By RYAN
Two posts in one day?
To begin with, here’s a link to an “article” written by some asshat which showed up on Reddit. I clicked the link out of sheer boredom, and a glimmer of hope that the article may have something interesting. Instead, it turned out to be a deluge of pseudo-intellectual garbage which attempts to redefine morality (which has been discussed for at least two millennia by philosophers and religious scholars) by hedging it into the definition some psychologist in 1987 provided, then regurgitates paraphrased snippets from Mill and a couple sociologists while affixing everybody (other than himself, as he’s “enlightened”) to Procrustes’ bed. Worse still, it appears have been some kind of post-graduate project, which is a clear affirmation that most of the people churning their way through college have no right to be there.
That may be a subjective statement, but even the opening paragraph clearly establishes that he considers himself a breed apart:
People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”˜a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the “war on terror” and repeal of the “death tax”) that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
The duty of government is not to tell us what is “right” or what is “wrong” (morals), it is to protect the intrinsic rights of its citizenry while not oppressing or extinguishing those of others, and provide them with beneficial services they cannot do themselves (or as a smaller collective). I, frankly, do not have anything to learn from an ideology which espouses intolerance, sexism, racism (even in its current anti-immigration form), abolition of the right to choose whether or not to keep a child, and encroaching government surveillance. These things are an anathema to ethical behaviour.
I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: “disgusts me” (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and “disgusts me less” (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).
Hmm… I’m going to assume “so many ancient texts” refers to the Torah (and dependent texts, such as the Bible), since Babylonian law, Hittite law, Assyrian law, Indian law, Phonetician law, Greek law, and Chinese law say no such thing. Beyond which, modern analysis of kashrut gives clear reasons for the prohibitions on eating certain foods (including, but not limited to, trichinosis, salmonella, worms and other parasites), most of which relate to what that thing ate (prohibitions against shellfish, given that crabs are bottom feeders, pigs root around in the ground, whereas locusts and cows primarily eat food which people ate by itself [crops], which is not likely to make one sick). Proscriptions against having sex with other people are not relegated to ancient law. Anti-sodomy laws are very much on the books. For the record, gay sex was only prohibited in relation to temple prostitution or pagan rites, and even then the Hebrew for it is “ritually unclean.” All the sex acts in Leviticus are “ritually unclean.” No more, no less. It was a way of separating Abrahamic worship from pagan. Control.
Do not rely on a text which went Hebrew (or Aramaic/Coptic) → Greek → Latin → German → English, losing the nuances and intent of the original.
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like “it’s wrong because, um, eating dog meat would make you sick” or “it’s wrong to use the flag because, um, the rags might clog the toilet.” These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.
In other countries, policy arguments (gasp!) are a form of persuasion. They do not expect their candidates to be the sort of people they can have a beer with (rather, they don’t expect them to be the dude down the street they barbecue and watch football with).
When intentionally picking an argument which plays to people’s inherent ideas of right and wrong (e.g. morals), it’s not surprising to find morality come up. This is reductio ad absurdum, not fitting for a paper on psychology. Essentially, his argument is that people will hold to preconceived notions no matter whether they benefit the rest of society (or even themselves) if it can provoke a “gut feeling.” Surprise. This assumes a lab experiment situation where these people have nothing riding on whether they’d hypothetically eat their dog if it were killed by a car, or use a flag for rags. Inasmuch as “gut feelings” come into it, people can certainly pursue dispassionate reasoning when they have a reason to. There’s little doubt that cannibalism provokes “gut feelings,” yet the players of a certain well-known soccer team wasted no time in setting the meat of their compatriots out to turn into jerky, as it would survive longer, nor are their qualms about drinking your own urine if necessary, etc.
It doesn’t just boil down to a matter of survival, though. The crew which dropped the second atomic bomb (knowing what happened to Hiroshima) and those who ordered them to do so made a cold-blooded decision to kill 50,000 people in the blink of an eye.
What’s missing from his analysis is realizing that the bolded line could just as easily be phrased as this:
Why of course the people don’t want $thing. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life (or livelihood) in a $thing when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want $thing; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked (or losing their national identity or whatever), and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
Yes, paraphrasing Göring. The people are easily manipulated. It’s not that they intrinsically believe whatever it is, it’s that the candidates convince them that they’re somehow superior (helped out by shit like this) to others, morally or otherwise.
