What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? Russell Conjugation - Eric Weinstein

What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?

I came across a reference to something called the Russell Conjugation, an idea created by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. (It’s also called an emotive conjugation.) It consists of three statements that describe the same behavior from different perspectives. Here is an example from an article by Eric Weinstein.

I am firm. [Positive empathy]

You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy]

He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy]

As Weinstein explains:

In order to understand the concept properly you have to appreciate that most words and phrases are actually defined not by a single dictionary description, but rather two distinct attributes:

I) The factual content of the word or phrase.

II) The emotional content of the construction.

How would this apply to political disagreements? Would it be the following? “I am right (because I have the correct principles). You are mistaken (because your principles are wrong). They are evil (because they have no principles, or their principles are evil).” In this case, “I” refers to yourself. “You” refers to a friend who disagrees with you. “They” refers to a politician or pundit who is on the other side.

I pose it this way because I think we are not likely to label a friend as evil. If we believe a friend is evil, why are we friends? But it is much easier for us to call someone we don’t know evil precisely because we don’t have a personal connection. As philosophers like Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) remind us, our psychology has deep tribal roots. Many experiments run by researchers show that they can get participants form us vs. them groups based on superficial qualities such as eye color or sports team affiliation. (See more at this You Are Not So Smart episode.)

I know that my observation on how we label friends versus people we don’t know doesn’t hold up all the time. I know friends who have disowned family members or have terminated friendships over political disagreements such as which presidential candidate to for. But I also know people who haven’t done this.

Review of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Coddling of the American Mind Review
How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

Recently my wife and I went to Portland, Maine with three other neighbor couples for a charity event. All four of us couples have kids between 20 and 30 years old. While we were walking around Portland the four of us guys started to talk about how our kids don’t know how to do things that we could do when we were their age. I’m talking about things like if the “Check Engine” light comes on it doesn’t mean the car is about to explode or the engine is going to melt down. Or how to balance a checkbook. Or unplug a toilet. We all agreed that we as parents had a hand in this by doing too much for our kids. We did so much for our kids, thinking that we were helping when in fact we were hindering their ability to deal with life’s challenges.

One of those challenges includes being able to deal with political opinions that are deemed dangerous or unsafe. I brought up how some colleges and universities cancelled speaking engagements of conservatives such as Ben Shapiro or Charles Murray (who probably would classify himself more as a libertarian). Or, if these speakers tried to deliver their speech they were shouted down by the vocal contingent of student or even physically threatened. My friends were completely unaware of these incidents.

During our conversation I brought up a book I had just finished that claims our kids have been taught three key ideas that are setting them up for failure. The book? The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff. The Amazon summary of the book nicely captures their thesis and explanation how these ideas became prevalent.

[T]he new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures.  Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. 

Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction.

Quoting directly from the book: “Many university students are learning to think in distorted ways, and this increases their likelihood of becoming fragile, anxious, and easily hurt.”

These “untruths” as the authors label them, contradict ancient wisdom, contradict modern psychological research on flourishing, and harm individuals and communities.

The authors point to an influential idea lying behind the idea of unsafe ideas and language. They refer to a 2017 The New York Times essay by Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology and emotion researcher at Northeastern University, in which Barrett claims: “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech – at least certain types of speech – can be a form of violence.”

The authors disagree. They hold that verbal harm does not equal violence. “Interpreting a campus lecture as violence is a choice, and it is a choice that increases your pain with respect to the lecture while reducing your options for how to respond.” “As Marcus Aurelius advised, ‘Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.’”

So how did we get to this point? Lukianoff and Haidt identify six trends: “the rising political polarization and cross-party animosity of U.S. politics, which has led to rising hate crimes and harassment on campus; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression, which have made many students desirous of protection and more receptive to the Great Untruths; changes in parenting practices, which have amplified children’s fears even as childhood becomes increasingly safe; the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking, both of which kids need to become self-governing adults; the growth of campus bureaucracy and expansion of its protective mission; and an increasing passion for justice, combined with the changing ideas about what justice requires.”

