I like the distinction between reflexive and reflective. I think people of all ideologies are more prone to reflexive reactions to one another when they don’t understand where morality and political persuasion comes from. If we could “spread the wealth” of knowledge about this then there’d be a little more reflection going on, and a little less reflex reaction, and things would improve. This may seem naïve, but stranger things have happened, so I ask; Why not?

I wonder, though, if reflexive/reflective is more prevalent in conservatives. It seems to me this is simply a human thing, common to all in equal measure. Do you have resources which show one side more prone to this than the other?

Sowell is great.

RE: “Conservatives are also easy to attack because unlike liberals they have nothing resembling a coherent philosophy about how the world works or how the world should look.”
Why do you say this? I don’t see it.

Conservatism is straightforward and easy to understand. It is the morality/ideology of seeking balance between the individualizing foundations of care/fairness/liberty and the cohering foundations of loyalty/authority/sanctity. Conservatism innately understands that it is, in fact, impossible for the individual bees to thrive unless the hive of society is healthy too.

Liberalism is the morality/ideology of care/fairness/liberty, and of those mostly care. It largely rejects the other three foundations; it seems them as tools of oppression against the individual.

I’m not saying anything polemical here. This is purely descriptive. As far as the latest research, data, and findings of academic social science is concerned, this seems to me to be pretty much a settled question.

If I were to hazard a theory as to why conservatives are easy to attack I’d say that it is because of moral dumbfounding from both sides. Moral dumbfounding is “the strong feeling that something is wrong without clear reasons as to why that is.” http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-04/23/jonathan-haidt-interview

“Imagine, if you will, a man going to a supermarket, buying a ready-to-cook chicken, taking it home, and having sexual intercourse with it. He then cooks it and eats it.

Or imagine a brother and sister who go on holiday, and end up sleeping together. They feel that it brings them closer, and are very careful with birth control so there’s no absolutely chance of pregnancy.

Don’t worry if you found these stories sick and wrong — most people do. But trying to pin down what exactly is wrong with these stories can be tricky. No one is harmed, the food isn’t wasted, the siblings are happy, yet it’s somehow still wrong. This is “moral dumbfounding’, the strong feeling that something is wrong without clear reasons as to why that is. According to Haidt, this offers a deep insight into human morality, and has profound implications for politics and religion.”

The “from both sides” part is where, I believe, Haidt misses the mark. He attributes it almost exclusively to conservatives, but clearly it happens at least equally on both sides, if not much more on the liberal side.

Dumbfounding on the conservative side falls along the lines of, “Do I really have to explain to you why that is bad? You can’t see for yourself?”

Dumbfounding shows up on the liberal side in their bafflement about conservatism. Liberal moral radar is, for the most part, working at half capacity; it “sees” only three of the (at least) six moral threat detectors. In the sense that perception is reality, conservatism is pretty much external to liberal reality. The result is that liberals are dumbfounded in their attempts to “get” conservatism, and are left with essentially only one way “to pin down what exactly is wrong” with conservatism, which is to ascribe it to some sort of psychological or cognitive disorder.

First, as I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe that conservatism is not about resistance to anything.”"

This conflict in how to view conservatives is probably at least in part due to there being both reflexive conservatives and reflective conservatives. Reflexive conservatives are the kinds of people who lament the passing of vinyl and CD’s and the closing of music stores because of iTunes, and talk about how they are sad their children are going to lose out on having the experiences they did with discovering music at the local music store. Reflective conservatives are like this guy.

Conservatives are also easy to attack because unlike liberals they have nothing resembling a coherent philosophy about how the world works or how the world should look.

Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that so many of these papers seem to strive to understand conservatism as if it were some sort of anomaly, some sort of curious diversion from the norm?

No, not at all, why would it? To the authors of such papers conservatives may as well be Martians as far as their understanding of conservatives go.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine that every instance of the notion of conservative “resistance to change” that you (and everyone else) has ever read had instead been represented as conservative “respect for experience.” Don’t you think the world would have a much different collective understanding, a much different “conventional wisdom,” about conservatism? I do.

But finding truth isn’t their goal. Self-congratulations and status-whoring are the goal. Mission accomplished I would say.

I’m not so sure. But then, maybe it’s me who is slow on the uptake.

The Larry Summers thing did occur to me. The same sort of thing is happening now to Tom Nagel. It’s the cover story in the current The Weekly Standard: The Heretic – Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?.

It’s also happening to Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock now on TED. Check this out.

Here’s a different blog that gives background and sort of a history of the Sheldrake Hancock thing: TED’s Spectacular Fail: Ideas Worth Suppressing.

It sorta did happen to Haidt when he called out his own profession for being what he calls a tribal moral community. He has a whole page on his home page dedicated to the talk, the controversy it stirred, and research on both sides of the debate. One of his comments: “One of the most interesting aspects of the controversy has been the vitriol shown in the comments.” Another is: “The most entertaining debate occurred with Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, the chairman of the philosophy department at CUNY-Lehman, who accused me of academic misconduct.”

