What Is Empathy? And What Good Is It?

Empathy has been a central concern of mine for most of my life.

Many conservatives talk about empathy being limited or somehow weak and unworthy, maybe even dangerous such as the allegation of sympathizing with terrorists. I’ve never understood this.

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Maybe conservatives have issues with their own ability to empathize, but my empathy is often on overdrive and my entire sense of identity, my entire sense of morality and humanity is rooted in it. If anything, my problem is too much empathy or too strongly felt empathy. This isn’t to say it is about empathy making me a better person. It’s simply doesn’t fit what conservatives describe in their own vision of human nature driven by naked self-interest and ruthless Social Darwinism or else driven by a sinful fallen nature.

To be fair, most average conservatives genuinely want more emphasis to be put on family, religion, community and civic duty (also, ethnic culture for some). But even these average conservatives seem to be motivated by the same basic belief of having little faith in a greater capacity for empathy beyond the narrow confines of group identity (however the in-group and out-group are defined).

I would make a clarification to which conservatives aren’t likely to admit. Conservatives seem to recognize that liberal-minded empathy doesn’t have the narrowness, xenophobia and parochial quality that is more common to the conservative-minded expression of empathy. If they didn’t understand this, they wouldn’t wouldn’t worry so much about liberals sympathizing too strongly with the enemies, foreigners, diverse cultures, criminals, drug addicts, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, along with others deemed to be social inferiors and social unworthies.

So, it’s more that conservatives think people should willingly choose to limit their empathy or have society, specifically the political and economic system, intentionally constrain the effect of empathy to the small-scale, especially families and churches or private individual interests such as charity. In the place of empathy, they think we should prioritize something better to guide the moral order: principles, faith, rules, merit, etc. It’s not that they dislike empathy, but they can’t imagine a morally good world that is centered on a broader vision of empathy (i.e., a morally good world centered on a core liberal value).

I wouldn’t argue that there are no problems with empathy. It is apparent, to grossly understate the problem, that the human race on the large-scale has yet to get the knack for fundamentally caring about and for all people or even most people, as true in wealthy countries as poor, as true in oppressive states as in capitalist countries. It is the reason why civilization is failing and probably will continue to fail for sometime, assuming it will ever succeed.

My main disagreement with conservatives is that they believe civilization is better off without worrying about all that namby-pamby stuff of peace, love and understanding. From their perspective, the problem is too much emotional concern, too much softness, too much forgiveness. From my perspective, such obvious cynicism (and the realpolitik that goes with it) is mind-blowing, heart-wrenching and soul-despairing.

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By the way, I hope it is obvious that liberal-mindedness and conservative-mindedness aren’t equivalent too or necessarily even strongly correlated to the two party system. I suppose it’s likely that most Republican political activists and elites would measure strongly on conservative-minded traits, but I honestly doubt that many Democratic political activists and elites would measure strongly on liberal-minded traits.

I’m not sure that liberal-minded traits are more rare. It might be something about liberal-minded traits not being as effective for seeking and gaining positions of power and authority, wealth and prestige. The regimented power structure of hierarchical big government (like big business) is fundamentally unattractive and contrary to liberal-mindedness, not to say it is impossible for a liberal-minded person to succeed under such circumstances, just difficult and less probable. Besides, to the degree they succeeded was most likely to the degree they sacrificed and undermined their liberal-mindedness.

In a conservative social system, even when some liberal values and/or rhetoric has been incorporated, it is a lose/lose scenario for the liberal-minded. To win according to conservatism automatically means to lose according to liberalism, although I’m not sure the opposite is true in the same way or to the same extent (since liberalism on principle is about accepting and allowing to the greatest degree possible for what is different, including conservatism), but I’d love to test my hypothesis one day if we ever finally create a liberal social system.

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I was looking at research on empathy, motivated by my speculations on empathetic imagination. This combination of empathy and imagination is key to understanding liberal-mindedness. But it isn’t as simple as conservatives lacking empathy

The research does show a correlation between the abilities of empathy and imagination. Seeing this kind of research is what originally led me to coining the term empathetic imagination. Other research shows that empathy is negatively correlated to analytical thinking. It is difficult to empathize and analyze at the same time. As a side note, this makes me wonder about the possible negative correlation between imagination and analysis (which might be related to the opposing traits of optimism and pessimism, the research showing the former having greater capacity for change and the latter having greater capacity for accurate present assessment; just a side thought).

Leaving it at that is unsatisfying because this generalizes too much about all people. What makes psychology interesting to me is how much difference and diversity exists within human nature. So, are these kinds of attributes fully and always opposing and contradictory? Do they inevitably suppress the activity of the other?

Yes, it is no doubt challenging to simultaneously empathize and analyze (or imagine and analyze). But, I’d have to offer strong doubt to it being impossible. Based on still other research, one would presume that some people might be better at it than others.

On a personal level, I notice how closely linked are my own abilities to empathize and analyze (and imagine). I don’t know that I do them precisely at the same time and in concert, but I find it easy to quickly and smoothly switch back and forth so as to feel seamless. I couldn’t say whether this is an inborn ability or learned. It does seem to me that I was less analytical when young. I’ve become more analytical without, as far as I can tell, sacrificing my empathic tendencies. The two are closely tied together for me, at least in my own experience according to my own self-observations for whatever that is worth.

I feel my way into ideas in the way I feel my way into the experience of others. This intuition doesn’t seem inherently irrational, although it is or has an element of the non-rational. My intuition is one of the main tools I use in ascertaining rationality. With it, I sense the connections and compare them with alternative possibilities and interpretations. I don’t see how analysis would be possible without some minimal basic functioning of intuition. Something has to be perceived first before it can be analyzed (indeed Myers-Briggs theorizes intuition as one of two perceiving functions — sensation being the other — which offers the information to the judging functions, and also Myers-Briggs research has shown intuition to be strongly and positively correlated to intellectuality and IQ).

To complicate things, all of these factors (intellectuality, imagination, intuition, empathy) share the common positive correlation to certain well-researched traits. The specific trait I have in mind is the thin boundary type which I will discuss further after looking at some intriguing examples of how empathy can play out in diverse ways.

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I was reading about how empathy manifests or not among those with different psychiatric disorders (read here for a summary).

For example, it has been theorized that psychopaths and autistics are mirror opposites. Psychopaths have impaired affective/emotional empathy, but may have unimpaired cognitive empathy. Even if they perfectly understand people (their beliefs, thoughts, motivations, etc) on an intellectual level, they won’t express much sympathy or compassion (especially to distress). Autistics have impaired cognitive empathy, but may have unimpaired affective/emotional empathy. They are strongly affected by the psychological state of others (especially distress), even though they have a hard time of understanding others. So, a psychopath can relate better to others than an autistic and also more likely to harm others, a dangerous combination.

My mom has suggested that I might have aspergers. I don’t know if that is true, but the empathy aspect fits.

I’ve always been extremely socially sensitive while, when younger, I was nearly a lost cause in terms of being socially oblivious and clueless. As a child, I was just as happy playing by myself as playing with other kids. I also had a language learning disability which is common for autistics and less so for aspergers, usually just a delay that can be remedied with therapy as was the case with me. My learning disability caused me to have delayed reading and permanent memory issues, specifically word recall, but I’m above average IQ. My above average IQ particularly related to high level of visuospatial skills which is a common trait of autistics.

This is interesting to consider as I see myself as extremely empathetic. Since childhood, I’ve overcompensated in many ways. I’ve become obsessed with communicating and with understanding human behavior. I still have social awkwardness and shyness, but it for damn sure ain’t because of a lack of raw empathy. My emotional empathy is always keen. As for my cognitive empathy, it has caught up at this point and now is, at least in some ways, far above average.

I haven’t thought of myself as having aspergers. I have developed a strongly intuitive sense of what makes people tick. If I have aspergers, I must have massively developed my cognitive empathy. I’ve had social issues, but the subjective sense takes no effort whatsoever. It is easy for me to read people these days, although the fact that I’m so self-consciously obsessed about it is probably a clue. Assuming I have aspergers, it must be mild which gives me immense empathy for those with severe autism. My mom worked with many severe autistics in public schools and her descriptions are very sad in some cases.

My brothers have told my mom that they suspect something like aspergers in themselves. My oldest brother had learning difficulties, although not with language, and my second oldest brother was diagnosed with anxiety disorder which might have been a misdiagnosis since aspergers don’t deal well with social stress (I’ve seen one of his anxiety attacks and I immediately recognized it as something I had experienced as well). All three of us have been socially challenged and have been on anti-depressants which could be a secondary result of the other issues.

Autistics have strong empathic distress with weak empathic concern (as a result of the impaired cognitive empathy) which causes social awkwardness and dysfunction. People are more likely to irritate or stress out an autistic than draw out a response of sympathy and compassion or even normal sociability and friendliness. This social distress is exacerbated with observing other people in pain which causes them to want to avoid the situation rather than offer help. However, when they understand someone’s state of mind, empathic concern is expressed normally.

Autistics lack a strong sense of Theory of Mind and can’t easily identify emotions even in themselves, much less in others, despite feeling emotions strongly. Empathizing is relational and so there is a close connection between self-awareness and social-awareness. Some theorize that autism may be an extreme male profile of neural functioning. What differentiates the genders is that men tend to have a smaller corpus callosum and so fewer connections between the two hemispheres. So, one might expect that men and autistics would have more difficulty than average with empathizing while analyzing or using both in concert by easily and quickly switching back and forth… or something like that.

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This then brings me to the aforementioned boundary types, originally articulated by Ernest Hartmann.

Conservatives and men (also masculine women) have on average thicker boundaries than liberals and women (also effeminate men). This is the basis of calling the Republicans the daddy party and the Democrats the mommy party, and it is a fact that the two parties respectively have disproportionate numbers of men and women. I’m not sure about what research might have been done on autism and Hartmann’s boundary types, but I do know that most diagnosed autistics are male.

Also, there has been a long debate about whether women have greater empathy than men or rather whether the differences observed are inborn or learned. I’d see this as related to the debate about whether liberals (i.e., self-identified liberals and the liberal-minded) have greater empathy than conservatives (i.e., self-identified conservatives and the conservative-minded). Is it a matter of the degree or the kind of empathy?

The research I’ve seen is that there is a difference in when and how empathy is used. It is significant that more men are conservatives than liberals and more conservatives are men than women, and likewise with conservatives and thick boundaries. To be something like a surgeon or a judge requires one to clearly demarcate empathy from analysis, something thick boundary types are good at doing and something conservatives idealize. Not just demarcate, though; also, be able to shut off. A surgeon doesn’t want empathy to be within consciousness at all while slicing into someone.

To completely or even partly shut empathy off at will is not a strong talent for liberals and thin boundary types. On the other side, when a conservative or thick boundary type is in empathy mode, the very opposite probably happens and if so they’d have less access than liberals to analysis. Everyone to some degree suppresses analysis while empathizing and suppresses empathy while analyzing, but not everyone does it equally nor does everyone value it equally and seek to develop it further.

That is my own hypothesis. It is supported by the data I’ve seen so far, but it is too early to declare exactly what the difference is being shown.

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The complicating factor for me is first and foremost personal.

As someone possibly with aspergers, my empathy may be far from the norm. Then again, those diagnosed with aspergers and autism have been increasing which either means the condition is increasing or the diagnosis is increasing. Maybe aspergers is on a continuum of normalcy, human nature normally containing a range of potential traits, behaviors and psychological profiles.

