What’s the Frequency Lakoff?
It’s religious emotion, not language, that dooms Democrats.
Will Wilkinson
[Read the explanation of this post.]
The Berkeley linguist George Lakoff was a semi-famous academic when he walked into a retreat of Democratic senators in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2003. He walked out as one of the most popular gurus in politics. Hillary Clinton wanted to do lunch. Tom Daschle invited Lakoff to come to D.C. for further schooling. By 2004 he had Howard Dean, noted screamer and future head of the Democratic Party, penning an enthusiastic forward to his pre-election manifesto, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Lakoff’s claim? Reagan-loving pols win because of their masterful manipulation of language, not their substantive appeal; with supercharged “framing” Democrats can win, too.
Despite Lakoff’s sage instruction, Bush won a second term, and the GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate. The post-mortem to the 2004 presidential election showed that “moral values” were the “most important issue” for a plurality of voters, and that of those most moved by moral values, a whopping 80 percent punched their ticket for George W. Bush. That would seem to be more a matter of substance than style and a point against the idea that Republicans are winning simply because the mind of the hoi polloi has become a plaything of spellbinding word wizards like the Lakoffians’ demon of choice, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. A small but vehement anti-Lakoff movement has arisen among Democratic commentators, with scathing critiques last year by Kenneth Baer in The Washington Monthly, Marc Cooper and Joshua Green (separately) in The Atlantic, and Matt Bai’s damning New York Times Magazine profile, which noted that Don’t Think of an Elephant had become “as ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao’s Little Red Book once was in the Forbidden City.” But despite the licking, Lakoff’s linguistic false consciousness doctrine keeps on ticking.
However, as Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in another Lakoff takedown in that appeared in the New Republic, Lakoff’s theories are both bad psychology and bad politics, and the one plays into the other. A better diagnosis of the Dem’s trouble with “moral values” voters might help them claim future victories based on more than Bush fatigue and scandalous instant messages to teenage pages. And better ideas are out there: if liberals take a good hard look at what separates them emotionally from most flag-waving, churchgoing Americans, they can better address their weaknesses.
In his new book, Whose Freedom: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, Lakoff dusts off his greatest hits and argues that “The conservative dominance of political discourse has been changing what Americans mean by common sense.” According to Lakoff, the post–Great Society welfare state embodies to near-perfection the “traditional” American conception of freedom. Right-wing newspeak threatens to destroy the real freedom we proud Americans cherish, or would cherish, if only our minds had not been colonized by right-wing newspeak.
Lakoff gets reinforcement from fellow Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, author of the maximally subtitled Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freakshow. Though Nunberg, to his credit, rejects Lakoff’s poorly supported theory that all thinking is based in metaphor, they agree on the root cause of the Democrats’ slump. “[T]he left has lost the battle for language itself,” Nunberg writes. “When we talk about politics nowadays…we can’t help using language that embodies the worldview of the right.” If “values voters” tilt right, that’s just because the word “values” has itself become loaded with conservative connotations.
Disappointed Marxists used the idea of “false consciousness” to explain why the oppressed workingman failed to rise in revolt with outrage at his exploitation; his mind had been hijacked by enemy propaganda. False consciousness explanations are powerful—so powerful that anyone can trot one out in a pinch to explain why people who don’t seem hypnotized would nevertheless affirm what the sane and upright despise. Fox News and conservative talk radio would go dead if they couldn’t wheel out the alleged leftist death-grip on academia, Hollywood, and the mainstream media to explain the otherwise inconceivable existence of anti-war protesters, practicing homosexuals, and legal fetus-killing. Nunberg and Lakoff’s tricked-out linguistic versions of false consciousness are barely better. Democrats interested in winning must surrender this disreputable redoubt of desperation and aim at an account of their woes that is more “reality-based.”
Even doggedly ill-informed voters sometimes notice bad results, and the Democrats may be able ride Republican incompetence and corruption to power. But in case the entire GOP doesn’t pull a Ralph Reed, Democrats should face up to the likely possibility that voters are rejecting the content of their message, not just the style. Maybe heavy unionization, comprehensive regulation, high taxes, free-flowing welfare, lax policing, and a passive military posture would have been unpopular in Topeka with or without linguistic shenanigans.
