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I watched Bill Moyers segment with Jonathan Haidt – a social psychologist – on the extreme positions that so many have these days both in our culture and it’s manifestations in politics.
You can watch the show here. And read the transcript here.
The segment deals with what Jonathan Haidt refers as The Righteous Mind. That now more than in the past, both sides tend toward good vs evil and black and white thinking. And judging each other in this way.
JONATHAN HAIDT: Anytime we’re interacting with someone, we’re judging them, we’re sharing expectations, we think they didn’t live up to those expectations.
So, in analyzing any social situation you have to understand moral psychology. Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams.
So, some situations will sort of ramp up that tribal us-versus-them mentality. Nothing gets us together like a foreign attack. And we’ve seen that, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor. And, conversely, when there are moral divisions within the group, and no external attack, the tribalism can ramp up, and reach really pathological proportions. And that’s where we are now.
They speak of how the civil rights acts push the south over to the republicans. And he and Moyers make some interesting points but I think they did not spend enough time on this main point.
JONATHAN HAIDT: So there are three major historical facts, or changes, that have gotten us into the mess that we’re in. So the first is the realignment of the South into the Republican column, which allowed both parties now to be pure. So that now there are basically no liberal Republicans matching up with conservative Democrats. So, the parties are totally separated. The second thing that happened was the replacement of the Greatest Generation by the Baby Boomers.
BILL MOYERS: The Greatest Generation fought World War II. Came home. Built the country, ran the economy. People’s politics, and, created this consensual government your talking–
JONATHAN HAIDT: Exactly. These are people who joined groups, had a sense of civic responsibility, participated in the democratic process. And so these people, as they moved through. I mean, they could disagree. Politics has always been contentious. But at the end of the day, they felt they were part of the same country, and in the Senate and the House, they were part of the same institution. They’re replaced by the Baby Boomers. And what’s their foundational experience?
It’s not responding together to a foreign threat. It’s fighting each other over whether this country is doing evil, or good. So you get the good/evil dichotomy about America, and about each other happening in the ’60s, and ’70s, when these people grow up, assume political office. Now, you got Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. It’s a lot harder for them to agree than it was for Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan.
BILL MOYERS: So we get through the culture wars. Fights over abortion, prayer in schools. And that conflict becomes very polarizing.
JONATHAN HAIDT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: And that’s because of the Baby Boomers, and-
JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, the Baby Boomers, I think, are more prone to Manichean thinking.
BILL MOYERS: Manichean thinking. Good and evil.
I believe that this one issue has as much to do with our culture these days ans it’s politics as anything else. Maybe more so. The righteous ideology that has been appearing now bares a striking resemblance to the ideological riffs between the baby boomers and their parents and parents generation and even between the baby boomers themselves.
My father never got around to talking about his experiences during the depression and WWII. Most of what I learned has been from my mother. I do not believe there has been a generation since that has gone through the same kinds of situations as those who fought in WWII or even those who remained state side and worked in the industries that supported it. I don’t mean to imply better or worse, just vastly different. That those who were fighting in Europe and Africa and the Pacific, though they may have hated the enemy – a lot of them also gained great respect for them as well.
And more so for their comrades in arms. You may or may not know or even agree with his or her’s personal politics and social, religious and other beliefs – they were your comrades and you learned to respect them. This carried over after the war. It’s is very difficult to have extreme views of those whom one has fought, worked and seem killed. I believe that it was a mistake that this need to respect and need to be able to view those who you disagree with was not passed on the way it should have been. And more so as to the reasons we need to be able to to this. That more people who were involved with WWII should have expressed better what it was really like. Instead what we got was some Hollywood romanticized version that was at best counter productive.
It was believed that WWII was a righteous and just war and though there was anti-was sentiment at the time, it was small and mild.
This was not the case with Vietnam however. The anti-war sentiment among those of my generation – baby boomers was very strong. Although mostly remembered as being directed toward those of my parent’s generation who supported it, what is rarely reported these days is how strong it was within the baby boomers who apposed it toward those who supported it. I would say with out fear of contradiction, even stronger as they were seen as evil war mongers, killers and traitors to their generation. And this feeling went both ways, with the supporters viewing the protestors as equally vile.
