INTERVIEW // Patriotic Empathy// An interview with John Wood Jr. (Copy)

Interview by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

Volume 2 // Issue 2 // Fall 2020 // FIGHT, FLIGHT, TEND & BEFRIEND

Braver Angels is a non-partisan organization that started after the divisive 2016 election with a question: Could Americans disagree respectfully and find common ground? A first meeting between avowed Democrats and Republicans led to a summer bus tour that traveled from Waynesville, Ohio, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The network has since become national and regularly meets—now virtually—to have brave conversations with regular Americans about difficult topics, including reparations, immigration, and other issues that may divide us.

John Wood Jr. is national leader for Braver Angels, and is also a former nominee for Congress, former vice-chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County, a musical artist, and a noted writer and speaker on subjects including racial and political reconciliation. He spoke with RQ Editor Heather Shayne Blakeslee about how we might move forward together as a country, even when we disagree; about the power of stories; and the need to understand our moral foundations.

Braver Angels has based a lot of its methodology on getting “red” (conservative) and “blue” (progressive) people into rooms together, talking with one another, not necessarily to change one another’s minds, but to find common ground—a lot of people are under the impression that we don’t have anything in common, especially on a policy level. Is there any way in which the pandemic has actually helped people understand that we are really, truly, all in this together? 

Wood: I think, particularly in the early stages of the lockdown, there seemed to be a way in which many Americans were seeing the importance of banding together and putting our differences into perspective relative to the larger things that we have in common. What’s been frustrating to observe is that I think that initial space of goodwill has still managed to give way quite a bit to our conventional pose with respect to embracing the polarizing rhetoric and postures. So that’s been tough to see, but it wasn’t altogether unpredictable. And it just means our work continues to be more important than ever.

When people talk about “the center” or “moderates,” many feel like it’s a dilution of more radical programs, policies, approaches that might be needed for change, whether those calls are coming from the right or the left. But I wonder if there are more nonlinear ways of thinking about “the center” or “moderation” or “common ground,” however you want to characterize it.

Wood: People, I think, operate under the assumption that any bipartisan organization like ours is, by nature, a sort of moderate or centrist organization. We really don’t see ourselves that way—which isn’t to say that we don’t have a lot of moderates or centrists. We certainly do. But we’re not a policy advocacy organization. And so there are people who work with us and support us, who are part of our community, who are well-to-the-left and well-to-the-right people, who support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and who support Donald Trump, etc.

I do think of us as trying to establish a new center in a way. But it’s not so much an ideological center in a policy sense, so much as it is sort of a new civil-society center, or a new center with respect to our conception of “what should the character of the civic space be?”

Temperamentally speaking, there needs to be established, I think, in American political life, a well-grounded and well-fortified temperamental center in American politics, which embraces this idea that [in] the project of building up our relationships as citizens and community together, we’ll have a mutual concern for one another that is reflective of their commitment to the well being of the country—what we at Braver Angels term “patriotic empathy.”

Can you talk more about “patriotic empathy” and how you foster it? 

Wood: The phrase “patriotic empathy”—incidentally, one that I think I coined, originally—is this idea that we demonstrate our loyalty to our country, our commitment to our country, through the concern that we bear for one another. 

So the Braver Angels program is rooted in the idea that there is an inherent dignity and an inherent right and respect we owe to one another as fellow citizens, to honor the space for one another’s perspectives even when we disagree. It’s also something that I see as having been core to the substance of nonviolence. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy began with this idea that we engage even our oppressors in a spirit of goodwill that seeks to speak to their conscience and honor them as human beings, even as we fight against, or even as we contend with, what we consider to be the errors in the ways that our fellow citizens look at the world. Why? Because, as Dr. King put it: The end of nonviolence is not the defeat or humiliation of the opponent, but the ability to reconcile with the opponent and to win his friendship, so that we might occupy a community together.

Braver Angels’ work is built upon the same essential premise, that what we’re trying to do is—without papering over our disagreements—signal the fact that we are ultimately seeking to build a community that is able to accommodate all of us in our diversity and our different points of view, and that committing to the process of understanding one another more and building relationships with each other in the process of doing so is how we get there. And so, “patriotic empathy” sort of encapsulates the value set that goes into that.

Are there certain issues or policies that different political groups tend to agree on, but where they at first didn’t realize there was an agreement? Are there surprises that come out of these sessions?

Wood: I’ve been around politics in so many different sorts of capacities at this point that it’s a little bit difficult to take me by surprise with respect to some things people might wind up agreeing on.

