How do we stop playing dumb games?

This goes back to some of the ideas that Jonathan Haidt sparked http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

I’ve been thinking more about the notion of changing the game or at least changing the rules of the game. If we continue with a black versus white sort of game - and in our current cultural context we seem to be stuck with the liberals versus the conservatives - every initiative to try to solve a problem ends up in a stalemate. It’s a dumb game.

Whether or not Haidt’s categories are definitive, I wonder, if we used them to try to place ourselves in a different context for a change, perhaps we could begin to see some of the issues from a different perspective – and find more creative solutions. Instead of playing regular checkers, let’s try Chinese checkers. I still have many doubts that enough people can actually learn a new game but simply continuing with the old game appears to me to be futile.

When I took Haidt's morals quiz http://www.yourmorals.org/ (whatever its flaws), I scored with the declared conservatives on harm, slightly above the declared liberals on fairness, close to the liberals on loyalty, close to the conservatives on authority, and in the middle on purity. I don’t think the categories are entirely arbitrary, but I think this exercise highlights my point almost as well either way.

Whose team am I playing for?

I appear, if I’m setting up the questions this way, to share values and real interests with people who label themselves conservative. The game we are currently playing in our society doesn't recognize that. Our polarized system resists letting me acknowledge that life and people are a lot more complicated than the ways in which we are expected to register our preferences.

Furthermore, the media and politicians seem to have us locked into this ‘it’s either us or them’ kind of game. For some of them, it makes it easier to manipulate people so that they can push the results in a direction that favors the interests of a few. For others, it just makes it easier to explain things and for them to hold onto their audience or their supporters. (Spectator sports appeal to many people for similar reasons.) And for many of the rest of us, we simply lack the imagination or the courage to do more than just try to go along (always complaining, of course).

Huge numbers of us are really not paying close attention or haven’t managed for various reasons to understand the nuances of the real questions at stake. But we are determined to hold onto what we think we believe (and often to what others are telling us that we believe). And so, almost in desperation we settle for at least choosing to identify ourselves with one team or the other. With the current structure of political reality, that’s about all that many of us are capable of, although we sometimes imagine that our yelling is somehow ‘informed’ and that it ‘matters.’

I would really like to be able to go beyond this game metaphor and make this discussion more connected to our social reality but explanations often tend to bog things down. Metaphors are how we think much of the time.

So, this attempt is offered mostly to illustrate. I can hardly imagine actually getting to this kind of practical result in a hundred years given the current environment (which is, after all, what I think needs to be changed somehow).

But let’s try this. I would personally be willing to consider that women should have a total, unrestricted choice to abort a fetus up to four months into a pregnancy. After that, there would be a variety of restrictions increasing over the span of a pregnancy and depending on an array of circumstances, AND these restrictions would be linked with full pre-natal care, with paid time away from work in various contexts, as well as paid child-care, AND other social structures would be provided so that mothers-to-be and mothers and children wouldn’t be overly burdened with responsibility. The father should be on some of the hook as well as the society that says it wants this baby. Many other well-considered provisions for the woman’s well being and a potentially unwanted child’s well-being should also be guaranteed. 

Clearly people on one pole or the other could never, ever accept something like this. And this is still only a first, very generally defined beginning. But I do think a large middle could likely be able to come to accept some social arrangement like this that they could live with. And of course 'money where the mouth is’ would have to be paid. 

But no one is playing this middle game. You either get to vote with the ‘Life begins at conception - women have no rights’ team, OR with ‘the woman has every right - the fetus and society has no say’ team. There is little talk of either sexual responsibility or social responsibility, except in polarizing terms. 

Again, I have over-simplified to make my point, and these ideas remain far away from touching the real world.

But what most of us want is a reasonable resolution to questions of unwanted pregnancies and children and the real needs of women who are pregnant and the children who might come into the world. The players who might address those possibilities are not even on the field. I can’t escape my metaphor. We don’t have a game – we have a stalemate. People who want to play, not just fight, can’t get into the game as structured. Most of the loudest people are preoccupied with pointing out that the other side is breaking the rules or improperly defining them or simply packed in around their own goal – anything but actually engaging each other over the question of making real people’s lives better. Each team only wants to strengthen itself so that it can win all the marbles. And the losers will, of course, never accept defeat.