[NOTE: please see a table at the end of this post that captures the key untruths and their counter ideas.]

Lukianoff and Haidt do an admirable job ferreting out these trends but if I had to criticize this book I’d say that Lukianoff and Haidt don’t identify the deeper premises behind the subjectivity prevalent in universities and culture. (Note: I’m not saying everything can be reduced only to the prevailing ideas. Trying to avoid the mistake of reducing everything to one dimension.) I think they miss one source of these three Great Untruths. I think we need to look a bit deeper, to philosophy. While most of us don’t deal directly with philosophical trends I believe universities are a major transmission belt for ideas where young people can flock to the ideas pushed by their professors. The kids are impressionable and idealistic at the same time so they’re susceptible to latching onto ideas that sound good but haven’t been tested in the world outside of the cloistered school.

So where do these Great Untruths come from and why are most people unable to refute them? For a possible explanation I recommended another book to supplement The Coddling of the American Mind. I'm referring to Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. What is postmodernism? Here is how postmodernism is described in Wikipedia.

“[P]ostmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection toward the meta-narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality. Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress. Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence.

Hicks provides this: “Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, ‘seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.’ “The task of postmodern professors is to help students ‘spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time.’”

“Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. … Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge about that reality. Having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality, and incommensurability of those constructs. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist, holding that individuals’ identities are constructed largely by the social-linguistic groups that they are a part of. … Postmodern accounts of human nature also consistently emphasize relations of conflict between those groups; and given the de-emphasized or eliminated role of reason, postmodernism accounts hold that those conflicts are resolved primarily by the use of force.” [This was written in 2004 but accurately describes what Lukianoff and Haidt say is happening in universities today.]

“In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity. Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual and class identity.” [Hence the focus on language and microaggressions.]

To summarize, postmodernism says that there is no objective truth. Therefore, your feelings are as valid, if not more so, than critical, objective thinking, especially if you’re feeling oppressed. Power is used to “correct” the legacy of white male “supremacy.” Therefore it’s OK to suppress certain ideas and speakers because their ideas are dangerous, discredited, aggressive and oppressive. Power trumps truth because truth doesn’t exist; feelings trump reason and logic.

Lukianoff and Haidt offer some solutions to counter the ill effects of the Great Untruths. One tool is to engage in “productive disagreement.” “It is part of the process by which people do each other the favor of counteracting each other’s confirmation bias.”  “[L]earning how to give and take criticism without being hurt is an essential life skill. When serious thinkers respect someone, they are willing to engage them in a thoughtful argument.”

Another tool they recommend: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). “CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various ‘cognitive distortions,’ such as ‘catastrophizing’ (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job . . .) and ‘negative filtering’ (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well.”

Basically they’re offering tools for us to be a bit more objective. Some might argue that it’s impossible to be perfectly, completely objective, given how many biases inherent in our mind, but I maintain (and I think Lukianoff and Haidt would agree) that our lives will be better and our political discussions a bit less contentious if we strive to be more objective even if we fall short of perfection.

Bottom line: this is an important book. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m pleased to say that this book appears to have done well both in terms of sales and in the discussion it has generated on Twitter. Bravo!

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I’ve put this table from the book at the end because it lays out a good overview of the great untruths, sound psychological counter principles and related wisdom.

Psychological Principle	Wisdom	Great Untruth
Young people are antifragile.	Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.	What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
We are all prone to emotional reasoning and the confirmation bias.	Your own worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.	Always trust your feelings.
We are all prone to dichotomous thinking and tribalism.	The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.	Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

OpenMind | Reduce political polarization in your community

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I like the work of Jonathan Haidt. His books are among my favorites: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. (I'm working on a review of the third book.) This morning Haidt posted on Twitter that he has started a website called OpenMind, "A free interactive platform designed to depolarize communities and foster mutual understanding across differences." Here is the link.


