Since a recent meeting with a
close friend I’ve been thinking a lot about his caution concerning my views of
those who hold political and moral views different from mine.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking
about revising what I think of the mostly white, rich, Christian, (ultra)conservative,
Republicans, WRCCRs (pronounced “wreckers”) for short, currently in power in
the US. I’ve decided I want to shed my hatred for them and their beliefs and
values, and replace it with a deeper understanding of why they hold the views
they do.
Socially, I’m looking for common
ground as a basis for a better dialog when I encounter them, in person or via media. Personally, I’m looking to replace my hatred based on judgment with a
tolerance based on understanding. All things considered I think this approach
is the only reasonable option. "Those folks," as my friend reminded me, aren’t
going anywhere and their thinking isn’t going to change easily or quickly. My
hatred won’t free up or change their thinking and it leaves me ineffective and
unhappy.
To change my thinking I’m
relying on my old methods but have also added one I recently found. It’s contained
in a new approach to journalism:
It has become clear to me,
from the above article and from the admonishments I’ve received from my friend
and conservative acquaintances on social media, that the hatred I feel towards
the WRCCRs who disagree with me is a characteristic of someone involved in an
“intractable conflict.”
Amanda Ripley, author of the
essay linked above, “Complicating the Narratives,” describes IC as follows:
Researchers
have a name for the kind of divide America is currently experiencing. They call
this an “intractable conflict,” as social psychologist Peter T. Coleman
describes in his book The Five Percent, and it’s very
similar to the kind of wicked feuds that emerge in about one out of every 20
conflicts worldwide. In this dynamic, people’s encounters with the other tribe
(political, religious, ethnic, racial or otherwise) become more and more
charged. And the brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s
impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.
Despite her use of the now
wildly popular “my brain made me do it” approach which I’ve argued against here,
here,
here,
here,
and elsewhere on my blog,
Ripley is right. I, that is, me, my
entire embodied self, becomes a very different person when I’m exposed to or
just think about the beliefs, values and actions of WRCCRs.
I lose my normal tendency to
understand and tolerate others when confronted with persons or groups different
from me, for example Christians and Muslims in their own right, other societies,
cultures and sub-cultures, or races. As a trained anthropologist, someone in an
inter-racial marriage, and someone having had years of cross-cultural exposure and
international travel, I’ve learned to do this. But when it comes to the WRCCRs
all that goes out the window and I allow my hate to get turned on and dialed up
all the way! I don’t want this anymore. It is unreasonable, not useful, and
harmful to me. I want a new and better way to respond.
First, how did I get this way about WRCCRs?
Exactly how does one get drawn into the trap of IC? I’ve been an unwavering liberal
Democrat since Nixon became president. I didn’t think much about politics after
that except on election days when I would always vote Democrat. Before that I
liked Kennedy for some nebulous reason but was too young to know why or vote.
Since entering retirement
in 2007 I have taken the time to look closely at U.S. politics, especially the
history of the Republican Party since the mid-1960s. In doing so I found their
values and campaign and electoral tactics despicable. I looked closely at both sides of the reporting and commentary on Republicans courting
the Southern white vote after the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965); gerrymandering
that has helped the GOP win close elections in all but one instance in the past
one hundred years; Nixon’s late 1960s Southern Strategy
and “silent majority;” and Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba, Mississippi County Fair “state’s rights” dog whistle
speech to Southern white racists. I could go on but see here,
here, here,
here,
and here
for more examples, if you must. Eventually I passed my judgment on them – I hated them
and their money-and-power-over-people preferences, and the white privilege they
stood for.
My judgment of WRCCRs was less of a
decision about their preferred economic policies and modes of governance; it was a matter of their moral system. That is, their claims of how people
should treat each other and the things they actually did to others. This matter of morality was a tipping point for me.
When, in the late 1960s, WRCCRs’ views moved away from focusing on economics and governance toward an approach to politics having an immoral vote-getting, win-at-all-costs
strategy, I made my decision to hate them. I still believe in the necessity of
a good, moral conservatism in any democracy, but over the past half century the GOP has not been
that.
