I don't understand Justice Moore. What's wrong with me?

Roy Moore, the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, defies the legal decisions in favor of gay marriage, claiming that he is not bound by them, telling local judges to ignore them. This is the same judge who some years ago refused orders to remove Biblical tablets from the courthouse.

What’s wrong with him? Is he evil, or just an idiot? The law is clear – he may disagree with the Federal decisions, but he and the probate judges are bound by them. More importantly, the vast majority of the country (according to polls) accepts gay marriage, sees it as something personal, not something the courts and the police should get involved with. I don’t get what he’s trying to do.

On the other hand, what’s wrong with me? I believe we should strive to understand people who are different from us. I seem to be failing at that with Justice Moore.

Come to think of it, he's probably neither evil nor an idiot. There’s absolutely no evidence that he’s corrupt, and he’s not trying to harm anyone. He’s not even intolerant: he’s not advocating arrests or suppression of gays. He just wants them to stay out of his face.

Maybe he’s just trying to protect a good society, as he sees it, one where everyone is secure, where you know what to expect, where everyone knows the right thing to do and acts together in harmony. He’s defending it against people who want to disrupt, to sow discord, to plant foreign ideas, and thus to undermine the solid foundations of community and identity. They threaten his world, and he knows no good can come of it. And the people around him agree: they re-elected him to the state Supreme Court after he had been removed from it over the tablets battle.

Moore might say, with Shakespeare: 

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre

Observe degree, priority and place,

… but when the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,

What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!

Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors…[1]

For Moore, gay marriage is a threat not only to who he is, but to the identities of everyone he knows, and their relations, and their hopes for the future. "Frights, changes, horrors..." No wonder he fights so hard.

At least I think that’s what he thinks. But until we have a different kind of conversation, we won’t really know, will we?

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[1] Troilus and Cressida

The dress

Why did this dress go viral? Why did it spark stories in national media as well as across the internet?

The reason is that people are astonished that what they plainly see with their own eyes is denied by the friend or family member next to them: I see blue and black, you see gold an white. This is very disturbing. We normally rely heavily on the assumption that those close to us -- those who are part of our club -- "see things" in the same way as ourselves. This is a shorthand that makes everyday life possible, so we can rely on each other and don't have to argue about everything.

We know more and more clearly that there are people "out there" who see things very differently. For Whites, the recent evidence that Blacks have a completely different view of the police is hard to grasp. Liberals and conservatives are painfully aware that the other side just has entirely a different "point of view".

The easy thing to do is to say that the others are ignorant, or evil. We say that those who disagree with us are deniers, stupid, tools of bad forces -- anything to avoid trying to see things from their point of view. Because seeing it from another point of view is disruptive: it makes us question ourselves, our sanity. The dress does this, in a way that is amusing, challenging, not too threatening.

This national conversation about the dress color could be a lesson: people have gradually simmered down and accepted that there really are just different ways of looking at it. Maybe we could learn from it to think about other kinds of color, such as that of skin.

Communal correctness

Jonathan Chait recently burned up the internet with a column against “political correctness.”

 

It is true that in many settings now - not just universities - people avoid any possible offense to women and minorities. But one thing Chait gets wrong is that this dynamic is not limited to any particular political view: it happens in any community. A community is a group of people who share a common sense of what’s right. When someone deviates from that, it’s a threat to trust and good feeling; so everyone joins in disapproval and, at the extreme, bullying and expulsion. This happens in right-wing groups – try saying something nice about Obama – as well as left-wing.

The problem is that this “communal correctness,” whatever its source, shuts down dialogue and learning. In a period of increasing interaction across cultures and beliefs, it is particularly corrosive and must be challenged.

Yesterday, in a Masters’ class, I led a discussion on the problems women lawyers face in balancing work and family. A male student wondered whether women shouldn’t have to decide on one or the other. He started out strong – you really can’t both raise a family and do a top-level lawyer job well – and then, as he realized this was taking him into controversial waters, he hesitated and stumbled and looked around. “I mean, I really don’t want to offend anyone,” he said. There was an uncomfortable moment of silence, and the discussion went on as if he hadn’t spoken. I did not intervene.

What should I have done?

Ideally, I should have said, “That’s a very important question,” and then explored the costs as well as the benefits of families with two working parents. I should have put into question the unspoken consensus that it is wrong to limit women’s aspirations in any way. That’s what a university is for, after all – to look for truth by investigating all aspects of a problem, even at the cost of offending people.

I didn’t do that, because in the moment I was worried about putting this young man on the spot. He was clearly worried about the reaction of his peers. I didn’t feel I had the right to drag him farther than he wanted to go.

But I do believe in dialogue and understanding. I will find another way to bring this up. I will talk to the student offline and affirm his right to speak his views, as long as he follows the basic norm of seeking understanding rather than being hostile or mean. I will say something to the class as a whole on the norms of discussion, how to disagree without being disagreeable. In future discussions I will challenge the communal consensus myself when necessary, voicing the unpopular and uncomfortable perspective in debates.

There is still a danger that I may encourage some individuals to go “too far,” to get themselves in trouble with their peers. At that point, however, I would say it's just part of the learning process. We need to know how to get into trouble when we want to, and to get out of it again, in order to enlarge the boundaries of community and mutual understanding.Learning involves stretching, which always has an element of danger. We can't protect ourselves and others from it all the time. Political correctness, our communal correctness in general, is among other things an excess of timidity.