By way of Ross Douthat I have come across this very interesting 2007 post in Edge by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in which he argues that there are five fundamental moral stances in any society. I remember being quasi aware of it at the time it came out, but for some reason didn't grok it. There was also a NYT article about his findings around this time that triggered a flurry of interest. Briefly summarized (with my addition of the taboos), the five foundations of moral sentiment are:
- Harm: Don't do anything that will cause others to suffer. Taboo: murder.
- Fairness/Reciprocity: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Taboo: taking what's not yours/inequality.
- Ingroup loyalty: Always do what benefits the tribe. Taboo: treason.
- Hierarchy: Respect for authority and social order and for the existing norms established by authorities. Taboos: disobedience, irreverence
- Purity: A sense of the sacred and profane, that some behaviors are sublime and others disgusting. Taboos: gluttony/intoxication, fornication, perversion.
The main take away is that the first two predominate in Liberals, who have little sense how 3-5 serve moral purposes. Conservatives embrace all five, but tend to value the latter three more highly. The Times article quotes Haidt: “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggy-style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” "Disgusting?" Will Wilkenson asks (in an interesting Libertarian take on Haidt's work). "No doubt. Immoral? If your thought is, 'Well, they’re not violating anyone’s rights,' then, Haidt predicts, you probably didn’t vote for Bush."
So many interesting things to develop from these ideas, and I plan to in the future, but I thought I'd start with Douthat's response, which I found intriguing. In an earlier post on Haidt's work, Douthat quotes Haidt's piece in Edge, in which he talks about the first two moral stances--harm and fairness--as typical of modern contractual societies, and the last three has characteristic of beehive societies:
The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose. . . .
The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media. . . .
One might ask, If the beehive is an image of how a healthy tradition-centered society works, isn't it also an image for how a totalitarian society works? Are not Communist and Fascist societies also beehives? The longing for life in a beehive in postmodern societies, i.e., societies in which a living, vibrant connection to the ancestors no longer exists, is precisely what leads to totalitarianism. I would say that totalitarianism is the bizarro reverse image of a healthy traditionalist society, as for instance Dante's Christendom or on another level, any aboriginal tribal society.
If both totalitarian and traditionalist societies are alike as beehives in what do they differ.? I would argue that you get totalitarianism when a people, stripped of its traditional way of life, tries to live a kind of atavistic traditionalism in which the state substitutes for tradition, and force substitutes for sacred authority. Societies that evolve democratically into social democracies are in far less danger of left totalitarianism, but because of their complacency are vulnerable to a coup from the right. I'll come back later to defend that idea.
But first I want to retrace my steps. My argument for some time now has been that zombie traditonalists, people who live in groups where traditional forms are no longer animated by the cultural life that originally gave rise to them, are more likely to embrace a totalitarian regime. Why? Because they long for a way of life that has been lost; they are confused, alienated, and anomic. A people deracinated from its tradition might cling to empty traditional formalities out of habit, but they are peculiarly receptive to anyone who will fill the empty form with something that seems like life, even if it's warmed over death, so long as it makes them feel like they are living. In other words they are vulnerable to cultism.
How many times have we seen it? Oh, how alive it makes one feel, the thrill, to join in a frenzied book burning or to lynch a black man or gas some Jews or disappear someone's father or husband or invade a heathen country? And as thrilling as it is, it's also ok. They're doing God's work. How do they know? Because this is what the cult leader/authorities want and they are with their neighbors doing it. How shamed would they feel if they were to refuse to go along. They're doing it to protect the tribe. It's a sacred duty.
That's how it works for people who live in a cultic, self-reinforcing bubble world and anyone who challenges them is automatically identified as the treasonous Other. That's the kind of world that the hard right lives in at this time in our country. They have no real connection to the living, now dormant, tradition of the West. They live within some of its empty forms but with this other death-in-life that fills them.
Zombie traditionalists embrace what the cultic death mongers offer them because they crave to belong unthinkingly to a given world in which the choices are all made for them. These deathmongers speak their language and appeal to their aggrieved sense of tribal identity. This is what Franco, Petain, Mussolini, Hitler, and the Latin American dictators have all done. It's what all cult leaders do. They take advantage of people who hate how modernity has stripped their world of communal warmth and sacred mystery. These leaders promise them falsely that they can get it back.
