Friday, September 19, 2008

What the Democrats don't Get


Here is another entry into the L/C-mind discussion.
I got it from the edge.com website. My comments are after the end of the article...
Stu Denenberg

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. 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.
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 ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).
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.

The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.

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?
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.
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. 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.
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?
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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 http://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.
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.
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.

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.

A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.



STU'S COMMENTS:
I liked this article and generally agreed with most all of Haight's hypotheses.
However, I found this paragraph to be misleading:
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.
The above paragraph implies that conservatives are not only more complete but more diverse in their ethical positions than liberals. I don't know the reliability and validity of the statistical analysis of the surveys but I find it hard to believe that liberals do not care about "ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity". I think everyone cares about all five of these issues but to varying degrees. I would even go so far as to say that everyone has has the capacity for every belief,emotion and action, good and evil, as everyone else --- but these vary according to the individual which, I guess, is just another way of saying that we're all human.
And to end on a lighter note, here is a "joke" that even a liberal/independent like myself has trouble arguing with...
Amazon.com: HOW AND WHY I BECAME A CONSERVATIVE - nonfiction Discussion Forum

A little pertinent humor:

Right to the point and one of the big differences between Democrat and Republican outlook.

I was talking to a friend of mine's little girl, and she said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, "If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people."

"Wow - what a worthy goal!" I told her. "You don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then, I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food or a new house."

She thought that over for a few moments because she's only 6 years old. And while her Mom glared at me, the young child looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?"

And I said, "Welcome to the Republican Party." Her folks still aren't talking to me.

13 comments:

Howard Pattee said...

Haidt’s observations are obviously correct that, “Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years [because] they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.” What else is new?

However, his essay proves that he is a typical academic liberal psychologist who with effort can say in 3500 words what 2000 years ago Aristotle said better in 20: “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, and desire.”

Fortunately, many liberals do not share Haidt’s pandering electioneering values that “Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap.” By the word “sacred” we do not mean what you adjust to win elections! Reason is sacred to many liberals. “True virtue is life under the direction of reason.” (Spinoza)

What democrats need is a republican orator like Marcus Tullius Cicero: “The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.”

Ira Glickstein said...

Thanks Stu for posting what IMHO is an excellent analysis of what L-minds don't "get" - written by an L-mind academic (Johnathan Haidt).

I do not want this Blog to fall into partisan political argument, but I do welcome cross-discussion of the greater philosophical issues.

Haidt identifies five "virtues":

1. harm/care
2. fairness/reciprocity
3. ingroup/loyalty
4. authority/respect
5. purity/sanctity

L-minds "get" the first two and a bit of the third but are turned off by the last two. C-minds consider all five to be equally virtuous.

Stu says he finds "... it hard to believe that liberals do not care about 'ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity'. I think everyone cares about all five of these issues but to varying degrees."

I have not seen the statistics cited by Haidt on this issue, but I am sure Stu is at least correct about "varying degrees" of care. That is, C-minds care about all five nearly equally while L-minds care most about the first two and less about the others.

Some L-minds (not all) are so strongly opposed to residual racism (ingroup/loyalty), executive abuse of power (authority/respect), and intrusion of the church into politics (purity/sanctity) that they would classify items 3..5 as vices rather than virtues. Those L-minds are IMHO "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

Even if Haidt is correct in his advice to the Democrats (and I think he is), and even if Democrats use their reason to accept the truth of Haidt's analysis, I don't think there is a chance in hell they will use it effectively. Unless they buy in to all five as equally true virtues (which their reason prohibits them from doing) they will come off to ordinary Americans as somewhat ridiculous poseurs. They will look like the British actors in WS Gilbert's comic operetta Mikado who portray Japanese nobles - in other words, ridiculous!

Ira Glickstein

Ira Glickstein said...

Howard quotes Aristotle: “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Also Cicero: “The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.”

[Emphasis added to show most of us are motivated by things other than reason!]

