When people use the phrase “I’ll never understand why people do X” they are usually making a claim to some sort of moral or intellectual high ground – the people who do X are so much beneath them as to be incomprehensible. But in fact anyone who says it is, quite literally, admitting to the limits of their comprehension and/or their unwillingness to think about things from the point of view of someone different to themselves.
We do all have such limits, but they really only apply to human behaviour. You’d never hear someone say, for example, “I’ll never understand why badgers dig burrows”. It would just sound weird, because it’s an emotionally neutral question that, if you were curious, you could look into. On the other hand, “I’ll never understand why people are [let’s say] hostile towards immigration” is not emotionally neutral. To put yourself into the mind of a person who is hostile towards immigration might mean, if you are a liberalish sort of person such as me, digging down into parts of yourself you would rather not examine. Few of us would be willing to put ourselves into the mind of, say, someone who kidnaps and murders children.
Nevertheless there are always reasons why people do things, even if we can’t bring ourselves to understand them. “To understand all is to forgive all” is a quote I came across years ago that has stuck in my mind. According to the internet, it is usually attributed to, of all unlikely people, Evelyn Waugh, who says it somewhere in Brideshead Revisited, but may well have found it somewhere else. (I have a vague recollection of it being a French proverb). Anyway, whoever said it, I actually believe it to be true.
In reality we can’t ‘understand all’, because of the limits to our knowledge of the universe, and because there are parts of ourselves which we can only manage by avoiding going there. But I think most of us could try a little harder, at the very least, to see things through the eyes of people whose politics differ from our own, given that no one actually knows what the long term consequences will be of any particular political policy.
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A related phenomenon to the “I’ll never understand…” thing is what you might call virtuous optimism, as in, for instance, “I, for one, have a bit more faith than that in human goodness” said with the implication that someone with a more pessimistic outlook is somehow morally inferior. Optimism is often a good approach to take to life, but there is nothing especially virtuous about unfounded optimism, since it can have have disastrous results. To give an ad absurdam example: “I for one believe in the intelligence of children, and I have complete faith that any competent 7 year old is more than capable of piloting a jumbo jet without special training”.
What I’ve noticed is that people who are virtuously optimistic about human nature, really have no other recourse when things go wrong but to blame bad individuals, or bad groups. Not much point in a level of optimism about human nature that can only be sustained by excluding some people from humanity.
