A System for Better Communication
I rarely torture my brain by reading articles from leftist activists. I decided to amend my policy when I came across an article recommended by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. Self-described queer activist, T.A. Eady, penned the article Everything Is Problematic in November of 2014. It was a refreshing read about the problems with the far left, written by a person who experienced the problems firsthand.
What's interesting about the article is, while it was written by a liberal about the extreme left, the same article could've been written by a conservative about the extreme right. It's an article calling for more common sense from both sides, and Eady offers four suggestions for people interested in leftist - but probably any - activism:
Embrace humility. You may find it refreshing. Others will find it refreshing too...Question yourself as fiercely as you question society.
Treat people as individuals...When you hear an opinion about a kind of oppression from a member of the group that experiences it, seek out countervailing opinions from members of the same group and weigh them against each other. Don't be afraid to have original insights.
Learn to be diplomatic. Not everything is a war of good versus evil. Reasonable, informed, conscientious people often disagree about important ethical issues...When it comes to moral disagreements...anger [is] to be expected...That's what makes a diplomatic touch so necessary.
Take a systems approach to the political spectrum. Treat the pursuit of the best kind of society as an engineering problem. Think about specific, concrete proposals.
These suggestions apply to everyone, not just aspiring leftist activists. Eady's article was an analysis of her time as an anti-oppressive activist and the troubles with the ideals of that group. While many people find social justice warriors abhorrent, the evils that ail them are no different than those of other potentially abhorrent groups:
Dogmatism
Groupthink
A crusader mentality
Anti-intellectualism
The biggest trouble with the above attitudes is how they hamper respectful dialogue. Differences in opinion are wonderful. We should actively seek differing opinions to guard against a one dimensional, echo chamber existence. Author Khaled Hosseini once said, “It’s better to be hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.” Lucky for us, words don’t actually hurt. They may cause discomfort, but discomfort promotes growth. Discomfort is to our minds what sunlight and water is to a budding flower. We should be seeking it out and learning to interact with it civilly. Unfortunately, most of us don’t. Too many people seek out safe spaces and cover their eyes or ears when ideas make them uncomfortable. This behavior pushes society into the darkness. We must correct it while we still can.
Since we're all vulnerable to confirmation bias and other detrimental group behaviors, regardless of which “side” we’re on, we all have a vested interest in correcting these vulnerabilities. As Ben Franklin once said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” What better way to combat our biases than by preventing them before they arise?
More conversation, at earlier ages, guided by the principles above will result in more civil conversations and productive collaborations between adults, and a country that continues to function the way our founding fathers intended, more than 200 years ago.
To prime our youth for productive dialogue, we must encourage them to engage in productive disagreement during childhood and teach them some of the suggestions Eady offered in her article.
Embrace Humility
First, we must teach our children to embrace humility. We can create resilient kids by praising effort over outcome, and we can create humble kids by praising learning over being right. As early as grade school, teachers and parents need to expose children to their Unread Library Effect.
The Unread Library Effect is a concept coined by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay in their book, How to Have Impossible Conversations. It's the idea that access to knowledge gives people the illusion they know everything.
Imagine you inherited your great Uncle Arthur's sprawling estate. Nestled on the acres of beautiful property lies a breathtaking mansion – think Rockefeller’s Kykuit. Within the walls sits your great Uncle Arthur’s pride and joy - his personal library of 10,000 books.
As you turn the brass knobs on the glass paned French doors, you lay your eyes upon the towering oak shelves. They line the walls. They stretch from floor to ceiling. They remind you of a scene from a Bond movie. You smell the scent of knowledge - curiously similar to burying your nose deep in the binding of a book. You walk the aisles, dragging your fingertips across spine after spine, some bound with leather, others with cloth, some hard cover, and some with glossy paper jackets. You step back, turn in circles, and admire your library. You now possess the knowledge of ten thousand books.
That's absurd! You have no more knowledge than the illiterate beggar without a library card. To own the knowledge, you must read the books.
Many of us make the same mistake. We have access to more than ten thousand volumes every time we pull our iPhones from our pockets. But we must be careful not to conflate access to knowledge with possession of it.
To tame The Unread Library Effect, Boghossian and Lindsay suggest choosing everyday objects - things like a toilet or a coffee maker - and explaining how they work. To be effective, you must use as much detail as possible. Like I quickly learned while struggling through the explanation of a toilet's inner workings, you'll find your ignorance far outstrips your breadth of knowledge. This is an important exercise for two reasons: a) it increases your intellectual humility, and b) it increases your breadth of knowledge.
For each household appliance, political process, or scientific principle you attempt to explain (and fail miserably) you follow that up with an exploration of the topic - simultaneously decreasing your ignorance and increasing your humility.
Help your children expose their Unread Library Effect early and often, and they will grow up to be humble, intelligent, and pleasant adults.
Learn to be diplomatic
Equally important as humility is the ability to be diplomatic. As Eady mentioned, "not everything is a war of good versus evil." Eady is talking about dichotomous thinking, a cognitive distortion where we view people in all or nothing terms - something like "all liberals are socialists," or "all conservatives are racist."