More than just helping Democrats escape the hard truth about unpopular positions, the linguistic mindwarp thesis also blinds the Democrats to their problem relating to voters on crucial non-linguistic frequencies. If they’ve got to have a guru, Democrats should enlist Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who specializes in the moral emotions, and whose innovative research offers liberals—and libertarians, too—a better picture of their problems.
Working in the emotion-centered tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, Haidt’s research leads him to posit five psychological foundations of human moral sentiment, each with a distinct evolutionary history and function, which he labels harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. While the five foundations are universal, cultures build upon each to varying degrees. Imagine five adjustable slides on a stereo equalizer that can be turned up or down to produce different balances of sound. An equalizer preset like “Show Tunes” will turn down the bass and “Hip Hop” will turn it up, but neither turn it off. Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment, and justification. If you’re a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and ingroup pushed up to eleven. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned ingroup way down and harm way up.
Denizens of liberal democracies tend to be relatively tuned in to harm and reciprocity—concerned with suffering, violations of autonomy, fairness, and justice—while less sensitive to the tribalism and xenophobia of ingroup, the class-bound inequality of hierarchy, and the sense of the sacred and profane wrapped up in purity. That this pattern of sentiment is broadly shared is largely what it means for a society to be liberal.
Haidt’s studies, which involve confronting subjects with often bizarre moral scenarios (there is plenty of material about incest and dead animals) and evaluating their responses, suggest that while Democrat-leaning liberals draw almost exclusively from harm and reciprocity, Republican-leaning conservatives draw more from the whole range of moral emotion. “Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns,” Haidt and collaborator Jesse Graham write in a forthcoming paper for Social Justice Research. “When conservatives talk about virtues and policies based on the ingroup, hierarchy, and purity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves,” Haidt and Graham’s term for imaginary transmissions from space.
Most intriguing is the possibility of systematic left-right differences on the purity dimension, which Haidt pegs as the source of religious emotion. In a fascinating chapter in his illuminating recent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt explains how a primal biological system—the disgust system—designed to keep us clear of rotten meat, expanded over our evolutionary history to encompass sexual norms, physical deformations, and much more. Haidt asks us to “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggy-style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” Disgusting? No doubt. Immoral? If your thought is, “Well, they’re not violating anyone’s rights,” then, Haidt predicts, you probably didn’t vote for Bush.
The flipside of disgust is the emotion Haidt calls “elevation,” based in a sense of purification and transcendence of our animal incarnation. Cultures the world over picture humanity as midway on a ladder of being between the demonically disgusting and the divinely pure. Most world religions express it through taboos of food, body, and sex, and in rituals of de-animalizing purification and sacralization. The warm, open sense of elevation and the shivering nausea of disgust are high and low notes in the same emotional key.
Haidt’s suggestion is partly that morally broad-band conservatives are better able to exploit the emotional logic of religiosity by deploying rhetoric and imagery that calls on powerful sentiments of elevation and disgust. A bit deaf to the divine, narrow-band liberals are at a disadvantage to stir religious Americans. And there are a lot of religious Americans out there.
According to the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, Americans are more religious than citizens of every liberal democracy except Ireland. A recent study by three University of Minnesota sociologists, Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, found that Americans trust spiritually insensate atheists less than Muslims, immigrants, lesbians, and probably even the French when it comes to “sharing their vision of American society.” Pew Research Center surveys show that church attendance now predicts Republican and Democratic voting patterns better than income or education. And some of us, like presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the miraculous Mormon Republican former governor of Massachusetts, grew up believing that Zion is just east of Kansas City. Legions of Americans have the sense that Jesus smiles upon the Constitution, that tiny unborn babies breathe the breath of God, and that the body is a temple drugs defile. Few religious Americans hesitate to speak of America as God’s own land, even if they don’t think the New Jerusalem is in Missouri.
