Measuring Groupishness: Trait of the Individual versus an Individual's Groupish Cultural Commitment (part two of two)
Prev: Reflections on Defining âGroupishnessâ and Its Function in Human Society (part one of two)
I believe there is a meaningful distinction to be made between cultural commitments and an individual's ability to equal that commitment. An individual's cultural commitment to reason does not automatically result in an individual who is more capable of reasoning than another, but it is likely to result in an individual who will have their identity bound up with ideas around reason such that they will resist strongly any suggestion that they are not being particularly reasonable about something. There is a difference between someone who habitually votes for Democrat-party candidates and someone who has their identity bound up with the Democratic Party. The first is common place; the second, I suggest, is rare. Â
 Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham & Craig Joseph argue, based on âDan McAdamsâs (1995; McAdams & Pals, 2006) three-level account of personality (dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life stories)â that: Â
âthe single dimension of left-right is indeed a useful construct that describes a network of Level 2 adaptations (such as right-wing authoritarianism) closely linked to Level 1 traits (such as openness to experience), but the study of ideology requires us to look at the Level 3 narratives of self and society that people construct and internalize as they develop, join groups, and share ideologies.â(Above and Below Left-Right: Ideological Narratives and Moral Foundations, Psychological Inquiry, 20:110-119, 2009).
So, that is a mouthful. Earlier in their paper, they helpfully offered:
âWhy do people vary in their views of human nature and their visions of the good society? Why do many people categorize themselves as âliberal,â âconservative,â âlibertarian,â âsocialist,â and so on? Some researchers try to answer those questions by starting with peopleâs self-identifications and then moving âdown,â examining traits (such as openness to experience) that underlie and predict endorsement of an ideological label (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003, and Sibley & Duckitt, 2008, for reviews). In contrast, others find it more informative to move âupâ from such labels, examining the network of meanings, strivings, and personal narratives that unite the individuals who endorse a label (e.g., Conover & Feldman, 1981; Geertz, 1964; Smith, 2003; Sowell, 1995, 2007).â
Which is all very interesting, but really concentrating on particular sorts of ideological commitments [a San Francisco Democrat can be quite culturally different from a South Carolina Democrat (or not)] Â rather than groupishness specifically. And that is a problem I will run into repeatedly: studies that brush up against my concerns around groupishness that are actually conceived around oppositional political sorts of âaffinity groupsâ and what I would term coalitions, such as Liberal/Conservative and Democrat/Republican, rather than groups that are much more likely to be bound up with a person's identity, such as Cubs fan or White Sox fan.Â
Right from the beginning, I find myself annoyed with the (entirely accurate within academia) assertions Haidt, Graham and Joseph make about the âtrait approachâ being âextraordinarily successfulâ to the point where âthe Big Five taxonomy is widely accepted as a valuable high-order model of personality.â Sigh. I have looked at questions in the Big Five and they are so problematic that I am rendered the opposite of speechless whenever the topic comes up. (Conversely, Dan Kahan at his Cultural Cognition of Risk blog, argues that "These sorts of self-report measures predict vulnerability to one or another reasoning bias less powerfully than CRT and numeracy, and my sense is that they are falling out of favor in cognitive psychology.")
First, the âBig Fiveâ taxonomy is generated by a self-report questionnaire that asks a person to assess in a Likert scale (1 to 5) their agreement with statements like âI have a rich vocabulary.â It seems obvious to me that the correct way to assess these questions is to understand they are capturing cultural commitments, not innate personality traits. We donât know if the person has a rich vocabulary, only whether or not they believe they have one, and whether or not a rich vocabulary is something worth claiming is entirely cultural. How that meaningfully assesses âopenness to experienceâ is not clear, unless one means that people with interests in intellectual pursuits are inherently more open to experience, which is a tautology, not a finding. Second, the theory currently uses the descriptive âopenness to experience,â which has a particular usage in Standard English that equates to âopen-mindednessâ but the theory delimits the phrase as psychological category that does not (necessarily) equal the standard usage. The questions asked in the Big Five questionnaire do not assess a personâs functional open-mindedness, though that is how the results are commonly described. (I have gone on and on about this before [http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/30209151045/the-moral-emotions-openness-liberals-conservatives & http://isabel.penraeth.com/post/32275404553/us-and-them-openness-groupishness-care-harm-and ]). Haidt, Graham & Josephâs assertion around the âtrait approachâ being âsuccessfulâ and perceived as âvaluableâ gets back to the definition of a theory in psychology: a framework that has proven generative of studies, not that it has proven fundamentally true [a definition offered in this textbook]. I sometimes fear the social sciences really are semantics all the way down. Well, that and statistics.