OpenMind | Reduce political polarization in your community


I've signed up so I can take the quiz that measures my bias; it will be interesting to see if I'm practicing what I'm preaching! The site also posts resources to help explain liberal, conservative and libertarian mindsets. I haven't explored all of the content but I like what I've seen so far.

The Big Book of Wisdom of Western Civilization | The Independent Whig

The Big Book of Wisdom of Western Civilization | The Independent Whig

The Independent Whig posts his choice of books that would comprise chapters of an overall book that tells "a comprehensive story of Western culture."

The title and table of contents of my book of books would look something like the following. The first chapter-book lays out a foundational premise that each subsequent chapter-book logically follows, builds upon and expands, such that in the end a comprehensive story of Western culture can be comprehended. The appendices expand further still on the concepts told in the main story.

I've provided the chapters but without the brief description why The Independent Whig chose each book. I'm posting this obviously because I agree with his choice of books. I've read four of them and own seven of the others, waiting to be read. That leaves just two books that I hadn't discovered prior to his post. I've added in brackets after each book whether I have read them or have them.

Chapter 1: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker. [Have]  

Chapter 2: Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, by John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford. [Have]

Chapter 3: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. [Read. One of my favorite books.]

Chapter 4: The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, by Herman [Read. Found to be very enlightening.]

Chapter 5: A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Sowell. [Have.] 

Chapter 6: Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, by Goldberg. [Have]

Chapter 7: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Peterson. [Read. Also plan to read his Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.]

Appendix 1: The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, by Drew Weston. [Have]

Appendix 2: Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, by Joshua Greene. [Read]

Appendix 3: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard. 

Appendix 4: The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America, by Kevin Phillips 

Appendix 5: Pathological Altruism, by Barbara Oakley. [Have]

Appendix 6: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, by Paul Bloom. [Have]

Nov 6, 2017: Discussion with Dr. Jonathan Haidt NYU - YouTube

Nov 6, 2017: Discussion with Dr. Jonathan Haidt NYU - YouTube


This wide-ranging interview by Jordan B Peterson of Jonathan Haidt contains fascinating and rich insights that are too many and too broad to even summarize here. Both Peterson and Haidt touch on moral foundations, differences in how conservatives and liberals see the world, tribalism, free speech, and so on. It's over 90 minutes long. Highly recommended!

Further thoughts on the Fragile Generation

In my earlier post on the fragile generation the interview has this quote from Jonathan Haidt.

In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success’.

I agree with Haidt about the first two ideas that the current generation seems to believe. To me the first idea, that feelings are always right, stems from the lack of teaching kids the ability to think critically. Way back in the mid 1980s a friend and I designed and taught an adult continuing education course on critical thinking. At that time we could see that our adult students had never been exposed to thinking in a methodical, logical way. It makes sense that if people don’t have even a rudimentary grasp of logic and arguments they are subject to subconscious biases and to the push of emotional reactions.

I’ve read a number of books over the last ten years that explore how we form opinions and how we are unconsciously influenced by many biases. I recall reading about one study in which some of the participants read a series of words related to being elderly. When they were later given a series of physical tasks to perform they completed them more slowly than the control group that had not been exposed to those words!

As I explain it to people we like to think we’re being detectives when we’re really lawyers. By that I mean a detective tries to find out who committed a crime by objectively collecting and piecing together the evidence. A lawyer, on the other hand, tries to build a case, either to defend their client or to prosecute the defendant. The studies I’ve read about show that we often come to a conclusion about an issue then go looking for confirming data. We tend to ignore or discount data that doesn’t fit our conclusion.

I agree with Haidt with his identifying the second prevalent idea that what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker. This idea seems to be rampant among what some call the derisively call the “snowflake” generation. I think this is tied to the first premise. That is, if you don’t have the tools to think critically then we’re threatened by ideas with which we disagree.