The much-vaunted “values-voters” were casting their ballot for a man with a broad-band religious morality, like theirs. When George Bush says “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world,” people who feel this to be true know he’s tuned in, too. But when Al Gore says, “I believe that God’s hand has touched the United States of America,” they hear Al Gore expediently aiming to prove his spiritual qualifications for the presidency. That’s a real, deep problem that has nothing much to do with language. The liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias gets to the heart of the matter when he advises that “Democrats who don’t believe marriage is between a man and a woman but who feel they ought to pretend to believe this in order to win elections…need to do a better job of pretending.” But they’d be better off if they didn’t need to fake it in the first place. When it comes to the emotional politics of divinity, narrow-band Democrats are outgunned. Opportunistic fag-bashing and strategic God-talk won’t cut it.
Is the narrower morality of liberalism a form of moral retardation or enlightenment? That’s a question that also breaks along ideological lines. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder,” says the conservative Leon Kass, former head of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, in defense of what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance”—the moral authority of the digust-purity dimension of feeling. But the liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book Hiding from Humanity, argues that though emotions such as anger or fear sometimes embody reasons we can offer to others as legitimate justification for action, disgust is uniquely inarticulate, implying no real reason beyond itself, and so is unfit as a basis for persuasion and policy in an open, pluralistic society.
Tens of millions of Americans are viscerally disgusted by gay sex and therefore see the marriage of Adam and Steve as the debasement of a sacred rite. Nussbaum, and others who share her characteristically liberal style of feeling and justification, wouldn’t count that reaction as an argument at all. But that doesn’t stop tens of millions who dwell within the emotional reality of the sacred and profane from being completely persuaded by it. As Nussbaum notes, there is little hope of reasoning them out of it. An America less fueled by religious feeling—one that tuned down the purity dimension to Danish levels—might be a more just America. But you don’t start with the voters you’d like to have.
What, then, are Democrats to do? (And what about libertarians, who tend to have even more tolerance than the average Democrat for godless debasement?) Democrats can try to appeal to religious American voters by giving some ground in the culture wars. But it seems unlikely they will find an effective balance. There is no point conceding stuff too trivial to really matter, such as school prayer, and comically pretending to be moved by the pure and the foul. And there is even less point in nominating religiously convincing candidates who really do believe embryos have the spark of divinity, that gay is gross, etc. Socialized health care isn’t worth it.
Democrats should play to their own moral-emotional strengths, not apologize for not having different ones. Haidt’s early research on moralized disgust shows that its cultural manifestations vary. The Japanese apparently find it disgusting to fail their station and its duties. And here at home, formerly “repulsive” practices, such as interracial marriage, have become mere curiosities.
Despite its political salience, American religiosity is eroding. Inglehart’s and Norris’ research indicates that America, like Europe, is becoming more secular over time, “although this trend has been partly masked by massive immigration of people with relatively traditional worldviews, and high fertility rates, from Hispanic countries.” We may be stuck with our voters, but not with the configuration of their moral sensibilities. And despite all those Republican majorities, the margins are thin; if swing voters were that keenly attuned to their religious sentiments, they’d be Mel Gibson fans, not swing voters.
Democrats shouldn’t cater to and reinforce sensibilities that both hurt people and hurt the Democrats’ prospects. Religious doctrine and religious feeling can and have been trimmed and shaped over time to accommodate the full plurality of liberal society. Illiberal patterns of feeling bolstered by religious sentiments, like disgust for homosexuality, can be broken through slow desensitization, or a shift in the way the culture recruits that dimension of the moral sense. In dynamic commercial societies, this happens whether we want it to or not. But we have something to say about how it happens. The culture war is worth fighting, one episode of Will & Grace at a time, if that’s what it takes.
Liberals must understand the profundity to others of feelings that are weak in them, but shouldn’t pretend to feel what they don’t. They can lead as well as follow. And it remains true that all Americans, conservative and liberal alike, are wide awake to the liberal emotional dimensions of harm and reciprocity. The American culture war is about how thoroughly the liberal sentiments will be allowed to dominate. If a thoroughly liberal society is worth having, liberals will have to spot the points of conflict between the liberal and illiberal dimensions of the moral sense, drive in the wedge, and pull out all the rhetorical stops—including playing on feelings of quasi-religious elevation and indignant moral disgust—to make Americans feel the moral primacy of harm, autonomy, and rights. When the pattern of feeling is in place, the argument is easy to accept.
