Online Conversation | Hope and Healing for a Hurting Culture, with Jonathan Haidt and Peter Wehner

[Music] welcome to all of you who are joining us for today's online conversation with jonathan height and pete weiner on hope and healing in a hurting culture i'd like to also just thank our sponsors whose generosity has helped make this program possible including our friends at praxis circle doug and beth hemberger and quinn and nancy fox if you are new to the trinity forum we seek to provide a space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith and to offer programs like this online conversation to do so and to come to better know the author of the answers and one of the questions it seems that we all have to wrestle with is how to understand and respond to the deep divisions that have so poisoned relationships split families fractured our society and even undermine the practices of our democracy such that the secretary of state recently called domestic division our greatest national security vulnerability so how do we contend with the fear and the anger that we encounter both in our personal relationships and in the public square and how do we envision and encourage means of bringing hope and healing to a hurting culture both of our guests are public intellectuals who hold very different religious and political convictions they've both written both prolifically and sometimes provocatively on controversial issues and they've also developed a friendship over a shared commitment to the topic before us jonathan height is a social psychologist and a professor of ethical leadership at nyu's stern school of business in addition to his many scholarly publications he is the author of three major books two of which are new york times bestsellers including the happiness hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom the coddling of the american mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure and the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion he's been named a top 100 global thinker by foreign policy magazine one of the 65 world thinkers of the year by prospect magazine and his four ted talks have been viewed more than 7 million times joining him is pete wainer pete is a vice president and senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center as well as a columnist for the new york times and a contributing editor to the atlantic magazine he previously served served both as a presidential speechwriter and as the director of the office of strategic initiatives also known as strategery for president bush he is a widely published author whose writing has appeared not only regularly in the new york times but also in the wall street journal the washington post the financial times time magazine national affairs and christianity today among many others his several books include city of man religion and politics in a new era and his most recent work the death of politics he is also i am very proud to say a senior fellow of the trinity forum so jonathan and pete welcome thank you cherie thanks sheree it's great to be uh to be with you thanks for hosting this absolutely well it's great to have you both here and we will just dive right in so john you know there have always been divisions in the country anyone who can sort of go back and just think historically about not just the civil war but the deep divisions at the start of our nation's founding but you've argued that there's something different going on now that not only are our cleavages deep but they may also be starting to be somewhat different in nature more ideologically extreme but less coherent and perhaps a rising less out of a loyalty to a group or idea than simply an aversion to the other side what's going on um so i've been i've been concerned about political polarization and how how nasty things were getting uh and my original research was on how morality varies across cultures or nations and around 2004 i switched it over to looking at left and right which were becoming like different nations that lived in different worlds now of course if we could go back to those days when things worked so much better than they do today i think i would uh but things have gotten a lot worse since then and i'm sure we'll get into this there's many reasons why but the number one reason i think the number one reason why things just got so weird in the 2010s and not just for america but for a lot of western democracies i believe is changes in the eco system of media where for a brief period of time we had broadcasting we have to all remember late 20th century was the anomaly before then newspapers were partisan and nasty and had low standards so the mid to late 20th century is the anomaly broadcasting and then you get narrow casting with cable tv and fox news in particular has a big impact on the republicans and then you get the internet and now you've got anybody can confirm any conspiracies conspiracy they want to confirm you just google it you'll find evidence and then you get social media and the key thing that i've been focusing on is the way that social media changed between 2009 and 2011 before then it wasn't very polarizing it was just you know here are my friends here are my the bands that i like but when facebook puts on the like button twitter puts on the retweet button and then they copy each other's innovations now suddenly both platforms are really engaging and they use algorithms based on that engagement to optimize the news feeds for engagement which is typically anger and so everything gets weird in the 2010s because social media connects us up a lot which you'd think is good historically it's good to be connected but it connects us in a bizarre way that has never happened before which is whatever we say is being raided by strangers and we are now not just like talking to each other we're talking to the strangers who are raiding us and so this is like like changing the gravitational force of the universe like everything got weird after 2012. so that's my opening piece about why this time is different from any other time yes so we definitely want to get into social media soon but pete one of the things i wanted to ask you is it increasingly it seems like not along with our polarization we're not only kind of divided over what is right or wrong but increasingly over what is true or false uh why are we having such a hard time sorting out what has actually happened and then related i'd sort of love for you to comment on the fact that you know our democratic pluralism helps us to kind of coexist with differences about right and wrong but what happens when we the people can't figure out true or false yeah um to answer your last question first a lot of bad stuff happens i mean i think in the end if you have an epistemic crisis if you can't agree on what's true and false you don't have a common set of facts common understanding of reality self-government gets very very difficult because persuasion becomes impossible terms let me comment very quickly on what what john said and then also this epistemic crisis because i completely agree with him i should say that i probably learned more from john on a variety of issues over the last 10 years than anybody both in terms of of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning but but also how human psychology works which has really helped me both in politics and and honestly in my conversations and faith is as well in addition to the social media which which i think has has added a kind of jet fuel to to all of these things you know there the soil was in a sense prepared for some of this bad stuff to happen so a lot of these trends polarization has been in motion for many decades we've had geographic sorting we've had the two parties sorting so you know when i was growing up in the 1980s when when i was being formed politically you had liberal republicans like chuck percy and bob hackwood mark hatfield and you're conservative democrats like joe lieberman daniel patrick moynihan southern democrats you don't have that anymore so that so the two parties began to polarize um and that that was a a problem and then you have a an alienation a loss of authority an isolation um which is deep i think philosophical currents that explain that and so in a way the soil was ready for some of these i would say more pernicious you know seeds to to to take root you know about the epidemic crisis and and i've had these conversations with people today that are just different than they were political conversations 15 or 20 years ago when you know when we worked together at empower america in the 1990s i would say some of it is really located in what what john had mentioned which is conspiracy theories have always existed as you alluded to earlier but there is now the capacity for people to link to different sources and create a community online which lives in a different epistemic universe