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Things changed in the 1990s, beginning with new rules and new behaviors in Congress.
“A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved.”
Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.14 Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less.
Innate does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.
conservatives react more strongly than liberals to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even low-level threats such as sudden blasts of white noise.
“The only things I find rewarding…are variety and the enjoyment of diversity.”18
Future liberals were described as being more curious, verbal, and self-reliant, but also more assertive and aggressive, less obedient and neat.
Because her social circle is entirely composed of liberals, she is enmeshed in a moral matrix based primarily on the Care/harm foundation. In 2008, she is electrified by Barack Obama’s concern for the poor and his promise of change.
The moral matrices that surround him are based on all six foundations. There is occasional talk in church sermons of helping victims of oppression, but the most common moral themes in his life are personal responsibility (based on the Fairness foundation—not being a free rider or a burden on others) and loyalty to the many groups and teams to which he belongs. He resonates to John McCain’s campaign slogan, “Country First.”
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.
Moral, Believing Animals, the sociologist Christian Smith writes about the moral matrices within which human life takes
It’s a heroic liberation narrative. Authority, hierarchy, power, and tradition are the chains that must be broken to free the “noble aspirations” of the victims.
it relies for its moral force on at least five of the six moral foundations. There’s only a hint of Care (for the victims of crime), but there are very clear references to Liberty (as freedom from government constraint), Fairness (as proportionality: taking money from those who work hard and giving it to welfare queens), Loyalty (soldiers and the flag), Authority (subversion of the family and of traditions), and Sanctity (replacing God with the celebration of promiscuity).
But when liberals try to understand the Reagan narrative, they have a harder time. When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.
Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.”
If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness.
Morality binds and blinds.
I wanted to use my research on moral psychology to help liberals win.
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.35
Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed.
They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital.
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. People who hold this “constrained”41 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. Without them, social capital will rapidly decay.
we can define moral capital as the resources that sustain a moral community.42 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.
The stricter commune would be better able to suppress or regulate selfishness, and would therefore be more likely to endure.
This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism.
Funda.ental blind spot
Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.
“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”44
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.46
I’m going to adopt a view of humankind as being Homo duplex (or 90 percent chimp, evolved to be self-serving, and 10 percent bee, evolved to be hivish), which means that we humans need access to healthy hives in order to flourish (that’s the Durkheimian part).
believe that the most sacred value is caring for victims of oppression.
I found it easier to believe that islands could float in the sky than to believe that all creatures could live in harmony, willingly lying down to let others eat them.
Glauconian.
Liberals go too far sometimes—indeed, they are often reflexively antibusiness,
several studies have demonstrated that the phaseout, which began in the late 1970s, may have been responsible for up to half of the extraordinary and otherwise unexplained drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s.
Some liberals began to see powerful corporations and wealthy industrialists as the chief threats to liberty. These “new liberals” (also known as “left liberals” or “progressives”) looked to government as the only force capable of protecting the public and rescuing the many victims of the brutal practices of early industrial capitalism.
Liberals who continued to fear government as the chief threat to liberty became known as “classical liberals,” “right liberals” (in some countries), or libertarians (in the United States).
We found that libertarians look more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures of personality
They do not oppose change of all kinds (such as the Internet), but they fight back ferociously when they believe that change will damage the institutions and traditions that provide our moral exoskeletons (such as the family). Preserving those institutions and traditions is their most sacred value.
pointed out that our graduate program at UVA was more exclusive than the church—we rejected almost all applicants.
something. Throughout this book I’ve argued that large-scale human societies are nearly miraculous achievements. I’ve tried to show how our complicated moral psychology coevolved with our religions and our other cultural inventions (such as tribes and agriculture) to get us where we are today. I have argued that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, and that our “parochial altruism” is part of what makes us such great team players. We need groups, we love groups, and we develop our virtues in groups, even though those groups necessarily exclude nonmembers. If you
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public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.
He found that religions make Americans into “better neighbors and better citizens.” He concluded that the active ingredient that made people more virtuous was enmeshing them into relationships with their co-religionists.
Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish.
Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group division, but anomie or social isolation. In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to “hunker down”—that is, to pull in like a turtle.
Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race, and more recently on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often lead them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital.
Emphasizing differences makes many people more racist, not less.74
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.
Riders can sign as many of them as they please, but the pledges are not binding for elephants.
We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.
You may not agree, but you’ll probably shift from Manichaean disagreement to a more respectful and constructive yin-yang disagreement.