When I decided to hate the
WRCCRs I stepped on the slippery slope of closed-mindedness. I had become a self-righteous
zealot no different from the WRCCRs I hated. I was just under a different moral
flag, a member of a different tribe. But once the decision has been made to
vilify and demonize the other, and one concludes that they and their
leadership are leading one’s country and its citizens to ruin, one is going from simple disagreement to utter hatred and into a characteristic of intractable conflict. Ripley says we have then become entrapped:
In this hypervigilant state,
we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That
anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of
investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter
what.
Intractable conflicts feed
upon themselves. The more we try to stop the conflict, the worse it gets. These
feuds “seem to have a power of their own that is inexplicable and total,
driving people and groups to act in ways that go against their best interests
and sow the seeds of their ruin,” Coleman writes. “We often think we understand
these conflicts and can choose how to react to them, that we have options. We
are usually mistaken, however.”
Once we
get drawn in, the conflict takes control. Complexity collapses, and the
us-versus-them narrative sucks the oxygen from the room. “Over time, people
grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and
increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or
crazy beliefs and actions of others,” according to training literature
from Resetting the Table, an organization
that helps people talk across profound differences in the Middle East and the
U.S.
So, what is so bad about that,
you ask? Hate the bastards, rail about them to their faces and to others, loudly
demonstrate against them in the streets, then vote against them at every
election. Right? Well, I had not stooped to the depth of cursing them to their
faces or taking to the streets, but I sure felt like doing so. But I did let loose
my pen upon them on my blog. Ripley offers a better response for journalists and the rest
of us:
The cost of intractable
conflict is also predictable. “[E]veryone loses,” writes Resetting the Table’s co-founder Eyal Rabinovitch [on the abortion IC]. “Such conflicts
undermine the dignity and integrity of all involved and stand as obstacles to
creative thinking and wise solutions.”
So,
if we choose the path to more creative thinking and wise solutions, what should
we expect? Ripley says:
In every
case, the goal is not to wash away the conflict; it’s to help people wade in
and out of the muck (and back in again) with their humanity intact. Americans
will continue to disagree, always; but with well-timed nudges, we can help
people regain their peripheral vision at the same time. Otherwise, we can be
certain of at least one thing: we will all miss things that matter.
So, what should we do to pull
ourselves out of intractable conflicts and equip ourselves to “wade in and out
of the muck” that divides us in a way that does not poison our thinking or
destroy us and our society? Ripley offers this:
The
lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict:
complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more
accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work will
matter — particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When people encounter
complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information.
They listen, in other words.
There are many ways to
complicate the narrative, as described in detail under the six strategies
below. But the main idea is to feature nuance, contradiction and ambiguity
wherever you can find it. This does not mean calling advocates for both sides
and quoting both; that is simplicity, and it usually backfires in the midst of
conflict. “Just providing the other side will only move people further away,”
Coleman says. Nor does it mean creating a moral equivalence between neo-Nazis
and their opponents. That is just simplicity in a cheap suit. Complicating the
narrative means finding and including the details that don’t fit the
narrative — on purpose.
The idea
is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. “The problem with
stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete,” novelist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her mesmerizing TED Talk “A Single Story.” “[I]t’s impossible to engage
properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of
that place and that person.”
In the midst of conflict, our
audiences are profoundly uncomfortable, and they want to feel better. “The
natural human tendency is to reduce that tension,” Coleman writes, “by seeking
coherence through simplification.” Tidy narratives succumb to this urge to
simplify, gently warping reality until one side looks good and the other looks
evil. We soothe ourselves with the knowledge that all Republicans are racist
rednecks — or all Democrats are precious snowflakes who hate America.
Complexity counters this
craving [for simplicity], restoring the cracks and inconsistencies that had
been air-brushed out of the picture. It’s less comforting, yes. But it’s also
more interesting — and true.
Right now, half of Democrats
and Republicans see members of the opposing party as not just ill-informed but
actually frightening, according to the Pew Research Center.