Everybody is distrustful of the media in one form or fashion: Right and left, everybody thinks media is pushing us apart. 

The hardest groups to get in the room, I think, tend to be your social justice advocates on the one hand—particularly younger folks, sometimes younger activists of color; the generational aspect is very important there—along with folks who are Trump-supporting, who don’t necessarily come from academic environments and so forth. So, the red/blue partisan divide is kind of this general stand-in, a frame within which there are a multitude of other, more specific and higher resolution divisions that one has to have a sense of to get a real feel for the broader geography of our divisions. Each of those becomes a topic in and of itself.

A colleague here at Root Quarterly, Jared Lowe, observed that we need to deepen the relationship between what he characterized as “old-school woke” and maybe “newly woke” people. And then we have people being characterized as “anti-woke”—you have been thrown occasionally into that category. Do we need to continue to deepen the relationships among these groups? Are those characterizations helpful, even?

Wood: Well, I believe that we need to deepen the relationships between all groups of Americans, particularly when the absence of relationship or understanding is leading to dysfunction in our broader politics, and so that’s kind of a general principle for me. Do I think that the labels that you just articulated are helpful? While I always sympathize with people who complain about the ways in which we use labels to simplify human perspectives and identities that are not necessarily so simple, there’s a reason we use labels. And that’s because we have to sort of functionally identify and sort of pass quick, practical judgments about people and groups in periods of time that don’t always allow for us to have a deeper exploration of the nuances of other folks’ perspectives or intentions. 

You can’t get away from labels… but I do think that we should never be content to settle for labels as stand-ins for genuine understanding of what those labels really only pretend to represent as the deeper truth of what people actually think. New woke, old woke, anti-

woke—these all point to general patterns of thought. But if one thinks that a person who generally subscribes to a woke kind of ideology is necessarily a person who’s incapable of a thoughtful or reasonable conversation, I’d say that that’s not true. I would say that there are broader tendencies in that ideological space which I think are counterproductive and should be contended with. But you don’t want to allow that to undermine your sense that there are conversational partners to be found in that space, or that there are not real sources of good and social imperatives that that space is working to defend, or working to advance, right? So we always have to walk the line of, on the one hand, confronting those things that are excessive, while also trying to recognize the more understandable human motivations behind them. Because there’s virtually always a mix of those things in the ideological and political group.

I have heard you articulate that this is an opportune moment to unwind some of the history of racism in our country and how it’s baked into our institutions and our systems—although I think I’ve heard you say that you don’t really like the term “institutional racism.” What characterization would you suggest instead? 

Wood: My reservations about the phrase “institutional racism,” and even more so my reservations about a phrase like “White supremacy,” as it is blanketly applied, is simply the fact that these send signals to folks that give the impression that the claim is that—at the population level—we are racist or White supremacist in our attitudes, as Americans, and as White people in general; although not just White people, in the way that these thought processes go. 

And I don’t think that that is generally true. And yet at the same time, if we can’t really come to agreement on what the term “racism” means to begin with, it may or may not be true depending on how it is you’re defining a certain thing. But… when definitions are so varying, and when we use these terms without a rigorous process of clarification in each conversation—which there is not usually time for—then the outcome is that they simply land with the emotional impact that they’re sort of preloaded to have. 

And so, for many folks, terms like “White supremacy” and “institutional racism” immediately put them on the defensive, because it seems like a personal sort of attack and blinds folks to the idea that there’s actually institutional and systemic problems here to be dealt with, whether they’re accurately characterized as racist or not. 

At the same time, to be charitable, the reason I think people want to attach the terms “racism” and “White supremacy” to their descriptions of endemic, structural, and systemic problems is because, one, these problems tend to flow out of a racist history in the United States, within which many of our systems evolved, or [within which] the historical circumstances that have interacted with our systems in the current day evolved. 

So from the vantage point of the experience of, particularly, many people of color over time, it is a part of this larger racist storyline. And therefore that seems like appropriate terminology to use to describe that. 

And even then there’s a whole other way of looking at racism that—and this is a funny thing because sometimes I’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, the system is institutionally racist; that doesn’t mean that the people in it are racist. Let me as a social justice advocate, draw that distinction.” But then you’ll hear from another person, maybe an Ibram X. Kendi or somebody like that, who will say, “Oh no, the system is institutionally racist because the people in it are in fact racist.” But it’s [described as] an inherent bias; it’s not the type of, you know, Bull Connor racism that we were used to seeing in the 1960s. And so, you know, à la Robin DiAngelo and White Fragility, let us explore the inner nuances of that prejudice and that bias.

