Robin Hanson links to another gated academic publication, all the more frustrating due to its eye-catching title: “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent.” In a study conducted by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, it is asserted that the more intelligent are better able to grasp the counter-intuitive appeal of both an expanding role for sympathy for non-kin and a universe without an intentional agent – God – at the helm. Evolutionarily novel ideas like atheism are more difficult to grasp, and thus positively correlated with higher intelligence (unless you’re merely signaling, something the study mentions). This explanation is itself fairly intuitive, to me at least, making me wonder if someone more intelligent than myself might run circles around my inferior intelligence with an explanation that either coincidentally coincides with the claims of those stupider than myself, or is entirely novel.
Some argue that liberals seem unable to grasp the lack of agency in economic matters, i.e. that they are believers in “economic creationism.” But economist Stephen Miller, writing in Critical Review (sorry, also gated, but ask me if you’d like it), shows that conservatives are more free-market oriented only relative to liberals. With data drawn from the GSS over nearly a 20 year period, a majority of conservatives agreed positively with the idea of government subsidies for job creation (including “jobs programs”); the notion that business managers care not for what workers want or need (so much for incentives); and that government should control electricity prices, among other things. I believe it was Edward Glaeser who claimed that opposition to the welfare state among conservatives was rooted in a sense of the state’s opposition (crowding out) of religious institutions. Being for a free market is bound up in being anti-state in the American political discussion, and thus being pro-religion is a happenstance compliment to being pro-market. It doesn’t come from conservatives being uniquely resistant to economic creationism, as the survey data suggests.
It’s understandable that economic creationism would stem from a similar mental space as creationism proper, but that for (more intelligent?) liberals the idea of substituting a body of regulators for God is fallacious because God is supposedly omnipresent and omnipotent, whereas regulators can glean from a body of social science the proper path to piecemeal engineering ala Karl Popper. So no, economic creationism is not on par with the creationism, even if the impulse to believe in either is erroneous.
Hanson notes that the study shows increased intelligence correlated with both atheism and male sexual exclusivity. But the Inductivist gives survey evidence to the contrary, showing religious skeptics to be less faithful. Any dishonesty on the part of survey respondents presumably holds across both the study and the survey. If either group of researchers were to employ the use of lie detectors it’d be Kanazawa’s, but that didn’t happen.
Addendum: I’m editing an audio interview I did with Slavisa Tasic, contributor to the newest issue of Critical Review entitled “The Age of Uncertainty,” which I hope to have online soon. See the link for a description of his article.
February 27, 2010 at 5:03 pm
He has a copy up on his website:
http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/SPQ2010OnlineFirst.pdf
February 27, 2010 at 8:51 pm
thanks!
February 27, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Here’sa good counter argument.
“Analyzing the data collected by Haidt, et al., and the amazing consistency he sees across various cultures in this regard, we recognize a number of critical points. First, we see that an individual’s political ideology is directly related to their definition of morality. Meanwhile, a moral mind which values only two of the five intuitive moral foundations has a strong affinity for the liberal notions of “social justice” and “fairness” as expressed in the collectivist ideologies of Marxism and socialism. Furthermore, a moral mind which values all five intuitive ethics in a holistic, comprehensive way is drawn to the conservative tenets of classical liberalism, as expressed in republicanism, individual liberty, right to property and capitalism, for instance.”
February 27, 2010 at 5:58 pm
“Evolutionarily novel ideas like atheism”
I don’t know, I’d like to seem some evidence that atheism is an evolutionarily novel idea. I think what is novel about our own era is not that there are atheists, but that our society prizes them over religious people. Atheists we have always had with us.
I’m speaking here of real atheism of course. Much of modern liberalism is highly religious in nature. It calls itself “atheist” only because of its rejection of Christianity.
February 27, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Yea, if atheism is simply the label one attaches to oneself after rejecting mainstream religion, especially if merely “non-religious” was not an option in the study, then this doesn’t mean they are especially convinced that there is no intentional agent directing the universe. The link between self identified atheism and high IQ would still hold, but it would mean that the “evolutionarily-novel-as-more-intelligent” belt has lost a notch.
An outlandish conspiracy theory in practice may be even more irrational than the idea of a God, even if the former is inherently more rational, being based in worldly actors and all.
February 27, 2010 at 6:09 pm
>”I believe it was Edward Glaeser who claimed that opposition to the welfare state among conservatives was rooted in a sense of the state’s opposition (crowding out) of religious institutions”
There’s a brilliant observation! The entire conservative critique of socialism is that it crowds out those intermediate voluntary associations which make true freedom possible. The destruction of those associations, cheered on for the most part by libertarians, is the reason why governments reach grows broader year after year. Socialism and libertarianism are not opposites, they complement one another.
Trying to fight socialism with libertarianism is like spraying gasoline on a fire.
February 27, 2010 at 7:00 pm
> the [welfare] state’s opposition (crowding out)
I think Charles Murray feels the same way. That it crowds out religion and also other stuff.
February 27, 2010 at 9:51 pm
What is an atheist? The term is very loosely used. Is an atheist defined as a complete materialist who denies the validity of any metaphysical belief, or just someone who disbelieves in organized religion?
There are plenty of people who don’t go to a church and abjure any conventional religious belief, but who (for example) take astrology seriously enough, at least, to read the columns about it in their daily newspapers. It hardly seems the mark of a person of superior intelligence to forsake the religion of his ancestors only to embrace a superstition without any moral content. The history of the eighteenth century shows that atheism of the scoffing type exemplified by the French encyclopaedists was accompanied by a proliferation of magical beliefs and the emergence of figures like Cagliostro and Mesmer. Chesterton is supposed to have said that when people cease to believe in God, they don’t therefore believe in nothing – they believe in anything. We might well add that historians will then label the result “Enlightenment.”
