How Our Groups and Practices Shape Our Reality

I've been struggling. I've been struggling to understand how it is that the reality of what happened at the capitol last Wednesday can be interpreted in different ways. I've been struggling with the fact that people I know seem to not care about truth or reality (or at least not publicly), because it gets in the way of their team winning. And I've been particularly struggling with how many who identify as Christian are leading proponents of different conspiracy theories and were leading participants in this violent insurrection.

When I think about all of this for too long, I feel sadness, I feel anger, and I feel a sense of despair. How did we get here? How will it get any better? What can I do about it?

One paradigm shifting book that reminds me why this is happening is called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, written by Jonathan Haidt in 2013. As a moral psychologist, he essentially argues what Thomas Cranmer believed: "what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies." Basically, we are primarily emotional creatures who have our own internal press secretaries that are there to find evidence that justify our line of thinking. To put it another way, "intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second."

Another core tenet of moral psychology is that this shared morality binds and blinds. It binds us to the collective group and blinds us to alternative moral worlds.

In his excellent Mockingbird conference talk in 2014, Haidt illustrates some of these ideas further. Speaking to the bizarre way that the same event can be interpreted completely differently, he says:

"reality is ambiguous and we find the evidence out there in the ambiguous world to support what we believe. 'Once I have justifications, I know I'm right and if you disagree with me, you are either stupid or disingenuous'...This is the acceleration of righteousness."

He goes on to say that our tendency to circle around sacred objects and principles ends up creating polarization where we think, "Our side is perfectly good. Their side is perfectly evil. Anyone who says otherwise, on our side, is a traitor." Sound familiar?

So, what's the solution here? One antidote is empathy. Seeing an issue from someone else's perspective. In one of his TED talks, he also argues for moral humility:

"...step out of the moral matrix. Try to see it as a struggle that is playing out in which everybody does think they are right and everybody at least has some reason, even if you disagree with them... for what they're doing. If you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility. To get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition."

Empathy. Humility. These are hard traits to come by, especially when our lives our more online that ever before. Where hot takes, rage, and de-humanization reigns. Where social media feeds and cable news networks are designed to confirm our biases, furthering our inability to understand and humanize those not in our group. And it's easy to point this out and call out how "they" are the problem.

However, I believe all of the work here starts with us, starts with me. I need to make sure I'm feeding my soul properly, spending as little time as possible on social media and being caught up in the "news of the day", and spending more time in the Word, in prayer, encouraging and being encouraged by one another, reading books, taking pauses, enjoying nature, and slowing down. To the degree I'm participating in these life-giving practices is the degree to which I'm training my soul to desire the kingdom, and walking in peace, in hope, and love for others. Please join me.

American Hyper-Instrospection

Ethan Watters, the author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, responds to a few questions from Adbusters. One question Ethan responds to is summarily stated "What is the root cause of the epidemic of mental illness we are currently experiencing? His response:

"If I had to put my money on one idea then it would be the American notion of the egocentric mind – the idea that you are the captain of your own destiny and that you should be able to chart your own path and find your own happiness and control your own destiny fundamentally without the need for others. I think that this idea in the West – and in America in particular – has led to a great deal of insecurity and a general loading of our psychopathology. I think that the human animal is much more of a group animal than the American idea of the mind suggests it to be."

Later on, he expresses the need for more community:

"I think that human beings cannot feel at ease mentally if they are disconnected from their sense of a role within a group. I think that the human mind is deeply permeable to the goals and expectations of the people around us, and if we don’t pay attention to that, if we think of ourselves as the captains of our own destiny, always able to pick ourselves up by our own individual bootstraps, then we are likely to experience that sort of postmodern insecurity that leads us to a certain form of American hyper-introspection – always looking inward."

Also, here's a brief video of Ethan explaining how we as Americans have incorrectly exported our ideas of mental illness to the rest of the world:

(via Roy)