Tolerating ideological differences through the presumption of good faith.
This past year has been one of increasing polarization. Across the political and societal spectrums, I have seen Americans dig deeper and deeper into their ideological trenches.
I recently read a thought-provoking article by a Georgetown professor named Jason Brennan. Brennan is truly a thought leader at Georgetown and one of the faculty members I respect. Brennan, in a somewhat hyperbolic fashion, captures the zeitgeist of this ideological entrenchment. His blog featured a simple argument for not being friends with anyone with different political opinions.
The logical steps went like this:
If you believe:
x is evil, unjust, and bad
y is pure, just, and good
And your peer believes:
x is pure, just, and good
y is evil, unjust, and bad
Then your friendship with your peer is an endorsement of what they believe in, which is an endorsement of evil.
It’s a thought-provoking argument. I believe that it even makes sense in the most extreme of circumstances. For example, it probably is not advisable to befriend someone who is still an advocate for racial separatism.
However, one main counterpoint to this argument is that I have had many friends that have crossed political lines. I recently talked to a friend who voted for Trump in 2016 and is now a vocal progressive. I just visited a friend and was surprised to find that he has transitioned from being a Third Way, Clinton Democrat to a libertarian.
What are the implications of these transitions? Are these people to disown their previous selves? Are they to write themselves off as permanently scarred by the prior lives they lived? Are they supposed to consider themselves “reborn”? Would they consider themselves bad people before and have since followed a path of redemption?
And where does that leave the rest of us? A vast majority of Americans live their lives trying to be virtuous and ethical.
To be human is to be flawed. Top psychologists, like Daniel Kahneman, have shown that all of us go through life with flawed perceptions of reality. Therefore, it can only be flawed to bound all our friends to the rigidity of our subjective realities.
I have come up with an acid test, borrowing from contract law, to determine whether someone is worthy of being your friend, regardless of ideological disputes.
I believe that the only thing we should ask of our fellow man is to operate in good faith. Anything more is tyrannical, but anything less is spineless.
Good faith, in human interactions, is defined as having honesty or sincerity of intention without acting maliciously towards others. So long as my friends are honest and sincere without malice, they are as worthy of friendship as anyone else. The one thing that my friends who went through ideological shifts had in common is that they operated in good faith the whole way.
I feel like this framework spits in the face of everything the past few years of discourse has been. And yet, I feel like it is core to the American ethos. A country that strives, and often fails, to accept everyone. A country that defaults to a presumption of good faith.
Be well and make as many friends as you can. It is lonely and maddening in the echo chamber.