So, even when psychologists think they are dealing with a personal trait (as measured by the Big Five), at an individual-level construct, I would argue they are capturing cultural commitments, a groupish-level construct. That is what I mean about confusion around what is a trait of an individual and what is a cultural commitment on the part of the individual to a groupish standard. Haidt, Graham and Joseph suggest that some theorists work âupâ and other theorists work âdown,â but it seems to me nearly all of modern American psychology fundamentally atomizes everything to the individual not only because of a strongly individualistic American bias, but because of the functional limits of the preferred experimental method: the self-report questionnaire. [For much more interesting critiques of the Big Five, ones that are critical in quite different ways, see: The Five-Factor Framing of Personality and Beyond: Some Ruminations by Jack Block; The Five-Factor Model Describes the Structure of Social Perceptions, by Sanjay Srivastava; Two Cheers for the Big Five! [paywall] Donald W. Fiske.]
In their favor, Haidt, Graham & Joseph go on in their paper to ask of the trait approach, âRather than arguing with success, an alternative response is to ask, Is that all there is?â They believe they can show there is more. But, yeah, me, I am absolutely going to argue with that sort of âsuccess.â
Group Groupishness versus Individual Groupishness
Additionally, there are useful distinctions to be made between a âgroup groupishnessâ and an âindividual groupishness,â where a group has traits that render it more âgroupishâ and an individual has preferences/habits that render groupish behavior more congenial to them. Triandis and Suh helpfully describe allocentrism and idiocentrism at the individual level, as well as work on collectivism and individualism at the cultural level:
The terms individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level of analysis, where the number of observations is the number of cultures (e.g., Hofstede 1980). In such data individualism is the polar opposite of collectivism. As mentioned above, results at the cultural level may differ from results at the individual level of analysis. Thus, different terms are used to indicate the level of analysis. Individualism and collectivism are used at the cultural level, whereas at the individual level of analysis (i.e., within-culture analyses), the corresponding terms are idiocentrism and allocentrism (Triandis et al. 1985). Idiocentrism and allocentrism are personality attributes that are often orthogonal to each other. Idiocentrics emphasize self-reliance, competition, uniqueness, hedonism, and emotional distance from in-groups. Allocentrics emphasize interdependence, sociability, and family integrity; they take into account the needs and wishes of in-group members, feel close in their relationships to their in-group, and appear to others as  responsive to their needs and concerns (Cross SE, Bacon P, Morris M. 2000. The relational-interdependent self-construal and relationships. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 78:791â98).â (P. 140, Cultural Influences on Personality, Triandis & Suh, 2002.)
This becomes particularly useful when one wants to compare individuals who are personally allocentric yet are living in a collectivist society and individuals who are allocentric living in an individualistic society.Â
In all cultures there are both idiocentrics and allocentrics, in different proportions (Triandis et al. 2001). Generally speaking, in collectivist cultures there are about 60% allocentrics and in individualist cultures about 60% idiocentrics. The allocentrics in individualist cultures are more likely than the idiocentrics to join groupsâgangs, communes, unions, etc. The idiocentrics in collectivist cultures are more likely than the allocentrics to feel oppressed by their culture and to seek to leave it. (P. 141)
[Susan Cain, in her recent popular non-fiction book Quiet, very busily conflates introversion with allocentrism. But I digress.]