As long as virtually any citizen - regardless of intelligence and education - can vote, arguments based on reason alone will not motivated them. I agree with Howard that "pandering electioneering" - pretending to embrace sanctity, authority, and loyalty as equally virtuous as care and fairness - will not work for Democrats.

Ordinary Americans may not be paragons of reason, but they can tell when an L-mind is pandering. Fortunately, according to Haidt, C-minds are not pandering when they embrace the same panoply of virtues that motivate all ordinary humans.

Ira Glickstein

Howard Pattee said...

Ira says, “Some L-minds (not all) are so strongly opposed to residual racism (ingroup/loyalty), executive abuse of power (authority/respect), and intrusion of the church into politics (purity/sanctity) that they would classify items 3..5 as vices rather than virtues.”

That is a half-truth that is typical conservative black-and-white thinking. Reason tells liberals that values are not black-and-white, but a matter of degree. I think liberals are correct in their belief that at some point, racism, abuse of power, and religious intolerance are indeed evils.

Haidt’s list of “virtues” consists of two very different categories. The first two are largely culture free and hard to imagine as evils in any society. On the other hand, the last three “virtues” we can easily see as evils in just those cultures we don’t like.

Obvious examples are the Islamic terrorists like the Taliban who excel in the last three “virtues”, even exceeding most conservatives in these qualities. I see no evidence that liberals do not have these values. They are just more cautious than conservatives who appear simplistic and credulous in defining what they call virtue.

Ira Glickstein said...

Howard says "...the last three 'virtues' we can easily see as evils in just those cultures we don’t like. Obvious examples are the Islamic terrorists like the Taliban who excel in the last three 'virtues', even exceeding most conservatives in these qualities."

I totally agree that when Islamic extremists value the last three of Haidt's virtues to the exclusion or downgrading of the first two we consider them evils. When some L-minds (not all) value the first two to the exclusion or downgrading of the last three that is not good either. C-minds value all five more or less equally. In other words, we tend to be "fair and balanced" :^)

Howard also claims Haidt's virtues "consists of two very different categories ... [T]he first two are largely culture free..." They seem to me to be in five different categories. I think many highly stratified European societies of the last century were unfair (#2 fairness/reciprocity) to the "lower" classes and gave them a lower standard of care (#1 harm/care), yet managed to support the other three virtues more or less equally.

I think ingroup/loyalty (#3) is in a class by itself as the keystone virtue based on biological necessity. Indeed, I cannot think of any long-term successful society that did not give a higher standard of care (#1) and fairness (#2) and respect (#4) to the ingroup. Can you?

Ira Glickstein

joel said...

Hi Stu, Ira and Howard,

Quoting from: WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt

........ 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......

Joel remarks:

I suggest that we four could write an article about the principles of L/C analysis which would be a contribution to the understanding of the process of understanding our political opposites. In the above. as well as the rest of Haidt's analysis, we see the result of not recognizing the general fallibility of thinking. He starts with the assumption that conservatism or republicanism is a pathological problem that needs to be understood only in order to be cured. I think that our joint author L/C method constitutes the only rational approach to the problem. What problem? The fact that L-minds and C-minds think each other incapable of reason. With respect -Joel

Ira Glickstein said...

Joel, thanks for joining the conversation. True, Haidt starts with the false assumption that C-mindedness is "pathological problem that needs to be understood only in order to be cured."

But, despite remaining an L-minded Democrat, Haidt is sufficiently honest in his academic role as a "tolerant anthropologist" to go on to correct his initial false assumption!

His research leads him to the realization it is the Democrats who are missing some key virtues! He writes: "To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the [liberal] halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is."

He realizes that "morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way."

I think a careful reading of Haidt's piece proves that C-minds are broader than L-minds when it comes to their appreciation of all the virtues. L-minds only get two, C-minds get all five!

Here is an analogy: C-minds are like those of us who have normal color vision. L-minds are like the "color blind*" who cannot distinguish some of the colors.

Ira Glickstein

*"Color blindness" is an inexact term. Most "color blind" people are simply color deficient. For example, unable to distinguish red from green or yellow from blue.

Howard Pattee said...