Haidt can’t help Democrats with their lousy economic policy, but he can at least help them see where much of their problem lies. Democrats’ problem isn’t the Republican lock on semantics; it’s the Republican lock on illiberal sentiment. But Democrats simply will not win a contest of religious emotion, no matter how dazzling the “framing.” Their best long-term hopes rest in moving the fight to a battlefield with more favorable terrain.
Perhaps Haidt’s most significant contribution is helping liberals of all stripes see that liberalism is not a mere intellectual commitment, but a condition of the soul, a condition to be proud of—one that puts us at a far remove from tribalism, caste, and theocracy. The culture war is real. It’s a war over the calibration of our moral sentiments, and mere “messaging” won’t win it. Democrats ought to buy George Lakoff a gold watch, send him off to the home for superannuated gurus, and start boning up on the new science of moral emotion.
—
Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
September 19th, 2007 10:35
[...] post below is a review essay I wrote for Reason in Fall 2006 loosely related to George Lakoff’s Whose [...]
September 19th, 2007 12:54
Great post!
It’s important to see that Liberals (of all stripes) need to develop a more broad-band approach to the liberal ethic, rather than arguing for the superiority narrow-band liberalism. (Though this does bring up tough questions about public discourse, etc.)One can be a political liberal and still have a robust account of the virtues and human flourishing. What we need is the right blend of Aristotle, Mencius, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek.
September 19th, 2007 14:56
According to “When morality opposes justice:
Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize” http://www.chicagocdr.org/papers/haidt%20paper.doc
“Most conservatives (with the exception of some economic conservatives) therefore embrace the ethics of community, and are morally opposed to the extreme individual freedom promoted by a pure ethics of autonomy….”
How about a little love for economic conservatives?
September 19th, 2007 15:04
Begs the question where the different settings of the five dimensions come from. Why should America be so different from Denmark or other western countries (except Ireland apparently)? It can’t be that 75% of Danes are born without the purity-disgust gene and 75% of Americans are. The distinction has to be learned and this implies culture so we are back at Lakoff. If the dial settings have changed over the last 40 years then what made them change?
September 19th, 2007 15:05
He is basically talking about libertarian types there, I think. In terms of Haidt’s schema, many libertarians and “economic conservatives” are simply liberals who are economically literate.
September 19th, 2007 15:18
Do liberals really have lower purity and disgust levels? What about things like pesticides or oil companies that elicit religious levels of disgust?
September 19th, 2007 15:28
8 has a point. Haidt’s work reminded me of how things like veganism can powerfully tap into the purity dimension. Also, think of how identity politics can tap into the ingroup dimension. Hardcore lefties are broad-band too, I guess.
September 19th, 2007 15:42
8, Yeah, on average they do. I think one of the important lessons of Haidt’s work is that we should expect all these dimensions to be doing SOME work in all people’s worldviews. I think your very good point about environmentalist types is more a point about where to place people on a map of political views. I’d prefer simply to define “liberal” in terms of its distinctive moral sentiments. To the extent that environmentalists are purity obsessed, or labor unionists are all about ingroup solidarity, then to that extent they aren’t liberal.
September 19th, 2007 15:52
Your post seems wrapped as advice to Democrats, yet provides only an explanation rather than a strategy. Of course libertarians like you and I think socialized health-care isn’t worth it, but what do progressives think?
I’m glad you started talking about Haidt after I mentioned him here on your blog. I’ve got a post on my own blog about Haidt’s Edge piece. On a somewhat related note, my latest is about how breaking down the ties that bind communities, including shared values, can be a good thing.
September 19th, 2007 16:07
Lakoff’s original analysis in “Moral Politics” is still sound, though I can’t speak for “Don’t think”.
Liberals - the old-fashioned kind - correspond to the “nurturing parent” family model, while conservatives correspond to the “strict father” family model. What’s happened since 1972 is that the Democrats have become more like the caricature of the “Nurturing parent” - the “indulgent-permissive parent”, and the Republicans have capitalised on that. It’s not just a matter of framing - Democrat policies and the policies successfully pursued by elements of the liberal coalition (NAACP, ACLU, etc) really have made liberal *policy* match the indulget-permissive model. Meanwhile, Democrats have tried to tar Republicans with following “authoritarian-abusive” model, but while there are authoritarian-abusive Republicans in power, here and there, Republican *policy*, and the policy successes of elements of the conservative coalition, are not seen by the public as authoritarian or abusive.