Ok, but that's not what a thoughtful conservative like Douthat wants. He wants exactly the opposite:
One of the central questions of our time, to my mind, comes down to balance: How far do we want to go in the contractual direction, and to what extent do we want to preserve and shore up the beehives? To what extent do we need to provide space for the dissenters to breathe, and to what extent do we want a society where the conformists can flourish? My preference would be to inhabit a society that's formally contractualist, that protects the rights of minorities and provides opportunities for dissenters and free spirits to find their way in the world, but that is undergirded by sturdy beehives - by rooted communities that are, as Haidt puts it, high on social capital and low on anomie. This is the American model, I would argue, from Tocqueville's time down to our own: a nation balanced between contractualism and community. And the question becomes, for those who think this model has been a great success, where do you strike the balance? And which side of the equation needs shoring up? . . .
Traditional forms of social organization are weaker in today's America than they were fifty years ago, but they're still much, much stronger than in Europe, where the economic left has held the whip for decades.
That's very similar to what I've been saying in my pieces over the years. In the political sphere we are all secular contractualists, but in the cultural sphere we develop a rich spiritual life that provides social cohesion and an antidote to anomie. I'm willing to argue the point with those who disagree, and I suspect Douthat would, but isn't that the formula for the kind of European or New Deal style social democracy that conseratives hate?
I would also argue that Douthat is wrong about Europe. Maybe some day I'll mount a more concerted case to support the point, but I think the developed European countries have done a much better job of maintaining local cultural vitality and traditions than we have done in the States. The Libertarian individualists among us have played a more influential and destructive role in the States than they have played in Europe, and the Europeans, I think, with varying degrees of success have found the balance that eludes us--or at least they do it better than we do. Americans might be more religious and Europeans more secular, but Europeans by and large have a sense cultural identity that is more securely rooted than Americans, and perhaps because of that they have been able to balance that better with fairness proposition. And let's face it, a lot of American religiosity is weird and zombie-esque.
So here's my point, and I'll try to elaborate more on it in future posts or in response to comments if there are any. The antidote to statism that conservatives rightly fear is vibrant local cultures. In that I agree with Douthat. But vibrant local cultures in the past meant "given" traditionalist, usually agricultural cultures. That "givenness" is no longer a healthy possibility for the establishment of vibrant local cultures in the future. We will all increasingly be living in a pluralistic world. This Palinesque "real America" vs. everyone else is toxic and ugly and needs to be utterly rejected as any basis for a beehive. I'm not sure, but I hope that's not the kind of thing to which Douthat refers when he says we need a contractual world "that is undergirded by sturdy beehives - by rooted communities that are, as Haidt puts it, high on social capital and low on anomie."
I am certainly open to be persuaded I'm wrong on this, but I don't think there really is a network of healthily functioning beehives out there in America--they've been slowly dying off since Toqueville's time and ceased to exist at all in the post WWII period culminating in the sixties and seventies. I understand the conservatives' lament, but lamenting cannot bring back what has been destroyed. And so this is where I part company with the principled conservatives. I like Douthat's idea of balance and redressing imbalances, but in America there is no existing healthy counterbalance to Liberalism--it has to be created. In the meanwhile we are mainly a contractual society because that's all we've got that we can all agree on.
We desperately need social worlds high on social capital and low on anomie, but these worlds have to be built in a pluralistic environment, and traditionalists, zombie or otherwise, don't do well with pluralism. But to me pluralism is at the heart of the grand American experiment: E pluribus unum. This idea that the Real America is only to be found in the small towns is a crude parody of the American ideal. We Americans are the small towns, and the strip malls, and the ghettos, and the gated communities, the exurbs and suburbs, and the big urban centers; we're gays and straights, Muslims, feminists, Asians, Mexicans, blacks, traditionalists, libertarians, and crunchy cons.
And we can fight and argue and still develop a sense of our all being in this together at higher level than tribalism. We can develop a heterogeneous patchwork of cultural possibilities, lifestyles, artistic and spiritual responses, and we can all benefit from the diversity and the cross-fertilization that will come of it. But we've got to be honest, and we've got to really want to understand why the Other is the way he or she is. And you can only do that with Others who are willing to reciprocate. I don't think harm and reciprocity are adequate foundations for the development of a deeply moral life, but that's where we start together. The last three are more hindrances than helps.
I don't care about preserving the social forms--the existing beehive husks; the forms can take care of themselves. I do care about the cultural vitality that gives social forms their shape. As a Christian I believe that what most deeply undergirds our feeble attempts to live together and to move through history is the Logos. And because he is there at the heart of everything, there is always the possibility of renewal, always the possibility for recovery--not of the forms, but of the dynamic, subtle power that moves us, evolves us together toward our telos. Forms come and go, and we must not make idols of them. The more important task is to be cuturally creative, and that in the end, if such a process is truly fruitful, is always and everywhere, the produce of grace.