Life is complex. People aren’t driven by just a handful of basic emotions that are easy to understand. They experience hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feelings that are constantly shifting, waxing and waning in relation to each other, leading to conflicted motivations.
Each emotion carries its own way of seeing the world, and its own manner of defining the right thing to do. Emotion drives morality, and when many different emotions struggle to dominate the mental stage, people feel torn. Any particular choice can be seen as morally right or morally wrong, dependent on the emotional frame through which it is evaluated. It often feels as if we will be guilty of something no matter what we do.
One way that people address the psychological tension that arises out of the moral complexity of human existence is simplify their problems by focusing on one emotional perspective to the exclusion of others. Aligning themselves with one moral code founded in a particular emotional framework, they adopt this view as their creed, declaring it to be right, while rejecting other emotional and moral perspectives as wrong.
Such people have become righteous. They feel pure and true and confident in themselves, having simplified their decisions by aiming for a single sort of emotional tone that they regard as the way things ought to be.
The trouble with righteousness is that it doesn’t match human experience very well. People have mixed motivations most of the time. They have to deal with people from different cultural and psychological backgrounds, with agendas that don’t match theirs. Though those who feel righteous may believe that they carry the banner of the one true path, they meet other people who feel equally righteous, but with competing agendas.
When these meetings take place, there’s rarely an emotionally valid middle ground. Centrism is really its own form of righteousness, one that elevates the emotional agenda of everyone getting along regardless of their needs and feelings. “Bridging the divide” and “overcoming polarization” become their own strident causes. There is no genuine common ground, no moderate center that everyone reasonable can agree upon.
An effective antidote to righteous moods can be found in an acceptance of moral multiplicity. Rather than trying to build a bridge between emotionally-opposed poles, we can transcend the concept of poles itself, and recognize that emotions and their accompanying moral dictates operate on many different dimensions.