There are other measures or attempts at measurement in the wild world of the social sciences. Is groupishness most accurately measured by the communitarianism side of the Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk group grid, leaving out worldviews that land on the individualistic side of the scale? Triandis gives us The Psychological Measurement of Cultural Syndromes (a measurement that maps quite nicely to the Cultural Theory Grid-Group schema). Is groupishness confined to Triandisâ vertical collectiveness? And if it is, how is that measured? Rayner & Gross, for instance, tried to measure communitarianism on the Cultural Theory of Risk grid-group scale with a mathematical computation based on observing how much time members of a group spent together (Measuring Culture). Or when we talk about groupishness, is it most properly referring to Triandisâ collectivism. Where does the individual fit? Can one individual be more groupish than another? Is one culture more groupish than another? Is groupishness confined to the Gemeinschaftliche âhigh group, high gridâ world of hierarchical-communitarians? Sometimes those using the term groupishness seem to be attempting to describe a measurement of how controlling the members of the group are of other people (in the group or not): how much they want to force their viewpoint onto others, or how totalitarian they are. It is a theorized variation on this theme that results in the calculation that totalitarian regimes that espoused Leftist views were really Conservative.
So, it seems entirely reasonable to me to suspect that one can be functionally groupish yet, if one has a cultural commitment to individualism, to adopt an identity-protective denial around that trait. Similarly, it also seems entirely reasonable to me that a cultural commitment/acceptance of groupishness need not be as pathological as individualist groups ["I would never join a group that would have me as a member."] might be inclined to believe.
I think the key to understanding groupishness and the current muddle around its use is the concept of authority. As Adam Seligman puts it in his book Modernityâs Wager:
Modernity, whether in the form of liberal politics, capitalist exchange, or the epistemologies of the social sciences, is inherently hostile to the idea and experience of authority and as a result has a hard time understanding its persistence. (P. 15 Seligman, Modernityâs Wager, Nook version)
So, of course, before we talk any further about groupishness, letâs talk about authority.
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Reflections on Defining âGroupishnessâ and its Function in Human Society (part one of two)
It is my observation that for some people, âgroupishnessâ (often vaguely conceived) is the moral sin that produces wars, Nazism, racism, homophobia and all manner of social/societal sins. Similarly, some groups that I have observed in the US habitually believe themselves to be free of this sin.
At the end of this series of pieces, which is a great many words from here, I conclude that it is not âgroupishnessâ per se nor the forms it takes in religiosity, nationalism, culturalism &etc that is the sin that breeds socio-political evils (Nazism, 9/11), but mono-moralism, and that mono-moralism, unfortunately, is a universally habitual sin that no groups are immune from committing. I will argue that the conviction that there is one moral truth is necessary for the individual, but the conclusion that this one moral truth applies to all people, in all situations, in all places, and all times is always false. I will argue that the conviction that anyone who does not come to the same, obvious, simple, fair and right moral conclusions is evil is the sin that leads to the sort of âotheringâ that allows for justifying considerable human harm. [Us and Them, by David Berreby] And that mono-moralism does not require âgroupishness,â as it is generally (oh-so vaguely) conceived, to work its damage.
Observations on Perspective-taking
I free the moth flinging itself against the window because observing its struggle begins to make me feel trapped, despite a certain squeamishness about flying insects and a concern that I might do more harm than good by accidentally injuring it.Â
Some would think that I am showing empathy and being effective at perspective-taking. That would not be true. The moth does not feel trapped. Its eyes are on the distant view beyond the window. It does not perceive its dilemma, but continues to attempt to move forward, uncomprehending of the impediment it faces. When I gently encase it in my carefully cupped hands and it *is* trapped, it behaves quite differently: docile, quiet, still.
I have not taken its perspective. I have placed upon it mine.
Similarly, when I observe the woman in hijab or burqa or niqab and conclude that I know what that experience is like for her, I am wrong unless and until I listen to her describe her own experience. Because, unlike the moth, I can ask her and she is capable of telling me. Just because observing a woman wearing a burqa makes me feel trapped and claustrophobic does not necessarily mean that is how she experiences it.
But, you observe, Dear Reader, that I did free the moth from its confinement, a confinement it was not aware of until I freed it! And, I must respond, a human being is not a moth, and it is some time since we have generally recognized the right of individual human beings to a certain personal dignity and respect [Durkheim/Bellah, On Morality and Society,p. 46 ]. The matter takes on a much more fundamental moral weight in a circumstance where a human being does not consider herself trapped than that a moth does not consider itself trapped.
