Can we find common ground without a shared reality?
A new book makes the case for understanding opponents’ perceived harms. I won’t be counting on that.
After a plurality of my fellow Americans voted in a way I found incomprehensible in November, I thought, okay, maybe we need a strategy that relies less on pleas by public figures and more on private persuasion.
If every Harris voter picked one Trump voter and worked to change their mind over the next four years, surely we could shift the electorate back — even if only 10 percent of us succeeded.
But before knocking on a neighbor’s door, I decided to read Kurt Gray’s new book, “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”
Generally, I’m suspicious of “common ground,” which as far as I can tell is something that only the left is asked to find — a fool’s errand we earnestly undertake every four years, to the sound of snickering at our backs.
Let’s just say it’s hard to picture a baby MAGA tech bro trying to learn what values he and I share. But maybe that’s a failure of imagination. Gray, a professor of moral psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, argues that most Americans belong to an “exhausted majority” that “just wants its government to get things done and the economy to help people flourish.” This claim appears to contradict the assertion that “we seem constantly angry” — “Outraged,” in fact — but I’ll concede that we hear all the time how divided we are and how angry we should be.
Gray’s idea is that all humans make moral judgments by weighing harm. Because our prehistoric ancestors were vulnerable to predators, we constantly scan even our relatively safe modern lives for signs of threat and act to ward off potential danger.