Masks and Morality

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In this video, ZDoggMD chats about why something so seemingly trivial can divide us so deeply.

Following is a partial transcript:

So, how many of you guys have just fricking had it with the amount of conflict that is going on because of COVID-19.

So, recall: COVID-19 becomes a thing. The next thing you know, within seconds it’s deeply politicized. So, family members are at each other’s throats. Everyone online is hating everyone else. Are masks good or are they the devil? Is lockdown good? Is it a disaster? Does the economy matter? Do people matter? Is there a difference? All these questions we see all the time, it’s polarized across the cable news networks, which are designed to polarize us, and in social media, which is designed to polarize us.

And so what I wanna talk about today is — why is it that good people on different sides of these issues can continue to be good people doing what they think is right while hating the other side and villainizing them? And how we can transcend this to actually be better citizens, more productive, less angry, and actually have debates instead of shutting down debates saying, OK, let’s actually talk about this. Because we’re all gonna assume that we’re coming from a place where we wanna do good in the world.

Now, there are always exceptions on the fringes to that. So, I’ll just put that out there right now that you’ll have psychopaths, you’ll have extremists who are so entrenched that you cannot reach them.

But in general, most Americans just really want what’s best for their families, their communities, and their country, right? Can we agree on that?

So, if we believe that, let’s start with a basic premise.

Jonathan Haidt, who’s a psychologist, quite a famous guy, recently did another Sam Harris podcast episode. I cite his work of “Elephant and Rider,” elephant being our unconscious emotional mind and rider being our conscious strategizing, planning mind that’s much smaller and newer to the scene.

Well, it turns out humans are not rational creatures. We are emotional, moralizing creatures. What that means is there’s lots of evidence, and he lays this out in his book, “The Righteous Mind,” that humans are actually born with a kind of moral sense, a moral matrix. And he posits that actually all humans pretty much have a similar palette or taste buds for morality that are like five or six different things. And I’m just going to pull up your comments here and on my laptop so I have them while we’re talking. Excellent, there we go.

And these are the following, so, one sense of morality that we have is around care versus harm. So, do we care and show compassion for fellow people? And how far does that compassion extend? Is it just me? Is it my family? Is it my tribe? Is it my state? Is it my community? Is it the globe? Is it all conscious creatures? So, that’s one particular taste bud, care versus harm. And that’s very, very important. And when you look at how people think about this pandemic, it really kind of stratifies a lot on care versus harm.

So, on the left, people who tend to have a more left-leaning elephant tend to really value care versus harm in a certain way. Like how compassionate can we be to immigrants, to the poor, to people who are disadvantaged, other races, others, in general, right? So, that’s a particular thing.

When you look at what’s happening with COVID-19, when you look at masks for example, or lockdowns for example, you really weaponize care versus harm and you really jazz it up because people start, their moral sense gets really outraged if they feel that people are behaving in a way that is gonna harm others.

So, we can talk about masks in a second because we wanna fill in the moral palette so that we can understand why it is people go so nuts about the whole mask thing.

So, the second moral taste bud that we’ll talk about is fairness versus cheating. So this is another sense that everybody’s born with and everybody has different flavors of these taste buds. Like some people like sweet, some people like salt, we can taste all the flavors, but we value some more than others. Savory versus … you know, that’s the analogy you make. But in morality and in how our elephant works, our unconscious mind, right — that is conditioned and somewhat genetic, but can be trained with a lot of work and it’s a lot of work. We have this sort of matrix of morality.

So, fairness versus cheating is one that is very acutely felt both on the left and the right. The left sees fairness versus cheating in the terms of how a rich guy like Trump not wear a mask and everyone else has to wear a mask? Or how is it that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poor? This isn’t fair. How is it the rich can cut in line at Disneyland, whatever it is, fairness versus cheating.

But on the right, that same moral sense is valued quite highly, but it’s seen as, how is it that someone doesn’t work and gets welfare? How is it that someone who hasn’t built a business and isn’t employing people can tell us what to do with jobs? You see what I’m saying?

This post originally appeared on ZDoggMD where you can read the entire transcript.

Last Updated May 28, 2020