It’s about protecting civil liberties, and it’s deeply ethical

An excellent and thoughtful piece. From What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan Divide by Evan Mandery.

The jaundiced eye would look at this and say, oh, just another Yankee coming to anthropologically examine the rural rubes. But fortunately, Mandery is not that sort of researcher. He is genuinely interested (and interesting).

BOONE, N.C.—On the first day of my “Justice in America” seminar at Appalachian State University, I offer a deal to a student named Forrest Myers. I explain that I’m a tough grader and that the class average will be around a B-minus. “I’ll give you an A,” I say. “All you have to do is designate someone to get an F.”

The other students laugh nervously while Forrest considers the deal.

I’ve asked this question at the beginning of every semester for over 20 years, mostly to liberal northeasterners at Harvard and the City University of New York. It’s a good starting point because it tends to show commonality. The beginning of ethical thinking is to accept that other people’s interests matter. In all my years of teaching, I’ve never had anyone take me up on my offer.

But I’ve come here seeking difference, not similarity. The 2016 election exposed a national rift so deep that it feels as if even reasonable conversation is impossible. I’m a liberal New Yorker, but I know that plenty of people on both sides of the political spectrum worry that this divide poses an existential threat to the American democratic project. On the most controversial issues—race and immigration, to name just two—we’ve lost the capacity for compromise because we presume the most sinister motives about our opponents. I’ve arrived here in the fall of 2018, hoping to find a wider range of views—not to change anyone’s opinions but rather to see whether there remain principles and a shared language of ethics that bind us together.

So I’m as curious as everyone else in the class about how Forrest is going to answer.

Read the article for the answer.

Mandery is a professor at John Jay College in New York. He comes to Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina to get a sense of similarities and differences. As he notes,

But Boone is a little blue island in a sea of red. You’d have to drive about 30 miles to find another polling district that voted for Hillary Clinton, and there are only a total of five within a 75-miles radius.

[snip]

But Boone is a little blue island in a sea of red. You’d have to drive about 30 miles to find another polling district that voted for Hillary Clinton, and there are only a total of five within a 75-miles radius.

His class is a structured experiment.

My class is modeled on one created by Michael Sandel, a charismatic, globetrotting political philosopher who has taught “Justice” to more than 15,000 Harvard undergraduates. It’s the perfect vehicle for learning about people’s political values. The syllabus pairs readings in classic philosophy—John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, John Rawls—with modern policy dilemmas including abortion, affirmative action and hate speech.

But inevitably, all journeys of ethical discovery begin with the trolley problem.

“A trolley is barreling down the tracks to which five people have been tied,” I explain during our second meeting. “You can flip a switch and divert the trolley, but you’d kill someone else who’s been tied to the sidetrack.”

I ask a young woman named Kierstin Davis what she would do. (It’s her real name—all of the students quoted here consented to participate in this article.) “I probably would flip the switch because I know less people would be killed,” she says. Almost all of her fellow students concur, albeit reluctantly. The notable exception is Jackson.

“You kill the one person,” he says without hesitation.

Jackson is wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a Carhartt shirt. His baseball cap, which he got on a trip to Yellowstone, displays the outline of a bison and mountains. In the discussion of grades, Jackson was the one who said that everyone deserved equal opportunity. I remind him of this, but he’s ready with a distinction: “In this situation you don’t have a choice—somebody has to die, so it goes beyond equal opportunity and becomes what this outcome is going to be.” It’s clear that Jackson will be a force. The distinction he’s drawing is smart—no one had to get an F in my first example, but, more importantly, it’s clear that he likes this kind of intellectual jousting.

Mandery, throughout the article, is dealing with individuals and their individual views and never uses anyone as a proxy for a group view. Wonderful.

But Jackson once again stands out. He says he’d kill his mom or even a baby if it meant saving more lives. “I mean, someone has to die either way and I’m fine putting my life—even if I had to spend the rest of my life in prison or whatever it is—to save the five versus the one.”

I haven’t known Jackson for long, but I believe that he would sacrifice himself for the greater good, and I can see that his classmates believe it too. Even if they don’t share his willingness to throw the switch on a family member, they see him as principled, not cruel. It’s a type of selflessness and consistency that seems lacking in contemporary discourse, in which people are too willing to prioritize what’s politically expedient over fundamental values. It’s what feels wrong, for example, about liberal intolerance of dissenting speech, especially on campus, or the rush to punish alleged sexual predators without due process. And it’s what feels equally wrong about conservatives who claim to revere life, and yet can display such brazen cruelty to immigrants and prisoners.