Meanwhile, liberals have cried (authoritarian) wolf so often, that even when some Republicans in power do seem to follow that pattern more than the “strict father” model, people mostly ignore them.
Strict fathers are, however, supposed to be competent, and Bush’s failing in Iraq (even supporters of the war question his competence in carrying it out) made the Republicans look like they’d failed at being “strict fathers” - and so people who could be swayed to the Democrats were in 2006.
September 19th, 2007 16:16
Ok, so now it looks like we’re just creating definitions that don’t seem to map to the things the words normally refer to. It seems to me that we should be using “liberal” to refer to the group of people who currently self-identify as “liberal”.
I think that modern liberals tend to have many of the same types of moral sentiments as the religious, but they apply them in non-traditional areas. They look for purity in environmentalism, different boundaries for thier ingroup, different conceptions of justice/reciprocity, different authorities, etc. But the intensities of these sentiments are just as strong for them.
It seems to me that most of Haidt’s description of liberals really applies more to classical liberals (libertarians) than to modern liberals (leftists).
September 19th, 2007 16:39
Great post. This is the stuff I come here for.
Gil,
Will (or Haidt) may paint with somewhat too broad a brush, but, while liberals as currently defined certainly have plenty in the way of moral sentiments, they just tend to be, more often than not, along different dimensions that conservatives. I would say, for example, that most environmentalists are motivated by the harm dimension, not purity.
I would agree that Haidt’s description applies MORE to libertarians than liberals, but then Will said as much.
September 19th, 2007 18:22
It’s possible.
And, it’s possible that the liberals I read and speak to are not representative. But my impression is that the intensities in the purity, ingroup, and hierarchy emotional dimensions are very high; just (as I said) not focused on traditional targets.
Is it your impression that most environmentalists are generally open to cost-benefit analysis (just trying to minimize harm)? Do they react well to Bjorn Lomborg’s arguments?
September 19th, 2007 20:53
Something is unclear: is the disgust/elevation response especially tied to the purity mode? As you and other commenters have suggested, the disgust response seems to appear in whatever foundation is intensely held. Personally, I feel physical revulsion at scenes of great suffering and/or cruelty, as I’m sure many do. And I’ve known authoritarians to have irrational, uncontrolled, disgust-like responses to rebellious behavior or even nonconformist haircuts.
Second, many liberal religous people will claim that their religious emotions are activated primarily along the harm and reciprocity axes. I think in general, people will understand their religious emotions as extensions of their moral emotions. I’m not sure I want to concede “religion” to conservatives just because they have different moral emotions.
September 19th, 2007 21:01
Agreeing with 12, Haidt’s methodology relies on individuals self-reporting their moral logic, so its largely an indication of who has been socialized to believe what. Liberals may have simply been socialized to talk only about the harm and reciprocity scales, while conservatives are socialized on all the scales.
Lakoff’s point seems to be actually reinforced by Haidt. It could be that individuals are drawn to whatever political party best matches their moral configuration, irrespective of what the actual positions are. “Disgust” voters want to hear about unnatural acts — gay sex or genetically modified food. “In-group” voters want to hear about group solidarity — unions or anti-flag burning amendments. It’s not so much that they care about those issues as they are convinced that the world would be better off if everyone was forced to adopt their private arrangement of moral logics, and the issue itself is not a problem outside of the fact that it has been made into an exemplar of the violation of a particular moral principle.
Finally, you can’t paying very close attention to accuse Lakoff of promoting “false consciousness”. I think he explicitly rejects that in “Thinking Points”.
September 19th, 2007 21:04
Gil,
Well … I think that much of the objection to cost benefit analysis is a combination of fear that the process will end up being corrupted (e.g., non-economic but real costs ignored) and/or that a lot of the most catastrophic risks are hard to quantify properly. By maybe I’m projecting.
As for the rest, I suppose that to the extent that you are correct, that may be one of the reasons why I’m moving in a libertarian (albeit left libertarian) direction. But my own experience with liberal friends and acquaintances is somewhat different than yours. And my current biggest exposure to liberal is in the blogging world; the liberal I read are disproportionately the ones whose world view I find most congenial, and hence the ones that fit Haidt’s results.
