Pamela Paresky: Re-Humanizing Our Opponents

“If we can re-humanize the people with whom we disagree, that takes us a good bit of the way to being able to engage with them outside of this realm of moral purity and moral pollution.”

What is “moral pollution”? On this episode of Watching America, we learn what it is and how it creates divisions between people that are difficult to bridge.

Pamela Paresky, Ph.D., is a Visiting Senior Research Associate the the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (SIFK) at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Scholar at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).

In this conversation, Paresky talks about her research for the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. We also hear about her forthcoming book, “Habits of a Free Mind,” a toolkit for engaging across lines of difference without feeling traumatized and without dehumanizing others.