I suspect that behind most professions of atheism today lies nothing more profound than the rejection of Judaeo-Christian sexual morality. People have committed fornication, adultery, buggery, and abortion since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, but only since the time of that prominent representative of the Enlightenment, the marquis de Sade, have they sought to justify such behaviors philosophically. Sade was a bit too advanced for many of his contemporaries, and so ended his days in the looney bin; but since the nineteen-sixties his views have become increasingly that of the Western intelligentsia. Of course they congratulate themselves an that account – how could they not?
February 28, 2010 at 3:54 am
i have serious qualms about the ontological validity of anything that claims to correlate ideology with other qualities. there is no objective place for the researcher to stand. if atheism is being defined as “less religious” than some arbitrary moving point of what value is the judgment? you certainly can’t repeat the exercise in 10 years and claim that more or less people are now atheists. from the perspective of materialism most “secular humanists” are deeply religious. from another they are militant atheists.
February 28, 2010 at 3:34 pm
You are quite correct that “from the persepctive of materialism most ‘secular humanists’ are deeply religious.”
Marxism is an example of a religious outlook masquerading as militantly atheistic. Its central premise, ‘dialectical materialism,’ is a highly metaphysical notion derived from Hegel’s concept of the historical dialectic. Hegel in turn derived much of his philosophy, as Glenn A. Magee has shown in his book “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition,” from sources such as Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and Theophrastus Paracelsus, who in turn trace their intellectual ancestry back to the Gnostics of late classical antiquity. Magee seems to have arrived at this conclusion quite independently of Eric Voegelin, who identified Marxism and other utopian political philosophies as modern varieties of Gnosticism.
That Marxism is religious rather than scientific in its nature is shown by the reaction of its Western votaries to the collapse of Soviet communism and its practical abandonment as an economic policy by the Chinese. One might suppose these events to be convincing empirical demonstrations of Marxism’s failure. Nonetheless, they persist in their belief, which can consequently only be described as a faith.
Many self-proclaimed liberals and atheists exhibit a profound intellectual and moral vanity. Indeed, these are the only kinds of snobbism that remain respectable in an age of political correctness. Perhaps Hanson and Kanazawa, being academics and hence surrounded by highly credentialled people who substantially adhere to such prejuidices, have made the mistake of taking them seriously.
The left’s intellectual and moral vanity is an old phenomenon. John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir), best known as an author of popular thrillers (“The 39 Steps,” “Greenmantle”) was also a Tory politician. He observes in his autobiography, “Memorty Hold-The-Door,” that though Conservatives may believe themselves better-born, Liberals certainly believe that they are born better.
If leftists were really as astute as they think they are, they’d realize that their frequent displays of intellectual condescension are not a winning political strategy. As George Orwell wrote in “The Road to Wigan Pier”:
“The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.”
This succinctly explains the reason for most of Obama’s recent political travails.
February 28, 2010 at 10:11 pm
I think you’re glossing something over when you say that the atheism of the encyclopedists was “accompanied by” a proliferation of magical beliefs. Does that mean that Diderot and his fellows actually believed in the magic of Cagliostro, or just that some contemporaries of theirs did? Because that is a pretty big distinction. If the latter, then the label atheist still applies; only in the former case does Chesterton’s quip really apply. I’ll admit to not having very deep knowledge of which of the cases is true, but as best I know, people like Holbach and Diderot really were proper materialists. Again, I don’t know, but I imagine they would have mocked astrology and other superstitious garbage just as forcefully as they did Christianity. As a modern example, consider noted atheist PZ Myers’ hostility to “woo” of the type peddled by Deepak Chopra.
March 1, 2010 at 1:53 pm
I’m not sure what Diderot might have believed about astrology. I do know that Voltaire was a freemason, which in 18th-c. France especially might have indicated a sympathy for the mystical hugger-mugger of its hautes-grades systems. Adam Weishaupt similarly professed to be a materialist, but quite tellingly planted his Illuminati within the hothouse of German freemasonry, where alchemical and Templar themes proliferated – all quite in contrast with the simple fraternal British masonry of three degrees.
In a sense it doesn’t matter what individuals believed so much as what was the general current of thought in their time and place. Another illustration may be seen in the history of the late Soviet Union. It was, right up to the end, governed by an officially atheistic policy, under which the public expression of Christian belief was strongly discouraged. Yet there was extensive publication in the Soviet Union of books and pamphlets about UFOs, ESP, paranormal phenomena, and the like. Given that all of these works were produced and distributed through state-owned outlets, they must have had official approval.
Why would an atheistic government with totalitarian powers wish to encourage such superstition? Perhaps because the powers-that-were thought it more advantageous for people to believe in UFOs than in the God of Christianity. The Soviet communists acted in the same way, that is to say, as that exemplar of Aufklarung, Weishaupt, did in packaging his atheistic assault upon throne and altar within the alluring and highly decorative wrappings of masonic mysticism.
Chesterton was of course a Catholic apologist, but players on the opposing team understood the truth of his aphorism just as well as he did. They exploited it, and continue to exploit it, to their advantage.
February 28, 2010 at 11:13 am
“Hanson notes that the study shows increased intelligence correlated with both atheism and male sexual exclusivity. But the Inductivist gives survey evidence to the contrary, showing religious skeptics to be less faithful.”
Intelligence can be positively correlated with male sexual exclusivity and atheism without them necessarily being positively correlated with one another though.
Inductivist has some stuff showing correlation between qualifications and apparently relatively restricted sexual behaviour – http://inductivist.blogspot.com/search/label/Sexual%20Behavior.
February 28, 2010 at 7:32 pm
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
— John Stuart Mill
Some more thoughts on conservatives self-identification with stupidity.
March 1, 2010 at 5:16 pm
If stupid people are to be deemed generally conservative, it would be worthwhile to test that assumption using the following thought-experiments.
First, ask yourself what would happen if everyone with an IQ below, say, 105 were disenfranchised.
Second, ask what would happen if a literacy test were to be required to register to vote, and everyone who flunked didn’t get to register.