and so you can have conversations with people on any number of issues and they will send you links to things like their conspiracy websites you know that may that may link to it but they feel like they have the force of authority and the other thing i would say is there is this phenomenon called affective polarization which is what now binds people to their political tribes their religious tribes is not necessarily or primarily a a feeling of affirmation for their side as much as a distrust alienation and hatred for the other side and so there's a demonization that goes on a dehumanization that goes on in the past there would be a sense of look we disagree on issues but it wasn't an indictment of a person in terms of their character and and that has happened and we now have the kind of instruments to uh fortify those those uh those impressions it's a complicated issue john you've written a lot about effective polarization what is driving the demonization over the disagreement yeah so it's important to note that americans are not getting more polarized in terms of their attitudes about issues we're not really further apart um the polarization is called affective or emotional it's the degree to which we hate each other as pete was saying and that's really important to keep your eye on because when you really hate someone you will believe anything that casts them in a bad light and you don't want to check sources you know and this has made us uniquely vulnerable to russian manipulation or anybody else because it turns out the russians you know they put some fake stuff in but they didn't have to put fake stuff in and it turns out they didn't need the bots researched at mit a big study showed that basically americans hated each other so much by 2016 that whatever ammunition was put in and let's remember the power of video that's also new the fact that as pete said you know it's not just like a mimeographed sheet it's like a video of you know a person explaining the conspiracy theory um so the the affect of polarization the hatred uh is is way up and that drives everything else and there are a couple of additional reasons for this increase in hatred in addition to the media changes that we were talking about um uh there's like so many of them it's actually a really fun time to be a social scientist and a scary time to be an american but um the many people point to the loss of a common enemy that's the best way to unify people is to have pearl harbor be attacked uh or 9 11. um uh but you know throughout the 20th century we had very clear enemies and and in the 90s thank god that ended but uh without a common enemy things kind of come apart um there are rising believe it or not rising education is one of the causes political scientists say because people with a college degree are much more involved in symbolic uh issues working class people are they're more concerned about bread and butter issues they're not going to get all involved in the nuclear freeze you know when i was in college that was the big issue or um you know things that don't directly concern their their interest so we have a more educated public on uh on a more outrage-inducing media platform without any common enemy we fight we we we're always going to do the good evil game and we do it against each other rather than aimed externally um there's also rising diversity uh we had very low diversity very low immigration for much of the 20th century and while diversity is great for the economy and for the creativity of of industry um it it does reduce social capital and trust unless managed very very well and we've not uh often managed it very very well so there's all these reasons that are sort of like there's a historical trend towards towards mutual dislike but it's really amplified by so many other features and again they all come to a head in the 2010s you know people you look like you're about to jump in there no no go ahead okay so a question for you pete and that is about um our identities too in that you know it seems like our politics are are growing much more extreme and our identities are growing more political and wanted to ask you about that in that actually i think it was a colleague of jonathan's who did a study recently that uh posited that it used to be kind of the you know the foundations of our identity the unmoved movers were you know our religion our faith um our identity um and those are changing and actually kind of giving way uh such that politics is what moves that now what has sort of thinned out um our non-political identities such that they are now increasingly subsumed by the political yeah it's a great question and you expressed it well um i mean i do believe that there has been an attenuation of these other identity forming institutions uh in people's lives there are a lot of them um faith is is one of them it's not it's not the uh the only one um i think part of that is is a broader um trend of mistrust toward institutions and a movement toward radical extreme individualism and that that's a philosophical current that's been in motion really in the middle part of the 20th century and gained and gained a lot of uh of momentum particularly in the in the mid and late 60s but it went beyond that it wasn't a trend by the way that was without benefits i mean there were some tremendous progress and some tremendous injustices that were corrected by this movement but i think it went it went too far so people became isolated and institutions uh don't have the force the shaping influence that they used to have you also have the fact that a lot of people that run institutions whether they're political or or faith or other uh view them um as our friend evolving is talked about as performative rather than formative so you have people who are becoming part of institutions and they don't see their task as soul shaping they see it as platforms from which they they perform so i think that has happened and at the same time politics has come in and it has become much more attached to people's identity you both of you may have had this experience but you know cindy and i were talking my wife cindy and i were talking the other day about uh how these political debates or conversations are and when you have differences today excuse me on political issues they are not um you debate simply on issues you get a sense very early with a lot of people that they feel that their identity is under attack that if if you have a difference with them on um on any number of issues it's not the issues there's there's a lot that's going on underneath that and that's very tricky because john knows it's much better than i but if you as an individual feel like your core identity is being attacked by somebody or challenged by somebody the armor goes up the swords figurative swords are drawn and it's not going to end well unless one of the people involved in that conversation has the capacity to steer it in a more uh in a more constructive way i know head on to that a bit yes please um so yeah i agree with everything pete said and that is another feature that political scientists have called attention to in the 2010s is the increase to which politics is identity and performance i think keep those two in mind that's very very important um ezra klein in his book why were polarized he spoke to a lot of political scientists that's really the theme of the book is that politics has become identity okay now i want to add on what pete was saying some more about the psychology of religion so the subtitle in my book is why good people are divided by politics and religion because i trace both back to our our original human nature and the evolutionary processes that made us good at being in groups and competing with other groups and that's true for both politics and religion i'm very pleased that even though i'm a jewish atheist and i say so in the book i've been invited to speak at a lot of christian colleges and uh and organizations and in preparing to speak at cccu i think it was the council of christian colleges and universities i finally looked up that quote that i'd heard from pascal there is a god-shaped hole in the heart of each man but having written a book on great truths i know you can't take the quote that you've heard especially if it's from a foreign language it's probably not exactly right so here's what pascal actually wrote which is even more helpful he said uh there was once in man a true happiness of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace this he tries in vain to fill with everything around him though none can help since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object in other words by god himself so substantively it's the same thing but it gives you a much bigger or richer feeling of people trying like hungry trying to pull something in there they have an emptiness and i think what we're seeing as christianity has receded uh from