insulting a sitting President by telling a ‘birther’ joke is incendiary. Repeating lie after lie after lie about the value of an insurance healthcare plan while denying that you yourself passed one in your state is despicable. Sorry, no credit for civility to Republicans. Not one iota until they admit that they humiliated a sitting President and plotted to do so from the night of his inauguration. Despicable is not a strong enough word.
You, sir are proof that education does not equate to intelligence.
Hey Bert–
Chill out a bit. I don’t suppose you ever insulted a sitting president when that sitting president was George Bush, did you?
Er, read the text of the speech: he didn’t say it closed under Obama. He doesn’t even say Obama’s responsible for its closing. He says Obama promised to save it and didn’t, which is inarguably true. He’s dinging Obama for so often promising more than he can deliver. That was pretty much the theme of the whole speech.
Seriously. Read. The. Damn. Speech. It doesn’t say what you’re suggesting. At all.
Tofu: Everyone who listened to that speech, including you, if you’re honest, concluded that Paul Ryan was blaming Barrack Obama for that plant’s closing. That’s doubly infuriating when you consider that Barrack Obama saved a great many of those plants that Mitt Romney would have shuttered. Honesty does matter, and that was Bert’s point.
Incorrect. He was pointing out that Obama had promised something unrealizable and something that did not come to pass. Politicians spread the great conceit, in Hayek’s term, that they can control the economy. They cannot.
We close ourselves off to the common human decency of people whose opinions we find immoral when we have closed our moral circle to them: it is okay for them to be harmed because they harm. It is okay to hate them because they hate. Shake his hand. Sit down to dinner with her. Watch them play with their grandchildren. Then try to hate them. It is harder, if not impossible. Because we share much in our common humanity and basic human decency more than we allow ourselves to notice when we can mercilessly pretend, by never having to shake their hand or share a meal, that they are the evil enemy. I am glad to see this post.
Amen to this.
It’s quite unfortunate how people of disparate beliefs have a tendency to haunt the political echo chambers that reflect only their views. Social Media may have virtues, but one real bug is the enhanced ability to craft one’s own customized echo chamber and screen out any dissonance. A choir of one’s own, as it were.
The essence of critical thinking is dialogical and multilogical thinking. But people show an overwhelming preference for monological thinking. Jon, in your book you mentioned that people have a life narrative. If we call it a monologue instead, it makes even more sense.
One of my best experiences as a long time independent blogger and poster is to have managed to have had lengthy useful discussions with both very liberal and very conservative people. Authentic communication is very difficult absent a presumption of good faith on both parts.
“Authentic communication is very difficult absent a presumption of good faith on both parts.”
Agreed.
I recall once watching the young children of a friend playing and becoming perhaps a little too boisterous. Inevitably they accidentally bumped heads which presumably hurt one more than the other as one started to cry. As the mother was consoling the crying child she said: “This is what happens when you’re too silly” and the child replied indignantly that their sibling had hurt them on purpose. This was obviously not the case but the child was adamant. Many people do not grow out of this. I see this presumption of malice all the time with feuding coworkers, quarreling spouses and of course, politics.
Last week illustrated an interesting example of this among public intellectuals. Niall Ferguson wrote a piece criticizing the president. This understandably drew the ire of several prominent liberal intellectuals who were quick to point out inaccuracies in his piece. Great. This is how things should work in my view. As Jon points out, we are horrible at pursuing contradictory information, we require others to do this. What I found appalling was the presumption of bad faith on Niall’s part. He wasn’t just making a bad argument he was being ‘deceptive’, he was ‘pamphleteering’, shamelessly twisting the facts for political purposes. One prominent critic even suggested he should be fired from his post at Harvard. Regardless of what you think of Ferguson’s argument I think it’s clear he genuinely believes in it. Was he blinkered by his own biases? Sure, we ALL are. The presumption of malice and hysteria that ensued sounded to my ears as “MOMMY, HE DID IT ON PURPOSE!”
Thanks Kuze, we seem to see this the same way. My own rule is to TRY to posit malice last. This is much harder to do than it sounds.
I try not to attribute to malice anything which can be more simply explained by ignorance or stupidity. Sort of an application of occam’s razor. But partisans really do harbor malice to anyone they perceive as not being on their team.
I see this as an aspect of the fundamental attribution error, which is to attribute flaws in yourself to circumstances, but to attribute flaws in other to their character.
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. -William Butler Yeats
This is something that is difficult for me.
For example, I can understand how my parents or other normal, everyday people think that marijuana should be illegal, but how can someone like Barack Obama think that? He probably has a 130 IQ, is highly educated, and it’s his job to know about these things. Yet, somehow his brain can’t process the fact that people who smoke or grow marijuana are no more criminals than people who brew beer or grow tobacco. What’s wrong with him?
So find someone who you view as intelligent and thoughtful and who is against marijuana legalization and ask them why they feel that way. They are out there.
It is amazing how these themes come up over and over again. My blog today deals with an almost identical theme. I came upon a work by Ludwig von Mises first published in 1949. The book deals with why people act. The key point of this chapter is were are destined to live in a world where cooperation is an absolute requisite for our needs to be met. Mises claims that our differences in ideology are based upon differences in perspective on how to accomplish this. He states:
“The problems involved are purely intellectual and must be dealt with as such. It is disastrous to shift them to the moral sphere and to dispose of supporters of opposite ideologies by calling them villains. It is vain to insist that what we are aiming at is good and what our adversaries want is bad. The question to be solved is precisely what is to be considered as good and what as bad. The rigid dogmatism peculiar to religious groups and to Marxism results only in irreconcilable conflict. It condemns beforehand all dissenters as evildoers, it calls into question their good faith, it asks them to surrender unconditionally. No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.”
That’s a great quote. It shows how long this has been a concern.
But here’s the thing. Jon’s research quite strongly suggests that it is NOT in fact a purely intellectual matter, because that’s not the way our minds actually work.
Our minds have an almost overwhelming tendency to reason FROM initial moral intuitions. Von Mises says that it is disastrous to “shift them to the moral sphere.” But the problem seems to be that they originate in our moral spheres even though we aren’t aware of these intuitions and moral bases.
AND, that we have an extremely difficult time moving them out of the “moral sphere.”
Classic von Mises, thanks- a bit absolutist, but to me, his characterization of the important problems as intellectual is simple and true. Our biases let us assume an opposite, that ideology continually shines a perfect light on our best path. As Brian points out, our biases are so built-in that it may be better to characterize human problem-solving as being done from within moral matrices- and that’s fine. But experiences like Mr. Ruben’s can remind us that there’s a stippled, unknowable reality out there, one that’s a little miraculous, that we continually remove ourselves through our biases. We choose to perceive and design our reality from within our ideological references, and that may not be all bad. But it’s good to be reminded that we pay an unknowable price for doing so.
Great one!
Whoooeeeee… this provoked some chit-chat, didn’t it?
I can mostly agree with Rubens’ thought. Most people are basically decent, irrespective of their political views. Some people are really not very nice a-tall, or hold opinions that are completely at odds with my values, but I have to sit down and talk with them first to figure them out. From time to time I find someone who I fundamentally can’t respect; these people never become friends. A little respectful give-and-take at the dinner table between friends? I’m all for it…
In the case of public figures, most of the public must find it nearly impossible to distinguish between rhetoric and personal beliefs. I certainly can’t. The public has only what they say and do as a basis for our opinions – testimonials from friends and relatives are naturally suspect.
John Burton (chair of Calif. Democratic party)? Well, now we know what he thinks in his heart of hearts. Too late to dial back the rhetoric, guy. You should sign out now, so the Dems don’t have you around as a target.
Paul Ryan? Unwillingness to even partially correct or retract his plant-closure statements, when given a chance on national TV, shows his colors. (Because he’s putting his political career on the line, I’m pretty much counting on Rep. Ryan to overdo the attack-dog act, and be publicly skewered for it. He’s already got quite a track record.)
I enjoy the site and the book. Thank you. I have written a journalist’s view of the media and media bias in my book. If you or your members email me at info@johndaly.tv I will gladly send a PDF version of the book. The Righteous Mind confirms so much of what I am writing about. However, how do you stop the emails — which I call weapons of mass distortion — from well-meaning friends but the emails are blatantly wrong and clearly ignore facts that have been publicly written and vetted?
I only just picked up The Righteous Mind yesterday, but I’ve read a great deal of your other work. I’m a Canadian who’s been living in the US for four years, and as a mostly-pretty-rational social-democrat, I’m trying to wrap my brain around how politics works here in the US, and especially how conservatives “work”.
I had a thought — which may have been addressed by you or someone else elsewhere, in which case I’d love to see appropriate links for me to read — which is a bit orthogonal to the “moral foundations” concepts, and specifically relates to loyalty/ingroup:
Is it possible that at least to some extent, liberals see their “ingroup” as larger and more diverse than conservatives? It appears to me, in speaking with and listening to different Americans, that many conservative Americans see their ingroup as people “just like them”; i.e. white, Protestant (preferably evangelical), not too educated (no graduate degrees, anyways), and so on. On the other hand, liberals I’ve talked to seem to have an “ingroup” that is far more inclusive, and includes people who are different from them, e.g. black, Latino, poor, immigrant (illegal or otherwise), different beliefs (Muslim, agnostic, atheist, whatever), and so on.
So when you show graphs at moralfoundation.org showing that conservatives have an average “loyalty” score of 3.1, and liberals are at 2.0, could it be that your questions in the Moral Foundations Questionnaire were geared more towards a “smaller”, less-diverse ingroup concept (which would more likely match the typical perceived ingroup of many Conservatives)? Could some kind of survey/questionnaire be designed which would rather measure the size/diversity of one’s ingroup? And would such a measure more accurately capture the distinction between liberals and conservatives when it comes to that moral foundation?
I’m just a curious layman, so if my ideas make no sense, feel free to shoot them down. %-) But this is one issue I have wondered about for a while. Thanks for all of your work!
I think thee raises an interesting perspective. Thee can take a closer look at Moral Foundation Theory’s “dictionary” (http://moralfoundations.org/downloads/moral%20foundations%20dictionary.dic) to get an idea of how they are “defining” loyalty. Whenever I think of the loyalty foundation and whether or not conservatives engage it more than liberals, I think of a story J. Haidt relates in one of his books (can’t remember which one, probably Righteous Mind?) where he shares that after 9/11 he had the impulse to place an American flag sticker on his car, but needed to “balance” that by also placing a UN sticker. From my perspective, that allowed him to express his loyalty to his country with one and his loyalty to the liberal moral viewpoint with the other. To display just the American flag on his car would have been functionally disloyal to his political tribe, and leave the impression that he was further right than he was comfortable appearing. But one will not find that sort of loyalty captured in the MFT dictionary, I don’t think.
Robert, I have been pondering that same issue myself.
It makes sense to me say that liberals are conceiving their version of loyalty more broadly. Ultimately. isn’y the conception that ideally there’s one broad and ever-expanding group that subscribes to the values of fairness and equality with an ever-deepening reservoir of compassion? That’s my sense of the conception.
When you read all of Jon’s book, notice how much time he spends talking about the social or group efficacy of the moral foundations. To understand loyalty as it is being conceived, you have to understand what virtues it brings to the group. Ultimately in-group loyalty’s efficacy relates to competition.
As a group gets larger, values can get watered down. Commitment to a set of values strengthens bonds. So for example. Jon talks about the American history of communes, and how the ones that lasted longest all had a strong religious/faith component.
In the absence of an authoritative faith of some sort, you’re left with rationality, and constant discussion and revision. And the constant addition of exceptions to rules and values. Too much appreciation for tolerance of differences leads to a weaker set of core values, which weakens the loyalty bonds.
Frankly I came thinking the author’s views might be a bit more objective.
In any event I did end up linking the referenced article in Salon with an accompanying comment suggesting that it might just be the most enlightening article on the liberal mindset I’d ever seen. I didn’t see anyone else bring attention to the part I found most enlightening so I’ll copy/paste it below and I believe it speaks for itself.
“You know – assholes.
Now, I like to loathe people. It just feels so good. I particularly like to loathe the sorts of people described above, and when I see them on TV or read their blogs I sigh contentedly and say, ahhh, it is now morally permissible for me to loathe this person.”
I’m afraid my HTML skills are somewhat lacking but the above is quoted from the link below.
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/the_daily_show_guide_to_my_enemies/
Dear Professor Haidt,
It is refreshing to hear empathic conversation and the ability to allow people to feel heard and understood as groups and as i9ndividuals. Please accept my praise and appreciation.
In the interviews and excerpts I have enjoyed, I have not heard you talk about fear as a human motivator directly. In understanding human nature and behavior, I believe it essential to talk some about normal fears, conscious or not, of feeling inadequate, unuwanted, unlovability, and abandonment. I am convinced that we may assume a very high view of human nature if we only open our individual eyes to the effects of abuse, humiliation, lack of unconditional love, and abandonment can have on the child. The intensity of the identity acceptability fears have everything to do with much of your discourse on values.
Abused children grow up into such fears, not of their making, that their weighted moral compass leans toward the demand of fairness, judgementalism, denial of victimization, projected over-icentification with victim-hood and moral inflexibility. These all born of fears of identity and the deeper fear (usually unconscious) of facing the terror that the child felt at the perceived loss of it’s most basic survival needs of love and safety.
If this human fact, called by author and psycho-therapist Alice Miller, The Untouched Key, is ignored, then even the best social psychological analysis will become misguided. Efforts to assist much needed socio-policical change will fail.
As I have not more than sampled your book so far, I hope your work, by addressing these underlying fears, will have great effect. If not, please study the subject of adult identity fears and the victimization of children, so that you can forward the essential work of helping children not lose their in-born good as well as relieving the deadening impasses of morality lost to righteousness moralism. Do not loose the difference between open hearted sacralization and fear-driven “idolatry” identification.
P
eace.
Paul W.
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.
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.
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.
—has begun to review headline jokes. The script is submitted by 3 pm, and at 4:15 there is a rehearsal. An hour is left for rewrites before a 6 pm taping in front of a live studio audience.
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.
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.
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.
Go to my website and learn about NVC. Your characterization of the polarity between permissiveness and dominance misses the nuiances of the challenge of Nonviolent Communication which eschews heirarchical dominant structures in which the one in power defines good and bad and gives punishment and reward. A power-with model is challenging and can reward the parent who practices this with children who choose to do things because they\\\’re meeting needs rather than submitting – or rebelling. Watch the video at http://www.CommunityTherapist.net
Go to my website and learn about NVC. Your characterization of the polarity between permissiveness and dominance misses the nuiances of the challenge of Nonviolent Communication which eschews heirarchical dominant structures in which the one in power defines good and bad and gives punishment and reward. A power-with model is challenging and can reward the parent who practices this with children who choose to do things because they\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\’re meeting needs rather than submitting – or rebelling. Watch the video at http://www.CommunityTherapist.net
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.