You can see all of this, Haidt’s original presentation, and more, on his web page, here: Post-Partisan Social Psychology

Haidt’s very good though. He typically doesn’t take the bait of the provocative language aimed at him by responding in kind. He replies respectfully and professionally.

You are right that I was not familiar with “the dissident Right and neo-reactionaries like Steve Sailer or Mencius Moldbug.” Thanks for the tip and the link. But I still get the feeling that conservative fans of Haidt are rather few.

[blockquote]I’m a huge fan, which apparently makes me somewhat of a rarity among conservatives.[/blockquote]

Then I guess that means you’re not familiar with the dissident Right and neo-reactionaries like Steve Sailer or Mencius Moldbug. This group of Righties reads the latest popular academic lit like Haidt and Pinker while channeling the very fires of Hell itself. By “fires of Hell” I mean this.

> I have to ask, what’s wrong with sounding like a conservative?

Absolutely nothing, in the right setting. It’s essential, to communicate clearly and quickly with your own about things. It’s just a completely different language than the one liberals can understand, a kind of a cognitive opposite. One has to get into communication theory to understand that well, where they’ve been dealing with this a very long time in a broad variety of settings. It has to do with communication and abstraction, which are much more slippery concepts than we give them credit for. I can’t sound like a conservative if I want to “do a good job of explaining conservatism to liberals without turning them off.”

Any abstraction like freedom, authority, charity, and so on has a large subconscious set of images, symbols, experiences, etc. that are assumed and built on by saying that single word. Conservatives of similar backgrounds and personalities usually have similar subconscious grab bags of related elements behind their notion of, say, freedom, so “sounding like a conservative” means having an effective shorthand that’s accurate and complete enough, as you each reach into your grab bags together and use helpful symbols, images, etc. Across ideologies, though, our sets of experiences, symbols, etc are so different that each side’s abstraction has to be dealt with separately, carefully, one at a time- yours first, say. I have to listen to the other person well. Once I’ve spent the time and energy to understand what you actually mean in that situation by the term loyalty, say, I can see what is and (importantly) what isn’t in your set of related symbols, etc. Then I can restate your version of loyalty- strengths, weaknesses, stories, where it comes up, confusing aspects, etc.- in a way that tries to avoid the conflict it would otherwise have with common subconscious elements of the liberal idea of loyalty.

This came up the other day with shaming. A conservative might say “sometimes we must shame a child into doing the right thing, so they’ll learn an important lesson.” Completely accurate, right? Easy. The problem is that somewhere near the top of that liberal pile of subconscious elements encompassed by the abstraction “Shaming”, there is almost always an image of some innocent kid who’s getting yelled at by an inattentive or mean or careless parent, maybe even for something the kid didn’t do. Or there’s a personal experience, say, of being miserable or angry or held back because one was inappropriately shamed by classmates, or a teacher. If I want to talk to a liberal about shaming, I can’t ignore that that negative element is almost always tightly bound to the liberal abstraction of “Shaming”. I can acknowledge inappropriate shaming as a possibility, call it a tragedy, say it has to be considered- I can do all sorts of things, but I can’t leave it out of the discussion like a conservative might.

There’s one more advantage over conservatives that you have as liberals. You’re not ensnared in the “Catch 22” that conservatives find themselves in (post on this coming soon.)

But I have to ask, what’s wrong with sounding like a conservative?

At least it has many distinct advantages- about 200 pages’ worth in Haidt’s most recent book. I would contend that it’s tough to proclaim that employing a broader moral foundation will result in a priori superior actions at every circumstance in life- but the argument needn’t be taken that far. Liberals should take a cue from conservatives to broaden their moral foundations: they will apprehend the world better, improve their envisioned policies, the execution of those policies, be happier– for all kind of important reasons.

As you know, I do a lot of work trying to get this idea across to liberals with entries such as http://www.reachtheright.com/2013/01/23/the-unintended-consequences-of-morals/ . I find some limited success by talking about impacts on happiness (conservatives are happier, statistically speaking, than liberals). But otherwise, each foundation they’re weaker at- authority, sanctity, loyalty, and a certain kind of liberty- has to be dealt with in detail and in isolation to make any headway. I’m not sure if my arguments sound conservative, but I don’t think so. I don’t think Haidt’s sound conservative either. I could be wrong about both, but I don’t get feedback that I sound conservative except from the very far left. I do get the impression that my arguments get through a fair amount with individuals, sometimes rather dramatically. That doesn’t seem to make them conservative, per se, though they do seem to sometimes be more open to conservative influence and some incorporation of conservative ideas in their world view. No- I think the main effect is that they become more thoughtful liberals, who have a better sense of what battles to fight and which to avoid. And how to fight them best. That’s what I want- liberals who use a broader set of moral foundations to accomplish what’s important to them, so that liberal advantages, if they exist, can be married up with a more accurate moral approach.

Jon Haidt himself is probably an example of this kind of liberal. You will have strong disagreements with such people, but they won’t seem quite as unhealthy to either you or me as, say, the liberals of the Occupy movement, who seem to go so far as to explicitly oppose moral values along the sanctity, authority, and negative liberty lines.