My main objective is to touch on his third point: that the world is divided into good people and bad people. I’m sure Haidt will explain this more in his upcoming book and that he isn’t saying there are no evil people. Being familiar with Haidt’s work, I believe he is saying that people are too quick to lump those who disagree with them into the evil camp. I’ve seen it happen many times where you’re demonized if you disagree with someone politically. Liberals think conservatives are evil and vice versa. I’m not saying everyone does this but a lot do. It has happened to me during the 2016 presidential election. A couple people have quit talking to my wife and me when we disagreed with them.

I’m assuming Haidt would agree that there are some evil people. The clearly obvious examples would be Hitler, Mao and Stalin or murderous sociopaths. But these are extreme examples. In our daily lives we rarely deal with people who are truly evil. They might buy into ideas or policies that we believe ultimately hurt people. For instance, conservatives and libertarians believe gun control disarms the poor who might live in high crime areas. Liberals believe gun control protects us from those who, in the liberal’s eyes, can too easily obtain guns. Conservatives and libertarians think welfare benefits eat away at the incentive for people to find work while liberals think welfare is needed to compensate for the victims of an economy rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. Neither side in these debates are necessarily evil. But I’ve seen it happen too often where you get slapped with the evil label for disagreeing! I assume Haidt’s book will delve into this in much more detail.

Before closing I’d recommend using something called steel manning and taking the ideological Turing test. Steel manning is opposite of a straw man argument which involves distorting what an opponent is saying then refuting it while the original argument wasn’t really addressed. Steel manning means we take the opposite approach of the straw man argument: you try to strengthen the argument of the other side before trying to refute it. To do this means applying what has been called the Turing ideological test where you try to state the argument of the other side as fairly as possible, as if you actually are taking that stand, then addressing it. I think if more people tried to do this we would have more civil and productive disagreements.

Both steel manning and the ideological Turing test take a lot of work! It means trying to think like your opponent then coming up with your response. Unfortunately, we tend to take the easy way out. Haidt has said in his earlier work that humans are still fundamentally tribal in nature. Once we form an allegiance to a tribe we talk the language of our tribe (see Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics) and look at the other tribe as the “enemy.”

The fragile generation - Jonathan Haidt Interview

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-fragile-generation/20257#.WcQOntN96SN

This is an excellent interview of Jonathan Haidt on the idea recently floated that it's OK to prevent certain people from speaking in public because their ideas are considered offensive and a form of violence.

Here is a summary that appears at the end.

In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. ‘If we can teach those three ideas to college students’, he says, ‘we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success’.

So how can we resolve the problem of vulnerability among young Americans? Haidt says part of the solution must begin in childhood and will require parents to give their children daily periods of ‘unsupervised time’. ‘We have to accept the fact that in that unsupervised time there will be name-calling, conflict and exclusion. And while it’s painful for parents to accept this, in the long-run it will give them children that are not suffering from such high rates of anxiety and depression.’

As for university students, Haidt references a recent quote from CNN commentator Van Jones. Jones said: ‘I don’t want you to be safe, ideologically.’ Building on this, he says universities should help students develop their ‘anti-fragility’.

‘We need to focus on preparing students to encounter intellectual and ideological diversity. We need to prepare them for civil disagreements. We need to be very mindful of mental illness, but otherwise need to minimise the role of adult supervision in their lives. College is a major opportunity, once they have left home, for them to develop anti-fragility and we must not deprive them of that learning opportunity.’

Here is an article from The Atlantic as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/07/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-tell-students-words-are-violence/533970/

How to Win Friends and Influence Refugee Policy by Megan McArdle [and influence others]

 

I like the approach Megan McArdle takes in dealing with the thunderclouds of heated debate that have mushroomed over the Syrian refugee crisis. She lays out the various arguments for and against having the U.S. take in some of these refugees. She says the following about the posts bloggers on both sides have written.

The posts are not intended to convince anyone. They are to signal tribal loyalties to people who already agree with you, while you marinate in your own sense of moral superiority.