Cultures and Morals
Human beings develop their cultures, and are developed by their cultures in return, to adapt to particular social/political/economic environments. The moth is not meant to live inside a home, and so freeing it is no sin. But when I try to insist that a Muslim woman cannot be living a free life until she sets aside wearing the hijab, I am describing how it is not helpful or necessary in my cultural/moral environment to wear the hijab. There is no guarantee that I am freeing her to live a more full life in the culture in which she is embedded and which is embedded within her. Humans adapt, personally and culturally, and regularly set aside habits and beliefs that are not helpful to them, sometimes quite quickly. When they are not doing that, when they are not setting them aside, it is perhaps more helpful to consider what purpose it serves than to conclude that they are doing it because they are (pick one) stupid, backward, immoral, authoritarian, kowtowed, unevolved.
I will attempt to convince you that moral standards, theories, systems, and codes all derive from communal lived experience organized around something that we both inherit and impact: culture. I will also try to convince you that differing lived experiences that produce moral standards that do not align with yours do not produce inherently immoral systems, only moral systems designed for a different environment. What is the same is that different cultures/moral systems are inhabited by people who are biologically exactly like you who have simply had different experiences/different resources/different environments. (think rural vs. urban, north vs. south, wealthy vs. poor) The battle is not properly defined as right vs. wrong. The battle is more properly defined around whose experiences will be validated and whose will not, and in a country with a vast range of lived experiences possible, whose preferences with be nurtured with communal resources and whose preferences will be starved. [See Chapter 11: Moral Particularism, p. 305 â 330, Moral Theory: An Introduction, by Mark Timmons; Chapter One: Sociocultural Psychology, Hazel Rose Markus &Â MarYam Hamedani, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama & Dov Cohen]
Cultures are constantly changing, responding to the environment. But they tend to keep what works and rapidly abandon what does not. Cultural shifts can be rapid. Cultures pick things up from each other. Cultures measure themselves against other cultures. Cultures are a communal response, a communal inheritance. Cultural systems are moral systems [Chapter 19: Cultural Psychology of Moral Development, p. 477, by Joan G. Miller, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen]. Moral systems are embedded in a cultural response to the environment. Resource restriction brings âconservatismâ and resource abundance brings democracy. Resource restriction brings cram schools and resource abundance brings a concern that children have a care-free childhood [also see, p. 87, Chapter Four: The Evolutionary Foundations of Cultural Psychology, by Melvin Konner, in The Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen]. Relative stasis in the environment brings cultural stasis and reverence for the wisdom of the elderly. Constant change and upheaval in the environment brings cultural reverence for the highly-adaptive young and disregard for the relative worth of the older generations.
Our âreasoningâ is fundamentally malleable. The person who argues that sexual expression should not be controlled because it is natural is easily able to simultaneously feel that childrenâs natural desire to eat large amounts of sugar should be controlled. We accumulate moral reasoning for the moral system that works for us and fits our experience. But most people make no attempt to be remotely consistent. For good reason.
One person says that it is immoral to experience the pleasure of homosexual relations. Another says that it is immoral to experience the pleasure of gun ownership. Measuring these statements is powerfully personal: where one believes there to be harm and where one believes there to be harmlessness is often based on experience and not particularly malleable or susceptible to persuasion [Parsing "Care" as a Moral Verb, this blog].Â
When it comes to implementing true values, there are always trade-offs, which is why there are different traditions of values (cultures) and why no one cultural tradition has ever been able to honor everything that is good.(p. 38, Culture Theory: Some Classic Problems, Why Do Men Barbecue? by Richard Shweder)
We insist on making group-level determinations about what sort of life is worth living and what sort of life is worth nurturing, because as a community, we bear the burdens of whatever these conclusions entail in allocation of shared resources and environmental effects.
Ultimately, moral systems are artefacts of cultures, and moral philosophers are inevitably apologists for the moral systems of their own culture.