not just public life but you know church worship church going um then you know the numbers for religion in america uh you know are down for most things and by far the fastest rising one is spiritual but not religious well if you're spiritual but not religious you're probably going to get involved with all kinds of political campaigns to fight injustice or whatever you think but um this as religion has left more people has receded from people's lives they're hungrier as i see it politics has really taken the place and we can see that in the cultish nature uh on the right the a person you know a cult of personality in the united states i mean this is really not appropriate the way that i think uh donald trump played that role sort of uh on the right and in my world in universities and and on the left we have wokeness or intersectionality or other things john mcwhorter and many others have been writing about how uh this new political movement on the left has all the signs not just of religion but of christianity specifically of christian worship and uh uh you know original sin so anyway i think that we to understand politics we need to understand religion uh and to understand the changes in american christianity we need to understand politics so peter i'm curious about that this is something you and i have talked about before and that you know one of the things that is so perplexing is that uh it's among many christians that there also seems to be a susceptibility to conspiracy theory um you know there was a recent study that came out that said that uh evangelicals which we would consider ourselves ones were the most susceptible group to the cue conspiracy so why why is it that um christians who presumably you know god has entered that god-shaped vacuum in their heart would be susceptible to conspiracies that uh others would not be or not into that to the same degree yeah it's um it's a puzzling question it's a troubling one as as a person of uh as i am of of the of the christian faith to see that uh you know um i was on a recent conversation with a with a scholar who was talking about how his conspiracy theories have um existed throughout christianity and really i mean conspiracy theories are a part of human life really since its beginning but within christianity too and you saw manifestations of it in the 20th century with with various sort of biblical prophecy books that that came out and a sense that for people of the christian faith that there's something beyond and behind what we see before us because as a person of the christian faith uh there's there's this life in this world but there are principalities and powers to use a christian term and i think part of what's happened is that that idea of principalities and powers has gotten co-opted and uh and and uh hijacked in political political causes it's quite troubling i mean a good friend of mine francis collins at the national institutes of health and francis is one of the great scientific minds alive today helped decode the human genome map the human genome and as a person of the christian faith has publicly spoken about this concern that he has among christians in the context of covet 19 and and in vaccines i'll just say i'm a broader point um too sheree which is the degree to which in my estimation faith has been subordinated to politics is a very troubling thing i mean we all struggle with this and i do too but i think i thought when i began my christian journey that you know imperfectly faith would become the prism through which we would interpret life and human relationships um and again we are we're falling it's a broken world we all struggle with that the degree to which it's flipped and that the identity of christians is political and people then use faith as a kind of weapon in that war that political war they begin to proof text the bible and even justify certain a kind of savagery in politics and and they use it for for faith it's it's a really really troubling thing and i think one of the negative ramifications of that not the only one is you're seeing a huge generational disaster um with with younger christians who are seeing what i refer to as a kind of moral freak show that's unfolding and this has caused them to move away not simply from their elders um but often from the church itself and the irony here is that of course as a person of the christian faith jesus said you'll know the truth and the truth shall set you free and the holy spirit is supposed to lead you into all truth so you would think of all the people out there would be christians above all that would care most for truth now that we may get into this this raises the question how you ascertain truth but as a concept that is the notion of what is really and truly the way things are and how do you apprehend it and and how do you come to know it that is a a a a an issue that should be at the forefront for christians and i'm afraid we've gotten a reverse yes yeah uh so i did i didn't know that evangelicals are right now the most prone to uh to conspir to the q anon conspiracy it makes sense but i think we can actually understand that using just the tools we've already brought brought up in this conversation so we've already established that politics has become much more about identity and that christianity is fading out of its prime position that it had throughout the 20th century uh the protestant christianity that you know that might you know that my my parents kind of you know the goal of of jews assimilating was to assimilate to sort of the wasp world and my my wife is her parents are from korea and they too you know the korean immigrants also aspired muslim were protestant but they aspired to this sort of american wasp ideal and as that's been declining i think many christians feel as though it's not just like oh they're being replaced they feel actively attacked they feel actively told you know it began with like no you can't have prayer in school uh you can't have a christmas tree or a you know a creche on the on the town green um so those were symbolic things that go back to the 60s and this and that wave of liberalism the supreme court in 1960s um i think with the the sort of the rise of uh the rise of this new left especially in the last 10 years that's been very aggressive on a lot of issues and they often see christians as the enemy largely over lgbt policies but um i think that we are entering a period in which christians at least those those who are drawn to the q a i think they feel that they are actively being attacked and i just i was sent just this morning i have a number of conservative friends who send me things i think in the hope of converting me over to their their view about politics and trump but uh one of them just sent me this morning an essay by pascal emmanuel gobery in the journal of american greatness and here's the key line he says when i look out at the landscape of america today and look at the problems that conceivably could be addressed by policy here's what i see a blood blood-sucking parasitic elite that despises its fellow countrymen despises its nation despises itself and is either passively destroying america by sucking the economic life out of it or actively destroying it by undermining every single value that once made america great so there's this sense and this is almost the definition of populism that the elites are the problem those damned elites and so this is a right this is a right populist view and he goes on to say the you know includes the the university professors and the uh you know the journalists the liberal elite and of course if you talk to the bernie sanders left it would be the corporate elites so everybody's got these elites that are a problem but i think that could help us understand why uh evangelical christians in particular feel attacked feel that their identity is attacked and therefore are drawn to a conspiracy theory that explains who the bad guys are and shows them how to fight back yeah well let's talk about truth-telling for uh just a second in that one of the things you have both written about uh it's an interesting phrase you've both written about epis uh epistemological modesty or epistemic humility and wanted to ask you about that a little bit in that it sounds a little bit like squishiness or relativism like you know who's to say how can you know and yet both of you are well known for at times rather fiercely articulating a point of view so would love to ask you know what is uh epistemological modesty and um and pete i'd also love to just sort of start with you and ask how in your mind it relates to faithful ways of knowing yeah it's um i would say epistemological modesty at least in my understanding of it um let me let me actually uh refer to it to a person um who's a very close friend of mine steve steve haner steve was a very key figure in my christian pilgrimage he was youth pastor minister at a