Can You Be Friends with Someone with Opposite Views to You?
Short answer: Probably not.
This is a question that was asked to me when having this humdinger of a political argument with a Facebook "friend" that spilt over to a couple of posts here at ATP about being a Trump supporter and having cognitive dissonance. It is evident as a pertinent question and issue in politics, but also in religious debate. Can you be friends with, or even be a partner of, someone who holds antithetical views to your own?
As ever, it probably depends how you define "friends". Bearing in mind you choose friends, usually, as opposed to family members where there are other psychological variables at play.
As a background to this piece, I believe that politics is a subset of morality, where morality at an individual level is what one should do in a given context, and politics is what one should do writ large across society.
An anecdote. At university, in my first term in my new halls of residence-type flat complex (flat = apartment in UK-speak for my US readers), you made friends with pretty much most people there. I became good enough friends with one of my new flatmates over the first three weeks until he said something to me. "There ain't no black in the Union Jack." After he expressed his political leanings to me, that of broadly the BNP (British National Party), I found there to be no reason for us to remain friends. I didn't have an outright argument with him - I was young, out of my comfort zone, in a new life and finding my way. But I did not pursue a friendship. His politics qua morality were too antithetical to mine. And I think I was well justified.
The comeback to this position is that I should be willing to change people, to work at them to change them for the better. In a perfect world, perhaps I will spend all my days seeking out and befriending racists, homophobes, misogynists and the like to see them as projects, works in progress.
But I have a life to lead and surrounding myself with good people, as I see them, for my friends, people with commonalities and shared experiences, is important.
Religion is a funny one. I can be friends with an ardent theist as long as their moral compass is broadly aligned to mine. I have been. Yes, there might be fuzzy edges, but this is all about morality. But how likely is this in an ardent theist? The problem isn't in the label of fundamentalist religionist, or hard-right conservative, the problem is in what moral package that entails.
As an aside, there are times when such people make moral proclamations in the abstract but that, psychologically and naturally, they are good people, and you can tell that. These people are environmentally more susceptible and I have engaged in more meaningful friendship with such people, recognising the kernels of ordinary morality blurred by thin layers of religious morality.
If, politically/morally speaking, you see homosexuality as a sin and that homosexuals should be denied access to the same human rights as me and should be discriminated against in law, then we are not going to be very good friends because you will literally be discriminating against three of my close family members. I'm not going to buy you a pint, have a jolly good time with you over a long session at the pub if you harbour views that seek to hurt my family members.
I wouldn't take Hitler out to lunch.
Then again, how do we go about changing such people's views? We know that this is better done from in-group members, so it is more effective to be in someone's in-group if you want to change their mind.
This is where there is a lot to be said for education and normalisation through culture (see Ginsburg and Her Replacement for explanation of what I mean by cultural normalisation here). I suppose my duty to society and my desires for friendship will find an equilibrium somewhere, but I do find it difficult to be genuinely good friends with (different to being friendly) with someone with whom I am morally antithetically positioned.
Friendship is a form of validation. If I choose to be friends with someone, or vice versa, it is a form of character validation. If I actively want to spend time with a Neo-Nazi, then perhaps friendship is not driving my desire to spend time, but some duty to societal betterment. That's not friendship.
Now, there may be elements of their character that I li\ke, they may be lovely to their mother and treat their friends very well, but this would just create uncomfortable cognitive dissonance in my own mind.
I'm sure there are some lovely people here with whom I argue vehemently on these blog threads, but lovely only in certain contexts. But they, whilst being decent people to their friends, will be simultaneously arguing and voting for someone who advocated separation of families and caging children, who has suggested gassing or shooting immigrants at the border, or, failing that, just shooting them in the legs. A guy who ridicules disabled people. A guy who wanted to sentence five innocent black boys to death and refused to back down when they were exonerated with DNA evidence. A man who serially lies and commits crimes. A man who pays off porn stars. A man who attacks deceased war veterans. So on and so forth.
If you really, truly support that man, think he is a fine fellow, then we cannot be friends. Your judge of character, your morality, is so divergent from mine that you are, in many ways, not a nice person. If you look at this man on TV and think, "Yes, this is my guy; I like him", then no, we can't be friends. Not in a deep, connected way. We can be projects, and you might even be nice to your mother, but that's as far as it will go.
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