Third, ask what would happen if a tax qualification were to be instituted, say, to the effect that single persons who did not show at least an adjusted gross income of $30,000, or married persons who did not show at least a joint AGI of $50,000 on line 37 of their dear old Forms 1040, could not vote. Needless to say, this would be a practical exclusion from the electorate of any person who was the recipient of public assistance.
Then, ask yourself, given electorates of such composition, how would the outcome of any recent election have differed (if at all)?
Possession of an above-average IQ, literacy, and income from gainful employment or investment are all easy practical measures by which a person can at least be deemed not stupid.
One breakdown of votes in the 2008 presidential election may be found at:
http://secularright.org/wordpress/culture/2008-presidential-election-votes-by-income-education
The group with by far the highest percentage of Obama voters was that with incomes under $15,000; followed by that with incomes between $15,000 and $30,000; followed by that with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000. McCain edged out Obama slightly among people with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000, Obama beat McCain slightly in the $75,000 – $100,000 range, while McCain again prevailed among voters in the $100,000 – $150,000 and $150,000 – $200,000 ranges. Obama again prevailed in the $200,000 – up range.
Without further information it is hard to pursue the analysis further, but it seems probable that if the under $50,000 people were excluded, Obama would have been deprived of the most numerous groups of his supporters.
The chart showing voters divided by level of educational credentials possessed shows Obama prevailing in all groups, but by the most significant margin amongst the group that failed to achieve even a high- school diploma. Obama’s margin narrows considerably among those with high-school diplomas, and even more among those with some college and college graduates. It widens again amongst those with postgraduate degrees.
Again, there is the odd result that Obama’s support was stronger on both extremes of the range, but strongest of all at the bottom of it.
How sound the underlying data are is hard to know, since the charts derive from exit polls. Nonetheless, assuming they are roughly accurate, it is easy to see why the left has so long been opposed to any kind of educational or tax qualification for voters. Extension of the franchise to the laziest and stupidest elements of the population yields the left’s most numerous and reliable constituency.
February 28, 2010 at 7:58 pm
>>”I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.”
So even in the 19th century, liberals were saying “everyone knows liberals are more intelligent”. There’s nothing new under the sun.
March 1, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Higher intelligence and good intentions: neither guarantees common sense OR an ability to overcome one’s basic moral instincts (however broken they may be). Advanced intelligence can just as easily be used to rationalize a broken moral framework; when we look at history and recognize the socially suicidal nature of the modern liberal agenda, we see how.
The point of Kanazawa’s foray into irrelevant thesis here would seem to be that self-described “liberals” are better suited to social decision-making because they are more intelligent. While intelligence (especially as defined by the constructivist/Deweyite/collectivist milieu currently directing academe) may be an attractive gauge for superiority on some level in this regard (though Kanazawa doesn’t actually touch on this), it is a risky one.
Governance is not (solely) the realm of intellect, it is the realm of the moral, as applied to society and, specifically, how society sustains itself and seeks liberty, fulfillment and happiness in the aggregate. Sustainability, for its part, relies upon a specific collection of intuitive ethics – societal moral genetics – identified through exhaustive research years ago by psychology researcher Jonathan Haidt and a number of his colleagues (http://tinyurl.com/yem36zx).
That research spanned numerous cultures, all of which exhibited the same basic phenomenon. The significance of this cross-cultural consistency is that (a) what we’re dealing with is not limited simply to Western culture and, therefore, (b) it is a facet of human emotional and psychological development, not necessarily just differences of opinion that drive choices made by ostensibly rational adults. That Kanazawa works in this field, but is apparently unaware of this research by one of his (self-described liberal, atheist) brethren indicates that he’s not interested in the truth but, rather, in supporting a narrative through the creation of a divisive meme.
flenser, the important thing to keep in mind about Mill’s insight is this: his liberalism was *classical* liberalism, not today’s marxism-cum-socialism-cum-progressivism-cum-liberalism. In quoting Mill, mtraven appears to be pursuing a bit of equivocation (reading the linked post, it’s difficult to tell). You wouldn’t see conservatives like Steven den Beste citing Mill as an influence if that were not the case (http://tinyurl.com/y9nngab).
March 2, 2010 at 10:51 am
I linked to your post in comment #2.
Classical liberalism (the liberalism of people in Britain and America in the 18th and 19th centuries) was not a well defined and consistent set of ideas. Many classical liberals disagreed sharply with one another on what we would consider to be fundamental questions. Many took the ideas of their predecessors and developed them in novel ways. For instance, Marx based his thought in large part on the ideas of John Locke – notably, on Locke’s labor theory of value. Marx is properly regarded as being a “classical liberal” also.
All of which is to say, I think that modern liberals can indeed claim to be the intellectual heirs to JS Mill. They may have to engage in some selective reading to do so, but no more so than libertarians do when claiming to be classical liberals.
March 2, 2010 at 11:49 am
Yes, I saw the link (that’s what brought me here to snoop around). Thank you.
March 1, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Kanazawa is not progressive/liberal.
“The best thing to do is to kill all the feminists and hippies and liberals. Destroy political correctness completely once and for all. Teach boys and girls that they are different, not the same, and that it’s okay (nay, wonderful) to be different.”
“I am a fan of Sarah Palin’s. I think she has the right charisma to energize the Republican Party and become the Ronald Reagan of the 21st century. I bet, in a couple of years, we will be hearing a lot about the ‘Palin Democrats.’ I certainly hope that, despite her sudden and mysterious resignation as Governor of Alaska, she will run for and then win the White House in 2012, unless either Ann Coulter or the Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter runs.”
March 1, 2010 at 10:33 pm
Kanazawa is very unreliable. He’s more interested in being provocative than right. My favorite paper from him is probably “Asians can’t think”. His definition of “liberalism” here is not the one most people would think of.