According to Haidt and Lukianoff's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, numerous cognitive distortions, including dichotomous thinking are more prevalent on college campuses since 2013. Similarly, Pew research found the percentage of people who identify as consistently conservative or consistently liberal has increased over 100% from 1994 to 2014 - another sign of dichotomous thinking.
Writing off an entire group of people as being one way or another is a distorted thought pattern. This yes or no, black or white, all or nothing pattern of thinking is dangerous because it creates an "us versus them" mentality. In their book, Haidt and Lukianoff talk about The Great Untruth of Us Versus Them - the idea that life is a battle between good and evil as a result of cognitive distortions, primarily dichotomous thinking.
This great untruth is fundamentally at odds with intellectual honesty, humility, civil discourse, evidence based argument, and many other important components of a productive and civil society. In order to correct the good versus evil mindset, we can teach our children two techniques:
Assume Good Intentions
First, we should teach kids to assume their conversation partner has good intentions. If someone’s intentions appear bad, the person probably has incomplete information. By assuming good intentions, you are being diplomatic. By assuming good intentions, you are removing the pretext of an adversarial, us versus them, encounter. By assuming good intentions, you're laying the foundation for a productive conversation.
Focus on Epistemology
Second, we must teach our children to focus on epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. The purpose of a conversation should be to learn, not to win. The best way to learn is to ask your conversation partner calibrated questions so you can understand how he knows what he knows.
Calibrated questions are a technique often used by hostage negotiators to obtain more information while simultaneously making the counterpart feel like he is in control. They are open ended questions, typically beginning with "what" or "how." This approach usually elicits a longer response and offers insight into your conversation partner's perspective.
If we can instill diplomacy by destroying the distortion of dichotomous thinking and focusing on learning rather than winning, we'll be sending curious, collaborative children into the world.
Teach the tribal roots of morals
We also need to teach our children about the basics of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). MFT is a social psychological theory popularized in Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind. It explains how people make moral judgments, as well as the origins and differences between those judgments.
You can think of MFT as a Rosetta Stone for moral languages. It helps you translate the motives of others into something that makes sense for you.
MFT is based upon five foundations broken into two categories: Individualizing Foundations and Binding Foundations.
The Individualizing Foundations, care and fairness, are typically valued most by political liberals.
The Binding Foundations, loyalty, authority, and purity, are typically valued most by political conservatives.
Both liberals and conservatives base their moral reasoning on a desire to make society better. As Haidt says, if you step outside a partisan mindset, you can “think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of [a] good society.” This is important to keep in mind if you’re striving for civil dialogue.
Also important to keep in mind is that liberal and conservative mindsets are a result of group selection, rooted in tribal history. "A society entirely composed of liberals risks being overrun by enemies," wrote Sebastian Junger in a 2019 Washington Post article, "and a society entirely composed of conservatives risks breaking apart over issues of inequality...Put those groups together, however, and you have addressed the two greatest threats to human welfare: enemies and discord."
The most successful ancient tribes were composed of liberals who could help resolve internal problems and conservatives who could defend against external threats. Those tribes survived to pass on their genes to us. According to Avi Tuschman, author of Our Political Nature, between forty and sixty percent of our political attitudes are inherited. Whether you lean to the left or to the right is largely based on genetics.
These traits were passed on through genetics because they combine well to form a functional and durable society. We need to remember we’re cooperating, not competing. Haidt expressed the idea well in a 2013 TED Talk: "If everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see these problems are actually best addressed together. Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage. But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job. So if you really care about strengthening families, you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality, who are working on raising the minimum wage, who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives."
We are actually one big tribe.We could successfully function like smaller ancient tribes if we realized our moral reasoning is complementary, not contradicting. We could transcend the divide from liberal tribes versus conservative tribes to one American tribe, and we would be far better off for making the mental leap.
The foundations by which we apply our moral reasoning may be different, but they each played an important part in our survival as a species. Understanding that a person holds an opinion because his specific brand of moral reasoning helped his ancestors to live and reproduce helps us to see value in the opinion, even if we don't agree with it. This goes back to one of the fundamentals of good conversations: assume good intentions. Knowing political beliefs are, at least in part, a result of our genes, allows us to assume our conversation partner has good intentions. He is trying to further opinions and policies that will propagate society, just as his ancestors did before passing their genes to him. When we understand this history, we can better appreciate our moral differences and realize how we can solve problems by combining our opinions and our efforts.
Next Steps
After we incorporate the above lessons into our parenting and our education systems, we need a practical environment for application. One year of compulsory national service is the perfect practical application.
High school grads can enter the programs of their choosing, across the country and far from where they grew up. They will be assigned to groups composed of individuals from diverse backgrounds with many different perspectives on life and politics.
They will all work together toward common goals - maintaining national parks, rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, caring for the elderly, or assisting in low performing schools - and forge a common identity. The common identity will be that of an American first - an American with a duty to his or her country.
Together we can destroy disunity in our country - one conversation and one service year at a time.
I wrote a long form essay exploring the details and benefits of a compulsory national service program. You can read it here.
Special thanks to Ana Lorena Fabrega, Tim Coil, and Dipan Patel for reviewing drafts of this article.