Then further on says:

If these factions want to convince other people, they’re going about it all wrong.

It took me years of writing on the Internet to learn what is nearly an iron law of commentary: The better your message makes you feel about yourself, the less likely it is that you are convincing anyone else. The messages that make you feel great about yourself (and of course, your like-minded friends) are the ones that suggest you’re a moral giant striding boldly across the landscape, wielding your inescapable ethical logic. The messages that work are the ones that try to understand what the other side is thinking, on the assumption that they are no better or worse than you. So if you are actually trying to help the Syrian refugees, rather than marinate in your own sensation of overwhelming virtue, you should avoid these tactics.

I agree! Unfortunately it is all too easy to cast those who disagree with you as having questionable (at best) morals and intentions. It’s also too easy to talk in prepackaged catch phrases that are readily accepted by those who agree with you but fall on deaf ears of those who don’t. The end result isn’t a true debate or civil conversation but pontificating and posturing. I’ve said a number of times here that it takes a lot of work being objective when thinking things through. It takes even more effort trying to fathom how someone else reached their conclusions then trying to explain your position in terms that the other person is more likely to understand or accept. I’m not saying they will agree with you but they could come away with a better understanding of your position. I can speak from experience that the method McArdle recommends makes more of an impact than just lobbing verbal hand grenades at each other.

Read her entire article. McArdle doesn’t go into specifics on how you can fashion your position in a way that someone who disagrees will understand. For a start in the right direction I continue to highly recommend Arnold Kling’s The Three Languages of Politics. For a more theoretical approach check out Jonathan Haidt’s Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Politics and Narratives

I've written before about the work of Jonathan Haidt who has influenced my thinking on morality and politics. This essay by The Independent Whig does a nice job summarizing Haidt's work while also touching on the role of stories. In fact here is a quote from early in the article.

The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor, and every ideology has its own story in the form of “grand narrative” that describes the social world from the perspective of that ideology.

He then outlines the Grand Liberal and Grand Conservative narratives.

Anyway, I recommend reading this essay.

Narratives, the two stories of capitalism and the three languages of politics

My friend Robert Bidinotto has been writing about the importance of narratives in our lives and in politics. His general discussion is here: http://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2011/04/narratives-that-guide-our-lives.html. While his application to politics can be found here: http://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2012/10/election-2012-and-clash-of-narratives.html.

Recently I came across Jonathan Haidt's writing on the two stories of capitalism. (He is working on a book on the subject.) In one capitalism oppresses people; this story fuels the narrative of the left. You can hear it in the language of liberals like Elizabeth Warren. It might not be stated so boldly but if you listen closely the message is there: that capitalism thrives by exploiting people and that government liberates us from the handcuffs of inequality foisted upon us by the rich.

The other story, favored by the right, proclaims that capitalism liberates people and that government oppresses by burdening us with rules and regulations. This story resounds especially strong within the libertarian and Tea Party.

I believe there is a third story in line with Arnold Kling's three languages of politics in which some claim capitalism civilizes us and saves us from barbarism. For examples listen to more traditional conservatives such as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.

I figure that Haidt would argue that ultimately this story boils down to liberation: capitalism saves us from tribalism and primitivism. Nonetheless, here is Haidt’s explanation of the two stories. I’ve provided several links after these quotes that explain Haidt’s ideas in more detail.