The angle of aspergers and autism confuses my thinking.  I suspect thin boundary is more closely related to affective empathy for that is the actual component of empathy that allows one to feel what another is feeling, to viscerally know another’s experience. Thin boundary types have a harder time distinguishing their own experience and identity from those they are around, especially in close relationships. Autistics and aspergers includes this affective empathy, above average in fact. On the other hand, these conditions also includes underdeveloped cognitive empathy which causes dysfunction in the affective empathy.

I’m not sure what any of that means. Are such people thin boundary types or thick boundary types? Is autism an extreme male psychological profile? Is this just an oddity that is irrelevant in trying to understand how empathy normally operates?

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To continue with the personal, I’ll use the example of my dad to clarify the conservative mindset.

He is one of the most morally genuine people I know. He sits around worrying about being a good person. He is no fundy. He doesn’t take the Bible literally. But he takes his religion very seriously. He does his best to walk the talk. Minus the religiosity, my own nature is close to his. One of the biggest differences is that he is much more social than I. He is more outwardly good and successful, according to the standards of society. He loves to have a role to play, especially the role of authority figure, and he plays that role well; but he is also more willing to submit to authority without question or irritation. He has little problem with sticking to the rules and conforming to expectations.

My dad might win the prize for being the least socially dysfunctional person in my immediate family. And I probably could win the prize for being the most socially dysfunctional. So much for the greatness of my valuing empathy; empathy plus dysfunction just creates dysfunctional empathy, well damn. Unlike his liberal children, he never had any major social issues at any point in his life. He says he is shy, but he has even overcome that and it is entirely unnoticeable to an outside observer. He has held many leadership positions, including in various churches.

Despite his arguing for empathy being limited, he uses what empathy he has in a socially beneficial way, although his empathy has much less of an emotional quality than my own, maybe more of a sense of moral rule-following that an uncertain relationship to empathy as emotional concern. His empathy is probably average, at least for a conservative, maybe more cognitive empathy than affective empathy. He even is fairly humble which helps his empathy express relatively well, considering how confident he is able to act when needed. He is proof that basic levels of empathy are all that are required for being a generally good person, good citizen, and good Christian; at least according to conservative social norms.

It’s true that he doesn’t spend as much time imagining the lives of and identifying with those who have fallen on hard times. And it’s true that he is more likely to blame people for the hard times they find themselves in. He has never experienced bad times to any great extent and so it’s not part of his personal sense of reality. Nonetheless, he’ll volunteer at the local soup kitchen and he’ll donate large amounts of money to organizations that help those in need. I’d put it this way. Empathy for him is more of a luxury than a necessity. It’s a good thing to have for charity, but it’s useless for the real work of life: business, leadership, etc. It’s just something to contemplate in one’s free time after a hard day’s work or in retirement after a life of hard work and success

He is a standard conservative in prizing pragmatism or rather the rhetoric of pragmatism, the question being pragmatism to what end. Whatever empathy he might lack relative to bleeding heart liberals, he makes up for it with practical action toward his conservative-minded goals. He is a man of action and authority, the ideal of conservatives. If all or just most conservatives were like my dad, the world probably would be a decent place, although the problems would still exist if in more mild form.

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I was having a discussion with my dad about religion.

My dad is in a Bible group. Because he is now living here in this liberal college town, he has been forced to deal with more liberals, including in his Bible group, than he has become accustomed to from having spent 20 years in South Carolina. There is one particular liberal view with which he has been struggling: the value of giving freely without limiting one’s charity to moralizing judgment and expectation.

He is coming around to awakening to how truly radical is Jesus’ message. It can’t be limited to conservative morality. Jesus didn’t demand people be good conservatives, good Christians or good anything before he offered help and healing. This is mind-blowing to him. I’ve been pointing out to him this fact about Jesus’ teachings for years, but he just didn’t get it. The idea of a radical Jesus didn’t fit into his conservative Christian worldview. Conservative Christians believe Jesus is good and radicals are bad. So, how can Jesus be both good and radical?

Jesus wasn’t interested in saving the social order, promoting family values, punishing wrongdoers, and forcing the troubled to be responsible citizens. My dad’s sense of honesty disallows him from dismissing this realization. So, he has to put it into terms he can understand.

He spoke of first-order effects and second-order effects. I suppose he is using terminology from business management, his area of primary expertise, or maybe from economics, an area of secondary expertise.

I’m not sure how this might relate to conservatism and liberalism, but I immediately saw a connection to the distinction between Confucianism and Taoism. Jesus is infinitely closer to being a Taoist than to being a Confucian. There are two quotes from the Tao Te Ching that reminded me of this first order idea:

If powerful men and women
could remain centered in the Tao,
all things would be in harmony.
The world would become a paradise.
All people would be at peace,
and the law would be written in their hearts.

In this first quote, what is described is the person embodying the first order principle. Jesus didn’t seek to enforce his own beliefs, values and worldview. Jesus, whether or not he was the Christ, was not a Christian and wasn’t seeking to advocate for a Christian moral order, much less a conservative social order. And the second quote:

The Master doesn’t try to be powerful;
thus he is truly powerful.
The ordinary man keeps reaching for power;
thus he never has enough.

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

The kind man does something,
yet something remains undone.
The just man does something,
and leaves many things to be done.
The moral man does something,
and when no one responds
he rolls up his sleeves and uses force.

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.

Therefore the Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.

This describes the first order type as opposed to the second order type.

A Confucian is a particular type of conservative which is why Chinese Communism being based on Confucianism always has had a conservative hierarchical social order with a conservative moral order. The Chinese Communists, like the Soviet Union Communists, were illiberal and anti-liberal to the extreme in being against free thought and freedom of choice, against intellectuals and artists, against homosexuals and other perceived deviants. I don’t know that the Taoist position was the polar opposite of liberalism, but it certainly wasn’t against liberalism. Taoists believed that order didn’t need to be enforced.

This could be fit into one aspect of conservatism and liberalism. Conservatives believe individuals will fail if not for external social order. Liberals believe individuals are inherently good or otherwise have great potential, although not necessarily the utopian perfectionism that conservatives fear in their worst nightmares.

I was struggling to fit all these ideas together. I intuit a resonance among them, but I’m far from certain. I sense there is a very powerful reason for why the conservative mind can so easily overlook this first order way of thinking. The powerful reason I suspect ties into empathy somehow. A larger sense of empathy is not necessary for Confucianism. Like American conservatives, Confucians limited empathy to the group, especially in terms of basing the social order on the family. Also, American and Confucian conservatives love ritual as symbolic expression and public enactment of social order.

Empathy, specifically in its fullest manifestation, is like a solvent to thick boundaries. It loosens the bonds and lets loose what was bounded. Taoism is about flow. But Taoism doesn’t oppose Confucianism in the way I hypothesize liberalism doesn’t oppose conservatism. Taoists understand that, even in flowing, boundaries are necessary. Taoists want balance, similar to how liberals want inclusion. It’s BOTH Yin AND Yang, not EITHER Yin OR Yang.

—

Empathy is a strange thing. I don’t fully understand it and I’m sure I never will. Nonetheless, I value it and aspire toward it.

That is the important part, in my mind and heart. Just to care, to know it all matters, that each and every person matters. Empathy is the very thing that allows us to, in the end, see us all as humans and as equals. We ultimately aren’t liberals and conservatives. We are immense, if not infinite, potential.

Despite my dysfunction, despite the dysfunction of others, despite the dysfunction of all of society, there is something fundamentally worthy and good within humanity and within the world. That is what I’d like to believe. that is what I choose to believe.

That is my moral vision.

Symbolic Conflation & Empathic Imagination

I feel the impulse to take stock of my thinking, he says with a heavy sigh.

I’m going to attempt the amazing feat of connecting together various strains of thought that have been mulling in my braincase these past few years. This is my way of warning you that the following is going to be a doozy, in which I will discuss: conservatism and liberalism (in the psychological sense), symbolic conflation and empathetic imagination, literalism and imagination, social order and its lynchpin, ideology and analysis, and we’ll just have to see what else gets thrown into the stew.

Bear with me, if you will; or if not, be off with you.

—

I’ll begin with symbolic conflation, as that is the originating point of my present contemplations.

In explaining symbolic conflation, the example I usually bring up is that of abortion. I just as easily could use sex education or something similar, issues of sex and gender getting at the tasty marrow of conservative values, but any culture war issues would do. These are hot button topics where symbolic conflation gets exaggerated which makes it easier to observe and analyze.

Symbolic conflation, however, isn’t limited to these kinds of issues. Also, it isn’t limited to just conservatives. Nonetheless, my theory proposes that it is more central to conservative psychology and specifically more central to highly emotional issues.

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As a side note, my theory of symbolic conflation might be correlated with and supported by certain psychological studies of ideological differences.

Numerous research shows that conservatives on average have higher rates of such cognitive behaviors as confirmation bias and smart idiot effect. Furthermore, conservatism is somewhat correlated with authoritarianism, although no direct causal link has been ascertained, just partial overlap of factors or a loose affinity of interests under some conditions. What this means is that there is a distinct subset of people who consistently measure high on both conservatism and authoritarianism.

Relevant to my discussion here, authoritarian types are predisposed to being drawn into hierarchical relationships with social dominance orientation types.

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The most basic definition — or the most basic element in my theory — of symbolic conflation is this:

A particular type of person is prone to a particular style of thought process that conflates symbolism with reality.

This conflation is inherent to the thought process itself and not merely an end result or side effect. Hence, it isn’t observable by those manifesting this cognitive pattern. Symbolic conflation is only effective when and to the degree it operates below the threshold of awareness.

In communicating shared values and beliefs, rhetoric (usually political rhetoric) can employ specific issues or talking points as symbols for something deeper or larger such that the explicit terms and phrases become codewords for something else, either an unstated meaning or context. To an outside observer, that something else may seem entirely unrelated or not directly related to the overt topic. None of this is necessarily intentional and certainly not conscious. It isn’t an attempt to deceive or manipulate by the person under the sway of the thought process, although it would be used this way by social dominance orientation types when they are seeking to shape the collective identity, perception, and behavior of a specific group or demographic.

For most people, they use symbolic language because that seems to be the easiest (simplest and most useful) way to express the (fuller and deeper) meanings that are otherwise difficult or maybe even impossible to communicate in a more direct and analytical manner. The problem is that symbolism plays a powerful role in the imagination, especially at an unconscious level. This is what makes conflation possible and (for certain types of people and certain types of thinking) probable, even if not inevitable.

One could say, to put it simply:

People don’t always say what they mean… or mean what they say.

However, it might be unfair to explain it with what can be interpreted as dismissive over-simplification. Maybe such people can be taken at face value or maybe not, but either way there is a subtext that is more important and I would add more interesting.

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Let me use one of the examples I mentioned earlier.

Sex education and sex-related issues, like abortion, has been put under the scrutiny of those doing scientific research and gathering public data. Using such objective knowledge, this issue can be attacked from numerous angles.

