As fate would have it, election season wraps up about three weeks before Thanksgiving in the United States. Annually, millions of Americans sit at the table during this holiday and engage in a smooth debriefing about personal political beliefs and walk away with changed minds.
OK. Kidding aside, we’ve all heard that discussions of politics, like chewing with your mouth open, should be avoided at the table. Both things may happen, but it’s wise to stop the moment you realize it.
Why Is It So Hard To Discuss Politics With The Ones We Love?
In short: we’re not really discussing politics, we’re discussing our morals without realizing it.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion is a book I have wanted to write about and promote for some time. It is brilliant. John is probably most recognizable by his other works The Coddling of The American Mind and more recently The Anxious Generation. Like his other works, this book is thorough, extensive, and easy to digest.
First published in 2012, readers get a look at the extensive research John did as he got his arms around how people come to approve or disapprove of different things. Forming convictions is, unsurprisingly, an intensely emotionally driven process.
But why so emotional?
To answer this, look no further than the moral foundations theory that he both authors and articulates in The Righteous Mind. This theory is as fascinating as it is difficult to encapsulate in a blog post. So, let me leave you with the same teaser that got me to read the book several years ago: we all have 6 dimensions that make up the foundation of our own morality (our “moral foundations”). Liberals typically care about the first two of them, conservatives typically care about all six.
The Role Of Language
Because moral foundations exist on a continuum, language leads us to think we are talking about something we might not actually be talking about.
Each associated direction our minds take around any concept speaks to our moral intuitions. It’s completely possible (and likely) that language leads us to think we are talking to someone about an agreed upon topic, but the connotation of the topic varies so wildly, we might as well be talking about something else all together.
Take a concept like “purity.” Many people hear it and automatically think about it in terms of human behavior. Others, in terms of environmental concerns (food, water, air, microplastics). Each camp doesn’t realize the associations found on their opposing side of the same concept. They then talk past each other and things heat up.
We can never have a simple-unemotional discussion about [insert political topic] because this topic taps into moral foundations like “care” and “fairness” or maybe “loyalty.” Each with a completely different meaning to engaged convesants. This is how seemingly any discourse around politics so easily becomes a polarizing argument.
Of course, politicians and the machines that back them take full advantage of this, creating a dilemma where “you think you’re talking rationally, but actually, no you’re not.” Jonathan Haidt refers to this fallacy as the “rational man riding an emotional elephant.” Our rationality is driven in the direction of-our emotions. We are limited by them far more than we realize.
Why You Should Check Out This Book
The Righteous Mind offered me a chance to step back and make sense of how things can get heated through the exploration of how we become convinced of things.
On a personal note, I recommend this book to anyone prone to begin a political discussion with someone thinking it’ll go well but regret it afterwards. Because of this book, I am content to side step conversations with people with opposing views. I don’t miss them. I also view all political ads differently than before reading this book.
And yes, I want to help my candidate win, but not lose a friend, or my cool, along the way.