Of Course I Haven't Actually Read The Book

This here, what I'm doing? It's like slow motion blogging. I write about things three or four days after I think about them.

Anyway, this is more a musing than a thought out post, inspired by another brush with the ideas of Jonathan Haidt, who's garnered some notoriety for his argument that human psychology has five categories of moral evaluation: "harm reduction, reciprocity and fairness, purity, respect for authority, and in-group loyalty." (Quoted from, and refreshed in my memory by, this post. Haidt's own project is self-described as focusing "on the moral foundations of politics, and on ways to transcend the “culture wars” by using recent discoveries in moral psychology to foster more civil forms of politics." Within the world of the liberal blogosphere he's garnered more specific attention for arguing that, roughly speaking, upper-middle and upper class educated westerners tend to articulate their moral framework entirely around the first two concepts, harm reduction and reciprocity and fairness, and further extending the point by claiming that liberal politics essentially springs from that sociological foundation and thereby struggles to connect with people outside that group, whose moral worlds (he claims) are more quitably distributed amongst all five categories.

OK.

First of all, it's unfair for me to get into evaluating this position without actually having, you know, done the reading. I'm sure that Haidt's work is actually deserving of careful engagement of the sort that I'm not currently about to embark upon. On the other hand, what I've outlined above is about the level of detail and precision with which his ideas have memetically filtered into (one particular extended) online conversation, so I don't think it's completely invalid to engage with them on this level. (My hazy and unfair justification being that it's not like the most influential and important discussions about, say, Marxism have ever had much to do with a nuanced understanding of Marx. That's bullshit but I'm tired. Also, no one reads this anyway [except You, Loyal Reader!] so it's not like I'm actually doing some concrete disservice, just thinking "out loud".)

Second of all, if there's something I'm not it's a cultural anthropologist (or a ballet dancer, or...), but my understanding is that there is a (potential) validity to Haidt's core observation. Since I'm not a professional, I'm very worried about balancing a respect for the strong differences between my inherent assumptions and those of another culture's, on one hand, and on the other being careful not to engage in the kind of laissez faire cultural relativism-as-excuse-for-offensive-thought-and-behavior type bullshit that has, e.g., US public officials saying things like: "Look, Arab culture is very different from ours. When we kill a family member, they're not satisfied by our apology, or even the offer of a cash settlement; the Arab mentality requires more for justice, and they want some sort of emotional reckoning as well. It's a completely alien culture." That said, it tracks with my ignorant nuggets of half-information to stipulate that, for example, traditional Chinese cultures might place a much greater emphasis on "authority" than they do on what I'd consider "fairness". And a casual consideration of the history of western cultural mores over the last thousand or so years also tracks an apparent devolution in the importance of authority (of God, of the King, of the State) vs. other moral considerations.

Where I struggle is with the application of these intuitions to the particulars of the current political landscape. Liberal politicians may make appeals to the moral button of "in group loyalty" less often than conservative politicians, but in practice it's absolutely a powerful mechanism behind the alignment both of casual voters and of more politically engaged and committed individuals; witness, re: the latter, the kind of snarling mutual contempt between "unrepentant" Nader 2000 voters and the rest of the actively political Democratic establishment (including, let's be honest, me in that second category), and re: the former consider the pile of data indicating that, from election to election, casual voters (and not-so-casual voters) will endlessly re-articulate what's important to them in a personality or a platform so that their stated ideals better line up with the current candidate of the political party for which they've voted for the better part of their adult lives. (Modern liberal politics in the US was also built in large part on the backs of the unions, which movement was certainly expressive of one kind of in-group loyalty as a moral virtue, but a lot's changed in the last eighty years.)

