Love Your Enemies? But…Why?

On the recommendation of my more conservative friend and partner in all things Lorenzo Thione, I began reading “Love Your Enemies” by Arthur C. Brooks. Normally, I wouldn’t pick up anything written by the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. But Brooks is an old-school conservative, one who is dismayed by the extremists in his own party, and his goal is to find *some* kind of common ground to bring America back from the perceived brink. So I began to read.

It surprised me to see Brooks citing one of my favorite social policy writers, Jonathan Haidt, whose work on the moral underpinnings of society I had earlier found compelling. Brooks agrees with Haidt that our ideas around morality rest upon five main pillars: compassion, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. (Haidt has since added “liberty” as another pillar.) While liberals base most of their political beliefs on the first two pillars, his studies showed conservatives measure each of these pillars more or less equally. This helps explain why, for example, liberals believe kneeling at the National Anthem is okay but conservatives go apoplectic over it.

To help the United States turn down the dangerous rhetoric and divisiveness that pervades our social discourse, Brooks and Haidt urge us to lean into the shared values of compassion and fairness when debating the other side, most of whom still believe fundamentally in those ideas. To be sure, what is “fair” may vary tremendously between the sides. For example, liberals generally believe that it is “fair” that wealth should be redistributed, while conservatives believe being “fair” requires a strict meritocracy as its guiding principle. But the key point is the vast majority of conservatives and liberals want some idea of fairness to govern.

Neither author had the current moment to consider when writing their works, however. Far right leaders have doubled down recently on the notion of “sanctity” to wage their culture wars, with the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade now just weeks away. They wish to impose the notion of sanctity (that is, their idea that we should not “pollute” God’s design through things like abortion, contraception, sodomy, trans identity or gay marriage), but in doing so they also attack the two fundamental and shared moral pillars.

Compassion and fairness are why people who are otherwise opposed to abortion also feel we should make exceptions in the case of rape, incest, and the health of the mother. They are also why most liberals and a good percentage of conservatives believe abortion should be legal prior to viability of the fetus. Understanding that extremists are foisting religious notions of sanctity upon society at the expense of cherished values of fairness and compassion gives us a useful framework for how to respond.

Liberals often get tied in intellectual knots over issues of fairness when conservatives attack at the margins. Indeed, attacks upon trans youth are proving so effective precisely because conservatives have found a way to leverage the question of “fairness” to press their radical moral sanctity. Why is it fair, they ask, for “biological males” to play on girls’ sports teams? In asking this, they of course want us to consider fairness only from the viewpoint of the cisgender girls, not of the female-presenting trans kids. When you flip the question around and ask, “Is it fair to exclude all trans girls from sports because in a few instances some might have a physical advantage?” the answer usually comes back “no.” I’ve found that asking liberal parents what would be the fairest thing for *everyone* usually results in some reassessments of their initial hesitation.

The reason things like racism and trans/homophobia feel so pernicious and have such devastating effect is that they both seek to exempt whole classes of people from the very idea of fairness and compassion, making the immoral case that they are not deserving of being treated as fellow human beings. Equality means fundamentally equality of moral assessment. Slaves were not considered “human” and therefore the normal rules of fairness and compassion did not even apply. Extremists want to label LGBTQ+ people as “deviants” or “monsters” who “groom” children precisely so they can get around these pesky moral pillars. On the other hand, sanctity extremists want to confer personhood upon fetuses precisely so they can make moral arguments that undo the basic rights of people who become pregnant.

Humans also appear generally to believe they can act with impunity toward other sentient beings on this planet, or toward the planet itself, because we somehow owe no moral duty to them or the Earth. But sanctity isn’t a moral pillar just for the very religious. The sanctity of the *natural* world is a very compelling moral pillar that is only just beginning to find deeper foundations.

Engaging on political and moral issues isn’t easy. That’s why it’s important to have a framework from which to begin. When I hear right-wing politicians stirring up their base or proposing laws, I now ask first what moral pillar they are appealing to, and crucially what pillars are they ignoring. This can be a very useful way to analyze their intentions as well as the appeals and weaknesses of their arguments. It also provides a roadmap for how to respond.