university presbyterian church as i was beginning my christian journey and um and steve was really at every key moment in my life was there for me um in important moments and through through real periods of hardship and grief too uh he became president of intervarsity was there for 13 years and then became president of columbia seminary steve died in 2015 uh pancreatic cancer and in the last conversation this was a wonderful conversation i have 11 pages of notes from it with with him and cheryl steve said that he believed in objective truth but he held lightly to his ability to perceive truth um and and and cheryl said that she had grown up in a period in which uh there was a sense of being right was was uh what mattered most uh and that uh we had to be open to being wrong and steve said uh we need to make room for other perspectives we need to make room for others at the table so the way i understand this is that there is an objective truth but there's a subjective means all of to that pursuit of truth and none of us uh and i think this is a biblical concept by the way you know and paul writes in corinthians that we see through a glass darkly but then face to face and he indeed christian theology would say that every part of of us as human beings has been touched by some degree of corruption so none of us can see truth as it completely and fully is the best that we can do the best we can do is to see slivers of truth or part of truth but what's essential is to have people in your life that can help you to see what you would otherwise not see i mean we all have blind spots um and we all have a certain life experience family of origins countries that we come from race gender all of those things shape us and they shape the way we perceive things and i think our problem is and again i struggle with this as much as anybody it's the notion that the way i perceive things is the way they are the way other people perceive them is not now you're right taken to its extreme this can become you know need to refer to perspectivism in the crude version it would be this notion that there's no objective truth everything depends on perspective you can basically create whatever script you want i'm certainly not there but and this is really where john has helped me over the last you know decade or so which is to have people in your life and they have to be people that have standing in your life that you trust that can help you to see things you wouldn't otherwise see and the last thing i'll say about this shari is part of this is just how do you view the enterprise itself right cs lewis and owen barfield lewis writes and surprised by joy about their friendship and lewis referred to first and second friends for him martha greaves was the first friend that's your alter ego you start the sentence your friend can complete it owen barfield was a very different person second friend and and lewis described it as a person where y'all this person is the alter ego you read all the same books but they draw all the wrong conclusions from the books but they had a deep 40-year friendship it's actually i think one of his earliest dedications in the book was to owen barfield who he said was my first and greatest teacher and louis describes the conversations they had he said we would go out at hammer and tong late into the night you could feel the weight of the power of the blows of the other person but over time there developed this mutual admiration and affection and barfield said that lewis and he through all of those debates never debated for victory they debated for truth right that's a huge difference we debate most of time for victory we think i got to defend my position and i'm going to go at anybody who's who's against it rather than thinking what does that person see that maybe i need to hear maybe they won't fundamentally change my view but maybe i'll understand them differently maybe their hierarchy of values is different than mine and that's why they end up at a different different different position but john knows more about this stuff than i do oh that's fascinating because there's a uh there's a concept of the jewish tradition which is based very much on argumentation the talmudic tradition is is scholars arguing and they have a phrase i forget what it is in hebrew but it translates to arguments for the sake of heaven and so they recognize that through argumentation is in the right circumstances and again by religious scholars who are bound together and their daughters probably married into each other's families and all of that stuff if you have the right relationships then arguments get you closer to divine truth uh but they're certainly cognizant that most arguments are not like that and i forget what the other term is but arguments for the sake of heaven i think is a good really a useful term here um sherry's original uh uh uh question was uh about whether we're sort of both moderates or centrists or or oh it's hysterologically humble um but yet you know opinionated or we make big arguments uh so i think that the key so the key psychology here that uh um is now widely talked about is as pete mentioned confirmation bias motivated reasoning and once you recognize that we all do it we all do it uh automatically and passionately then you realize okay what's the cure for that and nobody has ever found a kind of training that makes people stop doing that the only cure for it is other people who have a different confirmation bias and if you're in the right relationship with them and pete was describing those relationships then you make progress toward towards heaven as it were and so thinking this way has really helped me understand what it means to be a centrist i consider myself a centrist a centrist democrat i would say um because you know people think oh central's like oh is it you know so we're gonna you know half condemn nazis or we're gonna you know be in the middle on on everything no it's not about it's not about like i'm in the middle of the two things it's a realization that when you are a member of a team that's passionate you're almost guaranteed to not find truth those epistemic correction mechanisms are not working in in your passionate team and david brooks a you know really a mutual friend and inspiration for both me and pete uh he had a great column i copied this was years ago but he was oh he was being interviewed that's it he was being interviewed and the person calls him a moderate in the moderate middle and he says uh he wants to take issue with that he says i'm a moderate but i'm not in the middle and uh and what i mean by that i think being moderate is seeing politics as a competition between partial truths and like in this era we have competition between security and freedom between achievement and equality between mobility and cohesion and both sides have a piece of the truth and often you want to be radical on both ends and try to balance so it's all about the balance anyway this is a modern restatement of jon stewart mill in on liberty chapter two um where you know you you have to have that competition of perspectives and it doesn't mean you always come out in the middle but you've got to consider multiple perspectives so john earlier you talked a little bit about social media and i think at one point in a talk somewhere you said that if you were to try to develop a system to destroy democracy you really could not do better than twitter but both of you are on twitter both of you are kind of in the social media world so i wanted to ask you both about the effects of social media but also more practically how you both managed to swim in the waters without being poisoned and what those of us listening might be able to learn from that okay i'll i'll start this time because i've been writing about this uh recently um and you know so what i meant by that is i i've long been looking at american democracy or any country as especially any multi-ethnic democracy um with a lot of diversity uh again there are benefits to it but it's harder to cohere so you have to look at what are the centripetal forces pulling you in and what are the centrifugal forces blowing you out and when you have three television networks and only three that's a really strong centripetal force as is having a common enemy but when you have micro casting and all that stuff you know uh then those are centrifugal forces uh and i i came to see that um twitter and facebook after 2012 they built what tobias wrote stockwell calls an outrage machine an outrage platform um that they were huge enhancers of centrifugal forces so that's what i meant by that um now how do you of course it does a lot of good too let's never forget you know facebook creates enormous value for small businesses for people uh for people who love cat videos whatever um and twitter is it is enormously effective as a way to find information quickly i mean twitter really does do a