But how much do conservative politicians really actively reach for the "purity" or "in-group loyalty" triggers? In the Haidt-as-read-by-bloggers context, what he's talking about here is (to phrase it neutrally) that conservatives do a much better job of reaching out to a self-consciously "unsophisticated" (which is of course its own sort of elitism, but that's another post) population of a particular ethnic and religious identity (Northern European and Protestant, for the most part), which has for the most part set aside its own potential in-group distinctions (Irish v. English v. German v. Swedish, Lutheran v. Episcopalian v. Presbytarian) in favor of conceiving of itself as, in some way, the bedrock of Americanness. Now, I think this group is wrong to the extent that they think of themselves that way (another post, again), but it's almost not their fault; after all, they're constantly being told that they're the norm from which the rest of us deviate in our Americanness. But what interests me here is that appeals to this population's sense of mutually defined purity and loyalty are almost always expressed via the dog whistle. Look, the ugly flipside to what I tried to express above in non-valuative turns is that conservative rhetoric frequently tries to agitate and activate this population by reaching for the presumed belief that the further you deviate from White Straight Christianity (and, all right, let's throw Hard Working in there along with some other platitudes) the less American you are, which is why self-identified Democrats in West Virginia were talking about how they didn't feel confident that Barack Obama was American enough for their vote. (Just to put it out of the way: I'm not accusing a whole gigantic mass of people of racism or any other negative-ism, merely observing that politicans try to reach them as a group by appealing to intutions which, brought out into the light, aren't very savory. Maybe they're not actually reaching anybody this way anyway!) But my actual point here is to drag that last parenthetical out into the light of my paragraph's main body: these appeals are all coded and soft-spoken. When somebody gets strident they're talking about "Being American" without really examining what buttons they're pushing, because nobody's comfortable stripping away the assumptions people wrap into "Americanness," but other than that there are very very few explicitly racist (or other -ist) appeals to voters floating around, when weighed against the country's ongoing racial tensions. And why is that? Because it's not acceptable. (There are exceptions, which fluctuate over time; right now it's acceptable to be pretty vociferously anti-Muslim in American discourse, which is why attacks meant to suggest Obama's Muslimness are [a] presumed by their makers to have effectiveness, and [b] considerably less coded than attacks meant to highlight his blackness.) Those people who are out and out cognizant racists know they're not supposed to talk that way in general company, and the many many more of us who have intrinsically and subconsciously racist persuasions (of all sorts, and I'm not excluding otherwise good people or otherwise liberal people, including for the sake of fairness myself, from this group) actually just believe that it's wrong to makeor be receptive to that sort of transparently racist appeal. (I've been talking about race as my example, but a somewhat smaller segment of the population feels just the same way about religious plurality or what have you.) Appeals to "purity" often involve making "whiteness" and "Americanness" identical, but never explicitly, because you'd break the spell, disable the rhetoric, and turn your audience against you, if for no other reason than the preservation of their own self-regard as Good People who Don't Think That Way.

Now obviously I'm writing from a particular position whereby I claim that I can see into the codes and dogwhistles and divine subliminal racist intent, and lots of people would say "Shut the fuck up you overreaching liberal apologist, you hate America so much that you'll read evil subtext into the most innocuous call to patriotism," and there's not a lot I can say about that. I'm confident that a measured and objective analysis of the way the rhetoric of "purity" or "group loyalty" (I'm lumping these two Haidt-distinct concepts together because they're the conveniently most objectionable and questionable to me; I'm not going to talk about the moral value of authority here, but American poilitics has a very complicated relationship, I'd say, with the idea of authority) would bear me out that followed down the logical line to it's underpinnings these arguments are appealing to something racist or heteronormative or religionist. (And since people don't like using the word racist, I'll even get all milquetoast and say "racialist" if you want.) This is, again, part and parcel of a larger and different discussion about the role racial tension plays in American society and who's willing to own up to it and who isn't. ANYWAY.

