Michael Shermer: How to Discuss Issues in an Age of Tribal Politics

The problem you identified though, just a moment ago, was that if people identify with their beliefs, that is the specific, say, political platforms like on immigration, abortion, you know, civil rights, whatever, those are sort of secondary to the deeper core moral values that people hold. I define myself as a liberal. I define myself as a conservative, Republican, whatever. So when you attack one little thing here, well, you know, I agree with you on this and this and this, but you know, on the abortion thing, I think you're wrong and here's why. You know, the impulse is, well, but if I give up on that one, then I'm going to lose all these other ones and then I've given up my identity, right? So like when I used to debate creationists, intelligent design theorists and so on, you know, I could tell that if I give people a choice, like you have to choose between Jesus and Darwin for your life, you know, they're not picking Darwin, okay, because, you know, this sort of belief in their Christian dogmas about Jesus, that is their core being. Who cares about Darwin and whoever the scientist was? But if I say, keep Jesus, keep your whole religion, I don't care what you believe, but the science is really good on this and here's why you should follow the facts and you don't have to give up anything for it. And it's like, oh, okay, I'll listen. Right? So like with more recently with climate change, you know, most people, most of us don't know much about climate science. It's a technical science. The models are super complex. People send me these papers. I don't really understand them, you know, but if you self-identify, say, as a conservative, then climate change is just a proxy for something else. Like I believe in free markets and free enterprise and I'm pro business and those guys over there, you know, they want to attack that. Unfortunately, Al Gore's success with his film and books and so forth, then affiliated climate science with a left wing liberal cause. Therefore conservatives have to go against it. Even though neither side knows all that much about climate science, it's become something else that you identify yourself as. So we have to take that out of the formula. Like keep your worldview that you define yourself as. Don't give up that, but just follow the facts on these specific issues. Yeah, the polarization is the thing. If you are on one side, you have to subscribe to the whole menu of ideas. And if you're left wing, you can't really be pro-life. And if you're right wing, you're supposed to have a certain amount of skepticism about climate change. Right. Right. So when somebody publicly signals where they stand on, say, climate change, well, what they're really saying is, look, I am publicly declaring my commitment to my team. Yes. Yes. That's a problem, right? That's a problem. The virtue signaling, the saying, I have loyalty to this position because of this is my tribe. That's right. And so a lot of cognitive science studies of reasoning shows that we generally don't reason toward finding the truth, but defending positions that are part of our team ideology or sort of collective whole. And in this case, we've been talking about left and right, but there's religious or economic ideologies and so on that are part of that. And so even if you don't know anything about it, it's a virtue signal that I'm in that team and, OK, fine, we're all on teams. That's fine. Defend your team. But what I try to do in the book is disentangle the specific issues. Let's just take them one by one. Why can't I be personally against abortion? I don't want to do that. And I recognize, say, Ben Shapiro's arguments for the rights of the fetus. But I also think we have conflicting moral values there, the rights of a woman and the history of the way women have been treated. And men have always tried to lord it over women's reproductive choices historically. And this has always led to bad things like infanticide and back alley abortions and so on. But I got to err on one side or the other. I recognize and acknowledge your arguments are really good, Ben or whoever is a pro-lifer, but I still hold this position. I think there's a lot of progress that can be made socially to kind of reduce the tension when you say, I acknowledge your position. I understand it, steel manning the argument. And then the person on the other side feels like, well, at least this guy is listening to me. Yeah. That is the best topic when it comes to that. Because when you get to, particularly, we get to late term abortions. Boy, that's a very hard thing to defend morally and ethically. And it's also one of the things about the abortion topic is that it's so uniquely human in that it's such a messy topic. It's not, there's not like, here's a clear one. Don't murder people, right? Don't just go up to people and murder. And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, that's clean. That's a clean subject. Abortion is not that clean. When is it okay? Is it okay when the fetus is not a fetus, when it's just a bundle of cells? Most people are like, yeah, well, it's not really anything. Then, well, it will become a person though. When do we decide? Well, that's such a messy subject and it's such a human subject. And I, like you, I am on the side of pro-choice. And I think that it is the woman's choice to decide whether or not she wants to keep the baby. But I also recognize that at a certain point in time, that choice becomes very different. The choice becomes very different when it's a six month old fetus. Like what is, what are we saying there? If you are just, I am pro-choice, period. Okay. Are you pro-choice up until the day of birth? Like when do you back it off? When do you back it off? It is a subject that people do not want to breach. They don't want to touch it. And particularly people on the left when it