It was around 2010 when I was first called out by a friend for my support of the Washington, D.C., NFL team. That team, at the time, famously used a racist moniker for native Americans as its mascot and branding. Going off to college in another state and discovering that something as simple as my sports team affiliation could be the target of moral condemnation was eye-opening, and also, eye-rolling. It seemed so silly. This was a team I had grown up with, a team that my family had adored, and a team beloved in my hometown. Of all the moral arguments to pick, the demand that I stop being a fan of the team struck me as a pedantic and unreasonable. (In fact, I wrote about this very thing back in 2016, though the article is now quite dated.) Fast forward to today, and my friend’s moral argument has won out, though the Washington now-called-Commanders remain just as abysmal as they were ten and fifteen and twenty years prior. A moral argument that had first come to elicit eyerolls gained enough momentum to force a billion-dollar sports franchise to completely change its mascot and branding.
At Aeon recently, Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra wrote about what they call “the eyeroll heuristic,” which is similar to my knee-jerk response to my friend’s moral assertions. Who hasn’t responded to a moral claim with an automatic dismissal, a roll of the eyes or an exasperated sigh.
Why, rather than taking the moral concerns behind social reforms seriously, do we so often respond with this kind of petulant, knee-jerk defensiveness? It’s not that we don’t care about right and wrong. But cases like these can feel like a far cry from the sort of moral issues that we’re inclined to take seriously — you know, like murder and human rights. In fact, there seems to be an unspoken expectation that when we’re confronted with genuine, important arguments for moral change, they’ll be easy to recognise. Probably they’ll be accompanied by a flash of righteous anger, or a pang of compassion. And of course we will rise to the occasion. Annoyance and irritation, though, are often taken as a sign that the concerns aren’t that big of a deal, that the arguments are mere quibbles that can be safely dismissed. Call this the eyeroll heuristic: if it’s preachy and annoying, it’s OK to ignore it.
When presented with moral justifications for change, Kelly and Westra argue that we should be slower to dismiss them, to push past our knee-jerk defensiveness. Calls to moral reform are often violations of what they call “norm psychology.” We take for granted those things that are our social norms and respond with a mix of hostility and fear when those norms are broken. Whether it’s airline boarding protocol, neighbors arguing over trash day, or something as simple as a loud talker in a restaurant, norm psychology is a powerful human tool. It reduces the number of threats in an environment and allows us to either pinpoint a specific clear and present threat or be at ease by a lack of threats. Disruptions to that norm, even in the name of moral improvement or progress, are met with surprisingly deep-seated hostility.
Kelly and Westra articulate this eyeroll heuristic from a more progressive perspective, with illustrations involving civil rights activism and veganism. There is also, of course, a more conservative aspect to Kelly and Westra’s description of the eyerolls heuristic. One can rightly point to the myriad of ways that gambling is bad for a society, but any call to restrain its reach or curtail its influence are met with eyerolls. The same goes for policies that support two parent households, curtail pornography, or limit adolescent cell phone use. The data is there, but the moral claim is seen as fear-mongering, legalism, or modern-day puritanism. The eyeroll heuristic — judging whether something is morally right or wrong by immediate gut reactions — is present whenever a moral topic is brought forward, on the left or on the right.
The article’s headline itself, “Why Does Moral Progress Feel Preachy and Annoying,” also implies a sort of religious context. Every churchy person I know has bumped into Kelly and Westra’s eyeroll heuristic, as if conversations about God imply the same norm violation of a person’s life. If God exists, after all, and if God is good and just, then there will be some changes that everyone who follows Him will want to undertake. Religious conversion is quite the norm violation, which helps us understand why people avoid it so determinedly.
As for solutions to this eyeroll heuristic, which Kelly and Westra call a “serious obstacle to moral progress,” they offer a few directions for solutions. Some are less convincing than others. Their hope to inspire creativity and curiosity, for example, seems a bit too pie-in-the-sky, but their suggestion that new moral norms be implemented with an eye to reducing feelings of threat and fiction are helpful. Practically speaking, however, the duo admit “It’s not clear how to implement these ideas in practice.”
This is where I think religious preaching has a better chance of succeeding than its secular counterpart: It firmly roots its call to change to ethical change of behavior or attitudes within a more foundational affective transformation, namely love. A commitment to love creates a danger-free space for someone to consider, practice, and decide to embrace a new normal. Calls to ethical change are only ever heard as condemning threats, and threatened people will only double down on the norms they know for risk of losing identity, community, self-image or even social privilege.
To use theological terms, change is possible when the law of moral judgment heralds and gives way to a gospel of welcoming forgiveness and love. The former alone will only exacerbate fear and opposition, while the latter leaves a person who needs to change with no insight and direction. Act does not precede being, but the other way around. Fewer things could be more norm-violating and ineffective than climate activists gluing themselves to the Mona Lisa or the medically shocking anti-abortion placards displayed at busy intersections. Conversely, religious conversions can often bring about the very moral adjustments that society wants to see.
A brief case study: Consider the inner logic of love in the Civil Rights movement, a powerful moral movement that certainly changed moral norms for America. One core principle in the movement was that it was unloving to leave an oppressor in a state of hatred. This love and counterintuitive respect was one of the pillars that drove leaders to engage in nonviolent protest. Modern protest movements often mimic the non-violence of these activists but lack the conviction to love instead of condemn. In a 1957 sermon delivered by The Rev. Dr. King himself outlined the principle in a sermon on Jesus’s teaching “love your enemy.”
We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated, or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case. For the person who hates, you can stand up and see a person and that person can be beautiful, and you will call them ugly. For the person who hates, the beautiful becomes ugly and the ugly becomes beautiful.
This certainly doesn’t sound like the attempts at moral improvement today from the left or the right, where empathy for one’s supposed enemies — let alone love — is in short supply. The downside to insisting on the prerogative of “may truth” is the way it imprisons us within our faulty, limited frame of reference. Unable to see another’s point of view, their values and fears, we cannot take the risk of a love that requires understanding and forgiveness. And in the absence of love, all that’s left is the judgment of the law.
Consequently, this call to love one’s enemy as a foundation for activism could, ironically, draw the exact kind of eye-rolling that Kelly and Westra identify as a hurdle to moral improvement. And yet, the track record of moral progress speaks for itself.
When greeted with an eyeroll, does the person seeking a new and more moral social norm feel righteous indignation or heartbreak? The religious spirit says that heartbreak is the more transformative and successful response. The law/gospel hermeneutic of scripture may very well be the solution to the eyeroll heuristic. Roll your eyes if you must, but heed Kelly and Westra’s warning. Our gut rejections of moral paradigms shouldn’t be trusted.