Ira assumes that “biological necessity” requires that individuals have a higher standard of care, fairness, and respect within their own social group. This is true, but not really because of biological necessity, but because this is how we recognize or define a “social group,” more often just called cooperative behavior. At any given time, this “higher standard” within the group results in competition (often deadly) with other such cooperative social groups.

However, as I have pointed out before, there is no biological necessity except natural selection, and over longer periods of time the history of evolution as well as of societies is one of increasing cooperation with larger and larger groups. This is not an easy or smooth process. It took billions of years for single cells to cooperate to form multicellular organisms and millions more to form social groups. It took humans thousand of years for some families to develop tribes, some tribes to develop states, and some states to develop nations.

I have used this analogy before. In the context of biology the genes are conservative and the mutations are liberal. This is not an either/or or black-or- white relation, but an irreducible complementarity essential for evolution. I think this analogy also holds for social evolution.

The most conservative social groups are based on religious dogma or customs, and they are the most resistant to liberal mutations. Religious conservatism exists at all social levels, from the tribal regions of Pakistan to the Catholic Church hierarchy. In my view, conservatives also exist with all levels of resistance to change, from open-minded republicans (I know two!) to simple ideological conservatives, to xenophobes and paranoiacs. It is only natural that the level of a conservative’s resistance usually depends on their perceived level of liberal threats.

Ira uses the phrase “a successful society” but this means different types of society for conservatives and liberals. For conservatives success emphasizes stability and tradition. For liberals success emphasizes adaptability and change. As in evolution, both are necessary for survival.

Ira Glickstein said...

Howard introduces two dichotomies: cooperation vs competition and liberal mutations vs conservative genes.

For me, these are two sides of a thin coin, each pair totally opposite, yet as close as possible and dependent upon each other.

Multicell life arose when cells that shared the same genes cooperated to compete more effectively with cells with alien genes.

I know of no examples of cooperation between cells or organisms or families or tribes or schools of thought or corporations or political factions or nation-states that were not for the purpose of competing more effectively against others.

Liberal mutations are necessary for adaptation to changing environments. In Nature, these appear to be random, scattershot deviations from norms, and most are not adaptive. But Howard is correct that the few deviations that turn out to be adaptive are the essence of long-term survival since the environment is continually changing.

Conservative genes are necessary to preserve the "lessons learned" over eons of time to assure successful survival and reproduction. Nearly all genes that have survived and reproduced over long periods of time are still adaptive.

As Howard knows, I am "liberal" when it comes to accepting and inventing technological innovations (to the point that I went overboard on artificial intelligence while Howard was the more reasonable conservative.) I break with many of my C-minded allies when I favor embryonic and adult stem cell research and cell cloning for human embryo catalogs. It is the L-minds who are conservative about "privacy" while I favor a "positive ID society" where everyone and everything is tracked by computers.

On the other hand, I firmly believe human nature is quite stable and I am therefore C-minded when it comes to social customs and morals (even though I am not a literal believer in any religion).

Oh, and when I say "successful society" I am not talking about the kind of society I'd particularly like to live in. Like the biologial concept of "fitness", which simply means the ability to survive and reproduce over many generations, a "successful society" is simply one that survives and reproduces in essentially the same form over long periods of time.

Ira Glickstein

Howard Pattee said...

Ira’s combination of L and C thinking illustrates a fundamental game theory principle of success called a “mixed strategy.” A mixed strategy will always beat a fixed strategy in an iterated competitive game because the opponent can eventually figure out a fixed strategy and counteract it. The trouble with Ira’s strategy is that is not mixed enough.

Ira says that human nature is “quite stable” and he is therefore a fixed C-mind when it comes to social customs and morals. I agree that we all have similar basic emotions and motivations, but they are exceedingly complex and variable in their behavioral expressions. I think a mixed strategy tends to work better even with human nature. That is, sometimes a little L-adaptability gets what you want more often than fixed C-stubbornness.

I think a reasoned opportunistic mixed strategy also works better in market competition as well as waging wars and winning the peace.

Howard Pattee said...