Republicans think Democrats are much more liberal than they actually are — and vice versa.
In reality, explicitly racist
beliefs crisscross party boundaries. In a 2016 Reuters/Ipsos poll, nearly a
third of Hillary Clinton supporters described black people as more “violent”
and “criminal” than white people, and a quarter said black people are lazier. No party (or person) is without bias.
And it’s not just Democrats
who worry about offending people; in fact, 28% of Republicans with no more than
a high school education say people need to be more careful with their language to avoid offense (double
the share of Republican college graduates who say so). “There’s no limit to how
complicated things can get,” as E.B. White wrote, “on account of one thing
always leading to another.”
There is a business case for
complexity, too. Right now, FOX News and MSNBC assume their viewers want
outrage, which is to say, simplicity. And many do. But what about all the
people who aren’t watching? Many Americans have tuned out of the news, demoralized by the sniping,
depressed by the hopelessness. What would happen if they one day stumbled upon
a different kind of story — one that intrigued them instead of terrifying them?
Meanwhile, as online news
sites continue to struggle to make ends meet with clickbait headlines and ad
revenue, more outlets are turning to subscribers to help fund their reporting.
That means they have to shift from a one-night stand business model to a
long-term relationship with readers — which has to be based on something deeper
than cats and Trump tweets. Indignation will always be the easiest way to lure
readers, but by itself, it’s not enough to make people pay for the privilege of
coming back day after day.
So, how do we complicate the
narrative? Does it involve compromise? Perhaps. But can there be compromise when it comes to freedom, justice, and equality? One is either experiencing freedom, justice, and equality, or one is not. Yes, there can be checks on the abuses of freedom, justice and equality, but it seems there can be no partial meting out or compromise where some groups and individuals have more or less freedom, justice and equality than others. Ripley's guidance is primarily for journalists but there is much in what she says
we can all learn from. The following is an abridgment of Ripley’s suggestions:
1. Amplify Contradictions. There are many things that journalists cannot do. But
we can destabilize the narrative. We can remind people that life is not as
coherent as we’d like. Otherwise, the spiral to simplicity is all but certain:
“As the conflict progresses, the narratives get skinnier,” Cobb says.
2. Widen the Lens. Start a bigger conversation. Turn a disagreement into an inquiry. Starting
in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed
people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called
“thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say,
the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and
which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother
or homeless man).
Again and again, people who
watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame
individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother
was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens
stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of
poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.
In reality, most
stories include both wide and narrow-lens moments; a feature on a welfare mother
will still invariably include a few lines about the status of job-training
programs or government spending. But as Iyengar showed in his book Is Anyone Responsible?, TV news
segments are dominated by a narrow focus. As a result, TV news unintentionally
lets politicians off the hook, Iyengar wrote, because of the framing of most
stories. The narrow-lens nudges the public to hold individuals accountable for
the ills of society — rather than corporate leaders or government officials. We
don’t connect the dots.
Great storytelling
always zooms in on individual people or incidents; I don’t know many other ways
to bring a complicated problem to life in ways that people will remember. But
if journalists don’t then zoom out again — connecting the welfare mother or,
say, the controversial sculpture to a larger problem — then the news media just
feeds into a human bias. If we’re all focused on whatever small threat is right
in front of us, it’s easy to miss the big catastrophe unfolding around us.
3. Ask Questions that Get to Peoples' Motivations. Mediators spend a lot of their energy on this idea of
digging underneath the conflict. They have dozens of tricks to get people to
stop talking about their usual gripes, which they call “positions” — and start
talking about the story underneath that story, also known as “interests” or
“values.”
Opposing Obamacare is
a position; a belief in self-sufficiency is, for many people, the value
underlying their position. Whether you agree or not, these deeper motivations
matter far more to the debate than the facts of the conflict (and also happen
to be more interesting).
People
are driven by their gut and heart, not their reasoning, as New York University
social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, citing research going back
decades. In fact, superficial self-interest has never been a good
predictor of political behavior.