lot of good things uh but but it's one of the nastier platforms for um and so i don't know i try to be very uh positive i try to be helpful um i mostly tweet about things that i think will be helpful to people especially understanding the other side um and uh you know when when people attack you or criticize you for the most part just don't do anything because it'll go away in a few days um pete what are your thoughts how do you how do you stay sane or whatever yeah well i i think the first thing i'd say is that i i think some people would say that i i've not uh that i haven't been poisoned by by social media and the politics of this age um i mean just to get my cards on the table i was i've been a critic of donald trump really for five years actually 10 years if you go back to the birther controversy and my criticisms have been quite tough and i have a lot of friends people in the republican party um who feel like i've been unfair uh and and haven't shown sort of grace or understanding and i take those criticisms um critiques seriously um you know i looking back i feel like what i've said about president trump uh i'm not sure right now and i'd say it's probably events of in my estimation i could have confirmed what my concerns were but i'm sure i've gone over the line uh on twitter and and uh and elsewhere so i'm not i'm not immune to it for sure to the degree that i've kept from going further into it and i have cried um i'd say that there's there are several things one is just a very simple i guess tactical issue which is if i wonder about whether i should send a tweet i try and tell myself i'm gonna wait five minutes i think every time i've done that i think i've deleted the tweet maybe they're one or two occasions where i where i have not um but uh again john being the social psychologist knows it's better than i but everybody knows experientially if you're on twitter and you you're human you read certain things and you get sort of angry or something is triggered in you and so cortisol may go through and your first reaction is to is to strike back and you just have to be aware that that's happening and you just have to try and you know self-monitor the second thing is i do try and think and i do this in my writings too again not nearly as well as i should um i try and think about people who might whom i admire and think what would they think about what i'm saying um you know my wife is one of them cindy steve was one somebody like john is or or or mark laverton i mean they're different people in different areas of my life that i think i admire these people and what would they think about what i said and that can be a corrective as uh um as as well but it's easy to get to get pulled into this you know i i'll just tell an anecdote um with joe klein and you'll remember sheree joe as a friend of mine in the 1990s joe was at that time a journalist for newsweek and we were close friends um and had mutual affection make a long story short when i went into the bush administration um joe thought i went over to the dark side he was a critic of the bush administration i thought he was extremely unfair in his criticisms of bush and the administration when i got out he and i uh had our debates publicly and you can just google joe klein and pete weiner and you can see how how it went um i justified my back and forth with joe as i said look in my estimation he threw the first punch you have to defend yourself that's the way it goes you know i'm not going to be patsy here i'm not going to be passive i've got an argument to make and i'm going to make it but it didn't sit quite right with me um and i think cindy because she knows me best knew that anyway i made an overture to joe didn't go anywhere but then in 2015 i reached out to him on twitter i mean on on email to try and get together and we had a nice conversation actually a very nice back and forth so the timing turned out to be right remember this is years after the bush administration had left so we had breakfast at the jefferson where we're wherever i had had uh had breakfast and i guess fittingly joe and i came to the hotel from different sides of the street and almost before a word was said we embraced and we had this really lovely breakfast and we reconnected the reason i tell that story is a couple of reasons one is i'm not immune to these feelings and when political conflict can cause you to have strong reactions and secondly to reconnect with people or to stay connected with people in an in political environment like this is hard work and it requires intentionality uh and it requires a longing to want to connect probably some degree of grace and understanding and a sense of what's my role in this not just you know these are my bill of indictments against the other person what they've done against me well we're going to turn to questions from our viewers in just a second but i really don't want to do that before we address one of the most important questions which is we've talked a lot about some of the centrifugal forces kind of pulling us apart and there are a lot of people hurting a lot of people who have experienced um you know eroded or broken relationships as a result of conflict and difference and would love to hear from both of you and john maybe we can start with you about how we both individually but also within the institutions and communities that we are in can be agents of of hope and healing i'm sure i'd be very glad to talk about that um one of the one of the insights that i got from reading conservative writers is the emphasis on low and mid-level institutions you know people on the left tend to focus just on like there's the federal government and then there's individual activists and you know the french revolution they tried to wipe out everything in between but those are the things that make for a good civil society and so i think right now um this the culture war the politics that have so invaded college campuses they've been there all along but they really blew up in 2015. i wrote an essay the coddling of the american mind with greg lukianov in 2015 about these things they've now flooded into companies uh into high schools even middle schools and i think all of these institutions used to be and can be again places where people have a job to do they're there for a purpose and they can do that alongside people who have a different political identity but when you turn when you make everything be about political identity as it's now happening a lot of schools schools commit to anti-racism now it's great to be against racism but they mean the particular ideology of ibrahim kennedy which is all everything is focused on you know conflict between groups um so i think we need to find ways to address racism that don't polarize people we need to find ways in which employees can have voice in their companies but yet they don't bring in all of their personal political agendas and demand that leadership uh you know acknowledge their values uh so we have to realize we are in danger of really blowing apart here and um you know congress is almost unfixable well no there are some important things we can do for congress especially changing primary elections that's the most important single thing i think um but you know outside of congressional reform i think most of us can take action in in our the places our places of work or our schools or churches synagogues and you know pete's story i think was really enlightening that it was a spontaneous thing that you guys felt like embracing and uh that often happens we you know there's a conflict with someone but part of us wants to make up or or will readily accept an overture and so the best piece of advice i can give is be the first one to make that overture in every argument the other person is right about something they might not be right about the thing that you're centrally focused on but we're always essentially focused on slightly different things so if you can acknowledge you know i i was pretty harsh with you and i i think you know when you said x i i think you're actually right about that it's amazing what happens when you acknowledge that the person is partially right by the power of reciprocity they will often come right back and say yeah you know i i reacted i was just you know spur of the moment i was i was angry and i'm sorry and that you were right about so um you know humans are are tribal we easily are provoked into conflict but part of being tribal is also really good at reconciliation burying the hatchet um so be the first one to make the first move pete yeah i mean i would echo what what what john said um i mean there are different arenas i suppose one has to think about um you know matters leadership matters including political leadership and um richard reeves at brookings institution it said something a couple weeks ago uh to me and some others which is positive norms uh trickle down and