The DACA-Dreamer-Immigration Debate
This is the second part of a three part reflection on the DACA-Dreamer-Immigration component of the Senatorial debate that led to the shutdown of the US federal government for a little more than one weekend in January 2018.
Part II: On the Relationship between Emotional Politics and Reasoned Argument (the psychology underpinning the DACA debate)
In The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion, Jonathon Haidt argues we are first creatures of our ancient innate, intuitive, subconscious self. We are beings who largely react to the world in which we inhabit and do so impulsively. He uses the metaphor of an elephant to conjure an image of how our ancient brain responds to situations we find ourselves in long before we develop any conscious appreciation of what may be happening or how we may be feeling. The brain intuitively recognizes a cognitive sequence of deeply ingrained “images”, if you will, that cause us to react to what we sense may be at play in the world around us. We feel things first, and then we search for rational arguments to support our feelings.
Our capacity to reason, Haidt observes, evolved much later in the evolutionary journey of human kind. It came with the development of language and the ability to verbally make an argument. He uses the metaphor of an elephant rider to evoke a concrete image of this aspect of our identity; the rider being our conscious, or intellectual and reasoning, self.
Haidt points out that humans have this dual nature – an ancient emotional or intuitive one and a more recent intellectual or rational one. While not a new concept, Haidt provides a thorough argument outlining how this duality evolved and how this evolution has shaped our moral, social, political, and religious choices and beliefs. He makes the argument that we are not exactly what we may believe we are.
In contemporary times, since the dawn of the Scientific Revolution and that of the Age of Enlightenment, the dominant thinking has been that our intellectual, rational self can control and master our baser instincts. Reason and inquiry is what made our world both enlightened and modern. Enlightenment came to humanity because of our rational nature, not because we adhered to our emotional selves. It is a tenet many in our contemporary world have come to accept without question.
The dictate of this thinking holds that we must be governed by facts and seek the truth of things through inductive and/or deductive reasoning. We must be logical and systematic in our approach to living and to its challenges and mysteries. The great sin of humanity, before the dawn of the modern era, was that people allowed themselves to be governed by superstition, emotions, and innuendo. This made us to be susceptible to the emotive banalities of the seven deadly sins Dante identified in Commedia (The Divine Comedy) that beckon us into the fires of Hell. But, whereas Dante argued salvation was to be found through faith and revelation, modern thinking held that we fell into the abyss only because we listened to, and acted on, our feelings and our unquestioning submission to the authority of others, rather than our reason and our individual and collective capacity to reveal truths through our own intelligence and the disciplined, systematic study of natural phenomena.
Haidt argues this contemporary proposition is incorrect. He proposes that people are wired to respond emotionally or intuitively to events and situations before we ever respond intellectually. And it is our failure to grasp this truth that has led to much conflict in our world. We misread situations which, in turn, causes us to react, rather than reflect, before engaging in exchanges with others.
In the form of his metaphor, we have failed to understand that when the elephant moves in response to something it senses, it is not till then the rider awakens. But rather than taking hold of the reigns and guiding the elephant in a direction, the rider merely grabs hold of whatever he or she can and hangs on for dear life until the elephant rests. The rider does not reign in the elephant. No, the rider only provides a justification for why the elephant stirred and why it went were it did. This is how most of us respond to the world around us. We move before we explain.
This image goes some way to explaining why people may remain wedded to a particular position when all the evidence suggests something else may be true. The truth is in the eye of the beholder because it is what the beholder believes to be true that matters, not the facts.
Our intellect, which develops arguments, rarely stands independent from how we gutturally react to things, Haidt observes. We experience anger and then we find a way to explain our anger. We feel kinship and then we develop reasons for committing to that kinship. Over many generations, we have come to trust our gut feelings for they have often protected us from harm and allowed us to build bonds of association that are necessary to the forging of all communities, be they large or small. And the bonds that bind, are of a specific kind. They are of a moral kind.
Haidt observes that the bonds of community which bind people one-to-the-other all fall within the realm of six Moral Foundations. And the intensity of our feeling for each of the Moral Foundations provides insight into where our political or ideological and religious beliefs lie. The six Foundations Haidt identifies are the care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, and sanctity/degradation Foundations. How and where we rank the intensity of our feelings for these six Moral Foundations sheds light, not only on our political, ideological, and religious beliefs, but also how we will likely frame our arguments in support of our political choices, ideological preferences, and our religious beliefs.
Liberals, notes Haidt, tend to rank moral matters related to the care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression Moral Foundations much higher than they do moral questions tied to the loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation Moral Foundations. The mix of how liberals feel about matters encompassed within the six Foundations shapes how they see themselves in relation to other liberals, libertarians, and their conservative counterparts. The same is true of conservatives. However, the gap between the intensity ranking of the six Moral Foundations is much narrower for conservatives than it is for liberals. Liberals are stimulated by feelings involving the first three Moral Foundation more intensely than the last three, while the degree of divergence in the intensity of the feelings conservatives hold for all six Moral Foundations is not only markedly less, they rank the latter three Moral Foundations above the former three.