And the Kent State shootings helped to cement this view on both sides. Along the same lines there was a large number who were also beginning to question our form of government and economic system as well. And were seen by those who unquestioningly supported it as being traitors and anti-American and worse. These feelings that each side had toward one another did not magically disappear after the war concluded and the troops came home. And having not been really dealt with, have been passed on and have festered.
So the seeds of disdain amongst certain sectors of the the baby boomer generation were already sowed on both sides.
And as Jonathon Haidt point out later on in this segment, our culture has been self segregating since after WWII.
JONATHAN HAIDT: The third is that America has gone from being a nation with localities that were diverse by class, in particular, let’s say. You had rich people, and poor people living together.
It’s become, in the post-war world, gradually a nation of lifestyle enclaves, where people chose to self-segregate. If people are concentrating just with people who are like them, then they’re not exposed to the ideas from the other side, from people that they can actually like and respect. If you get all your ideas about the other side from the internet, where there’s no human connection, it’s just so easy, and automatic to reject it, and demonize it. So once we’ve sorted ourselves into homogeneous moral communities, it becomes a lot harder to work together.
Thus making it easier to justify our views of each side. Especially when we already have a negative view of them. And to justify our own beliefs as well.
This kind of thinking – this demonization of each other – has lead in the past to some of the bloodiest conflicts in history. At least one of which has occurred here on this continent.
44 Comments
Great diary. Highly recc’d.
Now, extend that black/white manichean tendency of the boomer era to today’s political internets, where not only do we have no external foes, there isn’t any externality at all, and we have, viola, the most polarised electorate in herstory.
Yes, racially polarised too, behind our gated communities both in RL and online….
As well as an exhorbitant, very costly amount of inactivism.
PS. Thanks to everyone who commented on my diary the other day. I decided not to participate in the thread for two reasons:
1. I said what I felt I needed to say in the diary and stand firmly by it, no need to pour the gasohol of repetitiveness on a magnificent conflagration.
2. Not enough free time to comment and respond to the best of my ability to all the comments anyway. Some I had no handy answer for.
But appreciated them all, especially the wicked counter-attacks!
Thanks DT. Glad you brought up the internet which has exacerbated the situation considerably.
Interesting. Good food for thought. Recc’d.
I’ve always found it ironic that the generation that literally saved the planet from the triumph of totalitarianism through a whole lot of self-sacrifice did their damndest to make sure their kids would never have to go through what they did, and the end result was tens of millions of selfish spoiled brats who often horrified their parents.
The Greatest Generation had good intentions. You know what road those pave.
LOL…Oh you betcha.
Haidt is most likely a neocon. Neocons denigrate the peace movement and the New Left for being too radical, over-reacting to the militarism and and capitalism, too much sexual liberation, too libertine, too drug-oriented, too anti-cultural. But neocons don’t seek to reconcile with this left, they seek to exploit their weaknesses.
And so you get a disingenuous argument that the left was a cause of social fragmentation when social fragmentation is a tool conservatives exacerbate to their own advantage.
Haidt also believes in the necessity of tribes and in hierarchy. He believes America must maintain its superpower status to maintain international “order”. In this ideology, the left is naive in its international expectations and is thus a threat. According to Haidt’s studies, the morality of liberals places greater emphasis on fairness and harm minimization than cons and cons place more on respect for authority, group loyalty, and “sanctity”. I have not investigated the metric Haidt used but he claims cons average the same weight on all five attributes. He presents this as balanced and the liberal averages as imbalanced. With this representation he justifies moral system more attuned to tribalism.
This claim of balance is likely constructed by the survey; even then the preference for balance is a value judgment on Haidt’s part. However, it must be admitted that different moral frameworks are suited to different times. And one can see that, with the collapse of capitalism’s golden age, the liberal framework is not tenable. Perhaps Haidt’s preference is only a pragmatic judgment for our regressing times. Or it may be something else.