Studies show that abstinence-only sex education fails to decrease sexual activity and ends up, for lack of focus on contraceptives, increasing the rate of both unwanted pregnancies and STDs (the unwanted pregnancies relates to the correlation to increased abortions in countries with abortion bans since such countries also tend to promote abstinence-only sex education and decrease access to contraceptives along with decreasing access to family planning and women’s health clinics). These results are predictable based on what is known about biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Humans living in pre-industrial and pre-agricultural societies have very different lifestyles and diets that include reaching puberty years later than modern humans and not delaying sexual activity and marriage like modern humans — thus demonstrating how conservative beliefs/values are divergent from and contradictory to the environmental conditions according to which human nature evolved.

This sex issue is what I first gnashed my teeth on in my coming to terms with the conservative mind. I brought up this info with conservatives, but it was all for naught.

I slowly came to realize that it wasn’t about the practical results of decreasing STDs, unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The issue was about culture and morality. Conservatives see society as morally corrupt and human nature as sinful. Conservative beliefs and values aren’t seen as having failed according to actual people and actual society, but the other way around. So, conservative methods not achieving practical results shouldn’t be blamed on conservatism, if anything it is taken as proof that conservative efforts need to be redoubled.

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It should be clarified that it isn’t about conservatives not deigning to make their pure ideals filthy with practical results.

From the conservative viewpoint, there are more important results that have nothing to do with the worldly or lowly concerns of a society ruled by progressivism/socialism (i.e., social democracy), secular humanism, and politically correct multiculturalism. What they seek to achieve is the creating, maintaining and defending of the conservative social order along with its underlying vision of conservative moral order.

Sure, people will inevitably fail to live up to the high standards of conservatism. Most people will fail most of the time and all people will fail at least some of the time, but two important results are hoped for:

1) High standards will filter out the unworthy through punishment and enforced accountability while allowing the worthy to rise to the top into positions of hierarchical authority and in other ways be rewarded for their merit.
2) Punishment, as a threat and an enforcement, will cause people to fearfully cleave closely to the conservative rule and order, thus creating dutiful conformity and social stability.

In the ideal conservative world, premarital/extramarital sex would lead to chastisement, humiliation, ostracism or even banishment and premarital/extramarital pregnancy would lead to the same or else get one forced into marriage, not that any man would want to marry a loose woman in such a society unless he too was forced. Put this in economic terms and you’ll get the ideal world of fiscal conservatism with its austere meritocracy of the haves and have-nots.

This ideal world, of course, will rarely if ever be stated so openly and directly, so starkly and explicitly. Its power resides with the symbolic issues taking center stage like puppets on a string. As the melodrama plays out in public view, the conservative narrative takes hold of the rapt audience.

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Symbolic conflation is a very specific way of thinking and communicating symbolically, not to be confused with symbolic cognition in general.

It is tricky trying to grasp at symbolism that seeks to remain hidden, but that just makes it all the more enticing. In my present ponderings, this hidden quality turns my mind toward thoughts of art and the imagination. In considering the liberal/conservative angle, I’m reminded of a similar difference I’ve observed with how art is framed and to what purpose it is used:

With liberals, ideology is expanded through imagination. With conservatives, imagination is constrained by ideology. Both may start with ideology, but go in different directions. The liberal impulse wants to escape or transform ideology into something greater. It’s not that conservatives don’t have a sense of something greater. It’s just that to conservatives ideology itself is an expression of that sense of something greater. Maybe it’s a difference between ideology as means vs ends.

The conservative mind treats art or any other creation of imagination in the way it treats religion. Its natural response is literalism. So, imagination is seen as having no truth in itself. In this way, there is no art for art’s sake, no creative play just for the joy of it, no envisioning of possibility just because one can. Literalism has a literalist purpose and a lieralist end. Literalism is the ur-ideology of conservatism. There is one truth, one reality, one interpretation, one solution (to rule them all).

That constraining of imagination to the ideological seems to be related to the conflating of symbolism with reality. In both cases, imagination or symbolism for the conservative plays an obfuscatory role. In analyzing the conservative worldview, it falls apart because what holds the conservative worldview together is the resistance to analysis. To speak openly and directly about ideology, to factually discuss objective reality, is to reveal the lynchpin of the conservative social order.

As I’ve noted many times before, a core element of liberalism is empathetic imagination. For liberals, imagination is personally and interpersonally real for the liberal imagination is about relating, connecting, merging, crossing boundaries, transgressing the taboo. It’s not that liberals care not about the social order but that they put the emphasis on the social part. Liberals see order serving the social while conservatives see it the other way around.

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An inverse relation exists between symbolic conflation and empathetic imagination. Let me explain by summarizing.

What symbolic conflation does is to focus on the symbolic by sacrificing the apparently practical results and real world implications. Nonetheless, the person under the sway of such thinking sees themselves as being perfectly practical. They are indeed being practical, although their practicality is being applied to the covert issue rather than the overt issue. Conservatives’ relative indifference to practical solutions for overt issues would be strengthened or exaggerated by their weak sense of empathic imagination. They are less able to imaginatively empathize with the victims of conservative policies and less able to empathetically imagine it being any other way, even when objective data of other societies proves and demonstrates another way works better in avoiding or solving some problem.

In the conservative worldview, instead of being freed by imagination, empathy is constrained by ideological literalism. Humans are seen as being constrained by their own fallen or selfish nature. As such, human failure and suffering is assumed to be unavoidable, inevitable, simply the way the world works. To imagine otherwise is idealistic utopianism and so imagination gets blamed for this state of affairs for it is seen as offering false hope. Hence, false hope is assumed to exacerbate suffering by creating dissatisfaction with the status quo and, worst still, false hope on the political level is assumed to lead to oppression when the ‘impossible’ is sought to be enforced on the ‘real’.

Conservatives assume the conservative predisposition represents all of human nature. So, they assume the limits of the conservative worldview are the same as the limits of human reality, maybe even all of reality. As a liberal’s imagination is the liberal’s reality, a conservative’s literalist belief is theirs.

—

My criticisms of the conservative mindset may be related to my wariness to the ideological mindset.

There is a correlation between conservatism and dogmatism, especially as it relates to authoritarianism (maybe dogmatism being the main or one of the main factors where conservatism and authoritarianism overlap). This probably connects to conservatism being negatively correlated to the openness trait and the thin boundary type. A set of ideas only becomes truly ideological when it is strictly systematized and that is precisely what the conservative mindset is good at doing. Conservatives excel or at least are disproportionately represented in careers where systems of rules, beliefs or ideas are central, such as in the legal system.

I’m wary about generalizing ideology too much and extending it beyond that which it most directly and usefully applies. Ideology etymologically originates from ‘idea’. An ideology is a set of ideas, a thought system. Ideologies are involved in or included within but not identical to governments, political parties, cultures, religions, mythologies, worldviews, lifeways, reality tunnels, etc.

It is unhelpful, maybe even dangerous, to think of ideology as representing all (or most) of human reality or, to put it another way, constraining human reality to the limits of ideology. However, to the person who becomes entirely committed to and identified with an ideology, it is experienced as if it were their entire reality. Even though though reality tunnels necessitate more than ideologies, it is an ideology that can play a central role in justifying a reality tunnel and keeping one trapped within it.

—

In thinking about this, I was doing many websearches and looking through my old posts here on this blog. Here is some of what I came across that was rumbling around in my head as I wrote all of the above:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-004-2553-x?LI=true

http://www.cog.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/papers/2007/Rogers%282007%29_JAutismDevDisord.pdf

http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com/2007/10/aspie-and-empathy.html

http://www.autismandempathy.com/?p=1476

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/aspergers-diary/200910/perspectives-aspergers-and-empathy

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-007-0486-x#page-1

http://www.alessioavenanti.com/pdf_library/minio-paluello_2009biolpsychiatry.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811905006853

http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2001/08080/Investigating_the_functional_anatomy_of_empathy.29.aspx

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1093/neucas/8.3.245

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ090909&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ090909

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178109000936

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-5914.2009.00402.x/abstract;jsessionid=D58D9FC0B8BFE453E7F846A690C2889D.d04t02?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2011.00913.x/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10803-009-0799-z?LI=true

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8k6yVdL-fiQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA149&dq=empathy+AND+aspergers&ots=Hq9yqrjlz8&sig=rjbTa-pPALsEi_vUe7RkJCDDfUU#v=onepage&q=empathy%20AND%20aspergers&f=false

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100426182002.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110125103825.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110628094835.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100427091723.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127085550.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121024175240.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120426143856.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100409093405.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623120837.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090128074929.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/03/what-rob-portman-learned/63166/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254/

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/22/are_republican_brains_different_partner/

http://www.wevotedforkodos.com/2013/02/05/genetic-predisposition-and-political-affiliation/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/giving-the-real-a-voice/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/liberal-mindedness-empathetic-imagination-and-capitalist-realism/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/the-iron-lady-the-view-of-a-bleeding-heart/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/do-rightwingers-love-war/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/the-enlightenment-project-a-defense/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/06/14/conservative-mistrust-ideological-certainty-part-2/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2009/12/25/interesting-stuff-on-the-web-122509/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/haidt-mooney-moral-foundations-spiral-dynamics/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/violence-vs-empathy-indifference-vs-unhappiness/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/why-did-i-become-a-leftist/

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/ideology-and-empathy/

—

Social Order and Symbolic Conflation

Again and again, I return to the issue of conservatism. What or who defines it? How is or should it be defined? It’s endlessly mesmerizing, at least to my more liberal mind.

There are two typical answers to the question of conservatism’s definition.

First, (true) conservatives want to conserve.

This a nice notion, but doesn’t work out very well. Everyone, liberals included, want to conserve something as this is simply a facet of human nature. So, this doesn’t get at the core motivation of conservatives as a distinct group, movement, worldview or predisposition: What exactly do conservatives want to conserve? What don’t they want to conserve? And why? Its clear that many conservatives don’t have good answers, beyond largely ahistorical nostalgic fantasies or else abstract philosophizing/theologizing. In relation to American tradition (in the mainstream), many mainstream liberals have taken on the role of conserving the status quo and mainstream conservatives quite the opposite.

Second, (true) conservatives are traditionalist.

This is another nice notion that is equally problematic. There are many traditions, even within a single culture or society or political system. Heck, after several centuries, modern liberalism has become one of the most dominant and well established traditions in the world, a tradition that the United States was founded upon. This is why American ‘conservatives’ are classical liberals rather than classical conservatives. The British Tories were the classical conservatives that Americans sought independence from.

Conservatives do want to conserve something, but many things can be and have been latched onto. Furthermore, anything conserved, even if only in memory or imagination, becomes a tradition and is treated as such by conservatives. This obviously doesn’t clarify the matter. The conservative impulse, separate from the general conserving impulse, does have limits to what or else how it is applied.

Here is my preferred hypothesis. It won’t win awards for originality, but it makes sense of the evidence.

Conservatives value relatively stable, strict or even rigid social orders that are based on, justified by and maintained according to hierarchy and authority. Conservatives will seek to conserve any tradition thus deemed worthy or, failing that, seek to (re-)create a tradition that when established will be worthy of being conserved; both of these easily being conflated at least in rhetoric, hence the close tie between the traditionalist conservative and the reactionary conservative, the distinction as such being an academic exercise — I wonder if traditionalist and reactionary are just two stages in the life-cycle of conservatism, each inevitably leading back to the other.

I would add that, in this way, there is no ‘true’ conservatism since there is no fundamental content or inherent substance. Conservatism isn’t any single thing or set of things, but a preference/tendency in relating to things. For this reason, conservatives have no loyalty to tradition simply for the sake of it being tradition.