When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see˜let alone respect˜a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
That “moral order” is narrow-minded, racist, and dumb. Religion is a personal choice. Keep it so, as the Constitution admonishes. Homosexuality is a choice which has fuck-all to do with governing, and is objected to solely on the basis of religion (as near as I can tell, since it’s not as if there’d be a mad press of people switching to the other team if gay marriage were suddenly legal). Give them the same rights in marriage that everybody else has (common law marriage pretty my abrogates any right to objection they may have, as that amounts to “living in sin” for anywhere from 5-30 years, and it’s recognized in almost all states). Immigration? Racist. Historically, we are nowhere near the level of immigrants we had in the 1880s, 1860s, 1920s, etc as a proportion of the population. People in the US have always hated immigrants when they come, yet they assimilate after a few generations, and nobody cares. Some cultures (Jewish in particular, but also a lot of Asian) still maintain a cultural identity, but nobody seems to care, as long as they’re not speaking Spanish. There’s no way one cannot pretend the Willie Horton ad was anything but racist, nor are the outright lies about Hispanics and crime (DoJ statistics indicate that the percentage of Hispanics in jail has remained steady over the last 20 years, and foreign nationals from Latin-American countries are going down).
After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about.
Just one comment here, really. Anthropologists are not supposed to be “tolerant.” They are supposed to be outside observers. Unbiased, and unable to have their prevailing opinions swayed by the culture they are documenting. That is their purpose.
My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.
It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a loud voice saying “Look, you tell him that this is the compartment over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it.”
Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion.
Summary: “India blew my mind, man.”
More accurately (and a tad more succinct): “I fail at anthropology.”
Essentially, his viewpoint utterly changed from living in a foreign society. While not totally expected, it’s not as if it puts him in a higher caliber than people in the US. Equality and personal autonomy are not “sacred values” in India (any more than they are in Pakistan or Saudi). India is moving towards our model, though. I wonder if he would have been swayed the same way had he spent a few months with some whackjob Mormon cult in southern Nevada. Probably.
Interdependence is not diametrically opposed to individual freedoms. India still has a caste system, for God’s sake, and they’re known for their atrocious civil rights (or lack thereof). I’d say that he’d know that if he weren’t living a privileged existence, with a strong inclination that his family likely lived the same, and they didn’t need to depend upon each other. Many people in America do. Sure, we’re known for being self-centered assholes around the world (namely, that guy on the plane). That doesn’t mean it’s endemic to US society, though.
He failed to see the men as “oppressors,” and didn’t see the women, children, and servants as victims. Servants. Not that the men are exactly oppressors, but the women in that particularly religious community in a country with a literacy rate of less than 60% aren’t exactly agitating for equal rights yet.
Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to “thicken up” the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.
So… once he put on the “moral lenses” of his “Indian friends” (presumably men) from the temple town where they still have servants, he saw conservative ideas with “clinical detachment”? Right… The last sentence I may agree with, but only with the notion that they are “visions” of the “good society”, not that the realization of their policies would lead to a good society.
He’s honestly saying that he thinks welfare programs and feminism raise the rates of single motherhood and “weaken the social structures…”. I guess those Cadillacs they were giving out to “welfare queens” must not have been a total racist fabrication by Reagan, and perpetuated for decades. I guess the US Census Data showing that the rates of single parents haven’t really gone up in decades, and it was blas&eaccent; enough for Lassie, as well as being commonplace enough for it not to be a major theme in
- The Scarlet Letter
. There’s no doubt that some people choose to have a child even though they don’t really have a partner, and they raise it themselves (or continue to do so after a breakup/whatever). Welfare and feminism hardly make up for the additional costs of doing so, and the vast majority of single parents are never on welfare.
The fact that he’d even consider such arguments shows a flawed point of view. His old mindset: “reject first, ask rhetorical questions later” seems to be the same as his new mindset, when it ought to have been “find incontrovertible facts, show them to the bullshit artists and easily swayed.”
On Turiel’s definition of morality (”justice, rights, and welfare”), Christian and Hindu communities don’t look good. They restrict people’s rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with “real” morality. But isn’t it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?
To answer his rhetorical questions: NO. No it is not. We ought not to “impose” a personal choice onto people to begin with, Hindu/Christian values included. “Justice, rights, and welfare” is a fantastic ideal to strive for.
Here’s my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don’t understand about morality.
Oh, really? I didn’t realize morality was necessary for social interaction. Tell that to Ted Bundy. Suppressing and regulating selfishness isn’t necessary for a functioning society. Keeping sociopaths out is. That which benefits the many almost always benefits the few. The converse is not true. Strive for the betterment of society as a whole (justice, rights, welfare, equality).