comes to deciding when it's okay and when it's not okay, because they feel like this is angling towards an elimination of a woman's right to choose. And it angles towards this, this very difficult conversation where you recognize that there is a difference between someone who's seven months pregnant and someone who's seven days pregnant. It's a very, very big difference. And if we can't acknowledge that, then we are being tribal. We're being ideologically driven. We're sticking to our position because we feel like if we concede that this is a complex issue, then we open up the door to possibly losing a woman's right to choose and losing these reproductive rights. Yeah. I think part of the problem also is that we tend to dichotomize most moral issues is right or wrong, good or evil. And the problem is that the law has to draw the line somewhere. We have to have a law to get along and so forth. So we have to say the drinking age is this instead of that, or the driving age is this. The point at which you can have abortion is right here. But most of life is much more on a spectrum, a continuum. So here I make the distinction in the book between binary thinking and continuous thinking. Most moral issues are on a continuum. Like immigration. It's like close the borders. What don't let anybody in ever? No, no, no, no. We got to let them in. Okay. Then we should open the borders. You mean you want to just open the borders up and let everybody in? No, no. No, I'm not saying everybody. Okay. Where do you draw the line? Right. It's another messy human subject. Yeah. Yeah. But if you think of it like, well, it's a continuum instead of a binary choice and whatever answer, it's not just right or wrong, good or evil. There's different places to set the dial. And here the comparative method of looking at what different countries do is experiments. Thinking of those as experiments. Like Japan has a very tight, they've slid it way down here. They let almost nobody in. Australia is a little looser, but tighter than us and so on. And you kind of look at the consequences of letting this many people in or that many people and see what it does. Of course, all countries are different. Some are more diverse. Some are more homogeneous. You have to account for that. And on and on. And here I think instead of thinking of it in these kind of polarized black and white, it's either this or that. And if you're on this side, then you're on the bad side. That's not helpful. So instead of binary thinking, continuous thinking, abortion, certainly you just articulated it perfectly. I mean, seven days, oh, come on. It's just a bundle of cells. But now it looks like by 20 weeks or so, you'll feel pain. One consciousness comes online around 24 weeks, 25 weeks. At some point, you've got to draw the line somewhere around there. Now, scientists, of course, they don't want to put lines anywhere. It's a day by week by week, day by day, even hour by hour, the development of the connect dome that creates thought and so on. There's no good place, but we have to have a line somewhere. So the law has to do that. But that then forces us into that binary thinking, which is not helpful. And it creates this, this is like the line in the sand, this polarization line between these two sides. And I think that so much of what people subscribe to when they do choose an ideology, once they choose an ideology, they have this conglomeration of ideas that they adopt. And they adopt in order to be accepted by the tribe. And this is also a very unique aspect of human communication and civilization. We have to adhere to the principles and the ideologies of that tribe. So you just take on all these thoughts. And it's one of the real problems with only having two choices in this country when it comes to politics and when it comes to just styles of life. And there's so many people that take great relish in switching teams too, which is interesting. It's like, I was a liberal my whole life. And then one day I woke up and realized I was being a moron. And now I'm a pro second amendment, pro Trump mega, make America great, keep America great. It's interesting because those are sometimes the most passionate supporters of the new side, whether they're newly liberal or newly conservative or, you know, some of the people that are the most interesting to talk to are people that used to be vegans and they're now carnivore. They're just, they just eat meat. I was realizing I was being a fool and like, Oh my God, it's the same thing. It's with almost every style of living. You can find a contrary style that people find appealing. You know, there's people that used to be atheist to become Muslims and they wear, you know, the hijab and they fully adhere to the Quran. It's really, really interesting because I've spent a lot of time watching religious scholars online talk and watching them preach and watch. And if there's something, and as a person who's very agnostic, when I watched that, it's appealing to me. There's a certain aspect of the confidence that they have when they're talking about what God wants or what, you know, what Allah has in store for you when you die or what you should do because it's written in this particular religious text. The confidence that they have when they describe these things is very alluring, even to me. It's not like I'm going to join, but I'm sitting there in front of my computer and I'm recognizing, Oh, I see the appeal here. Like it's not, it's not that it's working on me, but it's attractive to me. I see it. I see how this works on people and I find it incredibly fascinating. And I think it has to, it has to have some sort of an evolutionary reason. There's some sort of an evolutionary benefit that adhering and being accepting of the morals and the ethics and the ideology of the tribe is that that's how you stay alive. That's how you find other like-minded people that stick with you.