Haidt’s analysis of cultural fracturing is fraught with incoherence. The division between Republicans and Democrats, among politicians and the electorate, are now exacerbated with “peripheral” issues. The divisions between classes, however, are substantial and escape Haidt’s conservative/liberal segmentation.
Haidt’s attribution of Manichean thinking to Boomers is dubious both in fact and as a cause for division among them. If one were to say they only held the same value hierarchy as their parents but more vehemently, one would immediately be struck that the times were as considerable a cause as their characters. It appears as if Haidt is actually devious in this point as enforced a tribal cohesion and the economic harvest of WWII cultivated diversity.
It seems this rather a coded criticism of the left by Haidt, as the extremism in the left is cited as the justification for the hard right turn of America. As noted above, this is blame is characteristic of neoconservatism.
Haidt’s balkanization by class and ideology, however, is realistic but is also a product of golden age capitalism. Haidt remarkably fails to make this connection which would lead to two insightful questions: Did this era produce it’s own destruction and can capitalism go on indefinitely? The address of those questions would lead to entirely different suspects as to America’s downfall.
And so it is wise to be suspicious of Haidt’s research, both on its own terms and it’s political use by Haidt.
For a final thought, consider that international wars are useful to class suppression in the battling nations. Likewise, cultural warfare is useful for class suppression in the battling cultures.
And fuck Johnathan Haidt.
That is all.
I was there Ludwig. Believe me, it was both sides.
I do not agree with his contention on capitalism or competition at all though. And can name numerous times where neither came into play with the advances and achievements of the late 19th and the 20th century. (There will be no such advances from here on though)
But that was not the point of the post or I would have embedded the segment.
Ah, O’Donkeytale’s ass-backwards world, where real political polarization is due to no external threat in virtual domain. Meanwhile a virtual international threat in reality is used for fascistic coherence and farcistic political polarization distracts.
Yeah. O’Donkeytale analysis is for the flies.
But another interesting phenomenon began to manifest itself. I first began to observe it in the early 1980s. Where members of my generation who had marched and protested just as strongly as the rest of us but had chosen for what ever reason to not continue on in higher education, but to go into the trades and blue collar areas began to split ideologically from those who did pursue it.
And became very negative toward those who kept on and developed a loathing attitude toward academia and the intelligentsia. Possibly because the attitudes of those in higher education became condescending and snotty towards those who chose the the trades instead.
What was both sides? Is there something specific you are addressing in my comment?
You are of course entitled to you opinion, however wrong it might be.
Exactly, comrade. You can’t avoid the economic analysis.
Sorry forgot to quote.
You see. Your comments so far have proven my diary. You are right and everyone else – especially the right – is wrong. So you summarily dismiss them.
How does this make you different from the right wing. It most certainly does not make you superior in any way.
You can make a stupid objective come true if you try hard enough.
The suggestion that you need an “externality” and it’s threat to cohere is authoritarian. The idea that the lack of “externality” in the internet is a primary cause of manipulated political polarization is a lie.
C’mon, have some balls.
I clicked into the video because I thought it must have been a rerun; it was from Feb., and possibly Moyers’ season opener. Ubetchaiam had brought some discussion around it.
I will say I loathed Chait, and was shocked Moyers bought into his dreck so unquestioningly.
It’s odd though, that you liked it, C. Your contentions that all Tea Partiers are racist (no nuance in *that* term), and that (if I’m wrong, do correct me) all Southerners are racists…seem to prove his point, no?
Boy, howdy, am I glad that people can’t be put into the neat little boxes he puts them in, then nails the lid down tonight. Guy needs to add roughage to his diet, imo.
Ah. Well, I agree with you that the left did not cause this problem, then. And so you agree with me that the neocon attribution of blame to the left is incorrect.
Hmm.
It appears you want to attribute a lack of character to Boomers, relative to their predecessors, as cause for societal fragmentation. I’d have to say I don’t think the Greatest Generation did too well for Vietnam, comrade. Conformity can be a crime if you don’t have a Reich to squash. As to Boomers, I think it’s safe to say they were not a match for their times; then again, who has been?
