Mea sententia

Are you someone who understands how useful conversations across divides can be, but is reluctant to engage because you feel unsafe or unprepared?

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Comment about Musk from a college classmate: "Musk’s comment in his interview by Seth Rogan: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”  Says all you need to know about him. "

Reply by another college classmate: "But see Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.

From the back cover, courtesy of Amazon.com:

Humans are obligate social creatures. We cannot survive alone as individuals. We only survive, both individually and as a species, to the extent that we create and maintain functioning collaborative social communities. For the purposes of this discussion, I will refer to these social entities collectively as societies.

A friend asked me why I had bothered to engage at length on social media with a self-identified ‘vaccine skeptic’ who had posted his vigorous opposition to any vaccine mandates, supporting his position with demonstrably incorrect information and references to poorly done (and even retracted) studies. My friend felt that my efforts were destined to fail and therefore pointless. When I asked what he meant by failure, he said “You’ll never convince someone like that they are wrong.”

I often see or participate in conversations where two or more morally decent individuals,  acting in good faith,  make different decisions or hold different opinions when faced with moral/ethical choices. In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religions, Jonathan Haidt offers a useful framework for understanding this. Cogitive psychologists have names this Moral Foundations Theory.

Haidt and colleagues posit that:

When people feel threatened, they are less likely to use careful, fact-based, rational thought and decision-making processes and tend to depend more on intuition, gut feelings, and 'vibes' to assess the situation and decide what to do. When one senses danger, prompt and immediate action is called for. This preference under threat for what Kahnemann and Tversky termed System 1 thinking over System 2 thinking has a good evolutionary survival benefit: when an unknown large animal with big teeth and claws suddenly appears, that is a lousy time to sit and think.

Each of us finds our own personal truth about what the world is like and how it works. All of us then tend to confuse our experience of reality with reality itself. (Sometimes referenced as the map versus the territory.) The narratives we create about our world and then operate from are good enough to have allowed our species to survive, but we all believe things that are comfortable and useful but not true. Extreme versions of this are the outlandish conspiracy theories: flat earth, 9/11 conspiracy, Covid vaccie makes peole magnetic.