One of his points is for all the mainstream media hysterical cries of polarization, that is more rhetorical than real.

My students don’t come to class with signs around their necks announcing their political leanings. None of them were even old enough to vote in the 2016 election. But the near unanimity with which they responded to the trolley question is notable. Over the years, I’ve noticed that most people analyze these sort of dilemmas in more or less the same way.

Indeed, Jesse Graham, a professor at the University of Utah’s business school, says that for all their ideological differences, liberals and conservatives are pretty much identical in how they view trolley-like dilemmas. Graham has conducted a dozen studies on “trolleyology,” which occupies its own niche in social psychology research. “Liberals are a little bit more likely than conservatives to say, ‘OK, yes you can push the guy off the bridge to save the five people,’” Graham says, emphasizing a little. “It’s questionable whether you’d even say there’s a difference there,” he continues. “Overall liberals and conservatives are really similar.”

He makes a point which I believe to be critical but which is nearly absent in almost all talking head commentary.

Libertarians, however, are a different story. We don’t talk much about them—not members of the political party with that name, but rather people who believe in limited government. There are a lot of the latter (estimates range between 7 percent and 22 percent), and they merit greater discussion. Graham and his collaborators, including New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, have collected reams of data on people’s values at yourmorals.org. One instrument, called the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, measures the extent to which a person is influenced by five moral foundations: harm-care, fairness-reciprocity, ingroup loyalty, authority-respect and purity-sanctity. In a study of 12,000 libertarians, Graham found that libertarian responses to the MFQ differ more from either liberals or conservatives than liberals and conservatives’ answers differ from each other.

Graham explains that the libertarian cognitive style is cerebral rather than emotional. “Libertarians are far and away the most likely to say, ‘Yeah, push the guy off.’ They just see it as a math problem,” he tells me. “They have no squeamishness about having to kill the person.” It’s coldly calculating, but also, arguably, rigorously ethical. As Graham tells me this, I can’t help but think that efforts to unpack what separates red states from blue states haven’t been careful to differentiate between conservatives and libertarians. Venn diagrams of voters generally categorize voters as Republicans and Democrats or liberals and conservatives. But as is becoming increasingly apparent, the cool-headed libertarian in my classroom who’s willing to sacrifice his mother for the greater good doesn’t fit neatly into any of these circles.

So wrapped are the mainstream media in the polarization story that they fail to see what is right in front of them. Republican versus Democrat is such an archaic framing. And liberals versus conservative is incomplete.

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians and the moderates/undecideds/strategic voters is a better categorization. But even there it leaves too much unsaid. Liberals are really at least two categories - socialists and moderates. Conservatives are the most heterogeneous group - Classical Liberal conservatives (Locke, Smith, Hume, Mills, etc.), social conservatives, anti-communist conservatives, free market conservatives, religious conservatives, Burkean conservatives, Hayeckian conservatives, patriotic conservatives, etc.

Mainstream media are suffering from a problem of category error and they end up misreporting because they are misunderstanding what they are looking at. For example Burkean conservatives look an awful lot more like moderate liberals than they look like free-market conservatives. And neither of them look all that much like libertarians.

Refreshingly Mandery points out the consequence of these distinctions.

Strikingly, Jackson’s defense of gun ownership never once mentions a love of guns. He’s a “little-d” democrat who wants a super-process in place in case democracy, as his classmate Cole puts it, “fails to work or provide any meaningful benefits.” Resolving the ambiguity of for whom it’s supposed to work and who’s supposed to decide when change within the system is futile might be impossible, but it’s important to recognize the argument for what it is. It’s not about guns for the sake of guns, it’s about protecting civil liberties, and it’s deeply ethical.

In an article full of good insights (meaning they are insights with which I agree), this is one of the best.

Imagine if care were taken to frame the discussion not as outsiders trying to impose their will on people whose culture they did not understand, but rather as one among people with a shared interest in protecting the safety of their children. My suspicion is a conversation like that would reveal useful common ground. It’s an epiphany.

And it leads quickly to epiphany number two, which seems dramatically more important. If Americans are serious about reducing polarization, they’re going to have to start doing some careful listening, because what Jackson is saying has very little to do with what we say he’s saying.

For several years now, one of the filters I use all the time when hearing a debate or discussion is exactly this. Are the individuals talking engaging with one another's actual arguments or are they engaging with straw man versions of those arguments. Overwhelmingly, it is the latter. These aren't real discussions at all, usually are unhelpful and often destructive or divisive. They reflect an absence of respect for one another as individuals with sincere and specific actual beliefs which frequently end up being incorrectly characterized.

I often want to shout Distinguo! Or more simply, Listen!