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 (as in Obama’s calls for “unity”) to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.
I didn’t know my utilitarianism defined my political views. Thanks for the enlightenment! Mill certainly appealed to libertarians. Being libertarian, however, has little to do with being conservative or liberal. It has to do with not supporting an authoritarian government. Mill’s vision discards the need for a government, though not in quite the same way as Marx/Engels.
Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.
This is starting to sound more like a blend of philosophy, political science and anthropology, which are clearly not his strong suits. People are “emotionally responsive” to suffering and harm (particularly violent)? You don’t say. Maybe they have some weird desire to avoid it happening to them. Laws and cultures have norms and laws to protect individuals, but that’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Were we able to form lasting societies in the first place because these are intrinsic beliefs of people, or is it because somebody laid down the proverbial law and enforced it? All the evidence from ancient law indicates the latter. Laws are there to protect a functioning social order and economy, not individuals.
But now imagine 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 outgroups.
Again, this idea of “suppressing selfishness.” What the hell is that? People found means to live relatively peaceful, profitable lives through laws (and religion, another form of control). It’s all about selfishness, and even his comment about “free-riders” (I’m assuming it’s analogous to a freeloader, just that he felt it sounded less offensive). If anything, a conservative society pursues shallow and selfish pleasures (materialism, self-righteousness, etc). The basic unit in such a society is a limestone block, working to bear the weight of the capstone on top where some lucky fucker gets everything for doing nothing.
“Nested and overlapping groups” take on a life of their own, and protect their own interests (see: corporations, major churches, hate groups). Those that care for individuals (the ACLU, for instance) are held up as institutions to hate by the conservatives. This model does not support a conservative ethos.
A Durkheimian ethos can’t be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever “lost” him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.
So, his recent (uncited) research shows that conservatives do rely on “care” and “fairness.” Maybe those “compassionate conservatives” I’ve heard so much about. Their other “pillars” are:
- Ingroup — Hating outsiders, and doing anything you can to keep them out of your society
- Authority — who’d have guessed it? Not that authority is bad, but blindly submitting to some “alpha male” is hardly an ideal to base a society upon.
- Disgust — Apparently we “evolved” this, rather than subverting it from something which keeps us from doing things and going near things (spiders, feces, etc) which were likely to do harm to us in earlier parts of evolution. Now “avoiding carnality” is a pillar of conservative society, which is apparent if you look at the great moral leaders of conservative society (McCain, Limbaugh, et al).
All three smack of the same basic thing: A feeling of superiority. I’m better because I’m part of something you’re not, and I’m not going to let you in because that’d lower my social standing, or I’m better than you because I can pretend to abstain from “carnal” acts, etc.
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
Oh, several “large internet surveys”? I wonder why I haven’t seen them, and they’re not referenced anywhere, other than plugging some website which doesn’t have any actual data.
Regardless, why do I (as a socialist, but I’ll call myself a liberal for now) want a lasting political realignment with people who will do anything to win, filibuster protecting my rights and passing progressive legislation, spy on me, outright lie, spread racism (aforementioned Willie Horton, Cadillac-driving “welfare queens”, hatred for immigrants), and whose prevailing political message seems to be hatred. Don’t bother having any actual solutions, just criticize your opponent’s character (whether or not it’s true), etc. The link to PBS above is sickening, but the popularity of Fox News is just as bad. The hell with those people. We don’t want a “lasting political realignment.” We want their party to die, and their “ideals” (hatred) along with them.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane˜of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Appropriating is certainly the right word. It doesn’t matter if the candidate is a Catholic who served in Vietnam. They’ll call him a coward, and people will believe them because they’ve somehow been brainwashed into thinking that you “need” a conservative for national security. I wish I understood how that one happened (and I do, kind of, in a historical way, but not why people believed it then or now).
I’d rather have a party which relies on polls to pick policy the populace actually wants to get elected than one which lies and throws mud at their opponents. Regardless, I’d hardly call the primary process (which both parties have) “like shopping.” I’d say it’s “letting the people choose their candidate” (even if I do favour instant runoff voting instead).
Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.
Suppress selfishness, hah. None of these statements can be backed up. At all.
