They say that how you welcome the new year sets the tone for the following 365 days.

With two little ones barely out of diapers, my December 31st was spent in front of the TV. But not begrudgingly. I watched the series finale of the 25-year-old HBO masterpiece The Sopranos, a culmination of a three-month marathon through all 86 episodes, clocking in at nearly four full days of couch time. Let me stress that I’m typically not a big fan of television, regardless of its ostensible “prestige.” I tend to believe the form is almost always a diminishment of its larger-screened antecedent—produced more hastily, less thoughtfully, and within more rigid commercial parameters. But The Sopranos is different. The much-lauded mafia drama is a contemporary morality play without any simplistic moralizing. It’s a meditation on our constitutional frailty and how skilled we are at turning a blind eye when it serves our interest. It questions whether evil people can be lovable. It examines the degree to which modern life requires a state of perpetual psychological denial. And then somehow it’s also incredibly funny, clever, and humane. It’s the best TV I’ve watched in ages.

Morality has been on my mind of late. As the last days of 2024 have given way to a tepid and colourless January, I’ve been reflecting on shades of gray—both literal and figurative. Outside my window, a muddy ground reveals patches of green grass beside desiccated leaves. It could be October just as easily as it could be April; temporal disorientation is one of climate change’s more innocuous consequences. The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin invented the term “chronotope” to describe a specific intersection of time and space as it occurs in literature.

Looking out at this seasonless landscape, with Trump heading back to the Oval Office and wars still raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, I wonder if we aren’t all experiencing a kind of “chronotopic confusion,” in which time, setting, decade, crisis, conflict, and tragedy have blurred into an indistinct whole. Like a recurring nightmare, everything bad is strangely familiar. And yet we still can’t figure out how to wake up.

Our shameful love of polarization

Discussing the sorry state of the world at my family’s Christmas dinner, and agreeing that nothing about it was poised to shift anytime soon, my mother offered a platitude: “It’s people who need to change.” I found myself returning to the idea when I read Nikhil Krishnan’s latest in the New Yorker, an essay featuring philosopher Hanno Sauer’s new book, The Invention of Good and Evil: A History of Morality (Oxford). According to Krishnan, Sauer believes that human beings have a common morality. He argues that partisanship and politics are shallow distractions that disguise “deep-seated, universal moral values that all people share with each other, and that can be the basis for a new understanding.” For Sauer, these values are simple and enduring. They include personal safety and freedom, care and tolerance, happiness, autonomy, and self-fulfilment.

Krishnan is more skeptical of this overarching optimism than I am.

More than occasionally, I’ve wondered whether people at opposite sides of a polemic are actually arguing for the same principles in different guises.

Take a topic as polarized and inflammatory as capital punishment. Those against it (whom I ardently count myself among) think that taking a life, retributively or otherwise, is definitively wrong and debases our collective humanity, while those who support it might argue something similar—the crime of taking a life is definitively wrong and so debasing of our humanity that it must receive a symbolic stamp of unacceptableness.

Too facile? Maybe. Consider instead some key issues from the recent U.S. election. Harris was vociferous in her support of transgender rights, championing everyone’s entitlement to personal safety and freedom, care and tolerance, happiness, autonomy, and self-fulfilment. Trump, meanwhile, advocated on behalf of huge swathes of the working class whose diminished buying power amid rampant inflation has undermined, well, the same values: their personal safety and freedom, their ability to care for their families and feel tolerated in a rich man’s world, and, of course, their overall happiness, autonomy, and self-fulfilment.

If this line of reasoning makes you uncomfortable—if you want to accuse me of eliding more nuanced questions about power, discrimination, prejudice, social conservatism, etc.—I urge you to sit with your discomfort for a moment.

For my part, I’ve often felt a little too in love with my ideological beliefs or, at very least, too dependent on them. Whenever I have an opinion that diverges ever so slightly from the consensus of my “side,” I feel the need to pile on the disclaimers. You know how progressive I am. You know I’m a card-carrying member of the Left. Am I worried that I won’t be able to articulate my idea without inadvertently implying something I don’t mean to imply? Am I anticipating the stupidity of my listener? Or am I simply playing by the rules of the polarized system that we’ve all somehow agreed upon? Do my disclaimers save face at the expense of exacerbating our binary understanding of politics and morality?

