How Reason, Skepticism, and Compassion Can Win Hearts and Minds

ARTICLE

BY JOHN KIRBOW

I am amemberof the U.S.Army Special Operations community and Defense Department, with time spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Europe, as well as time at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). When I returned home from a tour of duty in the Afghanistan warzone several years ago and saw how deeply divided and viscerally polarized this country had become, it was heartbreaking. Over there, our team could sit down with tribal leaders and sometimes even the Taliban, and occasionally find productive ways to discuss problems in spite of enormous barriers. Returning to the states, however, I saw how many Americans would not even talk to their neighbors, especially if they were of a different political persuasion. This political polarization, and the deep distrust and hostility that I saw it produces, was often more jarring than the tribal infighting I had become so accustomed to dealing with in the Middle East and Central Asia. In a way, I felt as if my own backyard had become a tribal warzone. The situation on many of our college campuses seems to be one of the most acute strains of the problem. This observation led me to think about how skepticism and behavioral science, combined with some of my experiences in a warzone, could possibly lead to solutions to our divisiveness. Here are a few ideas on how a new roadmap might be realizable.

Nonlethal Counterinsurgency

Very few civilians understand how counterinsurgency works. It is not just about kicking in doors or engaging insurgents with lethal weapon systems such as rifles, tanks, or Striker vehicles. A crucial yet underrepresented part of counterinsurgency1 involves the use of nonlethal tools of face-to-face communication and cultural expertise. It is about working productively with villages, with tribal councils, or simply with the population at large. Some of my most enriching memories involve engaging with a variety of people, from everyday farmers to local government and tribal leaders. We did this amidst enormous differences in cultural and religious perspectives and points of moral conflict. These differences and frictions would arguably blow the minds of most people here in the Western world, yet we accomplished things together across divides that students at campuses such as Yale, Berkeley, Portland State, and Evergreen—where controversies have erupted into protests and, in some cases, violence— could not even imagine.

In this sense, counterinsurgency takes an approach grounded in credibility, respect, and trust, as well as a realistic grasp of the tribal systems and cultural nuances of places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Interestingly, American discourse—from university campuses to cities and rural countryside, coast to coast—seems to follow its own kind of tribal system, set along ideological and identity fault lines. People are increasingly bound into a team sport mentality, of “my tribe versus your tribe”, and this attitude clouds not only reason and clear thinking, but compassion for others outside your moral or political in-group.

This kind of team sport mentality is described in detail by the work of Jonathan Haidt, a wellknown psychologist and author, who has been studying morality and the psychology of moral disagreement for several decades. As he writes in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, “Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”2 The field of moral psychology probes deeper into the causes of moral disagreement (see, for example, Haidt’s website moralfoundations.org), often giving us useful insights into human cooperation and dialogue, clearer thinking, and more trust and compassion between people who may have the potential to find genuine agreement.3 It can help us address not only the college campus crisis, but also much of the hyperpolarization and toxicity that pervades much of America, from city to countryside.4 The idea from my early collaboration with Dr. Michael Rectenwald, Professor of Global Liberal Studies at New York University and author of the 2015 book Global Secularisms in A Post-Secular Age, was to help support civil dialogue and reasoned compassion, by expanding the space in which these exchanges can take place. We call this the Exchange Spaces model.