September 19th, 2007 21:19
Thank you, very thoughtful read. It produced both resignation and hope for me in this continuing struggle to understand this polarization we have going in this country. I consider myself moderate but have to go back to the EQ to check my settings…
September 19th, 2007 22:22
If you’re a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and ingroup pushed up to eleven
Do you, or does Haidt, have any non-immoral examples of moral thinking along dimensions that aren’t harm and reciprocity?
jenny
September 19th, 2007 22:35
“Their best long-term hopes rest in moving the fight to a battlefield with more favorable terrain.”
You unwittingly restated Lakoff’s thesis in his real book on the subject, “Moral Politics”. Having read Moral Politics and having sat in on a Lakoff seminar on the subject, I am continually amazed how the critiques of Lakoff continue to have little understanding of what the man was actually saying. I imagine they are relying on “Don’t Think …” which was poorly written and way too dumbed down and thus easily misunderstood.
So back to the quote above. That was Lakoff’s main point. Framing was mainly about making people think of Democratic values when they hear values. Make them think in moral and emotional terms when deciding to pull the lever for democrats, which is pretty much what Haidt seems to be saying. I’ll have to check him out. In the meantime, I suggest Will check out Moral Politics and then revisit this interesting post.
September 20th, 2007 00:42
I’m not religious, but I must have some of that disgust/elevation emotion myself. Because whenever I hear Lakoff arguing that ANY parent — be it a “nurturing mother” OR a “strict father” — is a good metaphor for government, I want to puke.
September 20th, 2007 02:21
[...] Wilkinson says Jonathan Haidt “posit[s] five psychological foundations of human moral sentiment, each with a [...]
September 20th, 2007 02:51
Does this mean President Hillary will be able to command all the wingnuts to submit to her authority?
September 20th, 2007 11:47
Will, I think you badly misunderstand most pro-lifer’s motivations. There might be some people out there who are thinking in terms of disgust, but the much more dominant note is harm. The Silent Scream is a movie about harm. The fight over partial birth abortion is a move to focus the debate on harm.
You seem to feel disgust at the impurity of pro-lifers (if your sneering references “embryos having the spark of divinity”) is any indication. But that isn’t what motivates us.
September 20th, 2007 12:39
[...] Will Wilkinson — What’s the Frequency Lakoff? Most intriguing is the possibility of systematic left-right differences on the purity dimension, which Haidt pegs as the source of religious emotion. In a fascinating chapter in his illuminating recent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt explains how a primal biological system—the disgust system—designed to keep us clear of rotten meat, expanded over our evolutionary history to encompass sexual norms, physical deformations, and much more. … [...]
September 20th, 2007 12:52
–”An America less fueled by religious feeling—one that tuned down the purity dimension to Danish levels—might be a more just America. But you don’t start with the voters you’d like to have.”
–”disgust is uniquely inarticulate, implying no real reason beyond itself, and so is unfit as a basis for persuasion and policy in an open, pluralistic society.”
Hmm. If only we had these silly ideas about transcendence removed from our decision-making, then we’d really have something. Why would anyone want to be disgusted at something like unfair taxation or slavery based on morals from some made-up god? We didn’t really need emotion to inspire people to fight in the Revolution or the Civil War. An open, pluralistic society would have seen by virtue of “pure” reason that these ills do not an efficient society make.
September 20th, 2007 18:51
Art D0dger at #19 - I understand the sentiment. Unfortunately, Lakoff appears to believe it, too, even though Moral Politics started off being descriptive. I’m fairly certain that descriptively, he’s right - most people really do conceptualize the relationship between government and citizen using some family metaphor or another, or several, inconsistently. You and I and Will can argue until we’re blue in the face that it’s an imappropriate metaphor, but we won’t win elections that way.
September 20th, 2007 21:25
Anthony,
We won’t win major elections for a long time, anyway.
But, it’ll be longer if we don’t encourage as many people to adopt a metaphor for government closer to “night watchman” than “mommy” or “daddy”.