Resisting magnetic poles

Trying to understand the other side of the debate, to empathize with those who hold seemingly irreconcilable views, and to recognize parallels between your argument and their own is the foundation of new anti-polarization work that’s becoming increasingly successful in democracies around the world. At the House, we’ve developed an ongoing collaboration with Mathieu Lefèvre, the co-founder and CEO of More in Common, an organization that’s leading critical work in Europe and the U.S. towards building more united, inclusive, and resilient societies in which people believe feel bonded by shared goals. Their mission is simple, but radical. It’s a first step towards breaking our binary understanding of politics—and, by extension, a binary understanding of ethics.

Another recent promising example of anti-polarization work is a pre-election initiative that was conceptualized and organized by researchers at the University of Berkeley. Developed by political scientists Alia Braley and Gabriel Lenz and colleagues at MIT, the project aimed to show that voters on the other side of the divide are not as extreme as we think and care equally about protecting democracy.

By providing powerful data-based refutals of assumptions, the project revealed how much leaders are responsible for creating fear of political opponents through campaign tactics, and how that fear can actually cause voters to act against their principles.

A study in the journal Science ranked this method as highly effective in reducing support for partisan violence, easing partisan animosity, and reducing voter support for undemocratic practices.

Anti-polarization work is also gaining momentum in the business community, particularly since DEI training has largely proven ineffective at improving workplace culture. (A meta-analysis of hundreds of anti-discrimination interventions found that few actually achieved their goals.) As companies ranging from Ford to Lowe’s put the brakes on DEI programs, other brands are finding ways to shift their goals from targeting unconscious bias to simply helping employees build conflict-resolution to and creating space for them to express differing opinions and have respectful conversations. An American non-profit initiative called the Better Arguments Project has partnered tech companies and other businesses to help facilitate difficult dialogues where there’s no right or wrong answer. The goal is not to push for consensus, but to understand how others arrive at their conclusions and to bridge the gap between differing viewpoints.

15 questions for the new year

Let’s go back to The Sopranos. Mob boss Tony (played by the late great James Galdofini) tends to get the most critical attention. The character’s complexity is virtuosic—here’s a sociopathic criminal who kills frequently (often without conscience) and maintains our empathy and fondness through six-and-a-half seasons. But I think his wife, Carmela, is even more interesting, largely because she is not a sociopath. She is decent, moral, and sensitive, capable of both profound empathy and self-reflection. Not only is she consistently concerned about other people’s feelings and wellbeing, but she also reevaluates her own behavior and apologizes when she is in the wrong. Except when it comes to the fact that her entire life, and all its privileges, is paid for in blood money. Carmela exemplifies how clear moral insight doesn’t always coincide with the ability to do the right thing, something she pays for in happiness.

I think there’s a little bit of Carmela in most of us. There’s certainly a little Carmela in me when I find myself sitting in traffic, en route to the daycare or my son’s school, listening to the latest stats on atmospheric carbon on the radio while car exhaust billows on all sides of me. Or, in another sense, when I refuse to hear someone out because I’ve prejudged their opinion as intolerable. With that in mind, my resolutions for the new year come in the form of 15 questions. There are no right or wrong answers to any of them—they’re meant to provoke reflection on your actions and beliefs and, perhaps, offer a measurement of the gap between the two.

1. Are you a moral person?

2. Are your morals reflected in your political beliefs?

3. Do you think a universal morality exists or do you think ethics are relative to the norms of one’s culture?

4. Have you ever been too embarrassed to express a political point of view?

5. Have you ever refused to listen to someone because of their politics?

6. Have you ever ended a friendship for ethical reasons?

7. Have you ever maintained a friendship for ethical reasons?

8. Is pity a moral feeling?

9. Is guilt a moral feeling?

10. How often do you do things that others may consider wrong?

11. How often do you do things that you consider wrong?

12. Are we all fundamentally selfish?

13. What ethical misdeed are you most ashamed of?

14. What moral act are you proudest of?

15. Can evil people be lovable?

Martha Schabas