Photo by Geronimo Giqueaux on Unsplash
Let’s say a guy named Bob is giving a speech about forgiveness. Imagine this confrontation afterwards….
Woman in front row: I didn’t like what you implied about student loans!
Bob: Student loans?
Woman in front row: Yes, given the timing, I assume you really meant student loan forgiveness.
Bob: I wasn’t trying to make any connection to student loans.
Woman in front row: Whew. For a minute there, I thought you were a Marxist!
Why we disagree
How can people have two different conversations while talking to each other? Jonathan Haidt explains what’s happening in his book The Righteous Mind.
Haidt uses the image of an elephant with a rider on top. The elephant is a mixture of emotional reaction and insight. The rider represents reason, which obviously is not always in charge. That explains why your uncle forwards all those angry chain emails. He thinks he’s speaking rider to rider but he’s really talking elephant to elephant.
Elephants are hard to stop when something causes them to react. So we need to learn to speak elephant, to calm the elephant. We must see how passion can drive a point of view. Otherwise, it’s like trying to win a squirt gun fight against a firehose.
Can you name the value?
So, gut-level intuition often takes charge. Afterwards, reason starts building a rationale for where the elephant is already heading. A value begins to form. We’re not used to talking on that level. When was the last time you named the value under your opinion about an issue?
Let’s take spanking as an example. Imagine a toddler running towards traffic. The mother grabs him by the arm, swats him on the fanny, and says, “No!” Reactions from eyewitnesses range from affirmation to disgust about that backside blow.
The affirmation crowd is glad to see some parents still choose a little hurt to avert real harm. On the other hand, the disgust crowd is upset about internal harm from such hurt. You can see the competing values of physical safety vs. emotional safety. The people on each side of this issue may value both the physical and emotional, but they they rank them differently.
Differing emotions lead to differing values and creates a difference of opinion. That’s part of how to understand why someone believes what they believe. Hidden assumptions. And yet that’s not where the conversation goes. The elephants are too restless.
A bigger example
At risk of provoking your elephant, let’s look at a bigger issue. Most people have an opinion about the reversal of Roe v. Wade. What’s the value under each side’s opinion? The pro-choice “elephant” feels the injustice of teenage girls caught in a cycle of generational poverty. Meanwhile, the pro-life “elephant” feels an urgency for human life inside and outside of the womb.
Each side might react like this: “Don’t those people see how unfair this is? Or, “Don’t they care about the unborn?” A difference in how we rank values explains why we talk past each other on the nightly news, social media, and around the dining-room table. The riders in the debate cannot understand the other side. Exactly. Their reasoning assists a different reaction that became a value that became an assumption.
I assume human life is valuable both outside and inside the womb. So I don’t see it as just a private choice. Why do others think of pregnancy in the abstract? As just a lump of tissue? It’s an assumption that forms often in the course of empathizing with plight of a young girl with an unwanted pregnancy resulting from a lack of leadership and love at home. If I can hear that concern, then I have a better chance of getting heard.
Where to start
What if you pressed pause in your next conflict and got curious about elephants? What’s the why or the value under an opinion? You can use these words: “Tell me more.” Draw out their stories. Put a check on your reactions and give someone permission not to agree with you, at least for one conversation.
“The discerning heart seeks knowledge, but the mouth of a fool feeds on folly” (Prov. 15:14).
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