Are we speaking different languages?

One day when I was six, my teacher told me to go to a “drawer,” and I had no idea what she meant. I had just moved to a new school — a new country — and was still learning the language.

When I repeated the mystery word back — “drawer?” — one of the boys laughed. To teach him a lesson, my teacher told him he had to do whatever I said. But he would have to hear that command in a language he didn’t understand… Spanish.

I don’t remember what I said to him. But I do remember his confusion! He didn’t know what I’d told him to do any more than I’d known what English speakers call a box on hinges you pull out of a cabinet.

Remembering this the other day got me thinking: What if we look at the challenges of our divide the way we look at the challenges of not understanding each other’s languages?

Moni Guzmán, circa first grade! (Courtesy: my dad and his impressive digitized family photo archive)

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt writes that there are six “moral foundations” beneath our politics: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and liberty/oppression.

Conservatives appeal to all six foundations, according to Haidt, while liberals focus on three: care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression.

So when leaders make political arguments that call up a sense of what is sacred versus profane — the sanctity/degradation foundation — conservatives feel a stronger moral urgency than liberals, who struggle to make sense of their significance. It’s like those leaders are speaking a different language.

Conservatives, meanwhile, can miss the weight liberals assign to arguments around what they think will hurt people — the care/harm foundation. When liberals talk about the pain groups at the margins feel, conservatives can lament that pain, but struggle to relate to the degree of liberals’ concern.

It’s hard to get meaning across to someone who lacks the tools to unpack it.

So how do we learn each other’s moral languages?

Spending more time with each other helps. It has to.

More time listening for the meaning underneath the words. More time listening for the urgencies in each other’s hearts. And a lot less time imagining we can already understand them.

Stay curious,