To say that a society which strives to maximizes utility while respecting the rules is a bad thing is unfathomable. What, exactly, is so awful about trying to make society better while respecting the rules? Is it better to break them for the person in authority? To try to make sure people are “pure” and keep “outsiders” out, even if they’d improve society? It can “easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers”? Because that’s happened so often. There are no comparable examples in history. Scandinavia is as close as it’s going to get for a while, and they’re not exactly “a nation of shoppers.”
The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words “God” and “faith.” But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals˜each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum (”from many, one”). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.
The Democrats “must” find a way, eh? Kind of assuming things, aren’t we? They seem to be doing fine.
Our national motto is, in fact, “E Pluribus Unum.” The point of it, you see, is that we are supposed to care just as much about “pluribus” as “unum.” That diversity is our strength. The core of our national identity. What makes America what it is. Society does need tending and caring. It needs a restoration of our rights. It needs to provide for every American, not just those with money, or who happened to be born well. It does not need Minutemen on the border, nor people crusading against being bilingual (it works just fine for Switzerland, Canada, and numerous other countries). It does not need some kind of “American” culture of fast-food restaurants and Wal-Marts (ever noticed how no matter where you are in the US, pretty much every interstate exit ramp looks the same as the last one, as far as restaurants and such go?). It needs to continue to assimilate, and grow, especially if we are to even attempt competition with the Chinese, Indians, and the Russians (the Russians most assuredly embrace multiculturalism).
I may think such competition is wasted effort at this point, but I still think this guy is wrong.
The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that “we are all one” is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people’s sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity.
Robert Putnam also thinks communal identity in the US is declining, which people thought in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. Every time there’s a new medium of mass communication, people assume it’s the death of society. Ethnic diversity increases social isolation because a lot of people are racists. They can’t picture a shared community of people don’t have exactly the same beliefs. It’s an anachronism to assume that encouraging assimilation would decrease racism and discrimination (see: white flight). Rather, it must be reinforced that a changing national or community identity does not mean the end of it, any more than aging destroys your individual identity.
The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual “deviance,” but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity.
Why must we “overcome” our “lower, grasping, carnal selves”, if I may ask? Liberals are hardly Gaius Germanicus or Nero. Our “carnal” selves are a necessary part of humanity (which is hardly discarded in Hindu beliefs, or even Abrahamic belief). Spirituality is not necessary. Protecting the environment has everything to do with protecting humanity. Our food chain. Our climate. The things man has depended on for thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years. The end of these things would spell the collapse of society (at least, society as we know it), and possibly a death knell for the human race. Beyond which, conservatives, as a rule, treat those who treat the environment with sanctity (Greenpeace, Sierra Club) with anything from disregard to ridicule.
The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to “question authority” and assert that “dissent is patriotic,” Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be “soft on crime” has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who “work hard and play by the rules.” But if you don’t do it at all˜if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers — then you are committing a kind of sacrilege.
Quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system? M’kay. That’s the first time I’ve heard that one. The trick is — candidates are not police officers, prosecutors, or judges. They do not need to be “soft” or “hard” on crime, and those who have issued the most pardons (and for the most egregious crimes) have not been Democrats. There is no law against being a slacker, and “imposing costs” upon such would be against the law. Even phrases such as “slacker” betray a bias in the author.
“Work hard and play by the rules” doesn’t win for people either. Sadly, people who fuck other people over often have the power in life, and it’s always been that way. Maybe I just agree with Locke, but I think people are inherently selfish and evil. History agrees. Benevolent societies are eventually overtaken by dictators and those who can work the mob (Pericles, Caesar, Marius, Medicis, etc).
The government can do little against “slackers.” It can do something against cheaters, but that would go against the Temple of the Free Market, which conservatives cling to (as it’s most often corporate executives who are “cheaters”), and the majority of ethics scandals in the last 100 years have been… conservatives. This line of reasoning falls flat on its face.
If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.
Liberals do not find it hard to understand the moral importance of the founding fathers. We find it hard to understand how conservatives can repeatedly spit on the ideals they stood for (and eloquently wrote), yet wrap themselves in the flag, as if it’s still worth something once we’ve abandoned everything it stood for. I’m going to assume that a “clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole” means “talk about illegal immigrants a lot.”
Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.
I don’t think they’ve been duped. I think they want to be deluded. I think they want to hate everybody. I think they want to be told what to believe, and not think for themselves or examine the facts. They’re going to be surprised.
A more interesting title for his blog, I think, would have been “Why do hunters and fishermen vote for the people who consistently work to destroy the environment they hunt and fish in?” Admittedly, I don’t think the reasoning would be much different.
