Last month our book club tackled Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The book gave us an illuminating look at moral and evolutionary psychology, exploring the moral pillars that underpin the morality of people from diverse cultures. According to Haidt, there are six moral foundations, including: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, liberty/oppression and sanctity/degradation. How important each of these areas are for our own internal morality impacts where we sit on the political spectrum, how we judge contemporary issues as well as our ability to understand where others “are coming from”. The Righteous Mind got us all thinking about how people need to re-frame their judgements if we ever hope to build bridges with people who aren’t so like-minded. Breaking down barriers to community and challenging the echo-chamber of the “Age of Outrage” is what we’re all about here at The Potentiality. We’ve written already about breaking through bias, realizing the potential of dialogue as well as how to have difficult conversations. However what can you do when you and the other person are operating on totally different planets than you?

Based on this reading and our collective experience, here are three ways you can relate to those who are fundamentally different from you:

Start with understanding

When you hear something that strikes you as abhorrent, many people will immediately dismiss a person as an idiot. Although this may be accurate in some particular cases, such a dismissal is often an easy way to get yourself past having to give much serious thought about the issue that have been brought up. People are cut from a million different folds, have different life experiences and may even be genetically coded to judge issues according to different moral frameworks (according to Haidt). But just because their moral foundations differ from your own, it doesn’t mean they are an idiot. So instead of outright dismissal, try to calm your inner frustrations and instead move from an emotional response to a state of questions. Ask them why they feel the way they do. Are they more reliant on the authority foundation of morality (which underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions)? If so, recognize this moral foundation has been around for thousands of years and informs how the majority of the world judges what’s right and wrong.

Know your morality

Western liberal democracies tend to put a lot of stock on the care/harm foundation, which is evolutionarily based on an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance. That’s why many liberals (as well as many conservatives), choose to withhold moral judgement on acts that, while we may not agree with and would not do ourselves, do not cause any harm to others around us. Many, many other people (the vast majority around the world), put equal emphasis on other moral codes such as the importance of authority, sanctity, liberty, etc. Opening your mind to other moral constructs that might be less familiar to you is a good first step in trying to see beyond your own moral foundations.

Focus on similarities

I wish people spent more time in conversation looking for (without any expectations!) where their moral perspectives overlap with others. Finding this overlap is the essence of community and it helps bring groups together. It’s a good panacea to what seems to be an increasing focus on conflict, inequity (which clearly exists in society) and a focus on difference. Building communities around moral communalities is a helpful starting point. By starting with what you share (common, there’s got to be something!) you are setting yourself up as well as possible to build a bridge towards consensus or, at the very least, understanding.

Illustration courtesy of the New York Times.

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