Steve Krizman's blog

I see some of my friends’ Facebook posts and wonder: I know he’s a good, smart, open-minded person. How could he possibly support that greed-head Romney?

I assume my friends who support Romney wonder something similar about me.

Most of us follow the maxim of not talking about religion and politics in social settings, but Facebook dispenses with that polite veneer — at least for those of us who choose to wear our politics on our Wall. I fear that online revelations could leak over into real relationships. Since Facebook hasn’t created a filter button that weeds out my friends’ political posts, I will have to figure out a way to better understand why good people can have such completely different world views.

I found guidance in Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind. A pioneer of “moral psychology,” Haidt has used liberals’ theology — science — to show how evolution, social development, and genetics have created innate moral foundations, hard-wired into us at birth and revised through life experiences.

His theory categorizes those hard-wired morals into five foundations. Liberals rely heavily on two of them while conservatives balance all five. Haidt, himself a liberal academic, argues that insistence on the correctness of only one or two foundations dismisses valid moral beliefs of others and fuels tribalism and polarization. It makes compromise and civility impossible.

Here are the five foundations. The first two are important to both liberals and conservatives. The last three are important to conservatives and make up what Haidt calls a society’s “moral capital.”

• Care / harm — the concern for welfare of others.
• Liberty / oppression — liberals emphasize the fight against oppression while conservatives emphasize individual freedom.
• Loyalty / betrayal — the commitment to your group or country.
• Authority / submission — the belief in institutions that ensure order.
• Sanctity / degradation — the reverence for life and our bodies.

You can take interesting surveys at YourMorals.org to find out which of these moral foundations drive you and how you compare to liberals and conservatives.

Your upbringing and personal experiences lead you to dial some of these moral foundations up or down. Being raised a Catholic in the 60s, civil unrest around me, seeing my parents demonstrate courageous support of the powerless, I hold social justice above all else. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But Haidt’s construct allows me to reframe how I interpret the views of others. To take an extreme example: I see a pickup truck with American flags flying. Instead of judging the driver as a simpleton who thinks of the world as one big football game, I can peg him as someone who highly values the loyalty / betrayal foundation — a moral position that is important to the survival of groups, such as our free and democratic society. I can better understand why he bristles when he hears Barack Obama tell an adoring crowd in Berlin that he is “a citizen of the world.” I will never agree with him, but I no longer cast him as ignorant, and that’s a step toward civility.

Haidt suggests that such reframing will help us discover the beneficial yin and yang of differing moral views:

“Liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions.”

We subvert this beneficial balance when we try to advance “us” by denigrating “them.” Romney fell into that trap in his “47 percent” comments, as did Obama in his “guns and religion” statement during the last election cycle. It is heartening that both of these gaffes prompted bi-partisan disavowals. It shows that many of us still can detect the language of closed-minded righteousness.

As I absorbed Haidt’s book, I consciously stopped spreading Facebook posts that defined “them” (the hardest has been the Dogs Against Romney ones). I continue to like and share political posts that comport with my moral foundations, not to prove the rightness of my beliefs but in hope that it describes my moral compass — and establish that liberals do, indeed, have moral compasses.

In researching this blog post, I looked at the Kindle passages that other readers highlighted and commented on. I detected an equal number of liberals and conservatives making favorable comments. Rare is an online discourse that doesn’t devolve into troll vs. troll.

If you don’t have time to read the book, you can get the gist in Haidt’s TEDtalk. Amusingly, he polled the audience and found only a handful of conservatives, confirming his thesis that liberals are more inclined to seek out new ideas. Here’s hoping his new idea takes hold among liberals and conservatives alike.