The link between conservatism and community was explored by Nisbet. I wrote a bit about him before (though I haven’t read him), for now I’ll link to Thousand Nations on him. There are some libertarians who are also communitarians, such as Charles Murray.
March 2, 2010 at 12:12 pm
It’s interesting that Kanazawa describes himself as “hard libertarian,” as described in the news article linked to by Hanson (I’m at work now, not enough time left in my break to verify this with total accuracy). Ilya Somin correctly notes that Kanazawa’s description of liberal is broad enough to encompass the vast majority of Americans, especially libertarians. You would think this would seriously undermine the usefulness of his research, and that a self identification like his would make him privy to this.
March 3, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I think Kanazawa just likes being controversial. I don’t know what’s particularly libertarian about him (Ann Coulter doesn’t consider herself to be one), perhaps it’s just that libertarianism is more popular with the elite.
goy: I could comment at your blog, but the post is from a previous year. I didn’t see where Haidt said that one kind of morality was typical of “maturity” or “adolescence”, though Robin Hanson has noted that we get more conservatve as we get older. Furthermore, you associate “classical liberalism” with the holistic morality of conservatives, whereas libertarians are actually even less holistic than liberals (who Haidt lumps them in with). Additionally, conservatives (like most Americans) are not that libertarian.
March 3, 2010 at 10:57 pm
t’ -
Because of his own moral relativism, Haidt works hard to see liberal and conservative notions of morality as equal. He does not identify selective vs. holistic morality as adolescent vs. mature.
It’s a long piece, and easy to miss, but I note this in the post: “…we see that these two viewpoints – liberal and conservative – are clear expressions of moral adolescence and moral maturity, respectively. While Haidt avoids making this observation, this difference is the great insight his work provides.”
I focused on self-described “liberals” and “conservatives”, to the exclusion of libertarians because those are the two groups primarily characterized in Haidt’s work. They are also the two groups primarily driving the American political debate at present. In that context, classical liberalism tracks far more closely with contemporary conservative thought than liberal/progressive.
All that said, I’m curious why you’d judge libertarians as less holistic (in the “Haidtist” sense) than liberals.
March 6, 2010 at 1:04 am
I don’t think Haidt sees them as “equal”.
You are basing your argument heavily on Haidt’s evidence, but Haidt himself doesn’t bring up adolescence vs maturity. You need to present a serious argument (as Haidt does) to support that notion. Nobody who isn’t already a conservative could take your argument seriously as something other than insulting the other side (which ironically enough is a behavior you cite as evidence for the adolescence of the left).
Haidt has explicitly discussed libertarians in his work. They fall under his “liberal” rather than “conservative” category because they reject ingroup-outgroup, purity and authority. “Classical liberals” are basically the same thing. Haidt is not writing about socialism or other such preferred policies but individual morality.
I judge libertarians as less holistic because they are either less moralistic (I, for example, am a Stirnerite egoist who denies there are any objective moral truths) or hold to a far simpler morality (Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable is a radical example of such libertarian moral thinking). Things that would be recognized as a violation of conservative morality (eating the family dog is one of Haidt’s examples) would not bother a libertarian. Furthermore, libertarians are fine with (even vociferously advocate) selling organs, which offends a great many liberals. Philip Tetlock has written about this in papers like “Taboo Trade-Offs” and “Thinking the Unthinkable”. It’s unfortunate that his page divides up papers by years, since there are related ones from 1999-2000 as well.
March 6, 2010 at 10:46 am
t’ -
We ran out of nesting above…
> I don’t think Haidt sees them as “equal”.
He does. And he explicitly states as much not only near the end of the TED video embedded in my article, but also alludes to it in “The Happiness Hypothesis”, where he devotes an entire Chapter (4) to the support of moral relativism, using sections with titles like “The Myth of Pure Evil”. It sounds like this chapter would appeal to you.
> You are basing your argument heavily on Haidt’s evidence, but Haidt himself doesn’t bring up adolescence vs maturity.
Again, I have explicitly stated that the idea of moral maturity vs. adolescence is NOT something Haidt has expressed. I’ve also noted my suspicion regarding WHY he hasn’t addressed this issue: he’s never addressed the question of WHY this dichotomy exists in the first place. But the nature of this difference is something that has become painfully obvious to me. In fact it was the very first thing that jumped out at me the first time I watched Haidt’s TED talk. As well, it’s overwhelmingly supported by Haidt’s research data. It’s also painfully obvious to anyone who seriously examines the inherent fallacy of the contemporary liberal agenda alongside the overwhelming degree to which its root ideology has been discredited by historical fact.
> You need to present a serious argument (as Haidt does) to support that notion.
And I have done so. Twice. Conversely, Haidt presents no argument whatsoever for his assertion that “liberal” and “conservative” sentiments are as equal as Yin and Yang. Not only is that a false analogy, which – at least based on the criteria he’s using – implies that it’s somehow rational to compromise between ignorance and wisdom, but this is also the one area where Haidt’s thinking strays completely from conclusions supportable by his research – into oriental mysticism. It’s my suspicion – and I’ve noted this in my writings linked above – that he’s taken this approach because it’s the self-described LIBERALS he’s out there proselytizing, trying to get them to live up to the diversity they worship by applying it to MORAL as well as other aspects of life. He has to speak in a language and terms that he knows (being one of them) they’ll respond positively to. But again, that’s suspicion based on the fact that he’s quite brilliant, objective and… a psychologist who understands human motivation.
Anyway, the simplest argument is the clearest, but it requires some familiarity with the psychology of human development, e.g., through Erikson’s Stages and Maslow’s Hierarchy. This whole concept requires outside-the-box thinking because most folks don’t possess that familiarity and at least as many lack the combination of objectivity and critical thinking skills required to leverage it in this particular context. The remaining few can readily recognize that the selective morality of self-described “liberals”, as recently characterized by Haidt’s work across multiple cultures, aligns perfectly with the narcissist psyche of the child, which adamantly rejects authority and actually has no clear comprehension of “in-group” or “purity”, much less any moral regard for them.
