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1/18 A thread about Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, by Chris Arnade.
The parallels btw it and Murray's Coming Apart, Sowell's Unconstrained Vision, Haidt's Righteous Mind, and Herman's The Cave and the Light, are unmistakable, & offer valuable lessons and guidance.
The parallels btw it and Murray's Coming Apart, Sowell's Unconstrained Vision, Haidt's Righteous Mind, and Herman's The Cave and the Light, are unmistakable, & offer valuable lessons and guidance.
2/ Teaser Spoiler:
The true nature of the partisan divide is very different from what we're told it is.
The true nature of the partisan divide is very different from what we're told it is.
3/ Arnade uses the terms Front Row and Back Row to describe two Americas according to the standard orthodoxies of rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, majority and minority, fancy neighborhoods and slums, whites and everybody else.
4/ Arnade distinguishes the Front Row from the Back Row according to the values and priorities through which each finds its meaning, purpose, and identity.
5/ The Front Row finds its identity in intelligence, education, credentials, and accomplishment, both monetary and cultural. It is mobile; ready, willing, able, and eager to pick up and move to a different part of the country in pursuit of what it values
6/ For the Back Row identity comes from relationships; family, friends, community, and neighborhood; the culture of the physical location in which it lives. In a word, home. In two words, social capital. To it, to pick up and move, as the Front Row does, is to lose one's identity
7/ The parallels:
The similarities between Arnade's descriptions of the Front Row and Back Row and Haidt's descriptions of the two predominant moral matrices and cognitive styles are too perfect to be a coincidence.
The similarities between Arnade's descriptions of the Front Row and Back Row and Haidt's descriptions of the two predominant moral matrices and cognitive styles are too perfect to be a coincidence.
8/ Arnade's Front Row and Haidt's WEIRD thinking one-foundation Righteous Mind are eerily the same. The same is true for Arnade's Back Row and Haidt's Holistic thinking all-foundation matrix. Two snips from Haidt:
9/ These same parallels exist between Arnade's Front Row and Back Row, and the two styles of thought Arthur Herman traces through practically the entirety of human history, for which uses the styles of thinking (but not the specific arguments) of Plato and Aristotle as shorthand:
10/ And finally, the parallels between Arnade's Front Row and Back Row, and Thomas Sowell's Unconstrained and Constrained Visions are also impossible to miss.
11/ Arnade, Haidt, Herman, Murray, and Sowell are like the characters in the fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant; each describing the same beast from his own unique perspective.
12/ The Lesson:
The biggest reason for the partisan divide is not WHAT we think - our viewpoints, opinions, or world views - it's HOW we think - the cognitive processes from which our viewpoints, opinions, and world views arise.
The biggest reason for the partisan divide is not WHAT we think - our viewpoints, opinions, or world views - it's HOW we think - the cognitive processes from which our viewpoints, opinions, and world views arise.
13/ Insofar as our cognitive processes create our realities for us, the two sides of the partisan divide exist in different realities.
In a way, parallel universes exist. We're living in one.
In a way, parallel universes exist. We're living in one.
14/ Both universes believe in values like liberty, equality, justice, and fairness, but because each universe employs its own cognitive style, they attach starkly different, even mutually exclusive, conceptual understandings to those words. https://theindependentwhig.com/2012/02/26/liberty-equality-justice-and-fairness-mean-different-things-in-different-moral-matrices/
15/ A great deal of political discord and animosity can be traced to our collective failure to grasp the fundamental truth of different cognitive styles.
16/ Because of that failure we have no tools through which to fathom where the other side is coming from, leaving us almost no cognitive alternative but to conclude that there's something wrong with them; that in some way they are malformed, damaged, broken, even evil.
17/ But there's good news. Recent research by Alexander Severson of Boise State university suggests that partisan animosity decreases when people understand that the other side was, in his words, "Born This Way." https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7qgcr/
18/END For this reason, IMHO, a top priority of any group whose goal is to build bridges across the partisan divide, or to increase intellectual heterodoxy, should be to teach that there's nothing innately wrong with the other side, but rather that we ALL are "Born This Way."