Mandery moves on -

If one looks—and listens—carefully, a consensus reveals itself across a wide diversity of fields on the importance and untapped power of listening. The names and nuances of these approaches to careful listening differ, but they share two basic qualities.

The first is to listen with an open mind. NYU psychologist Carol Gilligan, who began the Radical Listening Project in 2017, says the essential step is “replacing judgment with curiosity,” or, as put by my student Gaby Romero, who has been trained in the diplomat Hal Saunders’ Sustained Dialogue protocol, “to acknowledge that everyone is there out of a genuine desire to learn and understand.” University of Michigan professor Donna Kaplowitz, who practices an approach known as Intergroup Dialogue, simply calls it “generous listening.”

The second quality is that all these approaches, in one way or another, ask the listener to inhabit another person. One element of Gilligan’s Listening Guide, which she developed and practiced in researching her seminal gender study, In a Different Voice, is to separate each phrase containing “I” from a narrative and list it in order of its appearance, thereby composing what Gilligan calls an “I poem.” Professor Sandel at Harvard does something similar when he teaches. After a student speaks in “Justice,” Sandel makes eye contact with the student, gestures in his or her direction, often with an open palm, and restates the argument in its most reasonable form. Years later, this remains my most lasting impression of the class.

The aim “is to create a space in which I can admit—let in—another person’s voice,” Gilligan says. It’s a way of stimulating empathy. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. An emerging body of research shows that Finch—or Harper Lee—was right.

Curious things start to happen to people when they listen generously. At the most superficial level, one hears things that he or she might not like. But one also hears the sincerity of people’s convictions, the authenticity of their experiences, and the nuance of their narratives. Being open is transformative because, almost inevitably, one finds that the stories they’ve been told about what people believe oversimplify reality.

Here I make a distinction. I agree with the sentiment and some element of Mandery's argument.

Mixing people together can be a great platform for opening clarifying discussions which build understanding and respect. Can. But not necessarily.

My reading of the research is that this works when there is some adjacency of interests or some commonality of experience.

If you simply mix people together, it may or may not work or even might be destructive, reinforcing prejudices or negative judgments.

Putting middle-class black kids together in the same classroom as middle class white kids can work terrifically. Each group has an adjacency of interests and a commonality of interests with the other that, reasonably moderated, can lead to much greater understanding. Same with all sorts of configurations. Poor white Christians with poor black Christians - they have an adjacency. Muslim businessmen and Jewish businessmen.

It can work.

But if don't seek the adjacency or commonality and don't facilitate it, it can be a disaster. Because there is an element missing from Mandery discussion. I am not faulting him because it is a treatment beyond the bounds of an article.

All of the above can work but often will not work where there are constraints. Specifically, when there is no time, when there are no resources, when there is extreme uncertainty and when there is the justifiable fear of death or illness, or subjugation. A proximity, not of adjacency and shared experience, but of a variant of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Death, War, Pestilence and Famine).

Putting rich suburban white (or Asian-American or Jewish or . . . ) kids in the same classroom as impoverished urban black (or hispanic or Asian-American or white . . . ) kids is a recipe for disaster. Not because they are black and white but because they have little or no adjacency of interests or commonality of experience. AND because one (or perhaps both) groups may have a heightened sensitivity to time, money, uncertainty and negative consequences. With extreme care and close facilitation, even this can be made to work but the probability of it working on its own is low.

I think we have suffered too long from a naive expectation that if only people can be with one another, they will find out that we are all human. The "Can't we all just get along" assumption. I think there is plenty of research which suggests otherwise. Proximity is no guaranty and can be a recipe for disaster.

Our basic freedoms of speech, of assembly, of religion, consent of the governed, rule of law, equality before the law, equality of human rights, individualism, etc. - all these things facilitate constructive debate. Mandery is illustrating how this can happen and he is good story teller. It is refreshing to read his article. Everyone who believes in these things, regardless of their specific policy interests or views, can engage with one another to mutual benefit.

The challenge is when engaging with someone who rejects some or all of the above predicate beliefs. Someone who believes in only one truth, who is fine punishing the "other", who in fact wishes to stamp out the "other", who believe rules are to be gamed for benefit, who rejects individual rights in pursuit of group interests, etc.

When these conditions prevail, then there is conflict and discord. Mandery finds all the predicates in place and constructive engagement, respectful dialogue, and personal learning occur. We know it can and does happen and this is a delightful affirmation of that.

But when the shared predicates are not in place, when the Four Horsemen are galloping afield, then simple engagement becomes far more challenging. That is beyond the purview of this article but it is a reality not to be ignored.