Left is Left, Right is Right: The Emotional Political Spectrum, Part III

Over the past few days I've claimed that our political beliefs are not based on rationally-derived policy preferences, but rather on moral worldviews--on our emotional preconceptions about the world. I proceeded to abstract these worldviews into less metaphorical statements of cognitive preference:

1. The right prefers moral systems with statically defined, objective rules. 
2. The left prefers moral systems with dynamically defined, subjective rules.

I'd like to conclude these introductory posts on emotional politics by evaluating the potential benefits and pitfalls of each approach. 

In Moral Politics, George Lakoff spends the final third of the book developing his argument for the superiority of the left's "Nurturant Mother" ideal.  Lakoff founds his final argument on evidence that a nurturant worldview is rooted in a more empirically accurate account of human behavior. He may be right, but I think his approach risks getting lost in the details of his own metaphor. 

I won't make a similar attempt here.

But I would like to spend a little time discussing what kind of thinking these different approaches will tend to generate. Let's start with the left.  

The Left: Pragmatic and Unprincipled


The left's subjective approach has some clear benefits. It allows for highly contextual thinking in rapidly changing systems; it acknowledges the difficulty of organizing society around objective principles when society's objective conceptions of truth are both diverse and nebulous. It acknowledges that many societal goods (particularly those goods deeply embedded in social systems) are difficult to delineate in logically formalist terms. 

In more concrete terms, the left's moral worldview can make sense of the fact, for instance, that an individual's inability to afford healthcare right now may not be an appropriate measure of that individual's worth to society over their lifetime. The left (rightfully, in my view) views prices, particularly in tricky sectors like healthcare, as subjective approximations of value, not objective determinations of value. But this same sort of thinking can also get the left into trouble. 

Recall the 2008 Presidential election. We saw the debate over healthcare framed as "healthcare as a right" versus "healthcare as a privilege or responsibility." Here's then-Senator Obama: 

Obama, like most of the left, sees healthcare as a right. Me too. But there's some haziness embedded in this definition. If healthcare is a right, how much healthcare is a right? Almost everyone on the left agrees that some level of healthcare should be guaranteed, but we cannot believe that everyone should be given more healthcare at any time at any cost. We don't have an objective standard for the "right" amount of healthcare. We're content to approach healthcare with a subjective feeling about what constitutes a "fair" level of guaranteed care provision; we're content to dive in, to start tinkering, confident that we'll recognize our error if we go to far. 


And maybe we will. But healthcare provision stands as a situation where the left's pragmatism risks mutating into a lack of principle. And for a right which anchors its worldview on objective moral standards, this ad hoc approach to societal organization must feel terrifying. 


The Right: Principled and Dogmatic

(Yeah, that's Jesus driving the money changers from the temple. Lefty-as-charged. But mostly just looking for public domain images to give the blog some color.)


The right's objective approach has some equally apparent benefits. Using an objective, unquestionable, moral foundation, the right can build a view of society that features impressive internal coherence and unmatched efficiency of thought. Objective standards, which we can think of as "assumptions," are fundamental to human thought. It's useful (vital even) to assume the truth of Newtonian gravity in daily life, even if we know it's a technically incorrect assumption. 


Of course, the danger here is treating an assumption as an eternal truth. Internal coherence does not equate to external validity. And here's where the right gets in trouble. What moral standards are truly objective? Divinely inspired truth (unless it's The Divine Perspective, of course) doesn't work in a world with diverse conceptions of the divine. The libertarian account of natural rights tends can easily become a simple restatement of libertarian policy preferences (why is this particular set of rights somehow "natural" and true? No, a Lockean thought experiment isn't a good answer). 


The right is prone to arbitrarily defining certain ideas as objectively true and then riding them into the grave. The market may be the most useful institution ever created by man, but why should we treat its outputs (prices) as morally infallible? 


Finishing Up  


I think these modes of thought appear clearly in our less thoughtful insults. 


The left likes to attack the compassionate character of its enemies: "What, you don't think poor people should have an education? What, you think my uninsured grandma deserves to die?" We base our conception of immorality (and of the right's failure) on a lack of empathy and compassion. At our worst, we imagine that only a lack of compassion could explain deviation from our ideals. 


The right, meanwhile, likes to pretend that its enemies have violated some immutable moral code. Detractors from a libertarian worldview are enemies of liberty itself. Detractors from Christian (or Muslim, or whatever) morality are enemies of God. Folks who question the righteousness of the American political tradition hate America. 


Perhaps a successful human species depends on some optimal mix of both ways of thinking. Lefties to keep the right thinking, righties to ground the airy-headed left. I'll conclude with this suggestion from an evolutionary perspective: 

The underlying reason for the eternal conflict between Republican "individual rights" and Democratic "we're all in this together" is explained by a radical and magisterial theory of evolution outlined in Edward O. Wilson's groundbreaking new book The Social Conquest of Earth. Wilson, who has dominated evolutionary thinking for the past 40 years, has synthesized a lifetime of work into a "theory of everything". Greatly simplified, his argument is that two rival evolutionary forces drive human behavior: first, individual selection, which rewards the fittest individuals by passing along their genes; and second, group selection, in which the communities that work best together come to dominate the gene pool. Wilson argues that these two evolutionary forces are at work simultaneously, so that both self-serving and altruistic behaviors are constantly competing at the individual and at the group level. As he explains, "Members of the same group compete with one another in a manner that leads to self-serving behavior .... At the higher level, groups compete with groups, favoring cooperative social traits among members of the same group." In other words, individuals with self-serving behaviors beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of individuals with self-serving behaviors.

Extending this evolutionary theory, two competing forces are at work within the political organism: the "Republican genotype," which favors individualistic behaviors, and the "Democratic genotype," which favors altruism. Both forces are simultaneously at work at the individual and group levels. Different individuals -- and different groups -- will respond more or less to each of these forces depending upon the political and economic environment. The physiological differences between Democrats and Republicans in fear response, anxiety, etc., are simply symptoms of these competing genetic influences, and not the root cause of their divergent political beliefs.

[...] 

Wilson's theory of group and individual selection also accounts for the fact that political parties wax and wane in strength and influence, but that neither faction ever achieves total dominance. As he states, "The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressure cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies."

In other words, Democrats and Republicans are not two sides of the same coin, but rather different parts of the same genome. One cannot dominate the other, nor can either live without the other. Like it or not, the two parties are condemned to coexist with one another.