What national anthem controversy can teach us

It’s not what you say that matters, but what people hear. On Sunday, 32 Broncos players kneeled during the national anthem. Even teammates who remained standing placed their hands on kneeling players’ shoulders in solidarity or voiced their support after the game.

Players across the National Football League did likewise in response to President Donald Trump’s statement last Friday — “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired, he’s fired” — and subsequent tweets.

By these actions, the football players were in effect saying, “Mr. President, don’t scold us or our teammates for trying to bring awareness to racial inequality.” Unfortunately, a lot of Americans, particularly those on the political right, didn’t hear what players were saying about free speech and needed dialogue on race. What they heard was an attack on the flag and the national anthem and what they symbolize: our nation, our veterans, our fallen soldiers, our Constitution, our shared history, and our future together. This was not the intent of the players; nevertheless it was the message received.

The result has been a passionate and utterly unproductive social media brawl with the right accusing the left of hating the country and the left accusing the right of hating free speech — or worse, being racist — and of course threats of boycotting football. How can otherwise reasonable people interpret a situation so differently?

It may come down to differences in how people perceive the world according to their moral foundations.

Jonathan Haidt, professor of business ethics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” has identified five moral foundations through which humans make moral determinations. Cultures differ in how they institutionalize the five moral foundations in language, law, custom and tradition, and individuals vary in how they prioritize the values, but they are universal.

These foundations are: Care (compassion for others, particularly the vulnerable and afflicted), fairness (the desire for justice), loyalty (allegiance to the community and self-sacrifice for the greater good), authority (respect for law and tradition), and sanctity (pursuit of purity and virtuousness particularly as it pertains to sex or food).

From laws against child abuse to the ire we feel when someone gives us less than we’ve earned to a bumper sticker urging us to commit random acts of kindness or support our troops, our moral precepts, mores, practices and laws have their roots in the moral foundations identified by Haidt.

Even though the foundations are universal, individuals rely on certain foundations more than others. Through extensive survey research, Haidt has discovered that Americans on the left depend mainly on the care and fairness foundations to make moral judgments, while the right uses all five foundations. This difference explains why perceived disrespect for national symbols angers conservatives, who see it as disloyalty and an affront to tradition, and why liberals are not as bothered by it.

Conservatives need to understand that improper patriotic observance does not necessarily indicate what they think it does: a lack of appreciation or love for the nation. And liberals may have a hard time relating to conservatives’ greater sensitivity toward national symbols and demonstrations of love of nation, but they need to respect it.

Football players have a right to kneel during the national anthem in protest of President Trump’s disparaging comments and the bigger issue of racial inequality, but they are sabotaging their message by presenting it in such a way that it can’t be heard.