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The Righteous Mind
Chapter Twelve - Can’t We All Disagree More Constructively? - Continued
p288 My own intellectual life narrative has had two turning points. In chapter 5 I recounted the first one, in India, in which my mind opened to the existence of the broader [sociocentric] moralities described by Richard Shweder...
[In 2005, I believe, he visits a used-book store in New York] As I scanned the shelves, one book jumped out at me... Conservatism. It was a volume of readings edited by the historian Jerry Muller... I didn’t realize it until years later, but Muller’s essay was my second turning point.
p289 Muller began by distinguishing conservatism from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. [Zossima in The Brothers K. would be an even better example.] They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change. This can put them at odds with true conservatives, who see radical change as dangerous.
Muller next distinguished conservatism from the counter-Enlightenment. It is true that most resistance to the Enlightenment can be said to have been conservative, by definition (i.e., clerics and aristocrats were trying to conserve the old order). But modern conservatism, Muller asserts, finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned, pragmatic, and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlightenment project. Here’s the line that quite literally floored me: [He had to sit on the floor of the store and continue reading.]
What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.
As a lifelong liberal, I had assumed that conservatism = orthodoxy = religion = faith = rejection of science. It followed, therefore, that as an atheist and a scientist, I was obligated to be a liberal. But Muller asserted that modern conservatism is really about creating the best possible society, the one that brings the greatest happiness given local circumstances. Could it be? Was there a kind of conservatism that could compete against liberalism in the court of social science? Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?
Now I'm floored. Imagine me with my mouth hanging open in shock. I can’t believe he didn’t discover Burkean conservatism until so late. This, to use one of his (even wilder than my) wild metaphors, is like taking lessons from some amazing downhill skier and then discovering that at the bottom of the hill the only way he knows to stop is by running into a tree. Burkean conservatism was the political reaction to the wheels-coming-off-the-cart aspect of the French Revolution and to the liberal ideology of Mary Shelley’s parents (Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin). I’ve been a Burkean conservative since about 1971, plus or minus a year.
I’m going to hold off on, not one but, two tangents related to Burkean conservatism until the end of the chapter.
p290 I kept reading. Muller went through... the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought...). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes...). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes...).
There is also a very important aspect of caution, in the sense that ecologists are cautious about intervening in a natural ecosystem they don’t fully understand. Human societies are complex and you can’t just make random changes, like snipping random branches of a bush, without running the risk of unintended consequences.
...As I continued to read the writings of... Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century... [and] Friedrich Hayek [Wiki identifies him with "Classical liberalism," which seems to be the same thing] and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, [Wiki identifies Sowell as writing from both "a conservative and a classical liberal perspective"] I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital...
The term social capital swept through the social sciences in the 1990s, jumping into the broader public vocabulary after Robert Putnam’s 2000 book Bowling Alone. Capital, in economics, refers to the resources that allow a person or firm to produce goods or services. There’s financial capital (money in the bank), physical capital... [tools and factories], and human capital... [labor]. When everything is equal, a firm with more of any kind of capital will outcompete a firm with less.
Social capital refers to a kind of capital that economists had largely overlooked: the social ties among individuals and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from those ties. When everything else is equal, a firm with more social capital will outcompete its less cohesive and less internally trusting competitors...
He supports this with the example of ultra-Orthodox Jewish diamond merchants which he has mentioned before. Unfortunately, this is a good example of how social capital benefits the merchant community but not of how it gives an advantage to any particular firm. An Amish construction firm would have been a much better example.
p291 Everyone loves social capital... But now... let’s think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior. Let’s set aside problems of moral diversity and just specify the goal as increasing the “output” of prosocial behaviors and decreasing the “output” of antisocial behaviors, however the group defines those terms. To achieve almost any moral vision, you’d probably want high levels of social capital. (it’s hard to imagine how anomie and distrust could be beneficial.) But will linking people together into healthy, trusting relationships be enough to improve the ethical profile of the group?
If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, that may be sufficient. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. [I’m not so sure about “nations” here as they are such a recent innovation.] People who hold this “constrained” view are therefore very concerned about the health and integrity of these “outside-the-mind” coordination devices. Without them, they believe, people will begin to cheat and behave selfishly. [And keep the guillotine busy.] Without them, social capital will rapidly decay.
