Mind Walls

On Dave Chappelle, Public Soldiers, and Trojan Horses of Disillusionment

By Kemi C. Amusan

Essay Two: Not Principles
How We Turn Discomfort into Moral Certainty

Principles?

Well, it is the explanation we reach for instinctively because it flatters us. To say we are defending our principles is to present ourselves as people motivated by conviction rather than impulse, by moral clarity rather than personal preference. It suggests that our emotional responses are governed by carefully considered values instead of passing feelings. There is truth in that. Principles matter. Civilisations are held together by shared commitments. Communities cannot exist without ideas that people are willing to defend, even when doing so is costly.

The difficulty begins when we assume that principle explains the full intensity of our reaction. It often explains some of it. It rarely explains all.

If principle alone were driving these reactions, we would expect some consistency in the way we applied it. Principles are supposed to survive changes in circumstance and identity. They do not ask whether the person involved belongs to our tribe before deciding what is right. They do not become stricter when an opponent violates them and more forgiving when an ally does.

They do not change their meaning according to who benefits from them. A genuine commitment to fairness, for example, should make us willing to condemn unfairness even when it works in our favour. A genuine commitment to free expression should make us uncomfortable when censorship protects the people we agree with just as much as when it silences the people we dislike. If we believe that bridge building is valuable, we should be able to recognise its value when our own side reaches across an ideological divide, not only when the other side is expected to do the reaching.

Our reactions, however, are often far less consistent. We can praise intellectual openness until openness asks us to consider an idea we have already rejected. We can celebrate courage until courage requires someone we admire to disappoint our own tribe. We can demand grace for the mistakes of people we identify with while treating the same mistake in someone else as evidence of permanent corruption. The principle has not changed. What has changed is the person standing beneath it.

That difference matters. When the intensity of our moral judgment rises and falls according to identity, loyalty, familiarity or whose interests are affected, we may still be responding to something we genuinely value, but we are no longer responding to principle alone. Preference has entered the room. And preference is not necessarily shallow or arbitrary. It often comes from something much less visible and much more psychologically intimate: our need to make sense of the world.

Imagine the tediousness of every new person, event or idea requiring us to reconstruct reality from the beginning. Every decision would become unbearably expensive.

This is why we create maps. Our minds need to simplify reality for coherence. To reduce complexity into patterns that can be recognized quickly enough to be useful. We organise people into categories, ideas into narratives and events into stories that allow an otherwise overwhelming world to become intelligible.

Public figures are not exempt from these maps. As a matter of fact, they often become landmarks in the moral landscapes we construct, to orient ourselves within a complicated world.

But maps sharpen some distinctions while blurring others. They highlight certain features while making others almost invisible. Yet we can become so familiar with using the maps that we sometimes forget that the map is only a representation of the territory and begin treating that interpretation or representation of reality as though it were reality itself.

Thus, the discomfort we experience when a movement or change in the map leaves us feeling disoriented, can, according to Jonathan Haidt, be mistaken as moral judgement. Often, we can have a feeling that something is wrong before we can fully articulate why, and once that feeling has arrived, our reasoning can become less an instrument for discovering what is true than a lawyer assembling a case for a verdict that has already been reached.

The public figure makes the unexpected joke, appears alongside the wrong people, enters the wrong room, supports the wrong cause or simply refuses to behave in the way we expected. Something in us registers the disruption before we have consciously formulated an argument about it. We feel the wrongness first. Then we begin searching for the principle that explains the feeling.

And once we have found a moral vocabulary for what unsettled us, the feeling acquires the authority of conviction. We no longer experience ourselves as disoriented. We experience ourselves as certain.

And this is where preference can become almost indistinguishable from principle. Preference says, I do not like what this means. Principle asks whether the same judgment would still hold if the person were different, if the tribe were different, if the outcome favoured someone we disliked, or if the violation threatened something we ourselves valued.

That is the harder test. Not whether we can explain our reaction, but whether the explanation survives when the map is turned around.

None of this asks us to abandon our principles. If anything, it asks us to take them more seriously. A genuine principle should remain recognisable even when the map changes. It should survive encounters with complexity, resist the pull of tribal loyalty and remain capable of judging our allies as honestly as our opponents. Otherwise, we may not be defending the principle at all, but the particular arrangement of reality that has made us feel most at home.

And we may have mistaken our mental walls for the principles they were built to protect. We may have defended the walls for so long that we can no longer tell the difference between defending the wall and defending the truth itself. And that may be the most unsettling possibility of all.