It’s far easier to rationalize this notion away as partisan-driven “ridicule” of “liberals” than it is to acknowledge its truth and honestly address the question of “why”. And the former is the only context in which “insulting the other side” rings true, despite the fact that it’s not.
Narcissism is perfectly normative, healthy behavior… in children. Where it becomes a problem is when moral maturity lags behind sexual, chronological and, especially, intellectual maturity. When that happens, the product is an adult who engages in transference (e.g., a desire to be cared for by the State, which becomes the substitute for Mommy and/or Daddy) and intellectual rationalization of a fundamentally narcissist moral framework. An entire chapter of Haidt’s “Happiness Hypothesis” is devoted to discussion of neurobiological research demonstrating the manner in which we make moral judgments subconsciously and, later, if and when the need to justify those judgments arises, we rationalize them intellectually. This trait is at the core of our historically demonstrated ability to create societies based on morally bankrupt premises that can only be intellectually rationalized. This trait is also at the core of the behavior exhibited by our President that so many psychology professionals have characterized as narcissist.
Evolution from the selective, narcissist moral framework of the child, to the more holistic, comprehensive moral framework of the socially functional, self-actualizing and independent adult requires a process of maturation. That process requires life experience and/or critical thinking skills combined with vicarious exposure of life’s lessons through, say, a classical education. Thus, the phenomenon is accurately characterized as a difference between adolescent and mature morality.
> Haidt has explicitly discussed libertarians in his work. They fall under his “liberal” rather than “conservative” category because they reject ingroup-outgroup, purity and authority.
Actually, what Haidt has done is the the reverse of what you describe here, which indicates that you may need a deeper familiarity with his work in order to discuss it. The respondents to Haidt’s surveys self-identify as “liberal”, “conservative”, “libertarian”, etc., Haidt does not characterize them based on their responses, as most psych researchers have attempted to do using rhetorical mumbo-jumbo (aka rationalization). In fact, this one aspect of his research is the key to understanding its significance with respect to social policy and the political ideologies that have evolved over time in the context of governance.
Now this of course introduces the standard problem with “self-report”, i.e., how does a person know they’re “conservative”, especially when the term itself can mean different things to different people and in different context. The answer is: they can’t. The question that CAN be accurately answered, however, is what social policies does one support, and it can be strongly argued that respondents to Haidt’s surveys are in fact answering THAT question, not making an arbitrary and possibly erroneous assertion about their personal philosophy.
Anyway, as anyone who’s taken The World’s Smallest Political Quiz knows – we’re actually ALL Libertarians. ;-)
March 6, 2010 at 1:02 pm
The question that CAN be accurately answered, however, is what social policies does one support, and it can be strongly argued that respondents to Haidt’s surveys are in fact answering THAT question, not making an arbitrary and possibly erroneous assertion about their personal philosophy.
Given that the vast, vast majority of people support the welfare state in some form or another, I suppose we are all narcissists now. And to get philosophical for a moment – if we all are, is anybody?
I think support for bad social policies is based more on cognitive error and simple ignorance of social science than it is on moral immaturity. Moral immaturity assumes that people actually know how this whole welfare state apparatus operates and then go on to be immature about it, if being “immature” about the welfare state is possible.
I think moral immaturity makes sense at the interpersonal level, which you also describe, but applying it to the state? Eh, there’s too much noise.
March 6, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Dain, actually I think you’ve hit on what makes the so-called “moderates” – those who self-describe as between “liberal” and “conservative” – the determining factor in social policy, at least to the extent that policy is determined by elections (it isn’t always, obviously).
My experience of moderates is that they’re generally possessed of a good deal of common sense (moral maturity) and compassion, but a glaring and woeful ignorance of the limitations our Constitution places on government. This makes them susceptible to the most convincing-sounding argument, which is all too often an Appeal to Emotion or Appeal to the Majority or Appeal to Authority fallacy, disguised by clever-sounding but, ultimately, meaningless phrases (“social justice”, “universal health care”, “assault weapons”, etc.).
In that sense I think those who describe themselves as such, and who make up whatever support there is for the welfare state, fit your explanation very well – i.e., ignorance of social science or, more specifically, civics.
That said, the hard-core left as a political force absolutely conforms to the characteristics Haidt has observed in his research – that’s the most pronounced phenomenon. They view as “good” the notion of cradle-to-grave support by the State, often oblivious to the fact that this is collectivist, enforced support by the community at large at the point of a gun, not altruism made manifest at the societal level.
The ideology that derives from this view produces social policy that ultimately creates a nation of pathologically dependent subjects who rely on a therapeutic, omnipotent State for their needs. This is essentially the definition of moral adolescence as I’ve come to see it. Call it something else, that’s fine with me. The behavior and the outcome (a non-sustainable society) is the same.
March 6, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Goy,
It’s pretty clear from Haidt’s TED talk and written TED interview that he prefers the left, and wants it to use his insights to defeat the right. He wants rightists to receive the consolation prize of not being hated.
Your own argument for rightism seems weak. You want to discredit it as childish. Maybe it is, but then the left could just counter by saying they are childlike (same denotation, different connotation) — and that tragically some people become cynical and wretched after growing up, like Mr. Scrooge. To some extent this trope is in fact used on the left.
You seem to take it for granted that all five Haidt dimensions of morality must be given their due in order to make a sustainable society, and that the welfare state is unsustainable. From this you can conclude that the left is childish rather than childlike. I think this is false. Had Western nations, including European welfare states, not admitted mass numbers of low-IQ low-Conscientiousness immigrants, they would still be sustainable now, whether or not you or I would consider the resulting society to be ideal. What exactly defines (for you) a sustained society, not sustainable but actually sustained, and what is it that you call an unsustained society? If the USA has to keep its political traditions in order to be considered sustained, I think there is a certain likelihood that it will within 30-100 years become unsustained by becoming a non-democracy or even by secession. I’m not sure an increased emphasis on Authority, Ingroup, and Purity will reduce those odds. It may actually increase the odds, especially if there are multiple ingroups within the country. And/or if the salience ascribed to Authority and/or Purity end up much higher in some subsets (whether they be discrete or clinal subsets) than in others, moreso than is already the case.
