If you’ve lived through an election season, you understand quite well how people are easily stirred up into outrage. Politicians and their marketers have come to understand how primal and deeply seated outrage and fear can be, and how effectively it motivates people to vote and act in certain ways.

Kurt Gray has done great service in presenting the results of a lot of his psychological and sociological research into people in Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.

The author’s main thesis, broadly, is that the avoidance of harm is hard-wired as the basic proposition of human morality, and all moral reasoning can be understood in terms of mitigating the prospect and threat of moral harm.

The work is organized in three parts, with a common myth under exploration in each, its refutation, and what it means for us.

The first such myth involves humans as evolved to be apex predators. Using current evolutionary theory, he argues instead how ancestral humans were often preyed upon by larger creatures on the African savanna, and humanity developed its communal nature in part to mitigate this threat. In this way he would explain why we are hard-wired to be constantly on the alert for harm and why we prioritize our safety from harms.

It is understandable how many would consider this to be at variance with the portrayal of humanity in Scripture, but it does go a long way to explain how we behave in comparison to “true” apex predators like lions, tigers, etc.

The second myth is that of the moral mind and “harmless wrongs” as advocated for by Jonathan Haidt and his moral minds theory. I confess I have always been skeptical of Haidt’s thesis because the idea conservatives would have so many more moral domains than liberals seemed more as if there was something missing in the analysis than actual reality. The author well argued how it is really considerations of harm that underlie human moral reasoning: system 1 thought will always see certain things as harmful, even if system 2 thought can be persuaded those possible harms have been thoroughly mitigated. When we understand concern about harm as underneath all moral reasoning, we can understand how our views on political and moral subjects involve which harms we prioritize over other possible harms. The author does well at showing how we naturally sympathize more with those we deem “victims” than “victimizers,” even in contexts in which the “victimizer” is not responsible for what they have suffered (i.e., if both a victim and victimizer both have houses that burn down in a wildfire, people will want to provide more assistance to the former rather than the latter, even though neither are responsible at all for what they have suffered in this particular situation). The author also expresses how DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) works so well: we all ironically want to see ourselves as the victim so that we can obtain the appropriate moral standing, especially if and when we are accused of being the victimizer (and this kind of thought is very pervasive in political discourse, with white men now somehow feeling as if they are the victims in society).

The final myth involves our almost religious confidence in reason and rationality: facts as bridging divides. Instead, the author does well at showing, through research, how facts don’t really change minds. Stories change minds. One has to tell stories of how one or another has been harmed in order to get people to consider how it is seen by the other side. That is how the other side ceases to look like immoral monsters.

The author also encourages humility in these matters, which is very important. In truth, everyone fears their fears, and a lot of our political issues are profitably understood that way. Abortion? Obsessive concern regarding harm to a child versus harm to the mother. Social services? Concerns regarding the harms suffered by the poor and marginalized versus the harm of wealthy people having their wealth extracted by taxes. Immigration? The harms suffered by immigrants which lead them to immigrate versus the harm to employment prospects or living situations for those already here. Guns? The harm done by guns versus the harm suffered by someone who does not have a gun.

In this way, the people with whom you disagree are not cold-blooded monsters who hate all which is good, right, and holy. Instead, they fear different things than you fear. Their harm calculations are different from yours. That does not mean they should be fearing what they fear to the extent they fear it, or that their harm calculation is more correct than yours. But it provides a starting point for real conversation and hopefully better understanding.

I highly recommended this work; everyone should read it.

It is always interesting to see how others think we can, as a society, finally bridge the moral, political, and sociological issues that seem to divide us. By asking what "harms" others may be frightened of, we can easily see how much more closely aligned we may all be and find the way to build bridges through mutual understanding and respect.