Last night Twitter was ablaze with election results from Alabama. The beleaguered Judge Moore lost his senate seat and a pro-abortion Democrat will take his seat soon, possibly before the start of the new year. I got into it with a few liberal Catholics who seem to think taking down a man with allegations was more important than protecting the pro-life majority in the senate.
A few years back Mr. Pete and I went with another couple for a rare weekend away. After dinner and desert, in a cozy living room atmosphere, the conversation turned to current events and politics. The talking got quite animated and passionate – still, I thought to myself that it was wonderful to be able to agree to disagree, stand your own ground, and still be good friends.
I was wrong.
The next day the atmosphere was so thick you could cut it with a knife and a distance had grown between us. That was my first real experience in the schism between liberals and conservatives. Since starting this blog (see examples here, here and here)and particularly in participating on liberal forums such as the Huffington Post, it seems to me that that gulf is there and it is widening.
Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a fascinating article in 2012 entitled : “Why Liberals and Conservatives Can’t Connect.
He got my attention right away with his thesis statement:
Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.
Indeed. That was my observation with my friends so many years ago, and many, many times since then in online discussions – that no matter how carefully the argument was made, or how logical or calmly it was presented, frustration and eventually anger and possibly ad hominem attacks would ensue. It’s almost a familiar pattern now.
And now according to Kristof, this has been somewhat proven!
by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.I find this fascinating and it certainly explains a few things that have happened in my life. For example, a few years ago I had somewhat of an off and on debate with Carolyn Savage, the mom who had the wrong embryo implanted at a fertility clinic and then went on to rail at her bishop for defending church teaching regarding in vitro fertilization. You can read a bit of that debate here and here. She deleted many of my comments but it was as if she couldn’t bear to even read them or if she did read them and replied it was as if we were talking past each other, in two different languages.
A few years ago I also got an email from a former liberal blogger who had had a political and religious conversion and was now conservative politically and more orthodox in her Catholicism. She went over our past disagreements with brand new eyes, as if she was reading them for the first time. She ended her e-mail simply with “You were right, and I was wrong. God Bless You.”
Some other fascinating points in the editorial about the book:
Fascinating stuff to be sure.
Updated 2017
I wonder if part of the reason why conservatives can understand liberals is because most people hold liberal views when they are young, so they can look back on how they felt in those days. Most conservatives are old, so it is hard to imagine how you will think about things in 20 or 30 years time.
I don't think most conservatives are old. My own son is to the right of me!
Demographically they are, of course there are many exceptions.
According to this the shift towards conservatism is about 30 (that's about the time my own conversion started). The brain isn't fully developed until age 25 to 30 – wonder if there is a connection?
Quite possibly, although it may also be related to the early onset of dementia 😉
Even reason itself is being dumped by many on campus. From WSJ article:
"The experience of being an outsider is central to the poetry of Audre Lorde. So it’s curious that Lorde, who died in 1992, has posthumously become the ultimate insider on American campuses, providing an ideological foundation for today’s social-justice warriors.
It’s hard to overstate Lorde’s influence…More fundamentally, higher education is obsessed with “intersectionality.”…Lorde’s campus acolytes see the university as the “master’s house” and Western thought as his tools—which is to say that they espouse an ideology that rejects the idea of a classical education. Lorde claims to offer an alternative. “When we view living in the european [sic] mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious,” Lorde wrote in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” a 1977 essay.
She continued: “But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. . . . The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
In another essay, she asserts, “Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.” She defines the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings.” If student activists seem irrational, they’re actually deliberately antirational, rejecting reason as “white” and “male.”
And if they seem self-absorbed, that is consistent with Lorde’s encouragement to turn inward. “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within,” she wrote. Lorde also claimed that in an oppressive society, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Ergo, when students enjoy crayons and cookies in their designated safe spaces, it is a revolutionary act.
Moreover, Lorde claims that “in order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized”—and, if her comments in a 1979 interview are any indication, accepted unquestioningly. Lorde recounts how her interlocutor, the white feminist poetess Adrienne Rich, had once told her during a conversation, “It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.” Lorde insists: “Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating. . . . I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.” Skepticism or demands for evidence are not only a personal affront but an example of the oppressive system at work.
Earlier this year, this newspaper examined test scores and discovered that at more than 100 American colleges, at least one-third of seniors were incapable of making an argument or weighing evidence, among other tasks of critical thinking. Lorde’s influence would seem to match her popularity. -Jillian Melchior