American conservatives, for example, have no inherent commitment to any given American tradition, although of course they are committed to a collective imagining of a tradition (a social and political narrative, an origin myth) that may or may not partly correspond to some period or aspect of history. American conservatives have no particular loyalty to the tradition of the Republican Party prior to the Southern Strategy nor loyalty to the European tradition of conservatism. Each generation and group of conservatives has re-imagined what is ‘true’ conservatism.

The world history of conservatism is immensely diverse, including everything from theocracy to monarchism, from fascism to republicanism. Even American socialists have grounded themselves in conservative traditions such as German communalism. Just within the limited spectrum of mainstream American politics, there are conservatives as polar opposite as evangelical states’ rights libertarians threatening secession and secular statist neocons using liberal rhetoric about spreading democracy around the world, two extremes that can’t be contained in any single consistent ideology.

Loyalty and consistency aren’t the issues.

A social order is perceived as worthy or unworthy not because of the social order itself, rather what that social order accomplishes or fails to accomplish. What is trying to be accomplished is that a worthy order will reward the worthy and punish the unworthy. Conservatives turned away from a monarchical system of feudal aristocracy not because it oppressively denied individual rights and liberty.  What Corey Robin points out is that conservatives saw the old social order as having become weak and so no longer able to maintain its own hierarchy and authority against opponents. Conservatives didn’t want to remove this kind of social order, but to offer a new and improved version. This required adapting to changing conditions which is how modern conservatives adopted classical liberalism in place of classical conservatism.

The rhetoric of conservatism is misleading. The purpose of conservative social order is first and foremost to defend and maintain conservative social order, i.e., hierarchical authority. The upholders and representatives of conservative social order don’t need to justify their reasons to social inferiors. They just have to keep their social inferiors in their place, thus maintaining conservative social order.

On this most basic level, conservatism is morally neutral or rather morally relativistic. No external objective standard can be used to measure the authenticity and merit of a social order in the mind of conservatives. It is a self-referential closed system. That is what conservatism does: closes down, tightens the ranks, guards the boundaries, etc. This is what makes it stable and dependable, strong enough to be its own moral standard (in the way the conservative God doesn’t need to justify his own divine laws and moral pronouncements; it is right, good and true because God says so, and you know he said so because that is what God put in his own holy book).

Any principle, belief or value put forth by a conservative is always symbolic. And every conservative symbol represents the same thing: conservative social order. An example I’ve used before is that of conservatives claiming to be pro-life. I’ve pointed out to conservatives that research has shown banning abortions doesn’t decrease and in some cases increases the rate of abortions, just illegal and more dangerous. If conservatives were primarily pro-life, this evidence would cause them to change their mind. Does it make them rethink? Of course not. Being pro-life is a symbolic position representing conservative social order in its role as overt moral order.

This is an opaquely symbolic way of thinking and speaking. The best way to defend the social order is by disguising it as something other or more than what it is. The moment the social order is clearly seen, it can be openly questioned and doubted. The social order has to be taken as a given of reality in order for it to have power to persuade and inspire. The symbol must become conflated with reality and this conflation is of prime importance, the very heart of conservatism.

I can’t begin to explain how immensely this fascinates me. There is power in this that, as I’ve said before, goes way beyond anything liberalism can accomplish (which is meant as a compliment of sorts). As long as the conflation stands unchallenged, liberalism is pathetically weak (a definite criticism coming from my inner left-winger).

Many liberals don’t understand this or are afraid to speak truth to power. When social order is weakened, all of society becomes threatened by the possibility of change. Only the most radical revolutionary will embrace the new and different without trepidation. Liberals want to loosen up the social order, but they don’t want to pull out the lynchpin. This is why liberals can be more conservative than even conservatives, moderating the extremes. The reason conservatives rule to the extent that they do so is because liberals allow them.

Social order is a strange thing. It would seem even stranger that conservatives take social order for granted more than do liberals. I suppose this is the case because for conservatives social order always has to largely play out on the level of unconsciousness.

None of this is meant directly as a criticism of conservatism. Conservatism can be used in the service of beneficial social orders just as easily with destructive social orders. The deal conservatives and liberals have is the following. Liberals won’t do an all out assault on the symbolic conflation that holds social order together and conservatives will incorporate liberalism into the social order so as to strengthen it. Whether this is a good deal, whether this is symbiosis or codependency (certainly not opposing ideologies in a simplistic sense) is another matter. I offer it just as an observation and analysis of how  society seems to operate.

So, it is all comes down to social order. That is what all of civilization is about. The precariousness of civilization helps me understand the mysterious and hidden nature of conservatism. I have a basic respect for the function it serves.

I’ll end as I began with some questions:

Could civilization operate differently? Or could such ways of operating serve a new kind of social order?

Change and Acceptance: A Liberal-Minded View

I wish I could forget about politics and political divisions. But regularly interacting with my conservative parents constantly reminds me of how different my liberal-minded view can be. And this causes me to think about politics in very personal terms. 

I keep coming back to some basic truths about conservatives and liberals along with other related differences. I was at the moment focused on the issue of understanding that is informed by these respective ideological worldviews and how this makes communication challenging. Certainly, communication with my parents can be challenging at times.

I’d like to think that I’m slowly gaining in wisdom or something approximating wisdom. Over time, it has become clear to me how there are positives and negatives to all psychological traits, especially as they manifest in terms of ideological worldviews. This has caused me to become increasingly accepting and forgiving… or at least that is how I’d like to be. I’ve been trying to learn to just feel the frustration and let it ride.

Most importantly, I have no choice but to accept my own limitations in dealing with the limitations of others. No matter what I identify as, no matter how I may shift from time to time, I’ll most likely forever remain centered in liberal-mindedness. At this point, it just feels like who I am and I can’t easily imagine myself otherwise. It would be nearly impossible for me to shift into the full mode of the conservative mindset, although I do have enough experience with and tendencies toward conservatism to make it not an entirely alien reality.

Here  is my frustration. Even with some understanding, the bridge between the two predispositions can seem insurpassable. I sometimes think this bothers the liberal-minded more for we can tend to be over-sensitive bleeding hearts who just want everyone to get along. The conservative-minded seem more inclined to just assume that the liberal-minded are so clueless as to never understand their worldview, thus communication being impossible and cooperation undesirable. This can be hard for the liberal-minded to accept. Polarized partisanship may inspire the conservative-minded and mobilize the conservative movement, but it instead tends to depress the liberal-minded and immobilize the liberal movement.

I’ve noticed how the conservative-minded are more likely to see this difference as a moral difference, specifically those who are moral versus those who are immoral or amoral. It’s the typical dualistic thinking, this or that, right or wrong. This is not unusually portrayed as a battle with the moral imperative to fight and win. For many conservative activists, this is seen as a cosmic war of good versus evil where victory must be sought at any cost. For the fundamentalist, one’s mortal soul and all of humanity is at risk. The enemy, even if not entirely evil, isn’t seen as a worthy equal and so compromise is a moral danger not to be risked. Every step toward liberalism is one step closer to Godless Communism or some such thing.

The liberal-minded, on the other hand, tend to take a more emotionally detached approach, whether psychological or philosophical (more detached, anyway, from such emotions as fear and hatred). This emphasizes differences without judging them in as absolute of terms, seeing both sides as potentially having something positive to contribute. If there is a moral danger to be feared, it is the divisiveness that makes cooperation toward a shared vision beyond all hope.

One side is fighting a battle or else guarding their territory in preparation for war while the other side is simply confused about how to respond. The former mentality, specifically when in this reactionary stance, isn’t very open to sitting down and talking. It is only when the fear response is dampened that liberal-minded can satisfy their own approach because only then are the conservative-minded willing to accept terms of truce.

Fear is the determining factor, for both sides. When the social atmosphere is fear-ridden, two things happen. First, the conservative-minded can become even more conservative-minded which means not just resistant to change but reactionary. And, second, the liberal-minded can become more conservative-minded as well which means leftism as a movement falters and splinters while leftists either become radicalized to the point of being excluded from respectable company and/or become defensive  of that which the conservative-minded are reacting against.

Fear is only good for dealing with narrowly-defined threats such as immediate attacks by known enemies, problems that are short-term situations that require quick response, or situations that are localized so as to allow them to be easily defined and isolated. Fear is the most reactionary of emotions. It focuses the mind and prepares the body for action.

This is what conservative-mindedness is all about. Conservative-mindedness is defined by being low on the trait ‘openness’ and high on the trait ‘conscientiousness’. This adds up to a sense of focus and control. Research shows that conservative-minded traits are useful for clearly defined tasks and situations. The conservative-minded make good surgeons for they can focus intently while ignoring all distractions. They make good lawyers for they find it easy to deal with clearly worded laws and tangible precedents. They make good businessmen because success is so much more straightforward with either one making a profit or not, all other external factors being insignificant if they don’t add to or subtract from the bottom line. And they make good soldiers and generals in their ability to act quickly and decisively.

All of this relates to fear, whether fear of death or loss or failure or whatever. Problems arise for the conservative-minded when the situation is vague or complex, hence when fear and hyper-focus is an inadequate or unhelpful response.

Because of this, the conservative-minded will only feel comfortable and confident in certain situations and so they will constantly seek to create a society that conforms to their predispositions. This is why conservatives would love to create a society that is built around capitalism, the military, and/or fundamentalism. Capitalism is particularly clear in our society for conservatives perceive it in Social Darwinian terms where they seek to eliminate or weaken nearly all safety nets and so where one is driven to succeed out of fear of what would happen otherwise. Loss of status can be worse than death for the conservative-minded (and it is a good way to enforce social order in general). And so it is the fear of loss of status that makes life meaningful to them for that is their measure of morality and self-worth. Confrontation with fear strengthens the conservative mind or else just exaggerates it.

The strengths of the conservative-minded are clear. In those situations where they excel, they can utterly defeat the less aggressive and focused liberal-minded. And the conservative-minded are talented at creating the conditions for their success (also the conditions for the failure of their opponents). But their success doesn’t always translate into the success for the society they come to dominate (for this larger democratic society includes many potential ‘opponents’, including competion amongst the conservative-minded in their attempts to enforce their various and even contradictory preferred social orders).

The conservative-minded, however, don’t see it this way for their focused mindset only allows them to see what they choose to focus upon, all else being unnecessary or unworthy. The complex and diverse world of the liberal-minded simply doesn’t exist for them (heck, even the diversity among the conservative-minded isn’t ever fully acknowledged). They only see an issue or problem when it comes into their focus which means when it is no longer possible to ignore. Issues like global warming and economic inequality are vastly complex and so they seem unreal to them, mere abstract fantasies of the liberal elite.

This is a conundrum for the liberal-minded. Whether or not the conservative-minded see it, the problems of global warming and economic inequality remain as the reality we all face. Not even the most conservative-minded can ignore these problems forever. However, decades or even generations can go by before the point comes when the conservative-minded can no longer ignore them.

Here is the wisdom I’ve come to. All that the liberal-minded can do is repeat the truth and restate the obvious, over and over again, continuously and patiently. There is nothing else to be done. The liberal-minded has to accept that the conservative-minded will eventually come around, hopefully before it is too late. Either they come around or they don’t, but only reality itself can eventually force anyone to shift their focus. This is the Taoist approach to politics. Swimming against the tide is pointless and tiring. It is wiser to save one’s strength in order to use it when it can make the most difference. Timing is everything. If the conditions are not right, no amount of effort can make a difference.

