The divide in our country between left and right is serious. It is not a matter of disagreeing over fine points – the future of democracy in our country is at stake. For some people, this is a life and death struggle. It can’t be ignored.

But when you allow yourself to give into righteous anger, when you allow your thinking to become black and white, when you start thinking in terms of us or them – you have lost the ability to communicate. Without communication, there are three possible outcomes:

1. The problems you are concerned with will resolve themselves. This is probably not likely, because if the problems weren’t complicated you wouldn’t have gotten upset enough to allow your thinking to become black and white.
2. The problems you are concerned with will remain unsolved. This is probably not too likely, because if the problems were trivial enough to allow them to remain unsolved, then you wouldn’t have gotten upset enough to allow your thinking to become black and white.
3. The problems will be solved with violence.
4. Some of you are probably so far down the path of righteous anger that option 3 doesn’t sound so bad. Or maybe you are so frustrated you think it’s desirable. Or it’s the only option you see.

Think again.

Violence is always the last resort. Always.

I have never been in the military so I am not an expert here, but I have read quite a bit of historical nonfiction. I have read pretty many personal accounts of battle, and I have not read one yet that talks about what a great growth experience it was for them. Every account I read talked about how horrible it was – the range generally seemed to be from horrible to unbelievably horrible. Often it would result in life altering changes that can’t be forgiven or undone.

You should never entertain violence as a potential solution. It should be utilized only when backed into a corner and it is the only – I mean the ONLY option.

Liberals should be especially reluctant to resort to violence. The military is primarily conservative. Most police departments are primarily conservative. The NRA is a politically conservative organization, and most 2nd amendment supporters are conservative.

To put it mildly – if you are liberal, violence is not a practical option.

If you are conservative, it may seem that violence answers all your prayers. And I guess the truth is that it might – in the short term. But the fact that we have liberals and conservatives at all is because we need each other. We have evolved to check each other’s worst impulses. This blog post talks about this in detail: The Evolutionary Purpose of Liberals and Conservatives

Unbridled conservatism ends in fascism. This statement is based on the work of Dr. Haidt. I put together a pocket guide to his five foundations of morality which you can probably read in five minutes, or if you want more details I have links in there to his TED talk where goes into much more detail : The Five Foundations of Morality – A Pocket Guide. To understand the link between fascism and conservatism, watch the TED talk.

Or don’t – maybe you think psychology is bullshit. Ok, then how about history? Intellectuals are primarily liberal. Scientists, professors, etc. Killing intellectuals means killing primarily liberals. Countries that kill off their liberals for political purposes end up either fascist or totalitarian or both. This has happened in Germany, the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and China. I’m sure there are more – that is just what springs to mind. Can you give a counter example? Where killing large numbers of liberals for political reasons resulted in greater freedom? Maybe – I’m not a historian – but I doubt it.

So if you kill off the liberals, you will probably find yourself living in some weird version of the Handmaid’s Tale.

Violence is not the solution. Stop thinking in black and white terms. Find a way to talk. We are not backed into a corner yet.  Maybe this will help: Overcoming Differences in Political Morality

For a different perspective on the same problem:
Today’s Biggest Threat: The Polarized Mind

 

---

2019-04-23 Title changed from “Black and White Thinking” to “The Black and White Path”

You are downtown about to cross a busy street when you see a 300lb man slap a grandmotherly lady hard enough to make her fall over the hood of a car. What do you feel?

Nothing?

I doubt it. You are probably instantly furious. It is obviously an unfair fight. Your moral code has been violated. I’m sure you want to do something to make things right, or find someone who will.

This isn’t a logical reaction. It’s emotional. It could be that the grandmotherly lady had poisoned the 300lb man’s children and he had been looking for her for two years. You don’t really know what happened, so you really aren’t making a logical decision when you decide you want to help the grandmotherly lady.

It’s important to realize this: moral decisions are emotional.

What I am about to say is based on the work of Dr. Haidt, who outlined the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in a TED talk.  Here is a blog post that summarizes his moral foundations and provides a link to his TED talk for more detail: The Five Foundations of Morality – A Pocket Guide

You may already be familiar with Dr. Haidt’s five foundations of morality, but if you aren’t you should at least read the pocket guide above.  The rest of what I’m going to say may not make much sense if you don’t.

It doesn’t matter if you are liberal or conservative, grandmother slapping is very likely to produce a moral response in you.  Liberals and conservatives share the harm/care moral foundation, and grandmother slapping would violate that.

There are five moral foundations – conservatives have all five:

• harm/care
• fairness/reciprocity
• in-group/loyalty
• authority/respect
• purity/sanctity

Liberals have only two:

• harm/care
• fairness/reciprocity

Because some of us see issues involving these foundations as moral issues and some of us don’t, it can make communicating more difficult. I see this problem manifesting two different ways:

1. I may think we are having a discussion based on logic because I don’t recognize the issue as a moral issue.  You may be reacting emotionally to what I am saying because for you, it is a moral issue.  You may decide that I am not as good a person as you.  Instead of communicating, you judge me as immoral.
2. You may be trying to tell me something assuming I see the moral right and wrong of what you are saying, but I am interpreting everything you say with only logic.  From my perspective, what you are saying is illogical… but it really isn’t meant to be logical.  Morality isn’t logical. Instead of communicating, I judge you as unintelligent.

