I just had to stop for a moment and acknowledge an absolutely wonderful and poignant substack by Chad Ford. Ford points out that there is an unfortunate sentiment to respond to violence with violence, because the other person seemingly is refusing to listen to another’s point. It’s an honest assessment, and sadly completely understandable to me because of the things I’ve been learning recently.
I’ve been reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and this book can show why people would respond to violence with violence. In short, it’s because any measurable difference of core morals between individuals or groups could be intepreted as a threat to the other group. Haidt lays down his evidences to claim this is all part of evolution, and that is how humans learned to adapt and survive. There really is so much more to the book, and I highly recommend it.
Being in the middle of Haidt’s book and having read Ford’s post, it’s a reminder to me for the direction I want to lead my life. Everybody is rationalizing their moral levels in their own unique individual way, and everybody wants to have a relationship to a certain degree to validate those morals. And yet, when two parties don’t see eye-to-eye, then the relationship can devolve destructively. For myself, I want to be sure that I am seeing everybody’s moral values in their own respective light.
Wouldn’t this be the call from Jesus Christ in His Sermon on the mount? “Blessed are the peacemakers”. I can believe that Christ was teaching to go against what is rudimentarily evolutionarily true, that is He would want people to resist the need to fight against someone with different moral values. I have started to change my habits in order to understand more. At the same time, I feel myself being liberated from the weight and trap of anger and resentment.
From everything that I’ve been learning and will probably continue to learn, judging another person will almost always be biased and premature. That is a problem, because if a judgment is laid at another person, that other person is very likely to see it as unfair because they could have a different moral value system than oneself. It is more fair to refrain from judgment and instead be curious as to why another person is doing what they are doing.
Jonathan Haidt describes loyalty as a core moral. I believe people can still reserve their own loyalty while opening up unto understanding at the same time. Because somebody else has different core moral values does not mean your own core morals are any less valuable. I’ve learned to know how to be confident in my own core morals, in that I am secure with them.
I think Christ wants us to have a bigger picture of loyalty. I’m reminded of a passage from The Book of Mormon “The natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam”. Instead, a person ought to be humble, meek, and loving. To take this advice to heart, it seems that the urge to fight and protect ones own insecurity is against God’s purposes. Instead, it is in God’s purposes to listen and understand another person, perhaps, even our own selves. I have found much treasure in learning of other’s cultures and myself, and I am all the more grateful for having chosen it.