But from the vantage point of a person like myself, it comes to sound like a redefining of racism down to something that, to me, sort of sounds more like ordinary human prejudice, as opposed to a particular kind of animus toward racial groups.

In-group/out-group behavior in general?

Wood: Yeah, more closely akin to that. And so, back to the difficulties with labels and definitions—and yet, if we discarded all the labels and all of that, we wouldn’t really have any tools to start the conversation to begin with.

Have you found alternative language or better ways of communicating these concepts that often point to real phenomena? How are we going to speak to a broader group of people about the change that still needs to happen and have them hear it in a way that we can actually bring them into the conversation? 

Wood: Well, I don’t know that I as of yet have a singular phrase to just sort of swap out for “White supremacy,” but the way I tend to talk about these issues is to say that there is always in any—I think—particular society, a systemic bias in favor of the majority group or in favor of the group that holds the sort of institutional power going into things. And understanding that allows you to drill, in a more fine-tuned kind of way, past the idea of whiteness itself, right? 

It wasn’t really White people in general who set up the power structures in the United States of America to begin with. It was a select group of folks who happened to be White—men that I admire, men who formulated the Constitution, signed the Declaration of Independence—and people who came over here with capital, people who came over here and set up religious followings, people who owned land, and people who also constituted that minority of White men who were allowed to actually vote while the majority of folks who didn’t own property were not. 

What about all those other White people, right? They were stationed above women and above Black people—not to mention Native Americans, of course, in the hierarchy of things—and that’s a fair enough observation. But it still doesn’t really do justice to the fact that the term “whiteness” or the term “White,” and “White supremacy,” and this idea that it is just kind of the “state of being White” that is exalted in this history—it’s too broad a term to really identify what is actually taking place there. 

What’s taking place in the history of the United States of America is what generally has taken place in just about any other hierarchical society, which has been a subset of a certain group has achieved power. 

But all the same, we would have a better understanding of what produces structures in society when we recognize the fact that power and influence is networked around factors that may include going much deeper than mere ethnic commonality, and that these factors increasingly transcend ethnic commonality but produce the same problems. 

So, in other words, the elites in society are increasingly becoming more multi-ethnic and increasingly becoming more multi-religious, and I guarantee you that if the systems all remain the same but become diverse and multicultural, people are all going to have the same complaints, because the problems will not have really changed. And this is partially why on the left you do see this movement away from diversity as an intrinsic good and more toward equity, right? It’s another topic, but it’s related, in that sense. By leaning so heavily on the phrase “White” and “White supremacy,” you lose that higher resolution of understanding in terms of what is actually going on, while also personalizing the struggle in a way that tends to make enemies of any and every White person who retains any sort of connection to the idea of their being White, who sees in that condemnation some condemnation of themselves and the people they love—for attitudes that they don’t hold and actions that they never committed. And even for things that they themselves may not have even benefited from all that much in the grand scheme of things, in comparison to many other folks, at least. And then you have folks who have suffered in a longer history of oppression and subjugation within which that power differential was White on top, Black on bottom. 

So, looked at through that frame, the focus on “White supremacy”—one can easily see where it comes from, but it is neither accurate nor helpful in the long run.

To what extent have you been influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s work, or Moral Foundations Theory in general?

Wood: Well, Jonathan Haidt is on the board of directors and Braver Angels. I got to interview and talk to him along with my colleague April Lawson, who’s a brilliant intellectual and thinker who folks need to hear more from. I’ve always operated from the frame of observation that says that human beings—that our rational faculties are always serving our emotions. [Haidt’s] research has helped to lend terminology and sort of a framework for articulating that intuition, [which] has for me been very helpful. 

And it’s clear to me, beyond that, that Jonathan Haidt’s work has kind of provided us sort of a superstructure for talking about human psychology in this way, that sort of provides the grounding for the type of work that Braver Angels and other organizations—from The Village Square to Listen First, and well beyond that—employ in trying to cross these divides. 

And in the Intellectual Dark Web space, it has a very grounding effect, too, because one of the things I would tend to criticize about the online heterodox space is that we tend to lean too much on the conceit that says reasonable arguments should also be persuasive. But by that, what people mean is logical arguments should be persuasive, but you know what we receive as logical has to ultimately sort of correspond to our emotional and ethical intuitions. And so you have to have an understanding in terms of what those intuitions are based in, what they’re rooted in, and our moral foundations—and our arguments, our reasoning, depending on who we’re speaking to, need to be tailored to that if it’s going to be persuasive. Which means that we have to look inward to find our own place of empathy to be able to connect with what those moral foundations are in another person, and that becomes an inward-looking ethical project in and of itself, which again points to the substance of nonviolence, Dr. King’s philosophy. You know, this idea that we have to begin with goodwill for the other person. That goodwill itself has to be grounded in a desire to enact a [recognition of] the deeper kind of moral starting point the other person is working from in an inward sort of way. If we can do that, then we can establish that sort of thread of empathy that runs between me and you, and it becomes easier for me to think, to activate a sense of earnest desire for your good as a human being, because I can see what is human in you, right? It suddenly connects to what is human in me.

