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start by assuming that conservatives are just as sincere as liberals, and then use Moral Foundations Theory to understand the moral matrices of both sides.
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.
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
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I then showed how the American left fails to understand social conservatives and the religious right because it cannot see a Durkheimian world as anything other than a moral abomination.19 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.
By “sacred” I mean the concept I introduced with the Sanctity foundation in the last chapter. It’s the ability to endow ideas, objects, and events with infinite value, particularly those ideas, objects, and events that bind a group together into a single entity.
Democrats generally celebrate diversity, support immigration without assimilation, oppose making English the national language, don’t like to wear flag pins, and refer to themselves as citizens of the world.
The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the “American civil religion.”
In the remainder of the essay I advised Democrats to stop dismissing conservatism as a pathology and start thinking about morality beyond care and fairness.
On the left, many readers stayed locked inside their Care-based moral matrices and refused to believe that conservatism was an alternative moral vision.
Reactions from the right were generally more positive. Many readers with military or religious backgrounds found my portrayal of their morality accurate and useful,
I also received quite a few angry responses, particularly from economic conservatives who believed I had misunderstood their morality.
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.
conservative notions of fairness, which focused on proportionality, not equality.
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.
Are proportionality and equality two different expressions of the same underlying cognitive module, as we had been assuming?
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.
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.
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.32 In these communities, people used gossip to identify behavior they didn’t like, particularly the aggressive, dominating behaviors of would-be alpha males.
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.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by
cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements.
For groups that made this political transition to egalitarianism, there was a quantum leap in the development of moral matrices.
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 like bullies, were removed from the gene pool by being shunned, expelled, or killed.
The end result, says Boehm, was a process sometimes called “self-domestication.”
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 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.
The Liberty foundation supports the moral matrix of revolutionaries and “freedom fighters” everywhere.
Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries.
But despite these manifestations on the right, the urge to band together to oppose oppression and replace it with political equality seems to be at least as prevalent on the left.
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.]
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.
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).
Reciprocal altruism also fails to explain why people cooperate in group activities. Reciprocity works great for pairs of people, who can play tit for tat, but in groups it’s usually not in an individual’s self-interest to be the enforcer—the one who punishes slackers.
The game goes like this: You and your three partners each get 20 tokens on each round (each worth about ten American cents). You can keep your tokens, or you can “invest” some or all of them in the group’s common pot. At the end of each round, the experimenters multiply the tokens in the pot by 1.6 and then divide the pot among the four players,
Under these circumstances, the right choice for Homo economicus is clear: contribute nothing, ever.
students did contribute to the common pot—about ten tokens on the first round. As the game went on, however, people felt burned by the low contributions of some of their partners, and contributions dropped steadily, down to about six tokens on the sixth round.
After learning how much each of your partners contributed on each round, you now would have the option of paying, with your own tokens, to punish specific other players. Every token you paid to punish would take three tokens away from the player you punished.
For Homo economicus, the right course of action is once again perfectly clear: never pay to punish, because you will never again play with those three partners, so there is no chance to benefit from reciprocity or from gaining a tough reputation.
Yet remarkably, 84 percent of subjects paid to punish, at least once. And even more remarkably, cooperation skyrocketed on the very first round where punis...
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when the threat of punishment is removed, people behave selfishly.
Why did most players pay to punish? In part, because it felt good to do so.47 We hate to see people take without giving. We want to see cheaters and slackers “get what’s coming to them.” We want the law of karma to run its course, and we’re willing to help enforce it.
egalitarianism seems to be rooted more in the hatred of domination than in the love of equality per se.48 The feeling of being dominated or oppressed by a bully is very different from the feeling of being cheated in an exchange of goods or favors.
When people work together on a task, they generally want to see the hardest workers get the largest gains.
We can look more closely at people’s strong desires to protect their communities from cheaters, slackers, and free riders, who, if allowed to continue their ways without harassment, would cause others to stop cooperating, which would cause society to unravel.
In a large industrial society with a social safety net, the current triggers are likely to include people who rely upon the safety net for more than an occasional lifesaving bounce.
The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations.
Everyone—left, right, and center—cares about Care/harm, but liberals care more.