There were activists of the left who were very concerned with the cultural protest of the new left. You must realize, though, that capitalists sold that very same protest to all segments of society – so it’s disingenous to blame the new left for the spread of libertinism.
No. That bullshit is just Haidt’s sophistic trap.
Fuck that, dear hypocrite (thanks Wendy).
Interesting that both you and Ludwig go after the person and say little about the message.
Fuck the message kill the messenger.
I never said I liked the guy but I found his take interesting and it reminded me of those days where I was myself very righteously involved with the “movement”.
But words have consequences and those of my generation used some very vile language towards those we disagreed with and they towards us and we paid little if any attention to where they were coming from. And they paid little attention to where we were coming from. They were wrong and we were right, so screw them was the order of the day.
Now that karma is coming back to bite each one in the ass. And karma can be a real bitch sometimes.
Well that’s just wrong, comrade. And it seems with Haidt’s help you’ve moved on to a superior grade of righteousness.
So boink you too, comrade (hope that’ll pass the censor).
Hey, let’s do this again.
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
That’s a paragraph from a declassified and now widely available 1948 top-secret report (PPS 23) written by George Kennan, head of the State Dept. Policy Planning Staff after World War II. You know. One of the generation of fine folks who a few years later were bankrolling half of the cost of the French imperialist war against the Viet Minh by the time of the fall of Dien Bien Phu; the sweethearts who who by ’62 were orchestrating the US Air Force bombing of major civilian population centers in South Vietnam; the upstanding gentlemen who went on to author a National Security Doctrine that transformed Latin American military institutions into counterinsurgency death squads tasked with butchering their own people for opposing US “interests”.
Greatest generation my ass.
No, Mr. Haidt. Curtis LeMay and Daniel Berrigan were never two sides of the same coin. And neither were Timothy McVeigh and Rachel Corrie.
So you will condemn an entire generation because Curtis LeMay was a jack ass. (Which he was. He was constantly itching to do nuclear Armageddon on the Soviets)
This kind of thinking tends to lead to ether Stalin or Hitler.
But likely we would have not been in Vietnam had Kennedy remained in office. He was to order the troops home.
On the other hand we would not likely have had the civil rights acts ether as Kennedy was much more of a politician and democratic party supporter and was more concerned about loosing the south and any minority votes.
In which case we may have had the beginning of a race war. Hard to say.
Comrade, I take it you are too decrepit for MMA.
Goodness; I had assumed that ‘loathing Haidt’ implied ‘his message’. I will admit that his visage and expressions bothered me, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother range of non-verbal communication I won’t get into.
But I will paste in this exchange that exactly exemplifies what I detested in his ‘message’, and that Moyers so blithely seemed to tacitly agree with. I do remember yelling at the teevee, and finally turning the sod off. I’ve taken out Bill’s comments, questions that weren’t germaine to the dialogue in order to lessen the space it will take up.
“JONATHAN HAIDT: So what I’m hoping my book will do is kind of give people almost a decoding manual so they can look at anything from the other side and instead of saying, ‘See, this shows how evil they are,’ you say, ‘Oh, okay, I see why they’re saying that.’ All right, so, let’s take, ‘Stop punishing success, stop rewarding failure.’
BILL MOYERS: I remember seeing that at one of the early Tea Party rallies.
JONATHAN HAIDT: So that’s one version of fairness. Fairness adds proportionality.
JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, if people work hard, they should succeed. If people don’t work hard, they should fail. And if anyone bails them out, that is evil. You should not bail people out who have failed, especially if it’s because of lack of hard work, something like that. So as the right sees it, government is evil because it keeps punishing success, with redistributive policies, okay, take from the successful and give to the unsuccessful.
And it keeps rewarding failure by giving out welfare and other payments to people who aren’t working. So what I’ve found is that fairness is at the heart of both Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. But because the words have different meanings and they relate to additional moral foundations, that’s why they’re really, very, very different moral views.
