Watching this past week’s edition of Bill Moyers and Company, How Do Conservatives and Liberals See the World, I was amazed at how much leeway Moyers gave his guest, Jonathan Haidt. The installment titled, Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture, shed some light on possible reasons for our present philosophically polarized condition but left unanswered many questions. So as an explanation of “our contentious culture” it served to provide a theory to attempt to explain the cause but only---well, sort of. There was much that Mr. Haidt had to say with which I agreed but even more with which I completely disagreed. Knowledge of history causes some of Mr. Haidt’s assumptions to completely unravel.
Of course I understand that he’s the social psychology professor and not I. However, well thought out, researched, analyzed and documented push-back goes a long way toward calling into question some of the assumptions of the interview. Back to that in a minute.
It seems this past week’s group think or collective think (provided you don’t count those inclined to conservative dogma) centered around this nation’s elections, public policy, social ideology and/or philosphy. In addition to Moyers and Company Arianna Huffington wrote a piece titled “Beyond left and right.” The essence of her article is that the traditional concept of left and right politics only serves to polarize. Arianna’s explanation echos what I’ve been blogging for years, that is, that our two right of center major political parties are tailor-made for the tug-of-war we have and have had. It is the quintessential “divide and conquer.”
Another point of view titled The 99 Percent PlanThe progressive vision America needs ---Only a strong alternative to free-market ideology can solve our economic and political woes was presented by Salon’s “K. Sabeel Rahman a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a PhD candidate in Political Theory at Harvard University, and a JD candidate at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on progressive political thought, economic policy and public law. The essence of his discussion is that hey, the mess we have now doesn’t work. I agree. But it’s not that capitalism doesn’t work, it does. It works great for one-percenters---just not for the 99%.
Indeed we are at a point in the century when there is much impetus for change.” Some positive and some not.
There is a strong sense of a systemic push for something different, for change. No, not President Barack Obama style change but real, volatile, grassroots change brought about from anger, discontent and a tolerance pressed to the limit. And it’s not the first time in the history of this nation that its citizens have attempted to change the system. Think of it as our own “Arab Spring” times over---only to be thoroughly quashed by one-percenters every bit as brutal as anything Syria’s Bashar al-Assad can dish out.
It has been said by historians and scientist alike that there is more change in the first ten years and the last ten years of a century than in the rest of the entire century. The balance of the century simply tweaks and modifies the new brought to light by decades that are at polar ends of the century and yet contiguous to one another.
This score of years serve as a period of innovative thought. The balance of the period seems so serve only for rumination, often to little purpose.
Mr. Moyer’s guest, Jonathan Haidt provided a brief explanation of how it is we got where we are today. At the heart of Haidt’s explanation is that Boomers are of a Manichaean mindset that understands life in terms of good and evil.
According to Haidt, “there are three major historical facts, or changes, that have gotten us into the mess that we're in. So the first is the realignment of the South into the Republican column, which allowed both parties now to be pure. So that now there are basically no liberal Republicans matching up with conservative Democrats. So, the parties are totally separated. The second thing that happened was the replacement of the Greatest Generation by the Baby Boomers.”
The “Greatest Generation” according to Haidt “had a sense of civic responsibility”, “participated in the democractic process”, “at the end of the day, they felt they were part of the same country…”
Then he says the “Greatest Generation” was replaced by the Boomers who gave the nation, the infighting and dichotomy of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
“BILL MOYERS: So we get through the culture wars. Fights over abortion, prayer in schools. And that conflict becomes very polarizing.
JONATHAN HAIDT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: And that's because of the Baby Boomers, and-
JONATHAN HAIDT: Well, the Baby Boomers, I think, are more prone to Manichaean thinking.
BILL MOYERS: Manichaean thinking. Good and evil.
JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right. Manichaeus was a, I think, third century Persian prophet, who preached that the world is a battleground between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness. And everybody has to take a side. And some people have sided with good, and of course, we all believe that we've sided with good. But that means that the other people have sided with evil.
And when it gets so that your opponents are not just people you disagree with, but when it gets to the mental state in which I am fighting for good, and you are fighting for evil, it's very difficult to compromise. Compromise becomes a dirty word.
[Moyers plays a short clip of an interview between House Speaker John Boehner and Leslie Stahl in which Boehner cannot bring himself to use the word “compromise” choosing instead “common ground.”]
JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right, that’s right. Because once you've crossed over from normal political disagreement into Manichaean good versus evil, to compromise, I mean, we say, you know, his ethics were compromised, you don't compromise with evil. Now, I think it's especially an issue for Republicans because they are better at doing, sort of, tribal team based loyalties. The data we have at yourmorals.org shows that conservatives score much higher on this foundation of loyalty, groupishness. And the Republican, I mean, which job would you rather have in Congress? The Republican whip or the Democratic whip? You know?
BILL MOYERS: Right.
JONATHAN HAIDT: The Republicans can hang together better. And part of it is, they're better at drawing bright lines and saying, ‘I will not go over this line.’
BILL MOYERS: So the Greatest Generation disappears. The Boomers come along. The Civil Rights fight divides the country. And the third one?
JONATHAN HAIDT: The third is that America has gone from being a nation with localities that were diverse by class, in particular, let's say. You had rich people, and poor people living together.
It's become, in the post-war world, gradually a nation of lifestyle enclaves, where people chose to self-segregate. If people are concentrating just with people who are like them, then they're not exposed to the ideas from the other side, from people that they can actually like and respect. If you get all your ideas about the other side from the internet, where there's no human connection, it's just so easy, and automatic to reject it, and demonize it. So once we've sorted ourselves into homogeneous moral communities, it becomes a lot harder to work together.”
If so, the question is why? What makes this possible? Is this what serves to explain Rick Santorum fairly useless victories in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota?
Haidt’s explanation may serve to provide one explanation of the philosophical pattern of the past two generations but completely ignores the history of centuries of oppression by this nation’s one-percenters.
The professor also ignores the fact that our two party system is tailor-made by the one-percent for this type of philosophical “tug-of-war.”
Perhaps Mr. Moyers chose not to go there because--- well it could easily stir Mr. Haidt’s inner reptilian brain.
From Texas Red: a cratered landscape of prisons, deplorable apartheid public education, lack of healthcare and politicians and majority population intent on keeping it that way…
Hasta Siempre,
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