Instead, Haidt identifies six
moral foundations that form the basis of political thought: care,
fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. These are the golden
tickets to the human condition. Liberals (and liberal members of the media)
tend to be very conscious of three of these foundations: care, fairness and
liberty. Conservatives are especially attuned to loyalty, authority and
sanctity, but they care about all six. And conservative politicians reliably
play all six notes, Haidt argues.
I
disagree with Haidt on his biologizing of human behavior in his book, his
subordination of reasoning to emotion, and his view that Liberals care less
about loyalty, authority and sanctity than do Conservatives. See my critique of
Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind here.
But
I do take Ripley’s point below that we have to be mindful of and sincerely
consider all the moral foundations listed by Haidt – care, fairness, liberty,
loyalty, authority, sanctity - when we engage those we disagree with.
Conservatives (and
conservative media, I’d add) have a systemic advantage as a result. They can
motivate more people more often because they hit more notes. (Notice how
Democratic leaders still do not talk very often about
Trump’s disloyalty to America, his cabinet members and his wives, in
those terms, despite being bombarded with evidence of such disloyalty. They
complain more often about injustice, indecency and unkindness, because those
are the notes they most like to play.)
If any of us want to
understand what’s underneath someone’s political rage, we need to follow
stories to these moral roots — just like mediators. “People tend to keep
describing their stories in the same way,” McCulloch says. “In mediation, you
try to flip that over and say, ‘How did you come to that? Why is this story
important to you? How do you feel when you tell it to me?’” Those questions may
seem touchy feely, but it’s surprising how rarely people get asked them. “You
see people kind of blink and go, ‘I never thought of it that way.’”
These
kinds of questions reveal deeper motivations, beyond the immediate conflict.
Sometimes, the entire conflict disappears when this happens — because people
suddenly realize they agree on what matters most. More often, the questions
reveal that the dispute is about something other than what everyone thought.
4. Listen More, and Better. “When people feel heard and seen as they wish to be
heard and seen, they relax their guard,” says Melissa Weintraub, a rabbi and
the co-founder of Resetting
the Table. “It’s both very simple and very hard to accomplish. We have to
give them the most powerful and eloquent articulation of their own thinking.”
Then and only then will people even begin to consider information that does not
fit their usual narratives. In fact, this is one of the only ways to
get people to listen when they are emotional or entrenched in a particular
worldview. Humans need to be heard before they will listen. Trust is
mutual, in other words. It’s easier to get trust if you give it.
5. Expose People to the Other Tribe. The most powerful way to get people to stop
demonizing each other, as decades of research into racial prejudice have shown,
is to introduce them to one another. The technical term is “contact theory,”
but it just means that once people have met and kind of liked each other, they
have a harder time caricaturing one another.
Genuine human connections
permanently complicate our narratives. Communities with more cross-cutting
relationships tend to be less violent and more tolerant, as Diana Mutz, a
political scientist professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has found.
It is important to widen the
lens and connect a particular representative of the “other” tribe to a larger
history and story — or the story can end up just confirming the audience’s
biases.
But here
again, the execution makes all the difference. It’s important, for example,
that everyone invited to a community gathering feels like they are on equal
footing. The situation needs to be nonthreatening and fair (so you wouldn’t
want to host a conversation about race in the whitest neighborhood in town, for
example).
There should be moments of
levity and shared history or purpose, too. And ideally food. People still bond
when they break bread, just as they always have. These details matter a lot — just
as much as the substance of the conversation. In the Difficult Conversation’s
Lab, Coleman and his colleagues found that conversations go better when people
have about 3 positive interactions for every 1 negative encounter. And the tone
is usually set in the first few minutes.
The best conversations across
differences usually start with personal questions like, “Which of your life
experiences have shaped your political views?” When we tell our own story, we
tend to speak with more nuance, because real life is not a bumper sticker.
When Spaceship Media works with a newsroom to
engage a divided community, they usually start by asking four questions (often
through Facebook):
·
What do you think
the other community thinks of you?
·
What do you think
of the other community?
·
What do you want
the other community to know about you?
·
What do you want
to know about the other community?