There was a lot of empathy and caring at Occupy Wall Street. So this sign, “I can’t hurt another without hurting myself.” This is part of the ethos on the left, this is why you get a lot of Buddhists and sort of the Christian left.
It’s a lot of emphasis on care and compassion. When they talk about fairness, it’s in particular, fairness, that will benefit the weak and the poor. So, here’s a sign, “Marching for the meek and weary, hungry and homeless.” “Tax the wealthy, fair and square,” as though because they’re hungry and homeless people, it’s fair to take from them and give to them. Now, I think there are really good arguments for why we need to increase tax rates on the top. But simply saying, ‘Some have and some have not, therefore it’s fair,’ that’s not a moral argument for most Americans.
BILL MOYERS: And what’s the conservative moral position on this?
JONATHAN HAIDT: The conservative moral position is the Protestant work ethic. It’s karma.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean by that?
JONATHAN HAIDT: So karma, karma’s a Sanskrit word, for, literally for work, or fruit. That is, if you do some work, you should get the fruit of it. If I help you, I will eventually get the fruit of it. Even if you don’t help me, something will happen. It’s just a law of the universe. So, Hindus traditionally believed it’s, that the universe will balance itself, right itself. It’s like gravity. If I am lazy, good-for-nothing lying scoundrel, the universe will right that and I will suffer. But then along comes liberal do-gooders and the federal government to bail them out.
So I think the conservative view, for social conservatives this is, is that basically liberals are trying to revoke the law of karma. Almost as though, imagine somebody trying to revoke the law of gravity, and everything’s going to float away into chaos.”
He clearly states his views about ‘failures’ not working hard enough; please don’t make me wax on about how Randian that is. And the idiocy of ‘karma meaning work’ and ‘Libruls trying to revoke the laws of karma’…Oh, my stars. To change the meaning of karma, which is
’cause and effect’, any thought, deed, action, etc. turned blithely into ‘work product’ or something is just plain hideous and ignorant.
His defenders might say he was just giving both sides equal due, but clearly he believes…what he asserted. Meh!
Ludwig will be tickled to know that when I bipped around the web this morning for more info/opinion on him, some neocons have embraced him, rather in the way of ‘he was a librul, actually read some conservative thought, and now he’s kewl!’
It may be that one of your major themes is also the divisions that were created by the Civil Rights Act, and perhaps you focused on that angle rather than the rest, I dunno.
But his juvenile misunderstanding that karma entails alleged causes (thus effects) not only in *past lives*, but *future lives* and incarnations, showed me that he ballasts his presentation here. “Failure should not be rewarded.” And…the poor…are failures. He doesn’t seem to apply his own standard to the banks and corporations that failed and wanted to be bailed out. Nope, just ‘those failures down the food chain’ who didn’t work hard enough.
Moyers seriously whiffed with this guest. But then he still thinks OBomba’s a good guy beset by obstructionist Republicans, so…
Well that is not what I got from the segment. Though I disagree with his views, I still think that the broader point that is made is that when you start demonizing a group of people it’s a slippery slope to being able to justify their elimination by any means.
And this goes no matter what your personal ideology is.
However I do believe that this country has gone past the point of no return on this. That there is really no way we will be able to avoid some kind of violent conflict. There is just too much that has been said and done on both sides that can be undone.
So I would begin practicing my target skills if I were you.
In the absence of externality, Ludwig the consummate internet jerk-off seeks to conquer his internal doppelganger in a fit of imaginary -excitement- incitement.
I said that jerking off on the internet such as that in which we partake, where your hysterical pursuit of a meaningless self legitimacy through arguments about…nothing….amply illustrates my point, as usual, that this is inherently an internal process.
What is funniest to me is that I don’t even see the point to engage your circular self-pleasuring, as I am external to it. Thankfully, I am spared the need for a towel to wipe up after you’re done.
You do state some very basic truths for whatever good that does and for some reason you feel the need to restate
over and over ad nauseum by engaging in falsely framed arguments with imaginary (or internal, if you will) foes.
Meanwhile seeking the comfort of in the illusion of seemingly likeminded firedogs.
