Thesis Abstract

Saving Thanksgiving

Ideological Foundations and the Pursuit of Less Destructive Disagreement

Author: Cade Stone

Title: Saving Thanksgiving: Ideological Foundations and the Pursuit of Less Destructive Disagreement

Supervisors: Lee Walker, Primary Advisor; Dr. Carlos Rivera-Garcia, Second Reader

This project seeks to unearth and interrogate the roots of our nation’s increasingly untenable civic arrangement. It asks, first, how we come to believe so strongly, discussing personality, intuitionism, and moral foundations; second, how we come to disagree so destructively, discussing group formation, tribalism, ethics and ideology, and partisan conflict; and, lastly, how we might come to coexist more constructively, discussing structural, technological, and interpersonal reforms that might be used to limit the bandwidth of our destructive disagreement.

I argue that politics is an assertion of morals. Our minds—informed by genes, personality traits, and intuition; honed and dampened by variably ethical cultures; bound into cohesive societies defined by group competition—have subsequently come to treat it as nothing short of warfare. The humans that these processes have produced are modular thinkers, with different switch-like shortcuts adapted to respond to specific challenges. These now inform a kaleidoscopic range of moral intuitions that urge and inform our righteous minds. Today we believe passionately and quickly.

We, the remnants of successfully competitive ingroups, have further been molded by our desire to advance the causes of the units that inform our core identities. Certain ethical inclinations correlate with certain partisan affiliations, and groups peddling ethics of their own—from political parties to interest groups to anyone trying to sell you something—utilize moral appeals to activate the irrationally righteous beast within all of us. Today we disagree vehemently and patriotically.

It has taken us hundreds of thousands of years to arrive at today’s current conundrum, but we no longer have the luxury of time with which to solve it. We must act quickly to restore faith: in our system, our society, and ourselves; in the capacity of our norms and institutions to contain our caustic civics and eventually soothe them. There exists a range of policy propositions, technological tweaks, and interpersonal tools that can begin this process, but it must first begin with us: wanting to change, willing to pause. Like it or not, we are hopelessly lashed together while stuck in this world. Like a constantly revising nation grasping for the promise of its founding, we must push on.