This is the Burke/Wollstonecraft&Godwin debate in a nutshell.
p292 If you are a member of a WEIRD society... Having a concept such as social capital is helpful because it forces you to see the relationships within which these... [individuals] are embedded, and which makes those people more productive. I propose that we take this approach one step further. To understand the miracle of moral communities that grow beyond the bounds of kinship we must look not just at people, and not just at the relationships among people, but at the complete environment [ecology] within which those relationships are embedded, and which makes those people more virtuous (however they themselves define that term). It takes a great deal of outside-the-mind stuff to support a moral community.
...on a small island or in a small town, you typically don’t need to lock your bicycle, but in a big city... if you only lock the bike frame, your wheels may get stolen. [And the seat] Being small, isolated, or morally homogenous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community... (Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.)
...we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community. More specifically, moral capital refers to
the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.
...
[A thought experiment involving a commune]
p293 ...A commune that valued self-expression over conformity and that prized the virtue of tolerance over the virtue of loyalty might be more attractive to outsiders, and this could indeed be an advantage in recruiting new members, but it would have lower moral capital than a commune that valued conformity and loyalty. The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.
Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense... many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit...
I wish he had some support for this. I’m not sure that would really be the biggest threat to a nation’s moral capital.
I really like the term moral entropy.
...High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.
p294 ...if you... do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire, and why communist [and Arab Spring] revolutions usually end up in despotism. [or even worse, in failed states.] ...I believe that liberalism... is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly,.. [While] conservatives... fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
A Yin And Two Yangs
In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang refer to any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female. We need both, often in a shifting or alternating balance. John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
The philosopher Bertrand Russell saw the same dynamic at work throughout Western intellectual history: “From 600 BC to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them.” ...
It is clear that each party to this dispute -- as to all that persist through long periods of time -- is partly right and partly wrong. Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments. Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.
...
[I’m going to skip a bunch here as this is mostly review. He calls “Liberal Wisdom” Yin and shows its role in limiting the abuses of corporations. (And he stresses that corporations are superorganism and that only government can restrain them.) There’s also a discussion of “externalities” -- “the costs (or benefits) incurred by third parties who did not agree to the transaction causing the cost (benefit)”. Lead pollution from leaded gasoline, fertilizer runoff from fields being examples.
He then calls “Libertarian Wisdom” Yang #1 and shows how too much control, or the elimination of markets -- as with healthcare in the US -- can lead to negative unintended consequences like high costs for goods and services where there is no real competition. Ayn Rand... I mean libertarians, are very alive to this issue and so are useful in addressing or preventing problems like this.
(Note 68. See Cosmides and Tooby 2006 on how organizing labor along Marxist or socialist principles, which assumes that people will cooperate in large groups, usually runs afoul of moral psychology. People do not cooperated well in large groups when they perceive that many others are free riding. Therefore, communist or heavily socialist nations often resort to increasing application of threats and force to compel cooperation. Five-year plans rarely work as well as the invisible hand.)
Finally, there’s Yang #2, “Social Conservative Wisdom.” “A more positive way to describe conservatives is to say that their broader moral matrix allows them to detect threats to moral capital that liberals cannot perceive.”]
...
p307 ...John Lennon captured a common liberal dream in his haunting song “Imagine.” Image if there were no countries, and no religion too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would “be as one.” It’s a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell. I think conservatives are on to something.
...We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital.
...
Adam Smith argued... that patriotism and parochialism are good things because they lead people to exert themselves to improve the things they can improve:
p308 That wisdom which contrived the system of human affections . . . seems to have judged that the interest of the great society of mankind would be best promoted by directing the principle attention of each individual to that particular portion of it, which was most within the sphere both of his abilities and of his understanding.
Now that’s Durkheimian utilitarianism. It’s utilitarianism done by somebody who understands human groupishness.
...
[In a study, Robert] Putnam’s survey was able to distinguish two different kinds of social capital: bridging capital refers to trust between groups, between people who have different values and identities, while bonding capital refers to trust within groups. Putnam found that diversity reduced both kinds of social capital. Here’s his conclusion:
Diverstiy seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie and social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down” -- that is, to pull in like a turtle.
...What Putnam calls turtling is the exact opposite of what I have called hiving.
p309 On issue after issue, it’s as though liberals are trying to help a subset of bees (which really does need help) even if doing so damages the hive. Such “reforms” may lower the overall welfare of a society, and sometimes they even hurt the very victims liberals were trying to help.