March 6, 2010 at 9:05 pm
>>”I think this is false. Had Western nations, including European welfare states, not admitted mass numbers of low-IQ low-Conscientiousness immigrants, they would still be sustainable now, whether or not you or I would consider the resulting society to be ideal.”
The assumption here seems to be that there can exist a left which is also confined to a single people. But opposition to such a thing is hard-coded into the lefts DNA. By definition they are utopian universalists. You are positing a left which can never exist.
You are also assuming that your posited left confined to a single people is sustainable over the long haul. The empirical evidence suggests otherwise, plus there would seem to be considerable theoretical difficulties e.g the tendency of left-wing countries towards suicide via birth-control. This is an instance of the “commons” problem which left-wing states are uniquely vulnerable to.
March 7, 2010 at 12:17 am
Hello T’,
Haidt is a self-described liberal, academic atheist. Basing a guess solely on that (probably unwise), I’m not sure there was ever any question about what he prefers.
That said, from what I’ve been able to find produced by him on this particular topic, his only real involvement in anything politically-related comprises his lectures and papers advising self-described “liberals” to understand and think more like “conservatives”. I’m not sure how to translate that into the motivation you’ve attributed to him and, unfortunately, you don’t provide much to work with there.
The left is not “childish”, and I haven’t argued as much. Rather, a childlike morality is generally associated with a preference for leftist ideologies over others, at least per Haidt’s research. In fact, I’ve argued that the left is able to damage society precisely because they present as fully-realized, comprehensively mature adults.
But that’s all in fact far from the point above. The suggestion was to provide an argument showing how these two moral viewpoints are adolescent and mature, respectively. When one morality can be shown to be aligned psychologically with that of a child and the other with that of an adult, that pretty much completes the argument.
That characterization in itself does not discredit leftist ideology, however. It doesn’t need to. Leftist ideology is historically self-discrediting. But what this characterization does do is provide more of the information needed to address the threat that leftist ideology presents to society. That includes, for instance, how to (a) prevent the left’s generally adolescent morality from adversely affecting public policy (e.g., don’t compromise with their agenda) and (b) find ways to encourage those possessed of an adolescent morality to mature out of it (e.g., reinstate classical education, implement universal civil service of some sort between high school and college, etc.).
March 7, 2010 at 12:09 am
You say your maturity-adolescence axis is “overwhelmingly supported by Haidt’s research data”. Please elaborate on that, because I can’t think of what you are referring to. Liberalism may be fallacious to the core (maybe conservatism is as well, who knows), but that doesn’t suffice to show that adolescence (rather than perhaps sclerotic senility) is the reason.
I have read both of your posts. In the latter you mostly assume rather than argue for it. In the former you say that liberals are like adolescence because they reject authority. On the contrary, I would say that it is only adults that can reject authority and become Ernst Junger’s “anarchs”. Arnold Kling characterizes government employees and union members as highly submissive.
Maybe I haven’t read enough Haidt, but I’m not aware of him appealing to the concepts of “Yin” and “Yang”.
“implies that it’s somehow rational to compromise between ignorance and wisdom”
Haidt doesn’t perceive the issue as one of liberalism vs wisdom, so of course he doesn’t think there should be a compromise between the two.
Children do have concepts of ingroup (Rattler’s Cave is perhaps the most famous example, but it is evident in playgrounds & lunchrooms across America) & purity (“cooties” is an example of outgroup+disgust). I believe Sanazawa is accurate to claim that moral “conservatism” is intuitive, which is why (as Haidt notes) it is typical of most people around the world and most time periods. We are conservatives (and creationists) by nature, but acculturated into liberalism.
You characterize liberals as “narcissistic”. From my perspective, I would prefer if they thought more about themselves and less about others. C. S. Lewis gave the classic explanation, Bryan Caplan gives the modern. Amusingly, in his recent paper which has caused so much controversy Kanazawa DEFINES liberalism as the opposite of narcissism. Needless to say, I disagree with his definition, but I would not define conservatism as non-kin altruism either.
“self-actualizing”
Funny enough, that’s a phrase I’d normally associate with liberals. The ones who believe in “positive freedom” rather than “negative freedom” are particularly focused on it. Glenn Greenwald has mocked the neo-conservatives of today for their dependence on their parents, suggesting that (in contrast to the first generation of neocons) they haven’t fully matured. Others have suggested the real difference between conservatives and liberals is that the former throughout their lives are bound by the unchosen obligations & support of extended family, while the latter as independent adults are bound only by the decisions they choose to take on. Funny enough, you focus here on the problems caused by dependence on state welfare (and I completely agree), but then in your post complain about the devaluation of the elderly (if only!) implicit in healthcare reform! The only way the government can avoid bankruptcy is to cut off the elderly from sucking on the teat of the state, for it is they who are taking up the lion’s share of expenditure.
“The question that CAN be accurately answered, however, is what social policies does one support, and it can be strongly argued that respondents to Haidt’s surveys are in fact answering THAT question, not making an arbitrary and possibly erroneous assertion about their personal philosophy”
From what I recall, Haidt doesn’t ask about preferred social policies. He asks whether people consider themselves liberals or libertarians, and the latter give answers on moral questions more like those of liberals.
“Anyway, as anyone who’s taken The World’s Smallest Political Quiz knows – we’re actually ALL Libertarians”
I’ve heard many people self-report differently after taking it. David Boaz, who erroneously tries to inflate the numbers in my view, only claims that about 15% of the population are “libertarian-leaning”.