This conflict of predispositions and worldviews isn’t essentially a moral issue, as the conservative-minded tend to think. Nor is it necessarily an issue of educating the public or reframing public debates, as the liberal-minded tend to think. It might involve all of those factors, but social change happens for reasons we don’t always understand.

This is where the understanding of a trait spectrum is helpful. It is best to remember that no one is entirely conservative-minded or entirely liberal-minded. The present responses we see from either end of the spectrum are situation-dependent. As the world changes, people shift, predispositions shift, ideologies shift, whole paradigms shift, etc. It doesn’t matter if the conservative-minded react against it or the liberal-minded try to force the issue. Reality always wins out in the end and one can only hope that one is on the side of reality.

Republican Liberalism

I was looking at two scholarly books about the history of American ideologies. Both books are fairly recent (2007 & 2008) and both bring up a similar viewpoint about the relationship of republicanism to liberalism. I’ve never come across this view before and so it made me wonder what caused two different authors to write about it at around the same time.

—-

The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America
by Michael J Thompson
pp. 2-3, location 208

“My basic argument is that liberal and republican themes were wedded in the American mind at the nation’s founding. Both viewpoints saw an intimate relation between power and property, if not coevality with each other. Liberalism was a doctrine of individual labor and, by extension, property, and it sought to give independence to individuals, smashing feudal relations of dependency that were predominate before the American Revolution. Republican themes emphasized the need for the institutions of the state to ensure that inequalities in property—and by extension, power—were kept in check. Within the context of an emerging commercial society bent on popular government, the theme of economic inequality was therefore central. Both liberalism and republicanism—two doctrines that have traditionally been seen as oppositional in previous literature on American political history—were actually seen as two sides of the same coin. Both sought to confront inequality of property and political power, and each saw that this was a central concern in eradicating the vestiges of feudalism that were at the heart of the birth of the American republic and modernity more generally. But the real essence of the story is that these two impulses begin to differentiate over the course of American history as the economic context develops. The evolution of capitalism begins to chart a course for liberalism at the expense of republican themes. By the end of the twentieth century, liberalism becomes co-opted by capitalism, and republican themes of the past fade into the background. The result is an overall acceptance or at least toleration of economic inequality and the gross differentials in political and social power it engenders in contemporary American politics and culture. I contend that this has led to a reorientation of democratic life in America and that as long as economic inequality and politics are held separate, a more vibrant democratic culture and consciousness will not be possible.

“Indeed, the success of neoconservative and neoliberal thought over the last thirty-five years has had the effect of redrawing the boundaries of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the loss in mainstream American political discourse of one of the most crucial veins of American political thought, which ran, until quite recently, like a roiling river at the heart of American life. This vein is the politics of economic inequality”

—-

Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns
by Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson

location 1685-1700

 

“Working with these orientations, proclivities, and tools, these thinkers and actors powerfully transformed republicanism into political liberalism but did so distinctively. Their pathways to a common outcome were not identical. The formation and crystallization of political liberalism was not the result of a single line of development. Nor can its origins be identified with a seminal thinker, or even with one lineage or sheer acts of substitution.

 

“[ . . . ] republican failure to identify and secure a stable and enduring political center in the space between radical Jacobinism and reactionary monarchism. This disappointment prompted her liberal inventions. It was her dissatisfaction with French republicanism’s violence, fanaticism, and dictatorship, as well as her fears that republicans could not end the Revolution, that impelled her to explore such new political formulations. Republican traumas, in short, motivated Stael’s liberalism.

 

“[ . . . ] These various paths converged. At their terminus, constitutional liberalism existed; republicanism no longer was a freestanding alternative, but it did not disappear. Republican values, sensibilities, and orientations have survived as deposits that fused with, and became integral to, liberal politics. In light of this history, some of the most familiar, and often pejorative, dichotomies in today’s political thought, including the right and the good, interest and virtue, individual and community, make little sense. These oppositions are new fabrications that do not accurately capture the rich historical and conceptual relations between the two traditions. They contradict the most prominent aspects of liberal beginnings.

 

“Further, both republican nostalgia and liberal purity are revealed to be false alternatives. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it became apparent that the republican model was radically deficient. So it is worse than ironic that some leading thinkers today counsel a resurrection of what even leading republicans two centuries ago transformed and superseded, and for good reasons. It is respectively discomfiting that a good many liberal advocates have distanced themselves from the lessons taught by key founders. By contrast with often abstract and philosophical exercises, the thick and sturdy liberalism fashioned within and against republicanism was open and syncretic, not closed and exclusive.”

Culture As Agent of Social Change

I’ve become aware of a particular conflict that hides a deeper issue.

There are the partisans who often promote the view of voting for the lesser of two evils or else they promote the personality cult of a particular politician, the idea being that the right party or the right politician can save us from the problems or at least save us from these problems getting worse. The critics of this are often the right-wingers and left-wingers who instead propose particular ideologies or direct action tactics in the hope that change has to be forced from a more outside perspective.

I’m thinking both are wrong. What keeps things the way they are has to do with cultural factors that go much deeper than either party politics or ideological systems. So, what can change these problems must go deeper. I don’t know what that means, but what I sense is that parties and ideologies only barely touch the surface. Culture is hard to talk about and that is probably why it is often misunderstood and even more often ignored.

I’m not even sure what I’m trying to communicate by my use of the term ‘culture’. I’ve been studying the cultures of immigrants and regions in the US. It’s clear that it is fundamentally culture that has defined this country and it’s clear that it is fundamentally culture that has determined the events of history. But all of this is easier to see in hindsight. What is happening now in American culture? Where is it heading? How can it be shifted from within toward more positve ends?

 * * * *

I can imagine what some political activists would think of my thoughts here. There is a certain kind of political activist who would see this discussion of ‘culture’ as basically metaphysical speculation. For them, politics is about action, about making things happen, about results.

I don’t exactly disagree, but I was just wondering if intelligent and effective action might be possible. Political activists have been trying the same basic tactics for a long time and they keep getting the same lackluster results. Simply getting attention for a protest doesn’t accomplish a whole lot and neither does getting your favorite politician elected.

It seems to me that something is being missed in all these political maneuverings and manipulations. I wish I could explain this better. I sense this ‘cultural’ issue is the most centrally important aspect to politics and society in general, but I don’t know if most people would understand what I’m trying to get at.

Culture is like the air we breath. It can seem intangible for the reason we are almost incapable of lookiing at it objectively. We are in it and so we take it for granted.

Anytime there is a massive shift in a society, especially in terms of politics, there is always a shift of culture that precedes it, sometimes preceding it for decades or longer. Cutlure usually shifts slowly and imperceptibly, but occasionally like a fault line a massive earthquake can occur when there are major realignments.

Here is the core question: Are we merely victims of such over-arching cultural shifts or can we control them to a certain extent? If we are victims to these underlying cultural factors, then we are victims to all of society and any political action becomes mere blind fumbling. But how to convince people to take culture seriously? Everyone on some level probably knows culture matters and yet few people ever give it much thought. Unless this changes, we will continue to be victims.

 * * * *

Most people think of culture in terms of the groups we identify with because of similarities. Politicians are always playing off of our cultural prejudices, conservative politicians seeming to be particularly talented at this.

This is culture as ideological identity, as groupthink. This is culture as race (whites vs blacks, whites vs minorities), as origins (native-born vs foreigh-born), as ethnicity (European vs Asian), as religion (Christian vs Muslim, Protestant vs Catgholic), as region (North vs South, East Coast vs WEst Coast), etc. Or else added all together such as WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

But this isn’t primarily what I’m talking about. This barely scratches the surface and oversimplifies even these superficial factors.

It’s true, as this view portrays, that culture relates to how we perceive ourselves and others in context of how we perceive our society. However, this just points to what we are aware of and only the elements that are obvious enough to be made into stereotypes. On the other hand, there is a more complex level of culture that underlies and shapes our perceptions, including our perceptions of cultural stereotypes.

As such, to change perception is to change everything. Our perceived choices and perceived actions would change. Our perceived relationships and perceived realities would change. We are all trapped in a reality tunnel or else many overlapping reality tunnels. We can’t see outside of a reality tunnel until we’ve shifted to a new rality tunnel and maybe not even then. To consider a shift of culture on this fundamental level is in a sense a metaphysical speculation, but it is metaphysical speculation that points toward metaphysical action, the shifting of our very sense of shared reality.

I’m speaking of cultural paradigms. What is the cultural paradigm that makes some particular social/political/economic system or lifestyle seem possible and desirable?

Socialism used to seem both possible and desirable to average Midwesterners earlier last century. In fact, it seemed so possible and desirable that a successful socialist government was created and maintained for decades in Milwaukee. But now average Midwesterners no longer think according to that cultural paradigm.

What changed and how? There was political oppression from the Cold War that destroyed that cultural paradigm and caused many of the defenders of it to become less vocal or less radical or else flee the country. However, the fundamental Northern European culture that made this cultural paradigm possible still exists and still functions to some degree. The social democracy of the Midwest is the remnant of this cultural paradigm. It is a seed that could again manifest as effective socialism once again. What is stopping it from doing so? There are people alive right now in Milwaukee who were alive when the socialists governed the city, some of these having been socialists themselves or somehow involved with the socialist government. What has become of this still living memory?

In desiring and seeking change, what are we missing or misunderstanding?

The War on Democracy: a personal response

I wrote in my previous post about democracy, specifically the war on democracy. Both that post and this post are a continuation of my thoughts in my other recent posts: Is Classical Liberalism Liberal?, Political Labels – Meaningless? Divisive?, and Bashing My Head Against a Brick Wall: Love of Truth or Masochism?. The war on democracy is, in the final conclusion, a war on liberalism. Conservatives are often unwilling to acknowledge that America is a democracy at all. They think by denying the word they can make the reality go away.

I’ve been trying to grapple with the issue of ideologies and labels which can irritate me immensely at times. As a liberal, I often feel misunderstood living in a country where conservatism is portrayed as the norm, although the polling data seems to show that Americans are way more liberal than most mainstream pundits and politicians would prefer. To be a radically idealistic, freedom-loving, bleeding-heart liberal is to be forever discontented with the status quo of established power and authority, forever discontented with the forgetting of history’s horrors which leads to its repeating.

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In my above mentioned previous post, I offered a simple answer to a problem often made complex by ideological debates and rhetoric. By offering that simple conclusion, I was questioning whether the problem actually was complex at all. Those with complex answers will seek to make the problem appear more complex than it is. As such, I was hoping to find the heart of the issue.

My basic point, in that previous post, was that democracy is more about people than politics, more about how humans can relate well to each other on the largescale of society. My suggestion was that, if we actually care about seeking solutions, we should begin with caring about people. Either you care about others or not. It’s that simple.

I’d also add that to the degree that you care about ideology (personal beliefs, political systems, religious dogmas, ethnocentric groupthink, etc) is the degree to which you don’t care about people. When we see people in terms of their place within society, as labels and categories, social roles and demographic data, as voters and citizens… when we see people as mere ‘other’, as strangers and foreigners, as objects and resources… when we see people as as ‘us’ vs ‘them’, as workers or unemployed, as rich or poor, as their religion or skin color, as part of or excluded from some group… when we do this, people become less in our eyes (and in our hearts). We lose our own humanity when we embrace labels and categories. And that is a very sad way to live one’s life.