So with all this said, I don’t know how you ultimately break up the current game. I am only saying that I am convinced that restructuring our system and the frameworks in which we as a society think about conflicting ideas and values would give us a better chance at different outcomes. To recognize that declared conservatives and I share some specific real value might be a start. At this point, I think even using words like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ which have become mostly fighting words or shorthand words - but ones that no one even agrees what the words really represent any more – well, even using the words themselves virtually guarantees stalemate.

And the fact that I can only begin to properly explain myself in a thousand-plus words is part of the problem. Frustration with the mess has built to such a level that many people tend to simply want to retreat into the simplicities of ‘the system is broken’ and ‘there’s no point in talking about this’ - essentially giving up. And the truth is that the only answers that will make useful differences for people are indeed complicated. People really do have different values. Whether the question is abortion or climate change or taxes, resolution is not about tweaks to the system or making the right substitutions with the players. Changing the minds of enough people is a nearly impossible task. But a little bit at a time, positive changes sometimes do happen. Look at history.

In my mind, breaking up the old ‘liberal versus conservative game’ is one place to start. What happens if instead of bi-polar values, we tried to think in terms of five fundamental values? If nothing else I think it beats banging my head against the same brick wall.

I favor local markets, progressive taxes, the First Amendment, more tax-payer supported educational alternatives to public schools and more money and accountability in public schools. But the people trying to do the work of educating kids shouldn’t be jerked around. And I favor and oppose possibly a thousand other potential initiatives that should belong to we, the people, (if I took the trouble to spell them out). It should be made clear that I don’t really know what I’m talking about for at least half of them. And I’m pretty comfortable holding inconsistent positions depending on specific contexts. But most of all, we ought to begin to work to structure a system where people are able to win or lose whatever their particular position - if it comes to that - with more grace than we do.  Just give me a good game (one that’s fair and we don’t want to beat each other up all the time). You have a political party for me to join? Call me a Fairness Loyalist for now. 

Like I said at the top of this essay, right now we’re playing a very dumb game in this country. I am open to anyone with reasonable ideas about how to break up the bi-polar game we’re in. I have yet to hear politicians really articulate how fruitless this Liberal/Conservative, Democrat/Republican stalemate is. But then how could they? That’s the only game they know how to play.

I think the choice this country is facing is between continued stalemate or rather some near-impossible solution. But looking at the more fundamental option of changing how we think and how things are done, the people who should know better and who are actually in the position to make useful changes can only seem to think of how to try to make their own side stronger.

So the rest of us can continue to muddle along, or we can hope that some people will somehow be able to imagine a better game – and convince enough people that answers lie not simply in throwing one set of bums out for another but changing some of the structures of the game itself. I would have to bet on more muddle. But there’s still time on the clock. Maybe the game will get interesting – that is, maybe someone will succeed in proposing a better way to play.

The truth is that we are biologically predetermined to think primarily in this bi-polar manner. Black or white, either or or, yes or no, us or them - this is what is built into our mental structures. What I am talking about proposes that we devise societal structures that help us pull away from these natural tendencies when it just leads to stalemate.  You should recognize that the democratic ways of decision making that now exist began as ways of structuring societies away from our natural tendencies for the stronger groups to simply beat up on the weaker ones and take the spoils. Rule of law has much in its favor as well. But now we need different rules.

The time frame I’m thinking in is admittedly too vast. And yet those are the frames that human culture moves in if at all. I can’t address everything. No single person will put a solution together for what ails us. The question remains, how do individuals talk and write about our various situations so that there is movement towards better ways of thinking and doing things?

I like the ‘play’ of Jonathan Haidt. It’s at least a more interesting approach than the current game. And maybe it’s a push in a better direction. Shaking things up is always a risk, but there’s probably a chance that prolonged stalemate might lead to tyranny. When anything is perceived as better than the mess we’re in, then life can get really scary, really fast.

So how would you propose we begin to break up this dumb game we’re playing?