“Moderates” are the determining factor for Downsian reasons. In survey after survey they demonstrate that they are more ignorant than liberals or conservatives (who determine their own ideology after taking in some initial information and filtering the rest through that lens). The Audacious Epigone (who considers himself a paleoconserative I believe) has sought empirical data on “common sense” you might be interested in.
The left is not oblivious to the collectivism of welfare. They are often explicit about it as a selling point, denouncing critics as “atomistic individualists”. The radical revolutionary sorts often explicitly call themselves “collectivist”. Hillary Clinton wrote a book titled “It Takes a Village”.
flenser:
“You are positing a left which can never exist.”
Have you never heard of the Progressives?
“the tendency of left-wing countries towards suicide via birth-control”
Sweden & France actually have fairly high birth-rates for Europe. European countries with more traditional gender roles (Japan is also conservative in that respect) have lower birth-rates. Conservatives have been predicting the doom of Sweden for some time, Sailer for one has decided not to keep fooling himself.
March 7, 2010 at 6:37 pm
>”Have you never heard of the Progressives?”
I’ve heard of them. I’m not sure how that question is supposed to be a response to my point about the nature of the left. The Progressives reinforce what I’m saying. They were WASP American liberals dedicated to overturning America as a WASP country. They were not remotely interested in “socialism in one country”.
>”Sweden & France actually have fairly high birth-rates for Europe.”
All countries in the Western world practice the same socialistic birth-inhibiting policies. All of them have sub-replacement birth-rates. The partial exception is the US, which imports poor breeders to do job and is at the break even point.
March 7, 2010 at 12:46 am
t’ -
> Liberalism may be fallacious to the core (maybe conservatism is as well, who knows), but that doesn’t suffice to show that adolescence (rather than perhaps sclerotic senility) is the reason.
Precisely. As explained above, the strong correlation between adolescent morality and a preference for leftist ideology provides an approach to dealing with the social impact of the latter.
> Maybe I haven’t read enough Haidt, but I’m not aware of him appealing to the concepts of “Yin” and “Yang”.
Well, given the inference expressed in that statement (i.e., that I’m either suggesting something that isn’t so, or that I don’t know what I’m talking about) and the general, rather arbitrary and wandering contrariness in what follows, we should probably stop here until you have read more, assuming you’re so inclined. A familiarity with Haidt’s ideas and research is kind of a prerequisite to… discuss his ideas and research, at least in any depth, and it’s simply not feasible to reproduce even a portion of his entire body of work here in these comments. If you’d bothered to view the video embedded in the posts at my site, you would have known that he explicitly refers to this concept at 15:14.
Thank you.
March 7, 2010 at 11:23 pm
flenser:
TGGP is referring to the fact that those old-school progressives were leftist immigration restrictionists, in other words they had the ideology which you suggested couldn’t exist, and which I said could probably create a sustainable leftist welfare state if it were to exist. You might still be able to argue that such an ideology could not exist or dominate the left for long.
‘Strikingly, Morison’s history matter-of-factly treats immigration restriction as an issue highly popular with his own Progressive / labor / populist left-of-center alliance. He writes of the now-sacrosanct Ellis Island years: “One basic cause of the laborer’s standstill [in wages] was unrestricted immigration … Their competition kept wages low and hampered the unions’ attempts to organize…”’
March 9, 2010 at 7:50 pm
>”TGGP is referring to the fact that those old-school progressives were leftist immigration restrictionists”
Can you name me a few specific “old school progressives” who were immigration restrictionists? The question hinges on the matter of who counts as an old school progressive. Cesar Chavez was certainly an immigration restrictionist. And by some definitions he could be called an old-school progressive. But what we’re discussing here is the matter of old-school elite WASP progressivism and whether it ever overlapped in any serious fashion with the anti-immigration cause. If it did, it should not be hard to come up with a list of prominent progressive WASP politicians who championed immigration restriction in the 18th and early 20th centuries.
Show me that list and I’ll cheerfully concede the point.
March 9, 2010 at 8:09 pm
That is, “19th and early 20th”
March 7, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Actually, let me continue that quote from the Sailer piece:
“Since 1964, of course, the history of the long struggle for immigration limitations has been rewritten to fit the new [more diverse] elites’ ethnic preconceptions.”
March 8, 2010 at 1:28 am
“prejudices” rather than “preconceptions”, I’d say.
A big difference since 1964 is that the right has now developed its own utopian univeralism in the form of libertarianism. Where questions of immigration are concerned, this movement sounds remarkably like the do-gooder left – America must open its borders in order to help the worlds poor. Libertarianism is especially popular among “elite ethnics”.
March 8, 2010 at 1:20 am
>”TGGP is referring to the fact that those old-school progressives were leftist immigration restrictionists”
Perhaps it was his intention to make that claim. If so, the link he proffered did not substantiate it. It reads in part:
“To Morison, American liberalism was invented by his ancestors, the descendants of the Puritans. As he made clear in his Oxford History, rudimentary versions of most American progressive movements, including civil rights for blacks, feminism, and the rudiments of the ideology of environmentalism (Thoreau’s Walden), were up and running in the greater Boston area by the 1840s.
In other words, American liberalism was invented by the oldest and most socially respectable hereditary elite in the country’s least ethnically diverse region, and imposed from the top down.”
There’s nothing there which I’d disagree with. Here’s the one mention of immigration:
“He writes of the now-sacrosanct Ellis Island years: “One basic cause of the laborer’s standstill [in wages] was unrestricted immigration … Their competition kept wages low and hampered the unions’ attempts to organize…”
The union movement was not well-represented by the “progressive” movement. And in spite of Sailers’ characterization of Morison’s words, Morison does not include “progressives” in his description. In reality the union movement fared the same under FDR and the “left-of-center alliance” as it had before him. (Not very well)
The immigration-restricting Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was passed by a voice vote in the House and by 78-1 in the Senate. This was a result which cannot be attributed solely, if at all, to the Progressive movement or left-of-center alliance. As remarkable as it seems now, the entire establishment at the time lined up in favor of doing what was best for the country. It’s quite shocking, really, and deserving of serious study by immigration restrictionists.
