Surely every progressive knows someone who spouts out odious and hateful political ideas but who is warm, friendly, and engaging in personal life.
Of course, there are also ornery people with enlightened politics. This raises the question of whether foul progressives and amiable regressives are two versions of the same thing...or whether the similarity between them is merely superficial and does not indicate any deep similarity.
Now the puzzle of how a sweet person can have sour politics and a sour person can have sweet politics is engaging because it brings up considerations about the relative importance of the "personal" and the "political" and the relationship between them.
When we find ourselves facing a puzzle like this, it is often helpful to consider the assumptions we are making about the situation to see if they are giving rise to the puzzle in the first place. Perhaps we are puzzled only because we assume that nice people will have nice politics while those with mean politics will be mean people. Given this assumption, we are troubled when the parallel does not hold.
But what if the relationship between the personal and the political is not linear or causal? Marc Hauser's book, " Moral Minds ," offers a new look, based on explosive discoveries in evolutionary psychology, biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and linguistics about the nature and genesis of our moral intuitions.
In simplest terms, the basic idea is that a natural feeling of compassion is biologically hard-wired within each of us. Of course, this seems clearly wrong because if we are hard-wired to be compassionate, then why would there so much cruelty, selfishness, and unnecessary suffering in the world. Here is the explosive part. It turns out that our biologically hard-wired natural capacity to be compassionate can be overridden-by political and religious ideology, especially when it is based in fear. In other words, even though compassion is hard-wired into us and predates culture and experience, we can nevertheless kill and torture one another if we believe strongly enough that doing so is God's will or a way to a better world.
This is explosive because it leads to a complete turnaround of our conventional way of thinking. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has Ivan Karamazov contend that everything is permitted if there is no God. This idea is now widely accepted as a truism. Sartre even claims it is the foundation of existentialism. Interestingly, Leo Strauss, the intellectual father of the neo-conservatives, taught an inversion of this idea-namely, that it is "useful" to encourage common people to believe in God, not because it is true, but because it will help to keep them in line.
But according to the new discoveries that Hauser presents in his book, something like the opposite of what Ivan says is true. Hauser argues it is long past the time when religion and morality should divorce because religious ideology is now overriding our inborn moral intuitions.
The nice person who has a vicious political ideology is an example of this, as is the not so nice person who has a wonderful ideology. Both are acting out of ideology, and so in this sense they are similar. In other words, the social conservative is just like the progressive (both are ideologues), only more so (the social conservative is more dogmatic and less open to revision and experience).
Given this, perhaps the enemy of morality is not atheism but overbearing ideology. If so, then the most powerful wellspring of moral behavior and a movement to a better world would NOT be the ability to stand firmly rooted in one's culture and pick the best available moral ideas (though that is certainly important). It would be an ability to stand apart from one's culture and from all moral ideology in order to reconnect with one's original nature.
www.johnbardi.edublogs.org
John Bardi teaches philosophy and religious studies at Penn State-Mont Alto. He is also a musician and has been playing blues and rock guitar since 1961.
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
Religion and ideology are just father figure dress up.
Conservatives use ideology and religion as a set of instructions from dad. Liberals use moralizing as way of establishing their moral authority. Conservatives are liars and bullies. Liberals are condescending enablers.
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John Hanks (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1762 comments [39 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Friday, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:25:20 PM
Oh, how true. Yous guys got it goin' on. The conservative adopts babies from Africa, but sees American babies as cheats gamming the system, after all, they don't have a job. I saw this dichotomy when I went South, US. Some apparent racists were discussing Niggers. Then, what I thought was one, walked up, a memeber or their elite groop. I said, "You mean Him?" "No, not HIM." It seemed to be a dictionary problem. Some conservatives have another problem, they don't like to give up their white supremacy, whether they're racists or not, they have an edge and are afraid of losing it. Most conservatives are white. Their intensity is as much fear of change; the future, which is actually here now, shh; and loss of perceived power. The thing is, we are all more powerful together than working against one another. We could probably work the abortion rate down to pre Roe v Wade without laws, by working together. Or teaching values in school, like compassion and justice, without offending either side. Or drilling responsibly, or the thining out of trees by paper companies in a forest so dense they cause forest fires to rage out of control while, as a nation, we rage out of control. An open mind, but to all the best possibilities and not to divisions. I find that dropping negative judgmental words caused me to see that world of solutions, instead of getting caught in the world of cynicism. Easy world, instead of difficult world. It's easier to do things right. Cynicism is like depression or a mindset of fear, hard to get escape, like an addiction. The intuition gets us around all that, connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain and allows us to use the vision logic of the whole mind, that 98% of the mind they say we don't us. Yes we can. Einstein said that he wasn't a genius, but that he got his ideas from intuition. He saw and said that, "The only real valuable thing is intuition." If it connects us to our common sense, our true nature and the nature of the universe, then he has to be right. I, for one, second the motion. Of course, there are rules for intuition, and Einstein, typically, puts that into one sentence also, like he put his E=MC square. The intuition formula, intuition is the only real thing is probably more important than the math one. So, the liberals are like a lot of fundamentalists. Liberals know what's wrong in the world, they just don't know what to do about it. The fundamentalists think they know what to do about it, but they don't. I think that you hit the nail on the head. That dualistic way of looking at things solves for all the problems in the world and all the philisophical questions too. In fact. it shows the whole nature of reality and the logical system that is the world, as it's supposed to be. We can figure anything out, because the univers is all very rational. Only we aren't. I've checked all the details and objections, and I've answered all that I could think of, so believe it. Test all that's testable, by all the methods known to science. Hey, I know the scientific method. luv
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Harold Barre (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 55 comments [7 recommended, 0 rejected]) on Saturday, Nov 22, 2008 at 2:24:29 AM
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