September 21st, 2007 01:02
“If a thoroughly liberal society is worth having, liberals will have to spot the points of conflict between the liberal and illiberal dimensions of the moral sense, drive in the wedge, and pull out all the rhetorical stops—including playing on feelings of quasi-religious elevation and indignant moral disgust—to make Americans feel the moral primacy of harm, autonomy, and rights.”
Is it just me, or does this sound like Will’s advising more Michael Moore-like behavior?
September 21st, 2007 08:29
[...] http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2…; [...]
September 21st, 2007 14:24
JWill,
I agree that it looks bad.
But, on the other hand, if most people are built so that they’re shielded from arguments by their emotional armor, then it seems like a legitimate tactic to appeal to their emotions so that we can get past the blockade, and get a fair hearing of our arguments.
That doesn’t seem like manipulation to me.
September 21st, 2007 23:51
That was really thoughtful and informative - thank you for writing.
I’m not a libertarian, so I’m curious how the “slides” would work for one who held up anarcho-capitalism as an ideal. The following remarks are just guesses: Would someone of that type be more accepting of “harm” as something that would create incentives for others, or toughens one up? (I don’t mean this in a bad way - I’m thinking of the logic of the “Death Wish” movies).
“Ingroup” seems like something that would not register (i.e. “Starship Troopers”). Reciprocity as a sentiment might mean an enormous amount - one would have the right to be ungrateful, but the bonds needed for enterprise generally could mean that people need to recognize what is fair and unfair in their most essential dealings.
“Hierarchy” and “purity” are where I really get tripped up. I’m not clear how “hierarchy” is a sentiment distinct from “ingroup,” and positing an anarchist society seems to throw “ingroup” and “hierarchy” away at the same time for me, and thus a flag is raised. Then again, I’m just guessing at how these foundations work. Also, can’t “purity” be defined as a species of harm?
In any case, I guess I have two questions going: how do the sliders work for a libertarian, and if some of the foundations can be seen not-quite-so distinct from the other foundations, can a reasonable electoral strategy be to recast one’s ideas in terms of the relevant passions?
You seem to hint at this latter idea very strongly when you mention the “moral primacy of harm, autonomy and rights” - the repugnance at gay marriage is nowhere near as great as the repugnance of crime against gays for most conservatives. That can be played upon to give left-leaning and libertarian parties an advantage (of course, exaggerating a threat can also work to one’s detriment). Harm and reciprocity could be said to be at work in a greater vision of purity, where moral conservatives see themselves as classic liberals first, and therefore concede rights rather than see others be hurt by a climate of prejudice needlessly.
I realize this comment is all over the place, but any thoughts you have would be welcome, I’m still trying to sort out everything you said.
October 2nd, 2007 16:35
Here’s Pinker vs Lakoff
January 13th, 2008 12:57
[...] My unpublished essay on Haidt and politics, here. [...]
April 8th, 2008 12:28
[...] Recently, I was talking to Bryan about Jon Haidt’s (author of The Happiness Hypothesis) happiness research. I didn’t realize that the New York Times had just done a write up on Haidt’s research about morality. The Times piece is a really good overview but if you really want to get a good sense of Haidt’s work on disgust, then Wil Wilkinson’s (policy analyst at Cato) piece is a must read. From Wilkson’s article: [...]
May 30th, 2008 14:03
>Democrats should face up to the likely possibility that voters are rejecting the content of their message, not just the style.
Uh, it looks like exactly the opposite is true:
http://trueconservative.typepad.com/trueconservative/2008/05/pubs-and-dems-brands-and-beliefs.html
June 8th, 2008 12:50
[...] the psychology of morality! This was fun because I’m a huge Haidt fan. Here’s my unpublished essay written for Reason on why Democrats should pay more attention to Haidt and less to guys like [...]
June 9th, 2008 06:08
I’m a little skeptical of some of the ingroup claims about liberals and libertarians. Good college educated liberals can be very accepting of a bonobo like culture but may blanche at a purity father-daughter dance held by religious conservatives. I’m curious how well Haidt’s work takes into account the liberal problem of tolerating everyone except the intolerant. It’s hard not to see the “ingroup” (perhaps “outgroup” is a better word) processing in Will’s gleeful description of liberal democracy destroying the radical islam. (I’m gleeful too).
Great couple of podcasts, and I hope that you can keep mining the last questions regarding liberal culture.