sort of negative ones so i you know i think that matters i think there are some policies that can matter that john um has talked about national service which i think is is a very useful way to to try and get get people together but let me focus in on really what your question was which is um just in an individual uh in individual lives um and and how how that can how that can happen um one is i would say um asking other people with whom you have disagreements if you ask them questions just to try and understand where where they're coming from and the second thing is the ability to try and describe why people have different views of let me give an illustration with a story there's a conservative national talk show host that i've known for several years and we were at odds uh because of my position on trump versus his and i had written a pieces from the new york times so this is 2017 when james comey had been fired and i'd written a piece in the times and he wasn't happy with with it and we started an email exchange and you probably have had this experience where you're like in the third email exchange and the temperature's going up and you can just feel the energy and so he at this point he was starting to make kind of personal accusations against me and probably 15 years ago i would have written a 10 page point by point rebuttal uh sheree will remember from those days which i'm capable of doing that and i decided not not to do it instead one of the things i did is i said so and so i'm not going to answer these charges unless you really want me to let me try and explain to you how i think you're seeing the world and let me explain how i'm saying it and i did the best job that i could to give a fair-minded appraisal of what he was feeling and what i was feeling and the values that he was putting on certain things for him it was a loyalty and for me it was intellectual honesty and i said i think that explains why we're sort of ships passing in the night but the interesting thing was when he wrote me back as i read your note a couple of times and it was like a light bulb going on and they said i remember this line i said you're right i'm not interested in an objectivity i'm an advocate so we we so we had a very good exchange so fast forward this must have been a year later it was about a year later i was driving down the gw parkway here in in the dc area going to work uh and on a show he was talking about the parkland shooting and you'll remember that there were some of the high school students that led gun control initiatives and this person is a very right wing audience while i was driving in i heard him say to his audience look i completely agree with you on the second amendment absolutely put poor those arguments but don't go after those high school students they've been through a trauma and i remember the line he used he said i have socks as old as some of these students so when i got to the office i wrote him a note and i said look i just happened to be catching your show and i just wanted to express my gratitude for you to try and tell your audience they can believe what they want but to back off on the personal attacks and he wrote me back a nice note he said essentially i just want you to know that that voice you were listening to on the radio wasn't just my voice it was yours too and that was an illustration to me of how we were able to stay in relationship it had the capacity to go off the rails and it's not just that he's able to hear my voice it's that i'm able to hear his voice so i understand his views much better than i would otherwise do but these take time um but i think they're worth the time the question is as a country is how do you scale that up um and there are in organizations like braver angels that david blankenhorn runs which is a superb organization which teaches people how to have conversation with disagreements um but um but the personal is really where this stuff happens most agree so we're going to turn to questions from our viewers and i see that we have quite a few over a hundred that have already come in so uh we won't be able to get to all of those of course and for those of you watching as alyssa said you can not only ask a question but you can also like a question and that helps us have an idea of what some of the most popular questions would be one of the first questions i'll ask comes from jonathan canary and he says alan jacobs writes in his book how to think that it is impossible to think for oneself and if it were possible it would not be desirable we always think in relationship and community with others do you believe this is true and if so are there specific choices we can make as persons or leaders to promote better thinking with others uh jonathan i'll toss that one to you first oh yeah thank you for that nice softball i'll i'll say i'll take a swing at it um so i mean i i don't think it's literally true we're we are capable of thinking by ourselves but i think the gist of it the idea is that we do our best thinking or our deepest thinking or the thinking that's most likely to lead to growth and and you know pete and i both told stories about about that about how we grew from from such encounters um the there's a lot of interesting work in psychology on how reasoning like human reasoning is really we're really bad at syllogisms we get a lot of things wrong it it doesn't it's not a you know evolution didn't do a very good job of giving us uh reasoning it seems unless you see reasoning and language as having evolved to basically help us manipulate others and interact with others while guarding our reputation and doing impression management and so um and so there's a hugo mercier and dan sperber are two that have what they call the uh the argumentative theory of reasoning that we evolved reasoning in order to argue um and do social manipulation and so if you think about it that way then yes you better pick a good community as we've already said if you have a community of religious scholars or uh something i've always been impressed with when i go to washington dc is there's a whole community of people let you know left and right they all know each other they respect each other uh you know so i i love that about washington uh that's a i think there's a healthy policy community there um even if congress is not healthy the the intellectuals i think uh often are uh so i think the alan jacobs quote is right in that way find a good community find a place with good norms uh and uh this is why again twitter and other things are so damaging is that they actually they bring up the worst of our interactions with each other uh rather than helping us be better than we otherwise would be so pete feel free to comment on that but i'm also going to toss another question out which sort of pertains to some of your last answers this comes from michael murray and he asked what's involved in building relationships that are strong enough to deal with intense differences that's a great that's a great question i just pick up on on the first question i'll only say i'm a huge fan of alan jacobs and how to think which is a thin book is a really good one and so is his book the narnian which talks about the the inklings and and some of what we're talking about here obviously i mentioned owen barfield and lewis who are part of the inklings there's a lot to learn from from that from that uh that community what about building relationships that that can survive intense um disagreements um i i guess i would say you know several things um one is sometimes you find out in in intense political times just how deep those relationships go um and um you know in in my experience if if the relationship is built primarily or almost exclusively on politics then it's just harder but then i'm not quite sure what the what the relationship is i i don't i don't mean to imply that those relationships aren't important or meaningful but if that's all that it's built on then it's kind of more on shifting shifting sand i would guess in both of your experiences there are just relationships with people who have traveled the journey with you who have been with you in times of joy in times of sorrow and times of grief uh and who have an interest in vested interest in you because they care for you and they and they love you um just a bit you know back to to to a story about steve hayner somebody makes that long story short at one point steve and i had what i thought was going to be a difference on a political matter and i wrote steve because i was worried about it he wrote me back and he said pete i can't imagine there's any issue i would ever not love you uh over and uh he said you know my relationship with you is not based on those other things it's based on something else so if you have a relationship like that it'll it'll survive political differences but there's no question that in this time we've learned from adam kinzinger