This difference is exposed when matters involving community and belonging are at the core of a dispute between liberals and conservatives. One example of this difference involves the question posed by the presence of the undocumented youth holding Dreamer status in America.
The arguments liberals held in 2012 when Obama signed his DACA Executive Order, and continue to hold today, were in response to how they felt about the question of Dreamer status from the care/harm and fairness/cheating Moral Foundation perspectives. Their feelings, their gut reactions to the plight of Dreamers, was shaped by their innate response to what they perceived was the innocent condition of the Dreamers at the time of their entry into the US. They believed these young men and women simply could not be held accountable for the actions of their parents – the sins of the parent cannot be automatically assumed by the child. This is a belief entirely at odds with the feelings others hold about the plight of the children of Adam and Eve following their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. But it is the foundation upon which liberals rested their legal argument to extend a unique status to Dreamers. It complied with how they felt about the immigration-citizenship dilemma Dreamers confronted.
In short, the liberal community’s elephant rider developed an intellectual rationale to support their elephant’s response to their feelings about what it is to be an American. They believed and feel, and felt and feel in their gut, that America was and is an open, welcoming, caring, and fair community made up of many diverse peoples who all share in the promise of the American Dream.
On the other side of the Dreamer divide, conservatives considered the questions posed by their presence in the US also as a matter of community. Like liberals, they were, and are, emotionally wrapped in the blanket of feelings tied to belonging and identity. However, they responded and continue to respond, to the Dreamer question primarily from the authority/subversion, loyalty/betrayal, and sanctity/degradation Moral Foundation perspectives. They felt the Dreamers had subverted the rules of community, that they were violating the authority of the laws governing citizenship. They felt that granting citizenship to these immigrants would be a betrayal of the laws and principles of citizenship. People cannot be allowed to acquire such status having committed an illegal act. If such were granted, the sanctity of the laws of citizenship and belonging would be degraded. Conceding amnesty to the Dreamers was and is, for many conservatives, emotionally untenable. Accordingly, they argue for a pathway to citizenship that requires Dreamers to adhere to the existing rules governing immigration and the acquisition of American citizenship.
But, because our feelings and emotional responses are innate and tied to what have become moral concerns that balance our desires to be independent and self-reliant while at the same time social and part of a community, debates such as those about Dreamers become emotional ones. They employ language of an emotive kind that leads to people speaking past each other rather than with each other.
These conversations become accusatory and exclusionary both in word and tone. They become emotional exchanges with each side charging the other of being immoral or bigots or racists or some other similarly charged sentiment. The words directed at the other side are negative in nature and become rallying cries, or code words, for the community from which they come. These verbal engagements become verbal street brawls between gangs, each side looking to squash and soundly defeat the other. In the political realm, these emotionally charged verbal street fights take place during elections, during the legislative process, and in the public eye every day through traditional and social media platforms. Their power to shape our politics comes from the fact that they appeal to our base instincts tied to belonging and community.
Thus, the Dreamer debate involves each side accusing the other of using code words to hide their true prejudices and intentions. Conservatives are accused of using code language that hides their innate racism and white nativist affiliations while liberals are accused of using language that hides their globalist, internationalist, socialist, anti-American preferences. And these charges extend to the legal and intellectual positions each side espouses on the matter of the DACA Program and the fate of Dreamers.
In framing the DACA Program and Dreamer question this way, both sides of the committed divide have made it difficult to find compromise. Liberal Democrats want to narrow the question to the plight of Dreamers alone as much as possible, while socially conservative Republicans, for the most part, want to include the Dreamer question as part of a complete overhaul of the immigration system which, for them, includes securing America’s borders, particularly along the US-Mexican divide. In each case, the legal arguments are reflections of their innate feelings about how to prioritize the six Moral Foundations in the legislation to be enacted.
Accordingly, the DACA debate, like the American Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) debate, is one that is almost exclusively about what one’s personal vision of the American family or nation is. It is an emotional debate that pays little heed to facts. And because the debate is an innate and emotive one, objectivity is sacrificed, and rationalism, subverted. The idea of compromise is deemed to be an anathema for the concept is framed in the emotive language of capitulation and defeat. In this, the fathers of the great American experiment might be horrified, for, while they were all emotionally invested in the experiment they wanted to forge and held strong feelings about what they wanted to create, they all held that the new nation they wished to create had to be an enlightened one, built on the rational, objective, and civil exchange of ideas among a civilized and engaged public led by informed and rational leaders.
The founding fathers of the USA sought to establish the world’s first enlightened state, the world’s first country founded on the principle that all the people were committed to the ideals of the modern era – individual liberty, reason, civil discourse, tolerance, and the pursuit of knowledge through scientific inquiry and practice. They sought to create a state in which all citizens respected the religious beliefs of others and would find an enlightened way to ensure this principle of tolerance was honoured. They held the hope and belief that the people of the new American community they sought to establish would mirror the debates they held among themselves when they drafted the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and its empire, and deliberated on the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. And in this vision, the founders of America presented a challenge to its contemporary, and future, citizens and political leaders. They challenged them to rise above their base, emotional instincts, and engage in a discourse of the intellect rather than of sentiment alone.
Scrambled Thoughts 2.0 