 

There has long been a thoroughly negative story about commerce, going back to biblical times, in which businessmen, traders, and money lenders are bloodsuckers who extort wealth from workers and customers without contributing anything of value. When mercantile capitalism came along in the 16th century, and even more so when industrial capitalism conquered the globe in the 19th century, the negative story began to animate left-leaning parties and revolutionaries in many countries—with history-shaping consequences for the 20th century. This is story #1: Capitalism is exploitation. It is a curse, a virus, a disaster for the poor and the planet. This story is still told today, as we saw in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

But capitalism has also had its passionate defenders, most notably Adam Smith in the 18th century, who explained how capitalism achieves the magic of value creation (as in his famous example of a pin factory). The rising wealth, longevity, and living standards of the 19th and 20th centuries—even for the poor and working class—led to the formation of a thoroughly positive story about capitalism, told by economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. This is story #2: Capitalism is liberation. Free market capitalism is Prometheus, giving fire and freedom to the human race. In this story, it is left-leaning ideologies (socialism, Marxism, and the affection for big government) that continually attack human progress, disconnecting whole nations from the market and dragging them down into poverty for decades—until they see the light, as China and India did a few decades ago.

http://storiesaboutcapitalism.com/

http://www.ethicalsystems.org/capitalism

http://econjwatch.org/articles/the-moral-narratives-of-economists

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/how-did-politics-get-so-personal.html?_r=3

I mentioned Arnold Kling earlier. There is a lot of overlap between Haidt’s work and Kling’s three languages of politics. Kling argues that the language of the left centers on the oppressed versus oppressors axis. Conservatives argue along the lines of civilization versus barbarism. Libertarians see things in terms of liberty versus coercion. All three groups then will craft different narratives, each with their own favored axis and language.

How does this apply to us? I believe knowing about narratives and the kinds of languages can ultimately help us better communicate our ideas with those who disagree with us.

Where are the conservative social psychologists?

Is the Field of Psychology Biased Against Conservatives? This New Yorker
article starts with:

On January 27, 2011, from a stage in the middle of the San Antonio Convention Center, Jonathan Haidt addressed the participants of the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The topic was an ambitious one: a vision for social psychology in the year 2020. Haidt began by reviewing the field that he is best known for, moral psychology. Then he threw a curveball. He would, he told the gathering of about a thousand social-psychology professors, students, and post-docs, like some audience participation. By a show of hands, how would those present describe their political orientation? First came the liberals: a “sea of hands,” comprising about eighty per cent of the room, Haidt later recalled. Next, the centrists or moderates. Twenty hands. Next, the libertarians. Twelve hands. And last, the conservatives. Three hands.

Social psychology, Haidt went on, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity that was every bit as dangerous as a lack of, say, racial or religious or gender diversity. It discouraged conservative students from joining the field, and it discouraged conservative members from pursuing certain lines of argument. It also introduced bias into research questions, methodology, and, ultimately, publications. The topics that social psychologists chose to study and how they chose to study them, he argued, suffered from homogeneity. The effect was limited, Haidt was quick to point out, to areas that concerned political ideology and politicized notions, like race, gender, stereotyping, and power and inequality. “It’s not like the whole field is undercut, but when it comes to research on controversial topics, the effect is most pronounced,” he later told me.

The rest of the article ranges widely over the various studies researchers have conducted on this phenomenon. I recommend it highly as well as the work of Jonathan Haidt. He describes himself as a political liberal when he embarked on the journey to investigate the foundations of morality. Haidt ultimately identifies six foundations:

1. Care/harm: cherishing and protecting others.

2. Fairness/cheating: rendering justice according to shared rules. (Alternate name: Proportionality)

3. Liberty/oppression: the loathing of tyranny.

4. Loyalty/betrayal: standing with your group, family, nation. (Alternate name: Ingroup)

5. Authority/subversion: obeying tradition and legitimate authority. (Alternate name: Respect.)

6. Sanctity/degradation: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions. (Alternate name: Purity.)

This isn’t too controversial. However Haidt stepped on a live rail when he noted that conservatives tend to rely on all six foundations while liberals and libertarians tend to favor only one. Liberals rely on the Care/harm foundation while libertarians gravitate to liberty/oppression. (See his paper: Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations) As you can see Haidt is not afraid to question the status quo! Imagine the horror that someone dares to suggest that conservatives might have a broader moral foundation than liberals, and the conclusion comes from a liberal! (Haidt admits he has drifted
more to the center as a result of his research and thinking.)