The real O’donkeytale agrees with your critique of capitalism, FWIW. In the absence of an external (material) basis for enjoining your rather average perception in a real way, which is the problem with ultraleftism historically (and in spades in this the infoboobtube era), you don’t excite me. You do however, incite me. To LMAO.
Sorry, I don’t buy this. The Greatest Generation would have freaked out just as hard if a black guy got elected President.
But that is not the point. The point is that this has been going on for a very long time. That the hate and contempt the right has for the left especially can trace it’s roots back a long time.
Obama is simply the ultimate symbol to them. Voted in by the left, whom they already despised.
Their GWB as it were. The denigration the left threw at republicans from Nixon onward is not that much different than what is being tossed at Obama now, it has however intensified significantly from both sides.
We are right and they are wrong Fuck them, is now the common diatribe hurled by both sides.
Yes, hatred loves to dehumanize the perceived enemy. Yes, demonization is dangerous. But in the process of reconciling his own cognitive dissonance and self-perception, Haidt plays into the demonization, as do you with your blanket accusations against Southern conservatives, or is it Southerners in general; I confess I forget. But at least you’ve been honest about your total misanthropy on the boards, so…there is that (50 shades of misanthropy, mebbe). ;o)
I don’t even know which ‘sides’ will be in violent conflict? Race wars? Blue v. red? All that stuff, imo, is furthered by a media that loves to help capitalists out by dividing us over such stuff. I really think that the Gen X and Y folks just don’t share the same old bigotries over race and LGBT issues that their parents did.
I wrote another diary somewhat akin to this one, and I can’t remember the title to find it in the cache, so I dunno if you commented on it, but… On this one, I was mightly pleased to see this community so willing to forge common bonds with a segment or segments of ‘the right’ toward a common purpose.
As far as the term ‘racism’ goes, I think too often we flip it off without considerations as to the etiology, the ignorance factor, casual or overt institutional racism begetting reflexive, unexamined bias, etc. I tend to believe that most of us have biases that we carry, and need to examine and work against. Sometimes (as in my own case) one single traumatic experience with a person of noticeably different culture or race can trigger fears, that if left unhealed can lead to problems and…more irrational fear.
Anyway, your binary thinking on this (like Haidts) I do not subscribe to; no party is monolithic, no geographical area is. Red/blue states is very troubling a meme now. Just think that were it not for the electoral college, Gerrymandered districts, etc., how different electoral politics might look.
I just call en as I see em. Now back to playing.
Oops. The comrade appealed to an authority without realizing what an asshole he was.
And the neocons are against you whether you’re against them or not.
And some of your generation were possessed of a righteous courage and were undeterred by threats of murderers.
Yeah.
Let’s here of the ones you told to fuck off and how you were wrong to tell them so, comrade.
Hey. That was hysterical, O’Donkeytale. You know where to come to get your buttons pushed, honey.
Well…me,too, C. Isn’t that a good part of what we’re allegedly doing here? Selling ideas, commenting on events, philosophies, economic models, and other good stuff? And allowing counter-arguments as well as agreements, or even making distinctions to the offerings?
Well, one site who loved Haidt was seriously called ‘neoconeocon’, which made my crap eyes cross until I deciphered the words….
But I’m sure that with Moyers bringing him, and his previous reputation before his rather long hiatus…many liberals might have liked him, too. Lotta sites picked it up, and I sure didn’t click into all of em.
For me, he typifies what can be seductive until ya listen again, or read again. And I kinda remember ubetchaiam being kinda offended that I thought he was such a tool straight off.
I mean: Moyers had the best interview I’ve *ever* seen…with Barry Lopez. Knocked my bleedin’ socks off; dig it out one day when ya have time.
I especially liked the point about confirmation bias. Which is why I tend to be rather suspicious of most “scientific” studies. Unless they are double blind studies and there is some way of confirming that no one involved has some personal agenda.
Like one statistician said “Numbers a great. Torture them enough and they will tell you anything.”
And the point about believing one’s own bullshit. Tell long enough and loud enough, you begin to believe it yourself.
