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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Eight - The Conservative Advantage
I keep thinking I’m going to hit chapters that are just unnecessary additions to what’s already been said, but then I get this which is incredibly full of interesting content. I may have to split this into a couple posts.
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p158 [Results of an early study Haidt and some associates did on the Moral Foundations Theory] ...Everyone -- left, right, and center -- says that concerns about compassion, cruelty, fairness, and injustice are relevant to their judgments about right and wrong. Yet... Liberals say that these issues are a bit more relevant to morality than do conservatives.
p159 But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality... We can say, as shorthand, that conservatives have a five-foundation morality...
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p160 [They do a much bigger study] ...we always find the same basic pattern... Liberals value Care and Fairness for more than the other three foundations; conservatives endorse all five foundations more or less equally.
p161 We’ve found this basic difference no matter how we ask the questions. For example, in one study we asked people which traits would make them more or less likely to choose a particular breed of dog as a pet...
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p162 We found that people want dogs that fit their own moral matrices. Liberals want dogs that are gentle (i.e., that fit with the values of the Care foundation) and relate to their owners as equals (Fairness as equality). Conservatives, on the other hand, want dogs that are loyal (Loyalty) and obedient (Authority). (The Sanctity item showed no partisan tilt; both sides prefer clean dogs.)
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p163 [Even in EEG studies] Liberal brains showed more surprise, compared to conservative brains, in response to sentences that rejected Care and Fairness concerns. They also showed more surprise in response to sentences that endorsed... [the other foundations] In other words, when people choose the labels “liberal” or “conservative,” they are not just choosing to endorse different values on questionnaires. Within the first half second after hearing a statement, partisan brains are already reacting differently. These initial flashes of neural activity are the elephant, leaning slightly, which then causes their riders to reason differently, search for different kinds of evidence, and reach different conclusions. Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
What Makes People Vote Republican?
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p164 The key idea in the essay [by Haidt with this title written in the summer of 2008 when Obama was running against McCain] was that there are two radically different approaches to the challenge of creating a society in which unrelated people can live together peacefully. One approach was exemplified by John Stuart Mill, the other by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim. I describe Mill’s vision like this: [He's quoting himself here so I went with a sanserif font]
First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit, All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other’s rights and band together voluntarily... to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.
p165 ...I then contrasted Mill’s vision with Durkheim’s:
Now imagine a society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that “man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.” A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for out-groups.
Wow. Dostoyevsky (from the grave) says “Amen!”
p166 ...I... showed how the American left fails to understand conservatives and the religious right because it cannot see a Durkheimian world as anything other than a moral abomination. A Durkheimian world is usually hierarchical, punitive, and religious. It places limits on people’s autonomy and it endorses traditions, often including traditional gender roles. For liberals, such a vision must be combated, not respected.
(Note 18. I learned to see the Durkheimian vision not just from reading Durkheim but from working with Richard Shweder and from living in India, as I described in chapter 5. I later discovered that much of the Durkheimian vision could be credited to the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke as well.)
I’m surprised it’s taken so long for Burke to be mentioned.
If your moral matrix rest entirely on the Care and Fairness foundation, then it’s hard to hear the sacred overtones in America’s unofficial motto: E pluribus unum (from many, one). By “sacred” I mean... the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events with infinite value, particularly those ideas... that bind a group together into a single entity. The process of converting pluribus (diverse people) into unum (a nation) is a miracle that occurs in every successful nation on Earth. (Note 20. Of course, it’s much easier in ethnically homogeneous nations with long histories and one language, such as the Nordic countries. This may be one reason those nations are far more liberal and secular than the United States. See further discussion in chapter 12.) Nations decline or divide when they stop performing this miracle.
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What I Had Missed
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He gets a huge -- mostly negative -- response from the public. I’m going to try to skip this but may have to return and back-fill.
p169 These emails were overflowing with moral content, yet I had a hard time categorizing that content using Moral Foundations Theory. Much of it was related to fairness, but this kind of fairness had nothing to do with equality. It was the fairness of the Protestant work ethic and the Hindu law of karma: People should reap what they sow. People who work hard should get to keep the fruits of their labor. People who are lazy and irresponsible should suffer the consequences.
This... made me realize that I... had done a poor job of capturing conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equity. People should get what they deserve, based on what they have done. We had assumed that equality and proportionality were both part of the Fairness foundation, but the questions we used to measure this foundation were mostly about equality and equal rights. We therefore found that liberals cared more about fairness, and that’s what had made these economic conservatives so angry at me. They believed that liberals don’t give a damn about fairness (as proportionality).
It’s cold today and I’m working in a cafe with a door that does not have an automatic door closer. About half the people who come in or go out don’t bother to close the door behind them, and it takes less than a minute for the small cafe to fill with cold air. I find this makes me irrationally eager to see the conservative point of view expressed above: People who fail to close the door behind them do not deserve any of the benefits of civic or social services supported by my tax dollars. Plus they should be beaten by the police.