Ira also says, “I know of no examples of cooperation between cells or organisms or families or tribes or schools of thought or corporations or political factions or nation-states that were not for the purpose of competing more effectively against others.”

I think this statement is misleading biologically as well as a too black-and-white at the human level. Natural selection is a very subtle concept and it occurs at many hierarchical levels of organization and over an unlimited time scale.

There is no objective purpose in natural selection. (Darwin did not like the phrase because it sounded too causal and deterministic.) Also, what we see as cooperative or competitive behavior depends on the context and time scale that we are observing.

Many mutations appear to be selectively neutral (random drift) and therefore not clearly either competitive or cooperative. The biological terms like mutualism, parasitism, and symbiosis are all very relative and may exist concurrently in one relationship between species.

The same complications occur in human relations, only they can be even more complex. Nothing is black-and-white. For example, think about the complexity of husband-wife or parent-child relationships over time. I'm sure you have often cooperated with your wife and children “not for the purpose of competing more effectively against others.”

Ira Glickstein said...

I'm not sure I have my priorities straight commenting on the Blog as I sit looking out at the ocean here in Daytona Beach. Oh well, at least we took a walk on the beach and went into the wavy surf and the calm pool this morning, and I did a few miles bicycling on the hard sand beach and more on the island.

(1) OK, I agree with Howard that a mixed set of tactics (not "mixed strategy") is best for any complex game. (On the other hand, for the infinite-duration Interated Prisoner's Dilemma, a straight, unchanging "tit-for-tat" tactic has been proven to beat alternatives such as "two tits for a tat" or "random tits added to tit for tat" or others.)

The word "strategy" does not describe what should be mixed. Rather "tactics" should be varied over relatively short periods of time to keep competitors guessing while the "strategy" should remain fixed over longer periods. (Indeed one of my patents has to do with tactical coordination between team members who do not have reliable communications between each other. The invention allows them to vary tactics to achieve the overall strategic objective.)

(2) On my claim that cooperation between entities is always for the purpose of better competing with other entities or groups of entities, Howard writes: "I'm sure you have often cooperated with your wife and children 'not for the purpose of competing more effectively against others.'"

I don't think so. In a world with limited resources (in other words the "real world") any resources my wife and I give to our children, or them to us, or working together (for example encouraging them to get better educations, marry more wisely, etc.) strengthens them with respect to other members of their cohort. That makes it more likely they will survive and reproduce, as will our grandchildren if they pass the behavior down, and so on and on. (And conversely, that some other members of their cohort will get relatively less resources and be less likely to survive and reproduce.)

Of course, if we all give resources and good educations to our children, our entire society will be more successful and gain more and more resources. For example, Western societies. But all this is at the cost of non-Western societies that are exploited.

Ira

Howard Pattee said...

I don’t know why Ira objects to my use of “strategy.” The evolutionary literature on game theory strategies is enormous and the word “tactics” is not used. See for example the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

I also don’t know what “proof” Ira has in mind about the tit-for-tat strategy; but in any case, it is good only for artificial, unrealistically simple, memoryless games. Of course proofs are either true or false (“black or white”) but they are all artifacts. Reality is not simple or black or white. I know of more realistic Artificial Life simulations that show competitive and cooperative strategies evolve continuously and get more and more complex ― just like everything else.

I think that is one good reason not to subscribe to any “conservative” ideology. Real evolutionary and human social and economic systems are much too changeable and complex to justify confidence in any fixed “best strategy,” whether political or ethical. Free market fundamentalism comes to mind, for obvious reasons.

This different attitude toward complexity between L and C minds reminds me of a quote of the science fiction writer Poul Anderson that characterizes some L minds: “I have never seen a problem, however complex, that when looked at in the right way does not become even more complex.” Maybe some C minds could be characterized by KISS (Keep it simple, stupid).

I suppose I have to grant Ira the final say on the strategies he uses in making decisions about his personal life. On the other hand, I can’t believe all his decisions are really motivated by global competition ― like walking on the beach and taking a bicycle ride, for example.