This isn’t to say all labels and categories are always negative. They serve a function. In and of themselves, they are value neutral. However, labels and categories (when used without awareness and understanding) can easily lead to seeing the world through the filter of biases and preconceptions. This is how prejudice functions. Labels and categories are only dangerous when they are used in defense of an ideological worldview, a dogmatic reality tunnel.

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In the rest of this post, I will continue some of those thoughts but in the context of more personal experience and feelings, along with some complaints, questions and ponderings of a less personal nature.

I acknowledge that everything I have written applies to myself as well. I’m all too aware of that fact. I know that I don’t live up to my own hopes and ideals. I often feel the attraction of what is offered by ideological righteousness, by ideological labels and categories. I feel weak in my sense of self and in my experience of the world. I feel weak because I feel isolated, because I feel disempowered and disenfranchised. I don’t feel part of a community, that my life is integrally significant to the life of those I interact with on a daily basis. Even so, it may be true that I’m more rooted to the place I live in than many people (which, if true, is a sad statement about the lives of many people). I love this town where friends and family live, where I’ve spent much of my life (although with many intermittent years spent living elsewhere). But I always feel a bit disconnected, a blurring of the edges between myself and the world around me.

Modern life makes it more difficult to deeply connect (which causes many people to cling even more to artificial group identities). We have busy lives, each person isolated in their respective activities and goals. So many people spend their entire lives moving around from place to place… chasing careers, chasing dreams… seeking to escape the sense of dissatisfaction and unease that haunts the modern soul. I’m as much a product of the modern world as anyone else. I grew up in a family that moved on a fairly regular basis… and following that I moved around for a number of years.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to find a community to be a part of. I choose to live in this town where I’m surrounded by memories, a place that feels like home. During a period of my life, I sought to find my niche in this community. I went to many churches and found one I liked to an extent. I socialized and volunteered. I found people I connected with and made some new friends. But in the end the effort was too taxing for an introvert like me. It takes a lot of effort to try to create, almost ex nihil, a sense of community in the modern world. This town, for example, is a college town. It’s probably a majority of the population that either attends or works for the university and the university hospital. It’s a very transient population with very few people who were born here and lived their entire lives here. In a place like this, people come and go.

My life isn’t unusual and the town I live in isn’t atypical. Most cities in urban and suburban areas are to varying degrees like this town. Most people live in larger cities with transient populations and most people have moved a number of times in their lives. It’s just the social norm of modern life and of American society.

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This is the challenge we face.

Most of the evolution of the human species happened prior to modern society and so human nature isn’t designed to work optimally in large societies with concentrated populations. Well, to be more accurate, the problem didn’t just begin with modernism for the world we live in is merely the outgrowth of the first civilizations. The Axial Age religions were a response to the early urbanization of human society… which was when the human species first had to deal with the conflicts of cultural diversity, with the disintegration of traditional lifestyles, with challenges to ancient religious authority.

The reason Buddha and Jesus preached universal love and forgiveness,  unreserved acceptance and compassion for all (even strangers, even criminals, even prostitutes… heck, even the rich) is because the rise of civilization was stretching the limits of human nature. Humans are mostly just capable of identifying with and sympathizing with a very small group of people who they know intimately. In many ways, this is as true today as it was millennia ago.

However, humans didn’t stop evolving after civilization began. If anything, evolution quickened because civilization allowed the simultaneous mixing of diverse genetics and the concentrating of certain genetics. We can see the results of this today with the fact that liberals tend to gravitate toward cities and conservatives tend to gravitate toward rural areas. There is a theory that liberalism is a newer trait in human evolution which intuitively makes sense to me and which seems to accord with some data I’m familiar with.

A major difference between conservatives and liberals, as shown in psychological research, is that: (1) the former tends to respond with fear and disgust when faced with the new and different, the unusual and foreign (one particular study showed conservatives feeling disgust toward rotten fruit which, from a liberal perspective, seems like an oddly strong response toward such a harmless object); and (2) the latter is more open to new experiences, new ideas, new possibilities and, as such, more sympathetic to the plights of those perceived as being outside of the norms and standards of any given society (strangers, foreigners, criminals, drug addicts, the poor, and the homeless; those who challenge authority figures, those who don’t submit to traditional rules of behavior, those who are ostracized, and those who are considered to be at fault for their own problems).

There is nothing wrong with the conservative attitude in and of itself. In a traditional society, such an attitude was beneficial and even necessary. But such an attitude, by itself or in aggressive opposition, doesn’t serve us well in a global society and we presently have no choice but to live in a global society, unless someone wishes to either seek the destruction of civilization or else colonize space. Even the few remaining isolated indigenous people can’t avoid the effects of modern society in that they are forced to drink water and breathe air that has become polluted, forced to depend on food sources that become increasingly scarce, forced to deal with new and deadly diseases introduced by foreigners, and are forced to constantly retreat from encroaching poachers, loggers, farmers, miners, missionaries, soldiers, bureaucrats, and others.

All humans (of all persuasions, in all places) are forced to adapt to a changing world. There is no conservative paradise where everything is frozen in some idyllic moment in time.

The Axial Age prophets like Jesus preached an essentially liberal vision, and radically liberal at that. Jesus was a leftwing loon of his era. The Axial Age prophets taught that we should treat all others as we would want to be treated; that we shouldn’t judge others according to ethnocentrism, class divisions, and other social norms; that one’s spiritual family was more important than one’s traditional nuclear family (that the water of baptismal rebirth was stronger than blood). The liberal ideals of egalitarianism and compassion (i.e., bleeding heart liberalism) are at the core of all civilization because only such ideals can counteract the negative side effects of building a civilization. Unless civilization collapses and we return to small traditional communities, we will have to come to terms with these liberal ideals.

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This isn’t about liberal ideology defeating conservative ideology. I’m not saying conservatism doesn’t have it’s place, but I am saying that liberalism is increasingly necessary.

Even conservatives today are more ‘liberal’ than conservatives a few centuries ago. It’s all relative. Conservativism and liberalism exist on a spectrum which is always shifting. Conflict is only perceived when the middle of the spectrum is ignored and when history is ignored. The liberalism of one era becomes the conservatism of the next era. This is particularly confusing for American society. As Gunnar Myrdal explained, “America is conservative in fundamental principles… but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.”

American conservatives may be an extreme example, but they may not be highly unusual. Jesus challenged the conservatives of his day (the social norms, the political status quo, the traditional religiosity of Judaism, etc) and yet has been embraced by the conservatives of later generations. Once Jesus was dead, he was safe for being turned into an idol, sterilized of radicalism. Similarly, classical liberalism is safe for conservatives today because it’s an ideology from the past, i.e., a dead ideology. A liberal ideal or vision, if successful, eventually becomes a set of dogmatic beliefs or other ideological system. Once that happens, liberals leave it behind and conservatives will then defend it (as a defense against the next new thing that liberals seek out). As such, every conservative principle began as a liberal ideal because every tradition began as a challenge to a former tradition.

Liberalism ultimately isn’t ideological because ideology closes down the mind which is the opposite of the liberal impulse. Liberalism is the impulse toward ever greater inclusion, acceptance, and openness. This liberal vision is idealistic but it isn’t ideology. Jesus wasn’t preaching politics. In fact, Jesus put no faith in politics whatsoever.

Maybe this is why liberal ideals can be placed in the context of any ideology, including conservative ideologies. The liberal impulse, by nature, will seek to expand any ideology to be ever more inclusive. Even the most righteously dogmatic Christian fundamentalism can’t entirely obscure the radical vision contained in Jesus’ own words and actions. Christians, no matter their ideology, can be inspired by these ideals. Liberals don’t own these ideals. This liberal vision isn’t liberal ideology. Liberalism, as a general concept, is defined ‘liberally’ because liberalism is expansive, ever reaching beyond divisions, reaching even beyond the status quo of liberal ideology. There is no and can be no definitive explanation of what liberalism is in specific terms for liberalism challenges limiting definitions, all definitions being limiting to some degree. The moment a liberal vision becomes an ideology it becomes less liberal, i.e., more conservative (to defend an ideology is to seek to ‘conserve’ that ideology).

That is the power of the liberal vision which is an inclusive vision, aspiring toward inclusion of all people even conservatives. It’s the same as Jesus preaching a universal message that applied to all people, even those who weren’t his followers, even those who actively opposed him (i.e., forgiving one’s enemies). There is no greater, no more radical vision of liberalism than this. And the most radical liberal vision of all is anarchism, both political and epistemological anarchism, because this is the extreme endpoint of the liberal desire for liberation, for liberty. Jesus’ refusal to acknowledge any earthly authority was a form of anarchism.

In the larger sphere of society, this liberal vision is basically the same as what is called ‘social democracy’. You can make it complicated with theory and with specialized terminology, but the ideals of freedom and egalitarianism are very simple. Even a child can understand these ideals. Even a child wants to be treated fairly. Children tend to be natural liberals because everyone is born with an openness to experience, a desire to explore, an endless curiosity. A child is just being a good liberal when he endlessly asks, ‘Why?’ And, when given an answer, asks ‘Why?’ again.

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It might seem like I’m getting a bit abstract or speculative here, but this relates to the personal for me.

I’m someone with a liberal predisposition. I feel strongly and I empathize easily. I care about others, even random strangers on the street or in the news. I’m a bleeding heart liberal. I don’t want to live in a society of blame, of ‘us’ vs ‘them’. I intellectually can understand that those with conservative predispositions are less likely to see the world this way, but in my heart I can’t understand.

From my (biased) perspective, liberal values seem to be the only way we will avoid collective self-destruction. Sure, if civilization collapses, the human species can return to it’s conservative roots. But I would hope that even conservatives aren’t seeking the destruction of civilization merely because it would benefit the predominance of the conservative worldview. It’s true that, during times of societal conflict and violence, the conservative worldview becomes persuasive and hence popular. However, any conservative who promotes a vision of conflict or incites violence in order to achieve this end has become cynical to the point of utter moral depravity. I hope most conservatives are above such realpolitik games of hatred and fear.

Also, I’d like to believe that empathy and compassion aren’t merely liberal values. Everyone has some capacity for empathy and compassion… well, everyone except psycopaths. It’s not that conservatives are heartless, but research has shown that conservatism as a trait predisposes one to have less capacity for empathy and compassion (relative to liberalism as a trait)… or rather they have a more limited, narrow focus of their empathy and compassion, less empathy and compassion for those not perceived as part of their group. But are these attitudes inevitable and predetermined? Are people just born one way or another?

The question is whether people, all people, have the potential to develop more empathy and compassion. If we are fatalistically determined by our genetics and our early upbringing, then maybe our only or best hope is that there will be an evolutionary leap. The problem is we can’t exactly plan for and depend on an evolutionary leap happening. But how else will change happen in society unless some fundamental transformation happens within human nature? Isn’t such a radical transformation what was being envisioned, even prophesied by some, during the Axial Age? Is there a way that we as a human species can manifest on a global level our potential for empathy and compassion? Is Jesus’ inspiring message of love a real potential or merely an empty dream? Isn’t there a way conservatives can maintain their conservative values while also stretching the comfort zone of their ability to empathize and be compassionate toward others, especially those different than them?