March 9, 2010 at 6:07 pm
flenser:
“They were WASP American liberals dedicated to overturning America as a WASP country.”
No they were not. I am guessing you didn’t read my link. Here is another from Sailer about a different anti-immigration progressive. Try this one too.
“All countries in the Western world practice the same socialistic birth-inhibiting policies. All of them have sub-replacement birth-rates.”
No, there is variation and many have explicitly pro-natalist policies.
goy:
For one thing, I am questioning whether the different moralities are accurately characterized as “adolescent” vs “mature”. Additionally, even if we assumed they were the correlation between them and “leftist ideology” is muddled by the fact that libertarians adhere to the liberal version of morality. Most “conservatives” don’t have an ideology at all (partially because they are the plurality and most people lack ideology, partially because intellectual conservatism has been explicitly anti-ideology for some time).
I had actually viewed that TED video in the past, I just forgot about him using the Yin-Yang analogy.
Tyrosine:
“in other words they had the ideology which you suggested couldn’t exist”
“It. Just. Does. Not. Happen.”
flenser:
Libertarianism is vulnerable to such a charge (or acclamation, depending on one’s perspective!). I would say neo-conservatism/”national greatness conservatism” is another. Lawrence Auster calls mainstream conservatism “right liberalism”, which is a label Scott Sumner adopts for himself.
“Libertarianism is especially popular among “elite ethnics”.”
Libertarianism is often associated with losers online, “young nerdy white guys”. I think it would be best to check some data.
“In reality the union movement fared the same under FDR and the “left-of-center alliance” as it had before him. (Not very well)”
Union membership jumped greatly under FDR, and union members maintained a significant wage differential for some time. Perhaps from the perspective of many “Wobblies” one can complain about Taft-Hartley bureaucratic unions, but I don’t think anyone here is pushing that. Ironically, one reason we might argue for Progressivism’s distance from the labor movement is its association with the often (but not always) anti-union Ku Klux Klan!
“cannot be attributed solely”
I don’t think anyone is.
March 9, 2010 at 7:42 pm
>”I am guessing you didn’t read my link.”
I read your link. It does not say what you are claiming it says. It does not say that there were no WASP Americal liberals dedicated to overturning America as a WASP country. The opinions of Ken Burns and Otis Graham have no bearing on the question of the attitude of progressive WASPs towards immigration in the 19th century.
Historically speaking, this is an open and shut matter. With the short-lived exception of the “Know Nothing” party, all politics in America assumed that fairly open borders were desirable. The idea that progressive north-east brahmins were once in favor of immigration restriction remains a theory in search of supporting evidence.
>”No, there is variation and many have explicitly pro-natalist policies.”
Then you should have no trouble pointing to those with greater than replacement level birth rates and no social security or old age pension schemes. It is the old age pensions which are the explicitly anti-natalist policies.
>”Libertarianism is often associated with losers online, “young nerdy white guys”. I think it would be best to check some data.”
Is there any data in particular you think is helpful? My own observations indicate that online libertarianism is dominated by academics, of a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds but with lot’s of ethnic whites and even non-whites among them. For instance, look at the contributors at Reason, Cato, the Volokh Conspiracy, and so on. Far from being nerdy white losers, the typical online libertarian is quite establishment, frequently a college professor, frequently a lawyer, and frequently Jewish. What their self-image is I can’t say of course.
March 10, 2010 at 11:09 pm
Cesar Chavez was certainly not an old school capital-P Progressive. The Progressive movement is generally considered to have died with WW1. It was notoriously associated with eugenics, and every American eugenicist I’m aware of favored immigration restriction. A number of examples were already named in links I gave earlier, more follow below.
I didn’t say for a fact there existed no WASP Americans fitting your description of being “dedicated to overthrowing” etc. As it happens though, I can’t think of any.
Historically, Americans did try to discourage certain forms of immigration. Many Americans at the founding wrote about how blessed America was to have such an homogenous nation of Anglo-Protestants.
“The idea that progressive north-east brahmins were once in favor of immigration restriction remains a theory in search of supporting evidence.”
A number of such individuals are given as evidence in the Ken Burns link above. n/a provides more evidence here and here.
March 14, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Thanks, I had not seen that Lodge paper. Good stuff.
Of course, it’s doing violence to language to call Lodge a “progressive”. (If that was what you intended to do) He was pretty conservative even by the standards of the time. A good example of the WASP progressive sentiment would be Woodrow Wilson, who opposed Lodge’s immigration bill.
I don’t understand the point of the Gilder link. He’s hardly an example of turn of the (19th) century progressivism. He’s not even anti-immigration, he’s an open borders shill. And his being of Episcopalian background rather then Puritan, while perhaps significant in terms of some other discussion, does not seem relevant here.
Gilder is a good example of early 21st century WASP pro-immigration progressivism. But I suppose that’s a category of people whose existence nobody would dispute.
March 15, 2010 at 11:22 pm
The point of the Gilder link is that at the bottom n/a lists a number of racialist descendants of Puritans in the last paragraph. Gilder is not a progressive, he’s pretty well-known for his association with supply side economics, antifeminism, critic of the effects of welfare on blacks and even involvement in the creationist Discovery Institute. He even (favorably) ties support for Israel to support for capitalism & technological advancement. Larison gripes about that here while Gintis praises it here.
Woodrow Wilson was a Progressive, but not a classic WASP. He was a Virginian, famous for his promotion (appearing on the title cards) of Birth of a Nation. He was also a fairly notorious racist/white supremacist. His reasons for opposing the bill are listed here. He gives examples of certain criteria he would accept to restrict immigration, he just doesn’t think literacy is one of them (an arguably southern attitude!).
March 18, 2010 at 10:13 am
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