Toward More Civil Politics
...in the ancient Middle East, where monotheism first took root, the metaphor of war was more common than the metaphor of balance [yin and yang]. The third-century Persian prophet Mani preached that the visible world is the battleground between the forces of light (absolute goodness) and the forces of darkness (absolute evil). Human beings are the frontline in the battle; we contain both good and evil, and we each must pick one side and fight for it.
p310 Mani’s preaching developed into Manicaeism, a religion that spread throughout the Middle East and influenced Western thinking. [See also Augustine of Hippo, who was originally a Manicaean. He also relates to much of the philosophy of the monks and fathers in The Brothers K., I can't recall if I linked to him there. And to bring us all the way back to Henry Ryecroft, Augustine is the origin of many of the ideas that got the Port Royal Jansenists in so much trouble with the Church.] If you think about politics in a Manichaean way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations, and neither should you.
The Roman Catholic Church has had a problem with Manicaeism because it establishes a second god. The Church would rather fudge the origin of evil from a “good” god than deal with an evil co-God. Ivan’s “visitor” in The Brothers K., also did a wonderful job of showing the co-dependence of good and evil. Which brings us back to a yin and yang situation.
...
[I’m skipping the contemporary political discussion... mostly. Here he’s talking about how America is becoming polarized,]
(Note 75. See Pildes 2011 for an up-to-date review of the many factors that have contributed to our “hyperpolarized” state. Pildes argues that the political realignment, along with other historical trends, fully explains the rise in polarization. He therefore asserts that nothing can be done to reverse it. I disagree... I prefer to follow Herbst 2010, who points out that civility and incivility are strategies that are used when they achieve desired results. There are many things we can do to reduce the payoff for incivility. See www.CivilPolitics.org.)
p311 ...In 1976, only 27 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties” -- counties that voted either Democratic or Republican by a margin of 20 percent or more. But the number has risen steadily... Our counties and towns are becoming increasingly segregated into “lifestyle enclaves,” in which ways of voting, eating, working, and worshiping are increasingly aligned...
“Landslide counties” and “lifestyle enclaves” may not be good for national unity, but they do show that we are turning the melting pot into new tribes, that Durkheimian rules are shaping 21st century America.
...We all get sucked into tribal moral communities. We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong... everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
...
In Sum
p312 ...People whose genes gave them brains that get a special pleasure from novelty, variety, and diversity, while simultaneously being less sensitive to signs of threat, are predisposed (but not predestined) to become liberals... [And vice-versa.]
Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in its moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult -- perhaps impossible -- to convince them that they are wrong if you argue with them from outside of their matrix...
And finally to my conservatism related tangents.
Regime change
One of the ironic aspects of US foreign policy in this century has been the Republican fondness for regime change. Even prior to Iraq, there were glaring examples (such as Somalia) of failed states. Of the Humpty Dumpty effect that can result when we interfere with the governing of other countries. A true conservative would be alive to this possibility, but the Republican party was not. To the extent that there was any voice of caution it came from the left. And this was repeated with the Arab Spring, with similar, very predictable results. (And in the case of Libya it was even Europe, not America, leading the way.) I think it can be argued that the more moderate factions of the Republican Party lost what little political capital they had within the party when they went along with Bush2’s adventure in Iraq.
San Francisco city planning and zoning
The local angle, when it comes to city planning, is just as strange. San Francisco progressives have pursue, for at least 40 years, a conservative agenda to keep the city as much the same as possible. They used government authority and limited the liberty of property owners in this cause, which is typical liberal behavior, but their goals were conservative.
By thwarting the natural action of markets, they (inadvertently) created a scarcity of residential units resulting in a situation similar to Aspen, where increasingly only the wealthy can live in the city locals had so carefully preserved for themselves. And, as Haidt would have predicted, now that the city is having to deal with serious, unanticipated consequences, the progressives here are seeking to double-down (limiting the construction of more units for the few people who can actually afford new housing) rather than doubting their policies and looking for new compromises to get what everyone wants. The irony of the left creating an urban environment where many of them can no longer afford to live, is a brilliant counterpoint to the irony of the right increasing international instability and threats to our national interest -- while also losing control of their political party to an extremest faction.
Edmund Burke would read this and just sigh.
And that's it for Zen Physics and The Righteous Mind. I have no idea what's going to be next, so there will be a holiday... I mean a break.
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