Explaining Liberals to Conservatives, and Vice-Versa - Miller-McCune
Pleas to tone down the heated political rhetoric in America tend to suffer the same fate as sensible-eating guidelines: endorsed in principle and ignored in practice. It’s clear enough why. The views of liberals and conservatives rest on fundamentally different foundations, making it difficult to locate common ground. Lacking a basic understanding of their opponents’ motivations, partisans view those on the other side of the ideological divide warily, often assuming the worst.
In his essential new book, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers no easy way out of this mutually assured derision. But he provides a deep understanding of what has driven us to this point, and out of that could come a rebirth of respect. In the past two decades, American politics has increasingly been cast, by both sides, as an issue of good versus evil. Haidt argues it would be both more helpful and more accurate to think of the left and right as yin and yang — worldviews that arose together, neither of which can exist without the other. Each brings something essential to the table.
I interviewed Haidt three years ago, when he was a scholar in residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara (see “Morals Authority,” May-June 2009). At the time, his framework for the different moral universes of liberals and conservatives struck me as a brilliant breakthrough. It let me hear politicians or pundits make pronouncements and instantly recognize the underlying ethics responsible for their certitude. This understanding didn’t change my own point of view, but it gave me a better handle on both the basis of my own beliefs and of others’.
Readers of The Righteous Mind (Pantheon Books) will likely have a similar experience, although even the most open-minded can expect to encounter fierce internal resistance to some of Haidt’s assertions. This is a book that asks us to step outside ourselves and admit that the ideas we hold — beliefs that seem so inherently right — are products of our genes and environment, not of some immutable truth. Since those beliefs give us identity and meaning, we are loath to question their validity. At several points in the book, my reaction was, “Sorry, Jon, I just can’t go with you there.”