The upshot of the understood unacceptability of bald appeals to (religious/ethnic) purity and loyalty wraps back to what Lizardbreath at Unfogged says in the post linked above: these are moral concepts that don't stand up to modern American society. Sure there are subsets which hold them dear, but the reality of American society is that it's far too heterogenous to support a commonly understood conception of purity or in-group loyalty that can hold moral weight, unless you try to stretch them so broad that the group in question is the most generous definition of "American". There is no defensible concept of what a pure American is, unless you resort to the literal legalisms, and valuing loyalty to the US as your group is so vague and taken for granted as to be not worth mentioning. To the extent that I have loyalties in this sense, they're to the United States (although I frequently root for the Puerto Ricans and Portuguese during the Olympics) - unless you want to weaken the whole notion of loyalty so that it means little more than respect, I'm not "loyal" to my ethnic heritage (I'd have to think the moral scales were seriously out of joint to, e.g., support Portugal in a war vs. the US). I think it's sad when people disown or reject their heritage out of hand, but I conceive of my obligations to my ancestors as acknowledgment and measured pride - my real loyalty, if not to the US, is to myself, and my conception of myself consists of much more than my genetic background. Even if everyone did value loyalty to their ethnic heritage as a moral good - "Don't trust people who aren't Polish-American, Kristof" - that's not something you can build a greater society around. I knew two guys who shared a dorm room in college, one a devout Muslim and the other some sort of quasi-Pentacostalist: they were good friends and quite happy to remain so while completely convinced each that the other was bound for hellfire. They were sort of tongue-in-cheek, but not really. Now, that's heartwarming in a ghoulish sort of way, but you can't write that into the morality of a society. You can't get up on a podium and say "My fellow Americans, it's important that we all agree some of us are going to hell, but it doesn't really matter which group!" This is the lie of the broad-based Christian coalition (and, more recently among intelligentsia, appeals to the Judeo-Christian tradition): their "goals" are currently far enough from achievement that they can be vague. If Pat Roberts had everything he ever dreamed of, though, it wouldn't be long before the Baptists and the Methodists would start regarding each other with the same suspicions that their most zealous adherents currently reserve for Muslims and atheists. A politics which morally values the exclusion of outsiders only works when pretty much everyone is the same. (There's also loyalty to the family in-group, but again I think it's too banal, in a country of 300 million people, to turn the moral good of family loyalty into an articulated political position, although perhaps this is one place where liberals unthinkingly concede too much ground to conservatives.)

This is all sort of one of the successes of liberalism - the triumphant recognition of a heterogenous society - but I am willing to concede that there's still a homogneous urge to be scratched. I just don't see what you can do about it except try to articulate why we need to set those feelings aside; perhaps somebody much more creative than I could articulate a concept of moral purity that would be broadly acceptable and philosophically sound and compatible with left-liberalism, but I don't see it happening. These are impulses no longer relevant to the great work of a society like this, even if we can find place for them in our more immediate lives. (And even then.) It's natural that as human society expanded we woudl try to continue rewriting our most basic intuitions into society even as it grew larger and larger, but at some point you need to try and stop -

One theory (which I like) of the Uncanny Valley is that it's a deeply coded evolutionary instinct (broadly akin to the instinctive revulsion most humans [most mamals?] have toward snakes) for self-preservation, and if so the instinct undoubtedly well predates the rise primates: something that looks almost like [my kind], but is somehow clearly not [my kind] is not to be trusted and possibly dangerous. The preservation of and need for and loyalty to the group is everything, evolutionarily, but that's just not where humans are anymore. One of the great things about the overstuffed human mind is that we've puffed ourselves and our societies so far past the point of evolutionary imperative, but one of the troublesome things about the human mind is that we still carry around so much luggage from before we really began using our minds to do such great things.

INSTANT UPDATE: I was skimming this post-posting and immediately thought: "Democratic Primary, you idiot!" but I think that almost proves my point: I can't imagine a political race in this country, today, being more overstuffed with overtly racist and sexist rhetoric (and, look, I'm not interested in who said what sinful thing: if you step out to no more than two proxy-levels away from the candidates, they had surrogates saying distasteful things) and it was universally and objectively understood to be an ugly race that in its more extreme moments was considered to be threatening the future viability of the Democratic party itself. The small group of voters who feel that by Clinton's defeat they've been somehow disenfranchised has given itself over completely to political loyalty as moral imperative (and I'm confident that had things gone the other way there'd be an analogous group), but the rest of us rightly understand that these people are BATSHIT CRAZY. Like, making unrepentant Nader 2000 voters look like well-adjusted political rationalists. This was a far more explicitly charged-with-combustible-group-identification-issues campaign than any I can remember in my brief political consciousness and it's widely regarded as near disastrous. We (most of us) just don't have much tolerance for seeing this shit dragged out into the sunlight, which is one reason why people don't like it when someone like me reaches into the coded messages trying to do just that.