The conservative impulse is to identify with their group, their religion, their tradition, their culture, their ethnicitiy, their nation, etc. There is nothing wrong with this per se, but I’d like to believe that this group identity can be expanded to include all humans. But do we have to wait for an alien invasion before we have an enemy ‘other’ that will force all humans to identify as a collective humanity with a collective fate?

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This is the problem I face.

I can, like Jesus, preach about love and compassion. But, as a liberal, I’ll mostly be preaching to the choir.

Is there a way to translate liberal values into conservative terms? Is there a way to translate conservative values into a larger and more inclusive global context? I don’t want to blame conservatives any more than I want to blame the rich. I don’t want to blame anyone, to exclude certain people or groups (because they are different, because they don’t conform to my values, because they don’t agree with my ideology). However, what am I to do if, as a liberal, conservatives want to blame and exclude me? And what am I to do if, as a working class person, the rich want to blame and exclude me? How does one persuade others toward an inclusive vision if their own vision opposes it? If someone doesn’t care about the poor living in slums or oppressed people living in developing countries, I can’t force them to care. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to care and not give into cynicism.

I hate this situation. It’s the eternal conundrum of being a liberal, the desire for universal values that transcend mere ideology… while, no matter what liberals desire, conservatives will still just see it as liberal ideology for the lense through which conservatives see everything is ideology. Liberals are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The desire to include those who desire to exclude you. The desire to treat others fairly and equally who don’t desire to return the favor. The desire to compromise with those who see compromise as moral weakness and failure. The desire for compassion even of those who choose prejudice and blame. Between openness and conformity, between idealism and ideology, why is it so often the latter that wins? I realize Jesus said my reward would be in heaven, but it would be nice to see a bit of heaven on earth.

I just don’t understand. Why are empathy and compassion often perceived by many as almost entirely exclusive traits of bleeding heart liberals? Why is unreservedly caring about others deemed to be a mere liberal agenda? And why do conservatives believe unreservedly caring about others will destroy society? Aren’t empathy and compassion traits found in all normal (i.e., psychologically healthy) people?

How can any ideology (whether religious, political or economic) be seen as trumping the basic human value of caring about others? How can conservative Christians continue to ignore Jesus’ message of love which, according to Jesus himself, trumps the oppressive Old Testament laws of hatred and divisiveness, of fear and vindictiveness, of blame and guilt, of retribution and scapegoating? Jesus never asked if the blind or sick person had the money to pay for being healed, never asked if people were deserving before he fed them, never asked if someone was to blame before dispelling the demons that were possessing them. Jesus simply acted compassionately in response to suffering. Jesus wasn’t acting according to ideology. Jesus wasn’t preaching about meritocracy or a free market, wasn’t preaching about constitutional republics or political revolutions, wasn’t preaching about traditional values and norms.

Why aren’t there bleeding heart conservatives? Why do compassionate conservatives seem lacking in compassion toward anyone who doesn’t conform to their own ideological agenda? And, when conservatives do help those in need, why is their attitude typically that of condescension and superiority as if the needy person should feel lucky that the well off conservative didn’t leave them to starve to death or to freeze alone under a bridge? Yes, I’m speaking of the extreme variety of conservatives, but I speak of them because this is also the extremely vocal variety of conservatives who vocally defend conservatism.

If we as a society are going to ignore Jesus’ radical message of love, then we should stop calling ourselves a Christian nation (not that Jesus would approve of nationalism in any form, especially not in his name). If being a Christian nation wasn’t mere ethnocentric nationalism and instead meant being a nation of love and forgiveness, a nation of acceptance and inclusion, a nation of helping the poor and needy, then maybe I (along with many liberals, atheists, and non-Christians) wouldn’t take such issue with this prideful labeling of America.

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It’s become increasingly clear, with events over the past decade, how interconnected is the global society. What one person, one group, one corporation, or one government does, effects people all over the world. We can’t continue to live pretending we are independent and isolated. We benefit and suffer because of the choices made by others. No one succeeds or fails simply based on their personal merits.

Poverty exists despite there being plenty of wealth in the world to allow everyone to live a decent life. Homelessness exists despite the resources being available to provide everyone basic shelter. Starvation exists despite there being enough food to feed everyone in the world. Many diseases continue to exist and proliferate despite there being known cures. The amount of money that the US government alone spends on international meddling (wars, military bases, CIA, propaganda programs, etc) probably would be enough to build schools, hospitals, health care clinics, and food banks in every city in the world. Most of the oppression and suffering in the world exists because of decisions made by other people, usually not by those who are oppressed and suffer. People born into poverty, homelessness, and hunger don’t deserve those conditions because of some personal failure. People living in war zones aren’t responsible for nations fighting over the resources that happen to exist in the ground beneath their homes. People born black in America aren’t to be blamed for the history of prejudice which is still being imposed upon them.

What we choose to do (what we buy, how we vote, who we donate to) or what we choose not to do (injustices we ignore, prejudices we accept, suffering we don’t seek to end) isn’t just a personal choice. Every action is public because the results of our actions are collective. We are forced to be responsible for each other, whether or not we accept that responsibility. If we walk past someone who is homeless or hungry, they remain homeless or hungry because we choose to allow such conditions to continue. We may not consciously realize we’ve made a decision, but that doesn’t change the fact that a decision was made.

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I’m complicit in all of these failings and problems. That is what pisses me off.

I want to live in a society of people who care. I want to be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem. It’s been said that we need to be the change we want to see. But I can’t get rid of the feeling that all actions seem futile, that nothing is ever going to change for the good. Despite all the superficial progress, the world just keeps getting worse in so many ways.

I’ve nearly lost all hope for the future, all faith in humanity. Part of me still wants to care and yet another part of me wants to give up. I just don’t know. What is the point? Change seems potentially so easy in that there is nothing stopping change besides ourselves (“We have met the enemy and he is us”). We are individually of no significance, but collectively almost anything is possible. The problem is that collective action too often is fueled by ignorance and fear-mongering, propaganda and herd mentality.

It may be true that, “United we stand, divided we fall.” But, even if united, are we united in anything worthy?

As someone raised as a Christian, how do I live up to Jesus’ radical vision?

As an American, how do I live up to Thomas Paine’s radical vision?

What can any of us do about such radical visions? What is the practical value of such inspiring idealism?

StartLoving3: Liberal?

I was recently blocked by a YouTube user (StartLoving3). I was surprised because I was subscribed to the person’s channel and enjoyed all the videos they posted. The video I had commented on was about WikiLeaks. I pointed out that I hadn’t heard any evidence that anyone had actually died because of the data released and StartLoving3 was outraged that I was defending the freedom of the press. I don’t always state my comments on YouTube in the kindest way, but in this incident I stated my comment very simply and without attacking. Another commenter even complimented on how fair my comment was.

StartLoving3 was so annoyed at my comment that he responded after blocking me. David Duke did that to me on his YouTube channel, but David Duke is a white supremacist. I expect white supremacists to act like cowards and run away from intelligent debate, but I hold liberals up to a higher standard. Going by the videos on StartLoving3′s channel, he seems to be as liberal as one can get. But, obviously, he isn’t my kind of liberal. His irritation at my comment (and maybe at the other commenter’s liking my comment) led him to take the video down entirely. It wasn’t enough to just censor my future comments. He had to erase my presence entirely.

I decided to send a message to StartLoving3, but I don’t think he’d receive it as he has blocked me. So, I thought I’d share it here.

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I was just visiting your YouTube page. I was wondering what type of person blocks another for making a point about the facts. Every video you post is exactly what I enjoy watching. We probably agree on 99.99999% of issues and yet you blocked me because you were hyper-sensitive about that 0.00001% of disagreement.

I always defend liberals as being better than conservatives. I often criticize right-wingers because they tend to block out what they don’t want to hear, but it isn’t what I expect from a liberal. I think of liberals as people who are always willing to listen to facts, always willing to try to understand. I made a rational argument based on facts. I asked for evidence and you blocked me.

That is the type of thing I expect from an anti-intellectual right-winger but not a true liberal. What gives? It truly bewilders me. How are you making the world a better place by shutting down dialogue? How are you any better than those you disagree with?

You seem like someone who cares which is why I feel so surprised. Right-wingers often shut out opinions they disagree with and facts they don’t like because they’re stuck in an ideology reality tunnel. I realize some liberals, even if not the majority, can get stuck in ideology as well. Is that what you see your role as? Being an ideologue?

If people like you shut out and attack those who agree with 99.99999% of what you believe, then what hope is there? Does every person have to agree with you 100% or else you think they’re worthless? They just seem like a very liberal attitude? Could you imagine a world where you only ever heard viewpoints that you already agreed with?

I honestly must admit you’ve shaken my faith in liberals. I always thought liberals were better than the kind of behavior your demonstrating. I thought the one thing that distinguished liberals was that we don’t hide in ideology. Am I wrong about liberalism? Is the type of world you want to create one where people can’t have intelligent discussion and possibly learn something new by hearing a different perspective?

I was just visiting your YouTube page. I was wondering what type of person blocks another for making a point about the facts. Every video you post is exactly what I enjoy watching. We probably agree on 99.99999% of issues and yet you blocked me because you were hyper-sensitive about that 0.00001% of disagreement.

I always defend liberals as being better than conservatives. I often criticize right-wingers because they tend to block out what they don’t want to hear, but it isn’t what I expect from a liberal. I think of liberals as people who are always willing to listen to facts, always willing to try to understand. I made a rational argument based on facts. I asked for evidence and you blocked me.

That is the type of thing I expect from an anti-intellectual right-winger but not a true liberal. What gives? It truly bewilders me. How are you making the world a better place by shutting down dialogue? How are you any better than those you disagree with?

You seem like someone who cares which is why I feel so surprised. Right-wingers often shut out opinions they disagree with and facts they don’t like because they’re stuck in an ideology reality tunnel. I realize some liberals, even if not the majority, can get stuck in ideology as well. Is that what you see your role as? Being an ideologue?

If people like you shut out and attack those who agree with 99.99999% of what you believe, then what hope is there? Does every person have to agree with you 100% or else you think they’re worthless? They just seem like a very liberal attitude? Could you imagine a world where you only ever heard viewpoints that you already agreed with?

I honestly must admit you’ve somewhat shaken my faith in liberals. I always thought liberals were better than the kind of behavior your demonstrating. I thought the one thing that distinguished liberals was that we don’t hide in ideology. Am I wrong about liberalism? Is the type of world you want to create one where people can’t have intelligent discussion and possibly learn something new by hearing a different perspective?

Ye slaves, find yer own ways

Below is a video of Noam Chomsky. I’m simultaneously intersted and irritated by his message. There is a strength in this attitude, but also a weakness.

It’s interesting because the view expressed is so representative of the liberal attitude. A conservative pundit would feel no wariness about telling people how to live their lives. Limbaugh fans proudly call themselves Dittoheads because they see Limbaugh as a hero to be parroted and Limbaugh encourages this Dittohead attitude of his followers, but Chomsky says he doesn’t even tell his kids what they should do.

This is such a simple distinction in how people think and behave. Still, it’s profound in its implications on the societal level. It’s why the apparent hypocrisy of some rightwingers can confuse liberals. To the far right mindset, consistency isn’t necessarily inherent to the system of thought but to the authority or tradition that is the foundation of the system of thought. As such, strange as it seems to liberals, patriotic fervor and secessionist paranoia aren’t mutually exclusive in the minds of many conservatives.

