Three principles

Liberals (largely secular)  and conservatives (largely religious) in America continue to talk right past each other, neither hearing the other, neither convincing the other and both demonizing the other. This is not a useful approach.  Let me suggest to both groups three principles:

Principle I: Each of us lives in our own private cultural framework or bubble, which shapes our world view, our biases, and our assumptions.

Our cultural bubble is shaped by our experiences, our circumstances, the culture and religion we grew up with, the family we grew up in, and the peers we surround ourselves with. A rich, single, white, young Silicon Valley entrepreneur simply has a different view of the world than an unemployed 50 year old black machinist from Detroit or a 35 year old married woman on an Iowa farm. In fact, your own children, your own parents and even your own spouse are more likely than not to live in a somewhat different cultural bubble than you do, with somewhat different assumptions, different biases, different political and social ideologies and different aspirations.

I call this a cultural “bubble” because it emphasizes the fact that none of us sees the world the way it really is. We all see the world, and interpret what we see, in a unique way filtered  through all of our own experiences and assumptions and biases and ideologies and religions and expectations, and to that extent what we see is distorted by these filters. And by the way, many, perhaps even most, of those biases and assumptions are buried in our subconscious, implanted in us, often non-verbally, when we were very young. We may feel confident in our beliefs because our peers, the people we hang around with and live among, all believe more or less the same things we do. But of course they do; we select our friends and peers for exactly that characteristic.

A good education would teach people all of this. Apparently American education isn’t that good, even for the expensively educated wealthy ruling elite who went to Ivy League colleges.

Principle II: However stupid, silly, backward, immoral or illiberal someone else’s views may seem to you from within your own cultural bubble, they make perfect sense, indeed may even be self-evident, within that person’s own cultural bubble.

How could it be otherwise? Why would anyone ever believe something that was at variance with all their own biases, assumption, and experiences?  If you accept this principle, than the more common, unproductive, and frankly blindly arrogant, approach of “that is a stupid thing to believe” becomes the much more productive question of “how does the world look to them such that that is a reasonable thing to believe?”

Principle III: If you want to change someone’s opinion on an issue, you have to address it from within their own cultural bubble, not from within your own cultural bubble.

There is an old saying: “You can always get to people through religion; their religion, not yours”. That applies here. Liberals lecturing (or more often, berating) conservatives from within a liberal view of the world is simply ineffective at changing anyone's views, and highly annoying. Conservatives condemning liberals from within their religious world views is similarly ineffective, and similarly rude.

The obvious corollary to this is that to be effective in changing the views of a group, you first have to work, and work hard, to understand how the world looks to them. You don't have to agree with or accept that world view (though getting a look at another world view might just possibly broaden your own), but you do have to thoroughly understand it. Only then will you know how to shape your arguments – in terms of their world views, their cultural framework, not yours – to be effective.

What is most notable in the current liberal-conservative battles is that neither side appears to have any interest in understanding the other, or perhaps even any capability of doing so. Both are locked into rigid, unthinking ideologies; both are so sure their view of the world is the only possible correct view that they are blind to the rather obvious fact that whatever they happen to believe, the vast majority of humans believe something different. A little humility here would go a long way.