a very poor poignant um story uh about his family 11 members of his family extended family sort of disowning him because of his position on donald you know donald trump um when that happens you know there are different ways to do it one is you can try and listen to the other people and engage them and as john was saying what do you think you know i have wrong or maybe i made a mistake here or it may be that you just have to bracket it and say look this is you know relationships have seasons just like like people and uh this is just not the season to to uh to deal with that uh but in some of the relationships that i've had where there have been political differences the thing underneath often or several that i'm thinking of is they're based on on our faith in common faith and i as a christian believe my you know my faith is more important than my politics i think they're both they're both very uh very important but look even when you have strong relationships and you're an intense time and you care passionately about certain issues um it puts pressure and there are times in which i'm sure i have friends very close friends that look at me and probably literally or at least figuratively want to shake me and say don't you see what you're missing and don't you see that you're aiding the enemy and why do you have to say what you're saying and i understand that i mean they care about these issues they're important um and and they want me to see it too because they think i'm wrong so it's a complicated matter we've had a couple questions come in i'm looking at both ones from randall paul and deborah christensen who kind of go about it the other way to ask how do we debate the most important issues of the day you know especially issues on which there are uh irreconcilable ideals that cannot honestly be compromised involved and how do we do it in a with civility in the midst of such a highly polarized and hyperbolic environment john you want to take first crack at that yeah sure yeah and i guess we should probably also try to keep i'll try to keep things very short because we have a lot of questions uh to get through um i would just say that uh the older ideal of let's all get together and talk um or you know within a company a lot of companies have an all hands meeting let's you know i'll talk you encourage people oh you know speak up uh i think that's no longer really possible or advisable um because people come to anything thinking what are they going to tweet or post and the line between what we're doing here in our company or our school and my life on social media there's no longer there's not a lot of a wall between them so i think that pete used before the phrase performative performative politics uh especially for young people who grew up with social media everything is performance and so there's really no point in having a debate or discussion with a lot of people because it's going to turn into this performance and people can't be honest so you have to have very small very small groups and a commitment that nobody's going to record this or nobody's going to report it out it's very hard the more we are tied together the harder it is to talk unfortunately i'll just say 30 seconds i'm sorry i'm long-winded too but or i'm long-winded but first there's a long now foundation and before the debates what's required is that each person is debating has to express the view of the other person in a sufficiently fair-minded way that that other person says yeah you got my views so that's a very good exercise the second is simply to be able to identify what the differences are and name them not necessarily reconcile them but say this is where our points of departure are and the third is that there has to be some kind of explicit or more implicit understanding that you can hold a different view and still be a good person uh and often the debates don't really you don't send that signal to others [Music] so the next question comes from maggie connolly and maggie says i am a student currently at middlebury university and i'm also in the middle of your book jonathan the coddling of the american mind in which you discuss an incident that took place at my school i find your book to be extremely insightful to my current environment what is your best advice for a student like me in the heat of it who seeks to find truth and fight against extremism but also fears social alienation yes that is exactly what the cuddling the american mind is about i gave a talk at middlebury uh middlebury had one of the major blow uh that was widely reported but the the the mood is very similar at a lot of america's top liberal arts colleges um and so what i would say is uh if you are not part of the dominant political group or even if you are but you see that there are issues or difficulties um i would say don't just keep your head down and say nothing um i heard one one student said her motto is silence is safer just don't say anything don't let that be your motto um but if you if you speak to people privately once again be be careful about a public setting where everyone else is performing or you could be strung up as a witch but um speak to people privately you'll find that people are actually much more open and nuanced in their thinking one-on-one than they are when they're performing so be very wary of that and seek out um you know well if you're on the on the right you're you can't avoid talking lots of people on the left but if you're on the left seek out the smaller number of people uh on the right because they're the ones that are going to help you grow it's those differences that help you grow thanks john so there's quite a few questions about the underlying issues behind hate on social media and i'll choose one from brad edwards it's kind of a rough representative brad says it's very popular to beat up on social media as the cause of polarization but it also seems to amplify what's already there could you talk about the specific dynamics or causes behind what may or may not be the case and how the church or christians can mitigate those effects in the public square pete would you take a first crack sure i i agree with that i i think i alluded to it um so many of these problems uh predated this this moment or the last the last five five years um and i think i identified some of them which was the polarization the the big sort as as as a journalist his geographic sorting the political parties becoming more more polarized um and and the uh the the lack of or the fracturing of information uh and and social media in terms of what christians can do about it i mean it's a great it's a great question i think the first thing i would say is for my part i would be grateful if christians actually first stopped making things worse which i think has largely been happening for for too many years um and uh and not been an accelerant to these to these worst tendencies what can be done to actually begin to deal the breach i mean you know paul uses the phrase ministry of reconciliation crisis referred to as breaking down the dividing walls and then there's this concept of grace uh and i would say that grace is one concept if in my understanding of faith that is specific to and maybe to be generous to christianity um and i think if more of us demonstrated graves uh and how we conducted ourselves um i was with philippians as a friend of mine we were exchanging notes the other day and he he referred to uh a praise from martin luther king jr weapons of grace and i think if if we were able to do that that that's one thing tree i would say that when a watching world sees people of christian faith manifest grace it is the thing that most breaks through even if they themselves aren't christians or don't become christians they see it and they will say there's something to that uh that's that's that's important so that you know that involves having one's affections and hearts went over here i'll speak as a christian to christ and that's its own set of issues well if everybody on social media were to radiate grace i do agree that it would be a lot better but short of that i think that major structural reforms are probably what we need i think the questioner is right that people love to beat up on social media and i'm one of those people i'm just putting in the chat right now an article that i wrote in the atlantic on on social media um so i i learned i listened to a podcast with uh sin on eral who has a book out now on social media i forget the title uh but i've learned from listen to him as i said before always note the social media does a lot of good things it creates a lot of value for others so i'm not saying oh it's terrible we got to go back to you know the 1990s before there was social media but i think that um i think that we are wired up now in a way that is radically different from how it was even in 2007 or 2008 it really changed between 2009 and 2012 