Furthermore, if a rightwinger considers a source of data as not valid according to some principle or dogma (which comes from a source they trust), then it’s dismissed even if it’s accepted by many respectable people in society. For example, climatology research is dismissed because scientists are liberal elites. It’s not that the rightwinger has alternative data of equal weight and merit, but what they do have is a collective mindset that sees the liberal elite as the enemy.

Social conservatives would criticize Chomsky’s attitude as moral relativism. Chomsky is essentially saying that there is more than one way to be in the world, more than one way to understand the world. To the liberal, this means offering someone else respect in the hope of gaining at least mutual tolerance. Chomsky is saying that there are no easy answers, nothing is black and white. Like Michael Moore, Chomsky motivated by a moral sense that makes him resistant to judge others even if he thinks they’re wrong or misinformed. Moore said he would never say he hated Bush and similarly Chomsky chastised his fellow liberals for being critical of Tea Party protesters.

My criticism is that this liberal reticence (and the conservative lack thereof) has often led conservatives to dominate the political and cultural dialogue. On the positive side, liberals prefer more subtle means of communication such as art and entertainment. In the longterm, I do think the liberal method is very effective, but it demands great patience.

Online Debates: Ideology, Education & Psychology

Internet discussions more often than not drive me bonkers.  I’ll mention some data and immediately someone will question and criticize the data.  If they’re a more worthy opponent, they’ll ask for specific sources.  I usually comply and then add even more data just to further support my argument.  The other person may offer data too, but they rarely cite the data and it’s even more rare for them to offer multiple sources.  Most “debates” never get past mere opinionated nitpicking.

I mentioned one example in a previous post.  I gave specific data and quotes from specific sources and framed it within the larger context of scientific consensus… and the other person acted like it meant nothing at all.  As a person who respects facts, I find it odd that many adults (who are potential voters) have such a dubious relationship to facts.  If someone shares facts with me that prove I’m wrong, I accept my being wrong and I do further research to better inform myself.  This attitude of intellectual humility and curiosity seems not to be shared by many people… or at least not many people I meet online which may or may not be a representative example of the American public (but if I had to guess, I’d think that the average internet user is more intelligent and better informed than the average non-internet user).

I just experienced another example.  This one was on Youtube and it was also about the scientific consensus of climatology experts.  Youtube has very limited word count for comments which makes intelligent debate a bit constrained, but I was up for the challenge.  I first mentioned some facts withou citing them, partly because Youtube doesn’t allow comments with url addresses in them.  Some person questioned the validity of my data and offered some other data which they didn’t cite either.  I felt lazy and didn’t want to try to figure out where he was getting his data, and I wasn’t in a mood for debating to any great extent.  So, I just offered the url addresses (by replacing the “.” with “DOT” which Youtube allows) of several scientific articles and Wikipedia articles (and the Wikipedia articles cited many scientific articles). 

My “debate” partner responded by saying that what I was referring to wasn’t peer reviewed and I assumed he must be talking about the first set of data I mentioned.  I had been looking at this data recently and I knew it came from the University of Illinois, but I didn’t know if it was or wasn’t peer reviewed.  I did a quick websearch and found it had been peer reviewed.  This is so typical.  If you look at people’s nitpicking, it is often unfounded.  I suppose people like this just hope you won’t actually check it out for yourself.  Why would this person lie to me just to try to win a debate?  It only took me maybe a minute or so to disprove his claim.  Does this person normally get away with such lies?  Are most people unwilling to check the facts for themselves?  Do most people not know how to use a search engine to find information quickly?

The ironic part was this person said the media is always lying.  So, I pointed out to him that, whether or not the media was lying, it appeared that he was lying or else uninformed.  He never responded back to further challenge me nor to admit to being wrong.  His only objective was to “win” the debate at all costs.  When it became apparent he wasn’t going to “win”, he simply abandoned ship.

I have an online “debate” like this probably on average of once a week (sometimes less when I’m not in a commenting mood).  I don’t go looking for idiots.  It’s just that the idiots are often the ones most willing to brazenly challenge any opinion (no matter how factual) that disagrees with their opinion.  To be fair, there are also many reasonable people online.  My experience, though, that the line between idiotic and reasonable often becomes rather thin when it comes to political and religious ideology.  Even when faced with the facts, few people are willing (or able?) to change their mind.

Why is this?  I’ve studied psychology enough to realize that humans are mostly irrational creatures, but I’m constantly amazed by how irrational certain people can be.  I seem unwilling and unable to accept the fact that most people aren’t capable of intelligent debate.  Part of me thinks that if I present the facts in a fair manner and make a reasonable argument that I can expect the same in return.  Apparently, I’m the irrational one for feeling frustrated by the inevitable irrationality of human nature.

But I do have reason for my irrational hope for rationality.  I occasionally have very intelligent debates with people online and these people even sometimes change their minds when offered new information… I even change my mind sometimes when presented with new information by an intelligent person.  Most often these people seem to be more liberal, libertarian or independent-minded. 

I’ve found that the only subjects that regularly attract intelligent conservatives are economics and sometimes philosophy/theology, but these are subjects that aren’t as easily determined factually according to scientific research (including psychological research).  Conservatives tend to argue more from a perspective of principles that they support with historical examples.  To conservatives, the past is where they look to verify a theory or claim.  I guess that is fine as far as it goes, but it makes for difficult debating because the attempt to understand principles and history is easily swayed by subjective biases.

For example, many libertarians and fiscal conservatives like to talk about free markets.  The problem is that it’s almost impossible to ascertain what this means.  The idea of a “free market” is highly theoretical if not outright idealistic.  No free market has ever existed.  Furthermore, no free market could ever exist because it’s merely a relative label of a market being more free than some other market.  There is no ultimate freedom of markets.  So, these debates lead off in all kinds of directions such as referencing “experts”.  The issue I have with experts in fields such as economics is that expertise is much more subjective in that there is less hard data.  Many of the economic models that have been relied upon have been proven wrong.  It’s almost impossible to scientifically study markets in that confounding factors can’t be easily controlled.

But even intelligent libertarians sometimes are wary of actual scientific data.  Libertarians don’t trust government.  Since scientists sometimes get government grants, scientists can’t be entirely trusted either.  For some reason, libertarians think corporate sponsored scientists would be more trustworthy.

Conservatives in general are more mistrusting of objectivity.  I’m not quite sure what is the reasoning behind this.  Some intelligent conservatives I’ve met actually agree with me about humans being irrational and that seems to be their reason for mistrusting objectivity, but this is a more intelligent argument and probably doesn’t represent the opinion of average conservatives.

To be fair, the smartest people of all probably are independents.  From the data I’ve seen, independents (and the American public in general) are socially liberal and fiscally conservative.  The question is which is the cause?  Do smart people tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative?  OR do social liberals and fiscal conservatives tend to be smart?  Or is there a third causal factor?  MBTI iNtuition and FFM “openness to experience” correlate with testing high on intelligence and correlate with high representation in college.  Also, these psychological functions/traits correlate to liberal attitudes, but I’m not sure how they may or may not correlate to fiscal conservatism.  (There is a nice site about politics and psychological types: http://www.politicaltypes.com.)

Some of the most intelligent debaters will be the MBTI NT types (iNtuition Thinking).  I know that INTPs tend to be self-identify as politically independent and I suspect the same would be true for INTJs.  NTs probably either vote with Democrats for reasons of social liberalism or with libertarians for reasons of it being a third party, but I some NTs might vote Republican for reasons of fiscal conservatism or else for reasons of principles.  I’m not sure how many NTs vote Republican, but polls I’ve seen show that ENTJs are more conservative (probably because TJ – Extraverted Thinking – is their primary function).

So, I can presume that most often, when I’m enjoying an intelligent discussion, I’m probably interacting with a socially liberal iNtuition type.  I don’t know what good this knowledge does for me.  Maybe it helps me to be more forgivng (this person sure is stupid… it’s too bad they were born that way). 

To be more optimistic, psychological research doesn’t show that most people fit in absolute categories.  Most people can learn non-preferred thinking styles and learn to develop weak traits.  Education should teach people how to use all parts of their mind.  The fact that so many people lack critical thinking skills is a failure of our education system and shouldn’t be blamed on individuals.  College favors iNtuition types.  Most professors and college-level teachers are iNtuition types and most of the coursework is more appealing to iNtuitive types.  It’s hard for a strong Sensation type to do well in traditional schooling.  Who can blame them that they don’t go to college or have bad experiences at college?  Who can blame them for falling prey to the notion that college is controlled by liberal elites?

Considering that the MBTI shows Sensation types represent the largest portion of the population, it is quite sad that our education system has the hardest time reaching this category of person.  Sensation types don’t have as much natural talent for abstract thinking and critical thinking.  Sensation types are better with concrete information and concrete learning.  Too much of higher education deals with abstractions and theories.  Dumbing down higher education isn’t the answer.  I think we should have more alternative routes of education. 

When I was in highschool, my best friend was very much a Sensation type who took many alternative classes involving technology.  He was good working with machines and with computers, but he wasn’t extremely smart in terms of intellectuality.  Alternative classes served him well in terms of preparing him for a job in the real world.  The potential criticism, though, is whether he was prepared for being a well-rounded and well-informed citizen.  I suspect not.  The highschool I went to didn’t require students take classes in logic and critical thinking.  The classes in general seemed rather dumbed down.  Unless you were taking college prep classes, you wouldn’t be intellectually challenged.

I feel frustrated.  I don’t want to blame the average person for not being well educated, but I do feel pissed off that our education system has failed these people and so created an intellectually inferior society.  Even news reporting seems dumbed down for the masses.  Shouldn’t the education system and the media, instead, serve the ideal of uplifting the masses by informing them?

Even with intelligent people, I think the education system has often failed.  College is less focused on providing a liberal education and created well informed citizens.  College has merely become a career path.  Many have talked about the problem of specialization of knowledge.  People go to college only to become isolated in some particular field and outside that field they may be largely ignorant. 

People, whether well educated or not, seem less capable of understanding the larger context.  Maybe it’s always been that way.  If so, I hope it’s changing.  I probably shouldn’t expect the education system to do anything more than create good workers… as that seems to be its primary purpose.  My hope is more in the realm of media technology.  The traditional media has been failing for a long time, but the new media has been very successful.  The most well informed people are those who use the new media to inform themselves.  And, because of the new media, the uninformed (be they the average public or the average politician) can no longer spout misinformation without being challenged.

So, to return to the original topic of online debates, maybe a purpose is served by all of the ideological conflict found in the forums and comments sections around the web.  The people who weren’t educated well in school get confronted, whether they like it or not, with new information and with actual critical thinking skills.  Some people might just become even more ideological in response, but many others will learn to be more intelligent debaters.  Even debates where people deny expert opinions may serve a purpose in that a discussion then ensues about the definition of ‘expert’.  The question about the new media is whether the positives will outweigh the negatives.  The uninformed have the opportunity to become even more polarized and entrenched in their views by isolating themselves in forums of the likeminded, but those who want to be informed have more opportunity than ever to do so… and there are many in the middle who are neither extremely ideological nor extremely motivated to learn.

My hope is that the internet remains an open resource and open platform for public debate.  My other hope is that the internet my force the education system to improve by offering both teachers and students to become more well informed.  Students now no longer have to solely rely on the information given by teachers, and teachers no longer have to solely rely on the information that was given to them when they were students.