Are proportionality and equality two different expressions of the some underlying cognitive module, as we had been assuming? Are they both related to reciprocal altruism... It’s easy to explain why people care about proportionality and are so keen to catch cheaters. That follows directly from Triver’s analysis of how we gain by exchanging favors with reliable partners. But what about equality? Are liberal concerns about political and economic equality really related to reciprocal altruism? Is the passionate anger people feel toward bullies and oppressors the same as the anger they feel toward cheaters?
I looked into what was known about the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers, and found a strong argument for splitting apart these two kinds of fairness. The desire for equality seems to be more closely related to the psychology of liberty and oppression than to the psychology of reciprocity and exchange... we added a provisional sixth foundation -- Liberty/oppression. (Note 25. ... Our decision to modify the list of moral foundations was also influenced by a “challenge”... asking people to criticize Moral Foundation Theory and propose additional foundations. Strong arguments came in for liberty. Additional candidates that we are still investigating include honesty, Property/ownership, and Waste/inefficiency. The sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, is provisional in that we... have not yet carried out the rigorous testing that went into our research on the original five foundations... ) We also decided to revise our thinking about fairness to place more emphasis on proportionality....
The Liberty/Oppression Foundation
This sounds like a brilliant concept for a non-profit that would appeal to (pull money out of the pockets of) nearly everyone. Sorry.
p170 In the last chapter I suggested that humans are, like our primate ancestors, innately equipped to live in dominance hierarchies that can be quite brutal. But if that’s true, then how come nomadic hunter-gatherers are always egalitarian? There’s no hierarchy (as least among the adult males), there’s no chief, and the norms of the group actively encourage sharing resources, particularly meat. The archaeological evidence supports this view, indicating that our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands of mobile hunter-gatherers. Hierarchy only becomes widespread around the time that groups take up agriculture or domesticate animals and become more sedentary. These changes create much more private property and much larger group sizes. They also put an end to equality. The best land and a share of everything people produce typically get dominated by a chief, leader, or elite class (who take some of their wealth with them to the grave for easy interpretation by later archaeologists). So were our minds “structured in advance of experience” for hierarchy or for equality?
...the anthropologist Christopher Boehm... In his book Hierarchy in the Forest... concluded that human beings are innately hierarchical, but that at some point during the last million years our ancestors underwent a “political transition” that allowed them to live as egalitarians by banding together to rein in, punish, or kill any would-be alpha males who tried to dominate the group.
Alpha male chimps are not truly leaders of their groups. They perform some public services, such as mediating conflicts. But most of the time they are better described as bullies who take what they want. Yet even among chimpanzees, it sometimes happens that subordinates gang up to take down alphas, occasionally going as far as to kill them. Alphas male chimps must therefore know their limits and have enough political skill to cultivate a few allies and stave off rebellion.
I would think the alpha also plays an important role in defending the pack’s territory.
p171 Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between the alpha (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That’s essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tools and weapon types. Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language, and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations, then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group.
Boehm’s claim is that at some point during the last half-million years, well after the advent of language, our ancestors created the first true moral communities. In these communities, people used gossip to identify behavior they didn’t like, particularly the aggressive, dominating behaviors of would-be alpha males. On the rare occasions when gossip wasn’t enough to bring them into line, they had the ability to use weapons to take them down...
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p172 It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls: “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”) [It also explains the American obsession with owning serious firearms.] The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperating among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!”
For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices. People now lived in much denser webs of norms, informal sanctions, and occasionally violent punishments. Those who could navigate this new world skillfully and maintain good reputations were rewarded by gaining the trust, cooperation, and political support of others. Those who could not respect group norms, or who acted as bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed. Genes and cultural practices (such as the collective killing of deviants) coevolved.
The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called “self-domestication.” Just as animal breeders can create tamer, gentler creatures by selective breeding for those traits, our ancestors began to selectively breed themselves (unintentionally) for the ability to construct shared moral matrices and then live cooperatively within them.
The Liberty/oppression foundation, I propose, evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of living in small groups with individuals who would, if given the chance, dominate, bully, and constrain others. The original triggers therefore include signs of attempted domination. Anything that suggests the aggressive, controlling behavior of an alpha male (or female) can trigger this form of righteous anger, which is sometimes called reactance. (That’s the feeling you get when an authority tells you you can’t do something and you feel yourself wanting to do it even more strongly.) ...
p173 The Liberty foundation obviously operates in tension with the Authority foundation. We all recognize some kinds of authority as legitimate in some contexts, but we are also wary of those who claim to be leaders unless they have first earned our trust. We’re vigilant for signs that they’ve crossed the line into self-aggrandizement and tyranny.
