Where conservatives and liberals can work together

in Psychology

I almost tripped over myself this morning as I listened (via the NPR app) to David Brooks talk about the communitarian tradition in the Republican party, during yesterday’s All Things Considered (see transcript). First of all, I didn’t even know that such a tradition exists in the GOP (that’s how smart I am). And second of all (second of all?) when we started this site last year, we hoped that we could attract contributors from both the so-called left and right. Being a conservative liberal myself, I hoped that here in this space we could bring together people who cared about their neighborhoods, and who wanted to do some good where they live, regardless of the color of their beliefs. It’s encouraging to know that maybe that dream might have some basis in fact.

Mr Brooks noted that the moderates in the party have so far been unable to put their communitarian and Hamiltonian ideas together coherently. We hope we can help.

NORRIS: Well, let me turn to our sunny conservative that’s here in the studio. David, are we at a point where we see precious few examples of politicians who move ahead and make gains because they happen to be moderates?

Mr. BROOKS: Yeah, I wish I had that megawatt smile. It’s more like 50 watts. But, you know…

Mr. DIONNE: It’s better than that, David.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BROOKS: Thank you. I have a friend who’s a Republican, a moderate member of Congress and he wanted to propose what he was going to call a moderate agenda and he wanted people to sign on so there could be Republican moderates. He found out that for his colleagues in the House, you can’t use the word moderate. So he called it a suburban agenda because the word moderate is no good.

And so, it’s just a bad word. And it’s a bad word for a whole bunch of reasons having to do with redistricting where the money is in the party, where the energy. But to me, fundamentally, it’s a problem of intellect. The centrists in this country, both in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, just have not put together the sort of coherent body of ideas, the left to the right.

There are two great moderate traditions in the party, a communitarian tradition which believes in community and social groups and then a sort of a Hamiltonian group of limited government to enhance social mobility. Those ideas haven’t been put together coherently. And as a result, the people on either end are just dominating.

Also on Our Blocks: Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

in Psychology

Community builders have to bridge all sorts of divides – of race, religion, money, politics, philosophy. In this TED talk, psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives an overview of how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and understanding of those whose morals don’t match ours, but who are equally good and moral people on their own terms. Excerpts:

Let’s start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines, that you find across cultures and even across species? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

The first one is harm-care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The second foundation is fairness-reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. We heard about this from Karen Armstrong as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The third foundation is in-group loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups — but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them because it’s fun. Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

The fourth foundation is authority-respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species — but authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.

The fifth foundation is purity-sanctity. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch or put into your body.

I believe these are the five best candidates for what’s written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with at least, a preparedness to learn all of these things.

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