and that's what i show in the article and the optimistic view is that this is like when they invented the printing press we had a couple hundred years of religious war but ultimately we learned to deal with information flowing all around including propaganda and um and so you know odds are in 10 or 20 years things will be better in most ways as steve pinker has shown and odds are social media i think will be more constructive but i think we could be in for a rep we have been in for a rough ride these last five to eight years and i think that could go for the rest of the 2020s uh it remains to be seen so for now i will continue beating up on while also praising social media so we'll take one last question and this is from patrick wilson and patrick asked the great moral historian gertrude himmelfarb who i know uh you both know made much of victorian elites desire to reform themselves and remoralize themselves she argued that this effort much marginalized today was actually a really healthy revulsion by learned christian people and oriented towards the idea that the poor man was actually more moral and good what do you think of this as applied to oh what you were just saying so jonathan we start with you yeah tonight we'll proceed to you no i really appreciate the question because i've i wrote an article in 2014 with sam abrams a political scientist listing 10 reasons we're getting more polarized and that's what i've always been drawing from but just in the last month or two i've decided whoa one of the biggest ones that i missed was the elites and um be they corrupt elites or incompetent elites and the reason i say this is now three there's three great thinkers that have really been pointing to elites as part of the problem peter turchin with his mathematical analyses of history says that you get these periods of dislocation and conflict when you get uh you know there's three conditions but one of them is you get a surplus of elites too many college grads and not enough places of prestige for them and so they they try to get their followers they try to make a name for themselves um uh michael lind a really brilliant political commentator is really savage on on the the current elites and how they've left the working people behind and then martin guri is the new person that i'm really enjoying reading and here's a book the revolt of the elite revolt of the the crisis of the elites and the revolt of the popular something like that um but uh yes the the elites you in the victorian times you can say well you know they were elite because of their heritage and who their who their father was uh and isn't that undemocratic but i've heard a couple people point out that in america and the uk and other countries um since the 80s or 90s the elite are the people who did really well on exams and we sort people in high school beginning on how well do you do on this exam and so by the time you get to the top you think you earned it you deserved it i'm smarter i worked harder and so uh today's elites really have a sense that they earned it they can go off to their gated communities or their islands to you know wait out kovid um so uh yes i uh i i think would be great to look back to p previous periods where the elites took responsibility and took some blame upon themselves and stopped having so much contempt for the masses pete yeah i i i agree with with that uh first thing i'd say is that uh anything gertrud is written i would i would i'd recommend a i was a great fan of her she died just a few years ago um look i think the elites have a lot of responsibility in in this um i think elites have gotten a lot wrong so i think some of the some of the social divisions and some of the issues we've been talking about during this conversation is because that there have been failures of elites including in in the political class and that created a a lot of problems and a big counter reaction i'd also say that there is an attitude of the elites toward the populace uh that can be particularly conservatives and often people of faith which can be patronizing and contemptuous um i i was at an event in november 2016 with arleigh hotchol sociologist who wrote a book called strangers in their land and she told me she said you know pete what you need to understand because you've gone to the country in louisiana she said you have to understand that these people that are living there and she was struck by how kind they were to her personally they feel dishonored and disrespected and she said donald trump for them is an antidote to that uh and to that into that that that kind of depression that they that they feel so there is undoubtedly uh an attitude of the leads toward others which is which has contributed to to this i'd only say that you know there's just a tendency to sort of pick sides here it's elites or it's the masses the masses have a lot to answer for too i'm a conservative not a populist and if you go back from you know from burke to the found well madison preceded but madison burke lincoln his lyceum speech in 1838 and all of them warned about the danger of mob mentality in the masses the reason we're a republican on a democracy is the whole idea that you would filter enlarge and refine in the words of madison the public viewed and you know i think there's a tendency sometimes on the right just to excuse some inexcusable behavior among among the masses and just say well you know they're they're they're angry or they have grievances and they're and they're legit well yes and no but in the end people are responsible for their actions and i think some of this has just gotten out of control everybody has a has a part of the problem and as a piece of the action which means everybody has has to be a part of the part of the solution well thank you pete and jonathan in just a moment i want to give you both the last word jonathan floor is yours well thank you sherry and thanks for hosting this discussion it's it's wonderful to be together with you and and pete and and uh reflecting at this time in our history um so given that the one of the themes here is that is the the best of christian thought and the best of religious thought um i could certainly end with the quote that is really is uh that i've used throughout my career studying moral psychology uh which is why do you see the spec in your neighbor's eye but you do not notice the log in your own um and that is just such a deep piece of of wisdom but i think it's important to note that this this is a great truth that we get from many of the world's religions that we are too judgmental too quick to quick to attack each other we need to slow down be more forgiving um and so i'll i'll end with this wonderful quote from a chinese zen master sensan in the 8th century he wrote the perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose do not like do not dislike all will then be clear make a hair breadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart if you want the truth to stand clear before you never before or against the struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease thanks jonathan and pete last word is yours thanks first uh cherie thanks uh for hosting this and and john for participating and um i just want to reinforce and say publicly again what i've what i've said before which is the trinity forum is doing a terrific job in an in an errand which institutions are failing um the trinity forum is just a beacon so i really appreciate what you're doing and it's it's it's been a a real honor to be with you and with john um yeah my quote is from a poet christian wyman who wrote a book called my bride abyss which is a really um a book that had an impact on on me so i would recommend it but there was a quote of his in it that i thought was opposite what what we've been talking about and so wyman says the spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play if two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree silently or otherwise that god's love creates and sustains human love and that whatever else may be said of god is subsidiary to this truth and even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that though it may not end the dispute though neither party may be convinced of the other's position nevertheless enters and nourishes one's notion of in relationship with god with this radical openness all arguments about god are not simply pointless but pernicious for each person is enthralled to some lesser conception of ultimate truth and asserts not love but lesson not god but himself pete jonathan thank you it's been great to be with you my pleasure for all those watching us thank you so much for joining us have a great weekend [Music] you

Channel: The Trinity Forum

Views: 7,425

Rating: 4.9672132 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: Q4ooKwJ7arQ

Length: 76min 54sec (4614 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021