This is where the Occupy people could find common ground with the Tea Party people. Not that that would be a good thing.
Not sure where this goes... Aside from accounts of Greek and Roman enslavement of defeated enemies, I’ve only read one article about the supply side of the slave trade, and this was a long time ago, about the African end of the trade that brought slaves to the Americas. As I recall, the trade started in subsistence African villages where the village leaders could trade their extra mouths to feed for sorely needed goods. If the article discussed how it was decided who was to become an export commodity, I don’t recall it. But with the ideas we’ve just read in mind, one can speculate.
Tyrannical alphas would be one option. Alpha wanna-bes would be a second option. And finally, anyone viewed as “deviant” by the community.
It also occurs to me that Haidt could use questions about how a community should make a decision like this to identify equality loving liberals and proportionality loving conservatives. My guess is that liberals would opt for a lottery system which would be “fair” to everyone as individuals; whereas conservatives would prefer more of a blackballing system which would eliminate individuals who contributed the least to the community.
The Liberty foundation supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere. The American Declaration of Independence is a long enumeration of “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute Tyranny over these states.” The document begins with the claim that “all men are created equal” and ends with a stirring pledge of unity: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The French revolutionaries, similarly, had to call for fraternité and égalité if they were going to entice commoners to join them in their regicidal quest for liberté.
The flag of my state, Virginia, celebrates assassination... It’s a bizarre flag, unless you understand the Liberty/oppression foundation. The flag shows virtue (embodied as a woman) standing on the chest of a dead king, with the motto Sic semper tyrannis (“Thus always to tyrants”). That was the rallying cry said to have been shouted by Marcus Brutus as he and his co-conspirators murdered Julius Caesar for acting like an alpha male. John Wilkes Booth shouted it from the center stage at Ford’s Theatre moments after shooting Abraham Lincoln (whom Southerners perceived to be a tyrant who prevented them from declaring independence).
p174 Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries. It just somehow feels like the right thing to do, and these feelings seem far removed from Triver’s reciprocal altruism and tit for tat. This is not fairness. This is Boehm’s political transition and reverse dominance.
If the original triggers of this foundation include bullies and tyrants, the current triggers include almost anything that is perceived as imposing illegitimate restraints on one’s liberty, including government (from the perspective of the American right). [The extreme -- anarchist -- left is about the same.] In 1993, when Timothy McVeigh was arrested a few hours after he blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City... he was wearing a T-shirt that said Sic semper tyrannis...
...the urge to band together to oppose oppression and replace it with political equality seem to be at least as prevalent on the left. For example, one liberal reader of my “Republicans” essay stated Boehm’s thesis precisely:
The enemy of society to a Liberal is someone who abuses their power (Authority) and still demands, and in some cases forces, others to “respect” them anyway. . . . A Liberal authority is someone or something that earns society’s respect through making things happen that unify society and suppress its enemy. {Emphasis added.}
p175 It’s not just the accumulation and abuse of political power that activates the anger of the Liberty/oppression foundation; the current triggers can expand to encompass the accumulation of wealth, which helps to explain the pervasive dislike of capitalism on the far left. For example, one liberal reader explained to me, “Capitalism is, in the end, predatory -- a moral society will be socialist, i.e., people will help each other.” [This is, of course Goethe’s position at the end of Faust and Dostoyevsky would certainly agree. (Ford Madox Ford is a trickier case in that in Parade’s End the Tietjen’s family wealth is founded on the coal trade. But I’m pretty sure Christopher would at least be sympathetic to a very Tory version of this point of view).]
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The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference seems to be that for liberals -- who are more universalistic and who rely more heavily upon the Care/harm foundation -- the Liberty/oppression foundation is employed in the service of underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere. It leads liberals (but not others) to sacralize equal rights. Liberals sometimes go beyond equality of rights to pursue equality of outcomes, which cannot be obtained in a capitalist system. This may be why the left usually favors higher taxes on the rich, high levels of services provided to the poor, and sometimes a guaranteed minimum income for everyone.
Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial -- concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity. For them, the Liberty/oppression foundation and the hatred of tyranny supports many of the tenets of economic conservatism: don’t tread on me (with your liberal nanny state and its high taxes), don’t tread on my business (with your oppressive regulations), and don’t tread on my nation (with your United Nations and your sovereignty-reducing international treaties).
p176 American conservatives, therefore, sacralize the word liberty, not the word equality. This unites them politically with libertarians... [Jerry Falwell’s] Liberty [University] students are generally pro-authority. They favor traditional patriarchal families. But they oppose domination and control by a secular government, particularly a liberal government that will (they fear) use its power to redistribute wealth...
This is probably a good place to break. We sill resume with, Fairness As Proportionality tomorrow.
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