I'm struggling to get inside of the heads of these people. Are they extroverts suffering from living in isolation? Are they simply in denial of the danger? Are they innumerate, not appreciating the meaning of exponential? Are they succumbing to incessant pressures of their in-group. to conform. Are they doing expensive signaling to impress each other? Have they attempted any sort of moral calculus in their minds, or have they simply declared themselves to be mini-Fiefdoms, self-legislating that it's time to move on, the consequences be damned? I'm working hard to pull myself out of any Manichean matrix that might tempt me to see the world in terms of "good" people and "bad" people.
I prefer to think of these people are ordinary flawed people, just like the rest of us, except that they are making a bad decision here.
Today is Day 87 of COVID-19 here in the U.S., and it is bringing out the best and the worst of Americans. Behold who we are!
On average, it appears that we are responding to COVID-19 with the same degree of care that we display when we A) drive our cars, B) take care of our bodies C) nurture the environment and D) fill our brains with TV shows. Why would we expect anything different?
I find myself repeatedly contemplating the potentially vast predictive power of Terror Management Theory in light of this cold blast of mortality salience related to COVID-19. This is the biggest flare-up of mortality salience since 9/11 and much of the resulting frenzied societal dysfunction was foreseeable, including the fact that so many modern-day tribes are so vigorously circling their wagons.
COVID-19 is a such terrible thing to grapple with. Many of the people we care about are going to be hurt, physically and economically. We are particularly taunted by COVID's invisibility because, as a species, we rely so heavily on brain systems related to vision. That said, we human animals are now living in a huge sphere-shaped petri dish. It's difficult to imagine the huge number of dissertations and research papers that will result from this upheaval. My speculative hope is that as a result of this pandemic we will learn something critically important about how to get along with each other. Whatever we learn, we need to learn it both in our hearts and our minds. We so desperately need some sort of reboot down here on Planet Earth.
I've closely followed the writings of Jonathan Haidt. His conclusions are closely tied to scientific findings. He crosscuts the current American political divide. He is hopeful that we will find our way as a country.
Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”
Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”
But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”
Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”
The key quote from the passage above: "Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.” This is a modern version of MLK's classic advice that is scorned by many modern day "liberals": "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Why has this beautiful sentiment become so difficult today?
I'm tempted to close my eyes, flip through a dictionary and put my finger on a random word. That single word will be my next Facebook post. I suspect that this single word, no matter what it is, will be enough to trigger a political argument between vocal representatives of the two prominent political teams hurling factually spurious darts and arrows at each other, neither of these teams stopping to consider whypeople on the other side say those "disagreeable" things. Neither of them will want to take the time to put forth any effort to put the other side's best foot forward before responding. Neither of them will feel compelled to treat members of the other "team" like the human beings they are. Many of them will feel reluctance to ever say the following three magic words, "I don't know." The participants will be oblivious to the fact that many of their own self-evident "truths" are rickety, distorted within the comfy social warmth of their team's moral/political matrix.
I often feel like I'm trapped in the Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," where all it took was a few random flickering lights to cause suspicions to ignite, leading neighbors to hate each other and physically attack each other. This episode of Twilight Zone, like so many other excellent episodes, was written by Rod Serling, who ended the show by reading this passage:
The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
Fast forward to a 2016 TED talk featuring moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who stated:
We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that.So this is why you can't win a political argument. If you're debating something, you can't persuade the person with reasons and evidence, because that's not the way reasoning works.
Why do so many of us treat opportunity to communicate online with each other like a vicious game when our country's existence is at stake?
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