Speaking Pidgin
Communicating across moral languages
I envision this short note as part one of three. This first part tries to examine how we might communicate better across the moral aisle about climate change. In the next part, I intend to focus on why the first section won’t work because the problem isn’t one of morals, it is one of bad epistemology. The third part, rather than try to reconcile these views (because, right now, I can’t) will present a descriptive view of what compels me on an emotional level to care about climate change.
Folks who are worried about climate change, including myself, are making a critical error in their messaging.
I read a book recently by the (former UVA!) psychology professor Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind. In the book, Haidt makes a convincing argument that people on different sides of the political spectrum build their morality using different building blocks: he calls these blocks Moral Foundations. The Moral Foundations exist as 6 dualities: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation).
Secular liberals, above all else, index on the care/harm and fairness/cheating foundations. They are concerned with fairness in terms of equality and the harm principle: restrictions on human behavior are only justified to prevent harm to others. In contrast, conservative morality is founded in fairness in terms of proportionality and concerns about loyalty, authority, and sanctity.
I bring this up because I think that in order to effectively communicate to people with different moral underpinnings than own our we must speak their language. Examined through this lens, it is clear why Greta Thunberg’s incredible, heartfelt declarations surrounding intergenerational equity and the plight of the Global South fall on deaf ears on the right; she is not speaking the same moral language. Arguments that would appeal to the right, Haidt posits, “will appeal to a sense of patriotism, group loyalty, or stewardship” rather than equality and harm to future generations.
Framing issues using the tenants of morality important to the group with whom you are speaking is like speaking a pidgin language—while not as ideal as fluency in each other’s languages, it’s better than, say, trying to speak in Chinese to my Southern grandfather (apologies if you’re reading this). Likewise, speaking about climate action as an act of patriotic stewardship, or as a matter of national security, is going to be more effective when I’m speaking to my grandfather than framing it as a way to promote racial justice in the Global South or enable the symbiotic utopia of deep ecology.
I distinctly remember a conversation with a coworker when I started my first job out of college. He asked me why I was interested in working in solar. I rattled off the usual talking points, straight out of my liberal arts sustainability education about climate change and global impacts of environmental degradation. He was quiet, so I kept talking. When I started talking about generating equity between historical polluters like the US and UK and those that are going to suffer from climate change most acutely in the near future, he interrupted me.
He said that he didn’t much believe or care for any of those arguments. I was slightly stunned. He said was interested in solar nonetheless because he liked that it promoted cheap power, resiliency, and energy independence. He mentioned the benefits of being able to produce your own energy without having to rely on the central electric grid. I realized that I had been thinking narrowly, expecting everyone to buy into solar on the same grounds as my own logic. His priorities were additive to my own understanding of the benefits of solar even though we were coming from different moral and ideological positions.
In case you identify as conservative and think I’m being a typical college-educated liberal coastal elite here, people on the right should do this too! We all win with better communication across the political aisle. Haidt makes the valid point that, descriptively, there is more to morality than harm and fairness. Because conservatives operate across all six of the moral foundations, while liberals are focused exclusively on harm and fairness, they can bring a unique moral perspective to the table that could be overlooked otherwise (provided it is framed in the pidgin we’re seeking to develop here).
I’m not great at spoken languages—as I often point out, I studied a Latin for 5 years (not that I regret it at all, as I also often point out!!!). Right now, though, I’m trying to learn this pidgin. I think that this strategy is useful to achieve better outcomes regarding not only climate change, but other important, divisive issues.
Or is it?