If you are only seeing human communication as a project of rational interplay, all of that is cut out, and suddenly you become calculators, like, you know, spitting figures back and forth to each other and wondering how it is that we’re getting unbalanced outcomes on either side of an equation. And, you know, the deeper art of human communication is lost. And so, Jonathan Haidt’s work helps guard against that.

And I think out of this particular conversation also flows the conversation about how to communicate—on one end—through strict statistics and rational argumentation, over to storytelling that resonates with our deeper morals and values-based personas—the places in us that are kind of hungry for that very basement-level, human interaction. What role does storytelling play? And this is, I think, where Chloe Valdary has a lot of insight.

Wood: Yeah, well, yeah. Chloe’s very sharp about this. One of Jonathan Haidt’s lines in The Righteous Mind is that the human brain is not a logic processor, it is a story processor. And in that vein, narrative storytelling—you see this sort of running throughout the way Jordan Peterson talks about psychology and what moves human beings, too—it’s sort of, well, everything, ultimately. There’s a way in which everything is a story. 

And what that seems to suggest to me is that there is this sort of moral starting point to all of our experiences and perceptions that kind of progresses along some ark of evolution, where we transcend our ignorance, hopefully, or we dive into our indulgences and our desires and we become more and more blind, and, depending on what path we take, we pay the price for that in the ultimate outcomes of our lives. And that applies to groups as much as it does to individuals, I think. And so we’re all trying to tell stories that preserve some lessons, some moral truth.

And you can just make up a story out of nothing, or at least out of half-truths. But I think that stories that really resonate with people and that move people to greater and greater acts of sacrifice and solidarity and ethical growth are stories that resonate more and more deeply in the human heart, the human soul. And so I think that part of what we need to embrace now is a story that honors everybody’s particular sort of cultural and political and social starting points but

ultimately weds us all to a more sort of universal kind of American and human project of realizing that more perfect union, realizing what Dr. King described as the beloved community: a place in which goodwill governs the interactions that exist among mankind. 

And I think that there are other stories that people are telling, stories that people on the left are telling about the search for justice, the stories that people on the right are telling about the search for freedom and justice and liberty. These are both important values that we defend. 

But it is possible for those things to be pursued in a way that obscures other goods and distorts our understanding of the larger story that we really should be committed to. Justice pursued in a spirit of retribution leads to social discord. Liberty pursued in a way that is callous toward the suffering of other people leads to inequity, and ultimately collapse, ultimately contention between groups. 

But [with] a story that says that, ultimately, we are, as human beings and as Americans, endowed with life, liberty, and the right to the pursuit of happiness—the rights to these things—and that through the power of goodwill, through the power of love, as Dr. King talked about it and as the Gospels referred to it, we safeguard the road to realizing these values through our common commitments to one another as members of a community. 

I believe in a story where we transcend these things in a way that allows us to maintain what is unique and special about us and our individual identities and our individual group identities, but allows us to create a larger social reality that is greater and more beautiful than the sum of its parts, you know? And so—ultimately—that’s the work of Braver Angels, and that’s the mission to which I aspire. //

Moral Foundations Theory

Some social and cultural psychologists posit that the political factions we think of as “the right” and “the left” are driven by natural psychological traits that direct people into valuing certain moral categories above others. Although our worldviews typically arise via emotion and intuition, we tend to trick ourselves into believing that our morality was chosen through meticulous reasoning.

The foundations analyzed within this framework are:

1. Care/harm

2. Fairness/cheating

3. Loyalty/betrayal

4. Authority/subversion

5. Sanctity/degradation

Liberals/progressives mostly emphasize the first two categories, whereas conservatives typically value all five to varying degrees. Although both major political groups demonstrate concern over “fairness/cheating,” they differ in how they define it: Liberals/progressives believe fairness is a matter of distributing resources more equally across the board; conservatives believe fairness centers around rewarding people in proportion to what they contribute.

Want to learn more about why people across different cultures, and within cultures, argue about morality in recurrent ways? Check out The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012), by New York University psychology professor Jonathan Haidt. //

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