Anyway, please check out this article as well as the links to the various studies that are referred to in it. To me Haidt shows the result of truly trying to be objective.

Science Asks: Why Can't We All Just Get Along? - The Atlantic

I've been eagerly awaiting the publication of Jonathan Haidt's new book, The Righteous Mind, which I plan on reviewing here (one of these days). In the meantime here is a good summary of Haidt's approach. Science Asks: Why Can't We All Just Get Along? - The Atlantic

Why liberals can't understand conservatives – Telegraph Blogs

Why liberals can't understand conservatives – Telegraph Blogs

This article touches on ideas that will be discussed in Jonathan Haidt's soon to be released book, The Righteous Mind. I am looking forward to reading it and reviewing it here. In the meantime Ed West gives a nice preview.

The Moral Foundations of Occupy Wall Street - Reason Magazine

Jonathan Haidt, author of one of my favorite books, The Happiness Hypothesis, applies his theory of moral foundations to the Occupy Wall Street movement. I’ve provided some quotes below. I like his approach.

My colleagues and I found that political liberals tend to rely primarily on the moral foundation of care/harm, followed by fairness/cheating and liberty/oppression. They are very concerned about victims of oppression, but they rarely make moral appeals based on loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Social conservatives, in contrast, use all six foundations. They are less concerned than liberals about harm but much more concerned about the moral foundations that bind groups and nations together, i.e., loyalty (patriotism), authority (law and order, traditional families), and sanctity (the Bible, God, the flag as a sacred object). Libertarians, true to their name, value liberty more than anyone else, and they value it far more than any other foundation. (You can read our complete research findings at www.MoralFoundations.org.)

So what is the mix of moral foundations at Occupy Wall Street (OWS)? In my visit to Zuccotti Park, it was clear that the main moral foundation of OWS is fairness, followed by care and liberty. Loyalty, authority, and sanctity, by contrast, were very little in evidence.

Many pundits have commented on the fact that OWS has no specific list of demands, but the protesters’ basic message is quite clear: rein in the influence of big business, which has cheated and manipulated its way to great wealth (in part by buying legislation) while leaving a trail of oppressed and impoverished victims in its wake.

Will this message catch on with the rest of the country, much of which also values the loyalty, authority, and sanctity foundations? If OWS protesters engage in acts of violence, flag desecration, destruction of private property, or anything else that makes them seem subversive or anti-American, then I think most Americans will quickly reject them. Furthermore, if the protesters continue to focus on the gross inequality of outcomes in America, they will get nowhere. There is no equality foundation. Fairness means proportionality, and if Americans generally think that the rich got rich by working harder or by providing goods and services that were valued in a free market, they won’t support redistributionist policies. But if the OWS protesters can better articulate their case that “the 1 percent” got its riches by cheating, rather than by providing something valuable, or that “the 1 percent” abuses its power and oppresses “the 99 percent,” then Occupy Wall Street will find itself standing on a very secure pair of moral foundations.

I particularly like what he says in the last paragraph about fairness. I’ve touched on this subject earlier in December in response to Obama’s speech in Kansas. 

Clashes of Morality: A different view

I’m mentioned Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis as one of my favorite books. He has written a thought provoking artile titled Obama’s moral majority. Haidt, a self-avowed political liberal, does something you rarely see on either side of the fence: admit the other side has some merit. In his article Haidt offers Obama advice on bridging the divide between Left and Right. He makes the following point:

First idea: use all five moral senses. A scientific consensus is emerging that human moral psychology was shaped by multiple evolutionary forces and that our minds therefore detect many—sometimes conflicting—properties of social situations. The two best studied moral senses pertain to harm (including our capacities for sympathy and nurturing) and fairness (including anger at injustice). You can travel the world but you won't find a human culture that doesn't notice and care about harm and fairness.

Political conservatives in the US, Britain and many other nations value three additional sets of moral concerns. Like liberals, they care about harm and fairness, but they care more than liberals about loyalty to the in-group (which political party cares most about flags and borders?), authority (which side demands respect for parents and teachers?) and spiritual purity (which side most wants to restrict homosexuality and drug use?). It's as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning. (My research colleagues and I have not just plucked these "senses" from the air; they emerged from a review of both evolutionary and anthropological theory, and were tested in internet surveys, face-to-face interviews and even in the decoding of religious sermons.)

This hypothesis doesn't mean that liberals are wrong or defective, but it does mean that they often have more trouble understanding conservatives than vice versa. Liberals tend to relate most moral issues to potential harms and injustices. They therefore can't understand why anyone—including the majority of Americans—would oppose gay marriage, for example, because legalising gay marriage would hurt nobody and end an injustice. Arguments about the sanctity of marriage or the authority of tradition sound like empty words sent out to cover irrational homophobia. But the culture war is not primarily a disagreement about what's harmful or fair; it is better described as a battle between two visions of the ideal society, one that is designed to appeal to two moral senses, the other designed to appeal to five.

Personally, I believe Haidt (and others) project too much hope in Obama’s ability to transcend party political lines. Based on what I’ve seen he has abandoned his message of hope and has resorted to more traditional party line politics.

I also believe there is another plausible theroy to expplain the differences in how conservatives, liberals and libertarians look at the world ethically. In reading Ken Wilber I became aware of Spiral Dynamics, a model for classifying worldviews based on stages of mental and spiritual evolution. Just as humans as a species have evolved over time, individual humans evolve through stages as they mature. Spiral Dynamics stems from the research conducted by Clare W. Graves, a professor of psychology who originally developed a model based on his research. Don Beck and Chris Cowan expanded on Graves’ work and added colors as a shorthand way to identify the different stages of evolution, which is explained in their book, Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change.

The Spiral Dynamics model has 8 colors divided into two “tiers” but I’d like to focus on three colors that are contiguous with each other: blue, orange and green. Blue (also called “Traditional” by Stephen McIntosh) feels there is a Higher Power (typically God) that punishes evil and rewards the good. Blue values stability and order which is accomplished by obeying higher authorities and their rules. Traditional Republicans and conservatives are Blue.

Orange (or “Modern”) emphasize the individual and feel succesful living consists of competing to achieve results. They believe the free market best rewards individuals for their efforts. Libertarians typify Orange. They often form an uneasy alliance with Blue Republicans who also support the free market, sometimes reluctantly because of its inherent appeal to self-interest. Traditionalists support the market because it disciplines businessmen and individuals to pursue not just their own personal interests but “the public interest”. While Blue cherish tradition Orange values individual achievement and freedom.

Green (“Postmodern”) believe humans find love and purpose through affiliation and sharing. Green is more egalitarian, relativistic and collectivist. They also oppose the hierarchies, believing that there are no “higher” or “lower” levels. As a result Green look down on Blue and Orange as inferior. All three levels look at each other as if they’re from another world. In a sense they are: different worldviews each with its own value system. Wilber has written about the “Mean Green Meme” because it reduces morality to one dimension. Or as Haidt writes, they strip out two of the 5 moral dimensions and discard the rest. A healthy Green integrates the best aspects of Blue and Orange.

For more description of the various colors see http://www..spiraldynamics.org/resources_colors_sd.htm.

I know this system might sound a bit New Agey but as I have read and apply this model I believe it has some merit. I think it does help expplain why we see liberals, conservatives and libertarians constrantly talking past each other without making headway. As Ken Wilber would say, Green is not superior to Blue or Orange. A healthy Green honors and incorporates the healthy aspects of Blue (the objective need for rules such as law and order, traditions, etc.) and Orange (individualism, reason, self-interest). There is much more than I can cover here. I encourage anyone interested to the links provided above as well as the work of Ken Wilber. (See also Wilber’s original piece on his quadrants model, which I hope to discuss here in a future entry.)