6. Counter Confirmation Bias (Carefully). One of the most well-studied biases in the human
portfolio is confirmation
bias — our nasty habit of believing news that confirms our pre-existing
narratives and dismissing everything else.
Worse yet, people exposed to
information that challenges their views can actually end up more convinced
that they are right.
We judge information based on
its source and its harmony with our other beliefs. As Daniel Kahneman puts it
in Thinking
Fast and Slow: “How do you know if a statement is true? If it is
strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you
hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of
cognitive ease.”
Another tactic is to use
graphics instead of text. In a series of experiments, Nyhan and colleagues
found that presenting information visually increased the accuracy of people’s
beliefs about charged issues — including the number of insurgent attacks in
Iraq after the U.S. troop surge and the change in global temperatures over the
past 30 years.
Cognitive ease also comes from
a feeling of hope. Uncomfortable information that could generate fear (such as
a report on the devastation of this year’s flu epidemic) is more palatable to
people if it comes with a side of specific actions that people can take in
response (such as a list of pharmacies offering free flu shots along with their
hours of operation).
Finally, some simple advice:
it’s important not to repeat a false belief in an effort to correct it, Nyhan
has found. If people are told Barack Obama is not Muslim, many will
remember that he is Muslim. The negative simply vanishes from their
minds, because it doesn’t fit with their pre-existing biases. The best way to
counter this disturbing tendency is to just state that Obama is Christian — and
avoid ringing any false notes altogether.
So, let’s sum up. Here is
some parting advice from Ripley:
“People don’t want to be at
each other’s throats,” says [John] Sarrouf [of Gloucester Conversations],
who convenes conversations about gun rights and other divisive issues, in
addition to his work in Gloucester, [Massachusetts, USA]. “People don’t want to be seen as callous.
They want to be understood deeply.”
Humans
share a tendency to simplify and demonize, it’s true; but we also share a
desire for understanding. Encouragingly, perhaps, we are starting to see
sporadic examples of high-profile journalists trying to break through the
tribalism.
…
Interestingly, it was left to
the politician — Senator Marco Rubio, who participated in the town hall despite
being wildly outnumbered politically — to explain what was at stake:
“We are a nation of people
that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped
being friends with people because [of whom] they voted for in the last
election,” he said. “We’re a nation of people that have isolated ourselves
politically and to a point where discussions like this have become very
difficult.”
And indeed, it was a very
difficult night for Rubio. But it could have been so much more than difficult.
It could have been revealing.
Journalists [and the rest of
us] need to learn to amplify contradictions and widen the lens on paralyzing debates.
We need to ask questions that uncover people’s motivations. All of us,
journalists and non-journalists, could learn to listen better. As researchers
have established in hundreds of experiments over the past half-century, the way
to counter the kind of tribal prejudice we are seeing is to expose people to
the other tribe or new information in ways they can accept. When conflict is
cliché, complexity is breaking news.
The approach outlined above
is hard, very hard, for anyone – professional journalists and the rest of us.
Implementing it in our daily lives will be difficult and uncomfortable. But do we
really have a choice to try it or not? I’ve decided I must give it a try.
I leave you for now with the
following. English philosopher Bertrand Russell, at age 86, in a television interview, had this to say about truth and dealing with those we disagree with:
Q: Suppose, Lord Russell, that this film
were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea Scroll in a thousand
years’ time, what do you think it is that’s worth telling that world’s
generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you have learned from
it?
A: I should like to say two things, one
intellectual and one moral. The intellectual thing I should wish to say to them
is this. When you’re studying any matter or considering any philosophy ask yourself
only what are the facts and what is the truth the facts bear out. Never let
yourself be diverted by either what you'd wish to believe or by what you think
would have beneficial social effects if it were believed. Look only and solely
at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing I would wish to
say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to
them is very simple: love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is
getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each
other. We have to put up with the fact that some people say things that we
don’t like. We can only live together in that way. If we are to live together
and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance
which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet. - Bertrand
Russell, John Freeman interview on Face To Face, BBC, 1959.