Once you can understand that different issues will be perceived by liberals and conservatives differently, you can understand that how you try to communicate can be just as important as what you communicate.  If you trigger a moral response and then try to discuss something logically, what you have done makes about as much sense as slapping someone’s grandmother in front of them and then trying to talk about the weather.

Even if you don’t feel even a hint of the emotion that goes into a moral code violation because your moral code is different, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there for someone who’s morality is different than yours.  It definitely is there.

I also realize that this is only one factor that goes into shaping someone’s opinion.  Understanding these moral differences will not give you 100% understanding into why someone thinks a particular way.  But it is a very important factor because an individual’s moral framework operates at a low level.  It is one of the layers that will affect your thinking before you even realize you are thinking about something.

So, for a few practical examples:

If you are a liberal and you want to talk to a conservative about how Trump has trashed the deficit… don’t.  If you insult Trump you are violating the authority/respect moral code because he is president.  And because politics have become divisive and conservatives value being part of a team more than liberals you will have violated the in-group/loyalty moral code too.  So you have just caused moral outrage in the person you are trying to talk to – twice.  Before you even state the first fact you have pissed them off and forced them to react emotionally.   To successfully talk about the deficit, talk about the deficit.  Don’t bring up Trump.

It’s a little easier to explain this for liberals, as I have done above.  Liberals have less channels in their moral code, so their primary concern is how to not trigger a moral code violation.

For conservatives, since you have more channels in your moral code, you will have to be concerned more with recognizing that you have moral values that liberals don’t have.  You will have to take the initiative to avoid morally triggering yourself, basically.

So, for the example above, if a liberal tries to talk to you about how Trump has trashed the deficit and you feel the comments about Trump starting to trigger moral outrage, then refuse to acknowledge any of the comments about Trump.  Tell your liberal friend that you are perfectly happy to discuss the deficit, but that you are not willing to discuss Trump.

You will also have to realize that having a purely logical discussion about anything that you have moral concerns about will put you at a disadvantage unless you are willing to bring your strong moral feelings into the discussion.  Liberals will not place any value on in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, or purity/sanctity.  They won’t naturally see what you see.  They will argue only with what facts are apart from that, completely ignoring those issues.  If your primary counter argument relies on protecting one of those moral foundations and you don’t bring it up, you won’t be able to effectively answer the argument.  So, for example, if your liberal friend insists on discussing how Trump trashed the deficit, and you feel that it is important that we respect our president – then you will have to bring that up if you chose to discuss Trump and the deficit.

It sounds complicated.  Maybe it is.  But learning how to communicate with each other, even with our differences, is important.

Because if we don’t our future isn’t too bright: The Black and White Path

And I think it’s important to always keep in mind that liberals and conservatives need each other: The Evolutionary Purpose of Liberals and Conservatives

 

---

2019-04-23 Updated title of link to “The Black and White Path”

Jonathan Haidt is a prominent social psychologist.

From his Wikipedia entry (Jonathan Haidt) :

Haidt has been named one of the “top global thinkers” by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the “top world thinkers” by Prospect magazine. In fact, he is among the most cited researchers in political psychology and moral psychology, and has given four TED talks.

More information about different projects he is involved in can be found on Jonathan Haidt’s home page at NYU: Jonathan Haidt’s Home Page

The work Dr. Haidt did accurately reflects some of the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.  He breaks morality down into 5 foundations and then shows how liberals and conservatives are alike and how they differ.

These are quotes from the transcript of his TED talk: The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives

1. harm/care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm.

2. fairness/reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called “The Golden Rule” — as we heard from Karen Armstrong, it’s the foundation of many religions.

3. in-group/loyalty. You do find cooperative groups in the animal kingdom, but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate and join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it’s fun.

   Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient drives.

4. authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference and even elements of love, at times.

5. purity/sanctity. Purity is not just about suppressing female sexuality. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body and what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays. A lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch or put into your body.

Of those 5 foundations, two are universal to both conservatives and liberals: harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The difference between liberals and conservatives lies in the other three foundations: in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity

Moral conservatives rate highly on all three, and for moral liberals they almost don’t exist.

So liberals end up with a two channel moral code:

• harm/care
• fairness/reciprocity

Conservatives end up with five channels:

• harm/care
• fairness/reciprocity
• in-group/loyalty
• authority/respect
• purity/sanctity

The TED talk Dr. Haidt gave on this information is about 20 minutes long.  For me, it was eye opening.  If you want details about what exactly these foundations mean and how they affect people in real life, please watch the TED talk: The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives.