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FirmhandKY -> Towards a Liberal/Conservative Synthesis (6/2/2010 7:54:56 AM)
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Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
If these concepts and long, involved posts aren't your cup ' tea, then you might be better off reading and posting elsewhere.
Still here? Good.
This will be a challenging post and thread, that I hope will rise and fall slowly up and down the page list while people have time and interest enough to read the source material, and put some hard thought into what they may say.
But it would be a shame to not at least attempt to muddle through this, as it does address a lot of the left/right issues that some many people struggle with on these forums.
With that intro out of the way ....
Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.
Thesis: Religion is the only way to order society.
Antithesis: Science and secularism are the only way to order society.
Synthesis: Both Religion and Science are needed for a sane and civil society.
For several decades, I tried to understand and integrate the seemingly hard contradictions between many of the viewpoints expressed here and on other forums throughout the internet, on the radio waves, in books and on TV when it came to the core differences between "the left" or "liberals" and "the right" or "conservatives".
I've personally struggled with my early lackadaisical religious training, and gone back and forth between ritualism, atheism, agnosticism and belief. I understand the scientific method and how it seems to cast religion aside, yet find reliance on only science and atheism to be shallow and unfulfilling in a personal and in a societal manner.
Nowadays, I personally see myself as mostly a "classical liberal with a twist", that twist being a belief that religious beliefs hold within them certain aspects that are beneficial to society, especially in the areas of morality and the establishment of a moral, coherent, safe and productive society. I'm well aware that this is a view that creates a lot of opposition. And there have been a few areas in particular that I've wrestled with. Two of them are:
1. The growing Western belief that all morals are "relative" and
2. The growing expression of absolutism in beliefs, particularly on the secular side of the arguments about religion.
I'm not sure that I have the answer to the first issue, although for several years I've defined "morals" in relationship to their effect on society, rather than to an individual. This concept has it's own dangers. I'm currently reading an interesting book which claims to have an answer. It has promise, but I'm not prepared to accept some of its claims without deeper reflection.
But I have found another person who uses my "morals from society" concept, which I will discuss below in greater detail.
The second issue can also be seen as a growing secular belief that no religion has a place in a discussion about civil society, combined with a growing animosity toward religion (especially the Christian religions that I believe led to and encouraged Western scientific thought) and conservatives who either embrace or simply support a place for religion in society.
I find this growing animosity especially among militant atheists who display (to me at least) many of the same belief patterns as the worst of the "fundamentalist" religions.
I'm not sure that it will be any easier to convince such radical atheists that they only have half of the answer, as it is to convince some religious believers of the same thing. And for the same reasons.
But there is a much broader number of people who are somewhere in the middle, between these two anti-polar beliefs of committed secular atheism and an exclusively religious worldview. I think we need an understanding between these two so that our world doesn't fall into an either/or philosophical and political trap which could easily lead to blood, pogroms and strife.
Much of what is written below is taken from a couple of articles by a liberal scientist by the name of Jonathan Haidt. I discovered his work several months ago, and while I do not totally agree with everything he has to say (and I'll point out a few of those with which I disagree), I think he has arrived at a way of understanding the divide between the secularist/liberal and the religious/conservative views of politics and society.
So I will be stealing much of what he says. Reordering some things, and changing a few terms to match my emphasis on the particular political divide that I'm addressing.
After you have read this post, and you are interested in reading his words directly and I've provided links for you to do so.
I'll start with one of his works, called "WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?" but later, I'm going to change his focus somewhat by substituting "conservative" for the term "Republican" and the term "liberal" for " Democrat".
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?
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.
What Hardt describes above is what I see daily here on the forums, and more and more in our society. And it is a basic problem that I think will end up tearing our society apart, especially if liberals do not come to better understand what they are missing in their basic understanding of "the other side". But I don't let the conservative side off either. Understanding that liberals have "good intentions" is just as important to "our side" as liberals understanding that not all conservatives are "Hilters in the making".
For the rest of the discussion, we'll translate "Democrat" to "current American definition of a liberal", and "Republican" to "current American definition of a conservative", and continue with more of his thoughts from a second article of his: MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION.
In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.
The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.
Morality is about happiness and suffering (as Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.
The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media.
It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).
I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.
Don't dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve well-being even in a primarily contractualist society.
You can't use the New Atheists as your guide to these lessons. The new atheists conduct biased reviews of the literature and conclude that there is no good evidence on any benefits except the health benefits of religion.
I'm now going to synthesize his arguments, and try to parse it down for ease of discussion (appropriating many of his words in the process).
Liberals see society simply 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.
So a purely liberal society is based on two foundations, ones which Hardt calls "individualizing foundations", and discussions about "right and wrong" in society are seen as trade-offs along the continuum of these two foundations.
Individualizing Foundations
1. The Harm/Care foundation:
This foundation particularly concerns violent harm, and nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable.
2. The Fairness/Reciprocity foundation:
This foundation often expands 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.
However, these two foundations do not capture all the issues that make for a satisfying and civil society. Hardt particular addresses the work of Emile Durkheim in this respect:
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 out-groups.
A Durkheimian ethos can't be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity) ... social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems:
Binding Foundations
3. The Ingroup/Loyalty foundation: (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism)
This 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 ... found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people's sense of belonging to a shared community. Liberals 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.
4. The Authority/Respect foundation: (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates)
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. Liberals 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.
5. The Purity/Sanctity foundation (sometimes referred to as the "Sacred foundation"): (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)
This foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual "deviance," but it can also be harnessed for liberal 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
Some of Hardt's Observations:
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 .)
Liberals generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do conservatives. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other liberals, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the Democratic party in the 1980s, and whom the liberals must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
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 conservatives say that liberals 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."
Liberals 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 liberals 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.
If you think about what Hardt is saying, and read many of the acerbic posts from one side to the other in the forums, I think you can see their genesis in the failure of both sides of the issue to appreciate the moral viewpoint of the other.
I believe if we do not arrive at a better understanding, and a new consensus about the basic way to order Western society, (and American political society, especially) we are doomed to a society in which the extremes of both sides coalesce and cause untold misery along the way to a new equilibrium.
I also think that the toughest burden is on the secularists/liberals. That is not to say that they are wrong: it's just to say that the religious conservative side within our society has had to come to an understanding of the secular view over the last few hundred years. We can live with them. It just seems that they can't live with us.
Which is a shame, and would be a lost opportunity for a better society.
Can't we all just get along? [:)]
Or, more seriously: How do we reach such an understanding, for the benefit of our entire world? What can we do, each from our own positions, to achieve a balanced world view, or ... do we even have a desire to do so?
Firm
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