HAROLD: One, you’re a wonderful kid. I thought so from the first. That’s why I wanted you in the band, just so you’d quit mopin’ around feeling sorry for yourself.
WINTHROP: (Sarcastically) What band?
HAROLD: …I always think there’s a band kid.
You just diggin youself deeper, comrade. Next think you know, you’ll be quotin Maggie Thatcher.
Ghandi and MLK accomplished much w/o machine guns. Simplicity reframed the obvious.
Get with the donkeysass program and place your faith in his quest to demonize the REAL racists — the progressives calling so stridently for social justice.
Under vastly different circumstances though.
Nice post Cmaukonen, Rec’d
I have framing issues with Haidts’s use of a morality that is so easily brought into psychology, without an intermediate step of philosophic translation; but will abstain from nitpick.
Haidts understands that something he calls “moral sense” evolved into teams, but he misses a important key which would help to solve our problems: that we need not use our base survival instinct to destructively compete at all, if we understood fully that morally we’re all on the same team, the rules of acquisition could change. By missing this, his neoliberal agenda is exposed and is of marginal value.
The first homo sapiens, I believe, thought in terms of mutual assistance in surviving the environmental threats to their existence, before the tribe to tribe competition began. Yet this initially warrantable tribal competition for hunting ground, has grown into whats now an unrelenting competition between ourselves for any discernible resource which can be enumerated into immoral profit.
Platinum miners are mere externalities to be expensed by this moral incognizance. This immoral emergent enemy is therefor limitless neoliberal profitability. That its OK to perpetuate our initial instinctively to demonize each other in order to profit by death, has always been our SNAFU.
To be continued by a diary.
I cannot buy the statements which precede and follow the one biggie that babyboomers are Manichean and the Greatest Generation was – that. (I am prewar and my sister post, so I know whereof I speak – if anything, I’m more the ‘good vs. evil’ type and my sister is more ‘live and let live.’) And incidentally, many opposing Vietnam weren’t ‘baby boomers’ – they were my generation.
There is very little that has changed for people when it comes to facing and abhorring war. And that statement that those who opposed the war in Vietnam or in Iraq have hated the soldiers is totally bogus. For crying out loud, those poor souls came from our midst, the ranks of the ‘lower class.’ We sing the same songs we sang then about war and its brutality. (‘And the Big Fool said to push on’ ‘And I ain’t a-marching any more’) We know, and the WII vets knew, that the soldiers were cannon fodder. So do the survivors of these current wars.
The truth of your post, cmaukonen, is in the title. It is the ‘contentious culture’ of our time that is radical. And for nonthinking folk, that persuades; for thinkers it does not. The people are the same. The culture is more propaganda from warmongers than it ever was, and that propaganda, I am sorry to say, Mr. Moyers buys into more and more. It isn’t our morality that is evolving; it is the barrage of nonthink we are given to as consumers consume. (Here! Eat this!)
What two sides? The Democrats and the Republicans? They are not sides. They are pretenses, both of them. The argument they have with one another is not an argument but a smokescreen. There is a real argument to be had and we’d better start having that one before it is too late.
cmaukonen, you say: “The denigration the left threw at republicans from Nixon onward is not that much different than what is being tossed at Obama now.” Yes, that is true. But it can’t be categorized as ‘then it was the left, and now it is the right’ because that is simply not true. In both cases it was the same constituency – it was the young! (With a number of oldies like me thrown in.)
There was a watershed from WWII to now that came about as that biggie expanded from however it began (I’m no expert) into a war of necessity. And why are those who fought then called the greatest? A life sacrificed is a life sacrificed – that’s as big as it gets. My father was in that generation, and I love him, but he was a man just like men today. The later wars though, awful as they were and are, are nothing like that necessity in nature. But people, with all their complexities, are the same and they react in the same way to the truths they perceive. Even though it is harder now to discern them. Every generation is the greatest one, and my grandkids especially, mine and yours!
Manichean? That’s puppetry – as Wendy says, red and blue. And it’s the wrong argument.
Sorry about that split infinitive – ‘given, as consumers, to consume.’