My Method
My method, born of necessity not idealism, has been to simply observe, and upon observing I begin to notice patterns emerging, and then I locate discussions around those patterns in the academic literature, groping around until I find the terms that the specialists use to describe what concerns me. And then I become dissatisfied with the terms; it begins to feel that all the specialists have are semantics, and statistics based on the semantics. For linguists, the word âsemanticsâ has depth and richness, but out in the world, âsemanticsâ implies shallowness and word-play. The more I delve into these works, mostly in the social sciences, the more I am with the late, great sociologist George Homans when he observed:
We shall begin with semantics, the science of tracing words back to their references in observed fact. In sociology we are devoted to the âbigâ words: status, culture, function, heuristic, particularistic, methodology, integration, solidarity, authority. Too often we work with these words and not with observations. Or rather, we do not wed the two. No one will make progress with this book who does not train himself to extensionalize [See S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, 58-60], who does not habitually catch himself as he mouths one of the big abstractions and ask: What does this mouthful mean in terms of actual human behavior that someone has seen and reported? Just what, in human behavior, do we see? The question is devastating, and we do not ask it half often enough.â (emphasis in original: The Human Group, 1950, p. 10)
Observation is the start of everything, and while statistical analysis is helpful, it is not the end. After statistical analysis, we must take it all back to observation and confirm the analysis (and its usefulness) there.
 Sophistication includes knowing when not to be sophisticated. No one is more a creature of fashion than the average intellectual. He is quite ready to believe, at any moment, that certain kinds of work are the only respectable ones to go into. We are told, for instance, that our data in sociology should be quantitative, that is, should be cast in numerical form, and of course they should. But good observation ought not to be discarded just because it is not numerical. Sociology may miss a great deal if it tries to be too quantitative too soon. Data are not nobler because they are quantitative, nor thinking more logical because mathematical. . . . Let us make the important quantitative, not the quantitative important. The final emphasis must always be on the group before us. (Homans, The Human Group, 1950, p. 22)
A problematic word that seems to be at the crux of the things that concern me about what I have been observing is âgroupishness.â
 There is a great deal of fuzziness around the use of the word âgroupishnessâ (and to some extent also in the use of terms like âgroup cohesion,â âtribalismâ and talk of certain âhuman kindsâ [a la Berreby] being âteam playersâ). In one odd corner of the Internet someone described it as a ânonce wordââdesigned to be used once and not to become part of regular vocabularyâand someone else felt compelled to put quotes around it whenever they used it. In the latter case, the author offered that âIt's not very helpful to think of groupishness as a category unless you specify what sort of group is going to be produced.â Perhaps having something to do with the problematic lack of a lexical history, it is a word some people seem to use but few seem to trouble themselves to precisely define.Â
 I have come across a wide range of terms, thinking and theories around concepts of âgroupishnessâ in sociology, group psychology, social psychology, political science, evolutionary theory and anthropology that I have been exploring. Much of the work around groups and groupishness that I have delved into has centered on political groupings that have used some version of the right-left scale, though that is not groupishness per se, rather a form of groupishness. And it has been my observations of statistical conservatives and statistical liberals that have worrisomely not matched the conclusions reported in the social sciences that have mostly informed my own contemplations. Nonetheless, I find myself most concerned with groupishness more broadly, and so my reading has ranged quite widely.
 This list, frighteningly enough, is by no means comprehensive of all the reading I have done, but it includes some of the more helpful thoughts and thinkers.
Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Sherif)
Self-categorization Theory (Turner)
Cultural Theory of Risk (Douglas & Wildavsky, Rayner & Gross-- further elaborated as theÂ
Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk (Kahan et al)
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Toennies and Durkheim)
In-group bias (Sumner)
Social actions, Herrschaft, Verstehen (Weber)
Work groups and Basic Assumption groups (Bion)
Allocentrism and Idiocentrism/Collectivism and Individualism (Triandis)
Collective identity (Mead, Melucci)
Muscular bonding (McNeill)
Constrained and Unconstrained Visions (Sowell)
Optimal distinctiveness (Brewer)
Cultural memory/Tradition (Pascal Boyer)
Coalitions, mutuality and cooperation (Cosmides & Tooby, Kurzban, Sperber)
Syndrome of Ethnocentrism (LeVine and Campbell)
Authoritarianism (Adorno, Jost)
Motivated cognition (Jost)
Reverse Dominance Hierarchies (Boehm)
Relationship regulation, Relational Management Theory (Fiske)
Group cohesiveness (David Sloan Wilson, particularly around religiosity)
Groupthink (Janis)
The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality (Alan Page Fiske)
Infrahumanization (Leyens & Demoulin)
In-group boundary keeping (Lovaglia and Houser)
Dual Inheritance Theory (Richerson & Boyd, Henrich)
Cultural Psychological approaches (Shweder, Markus, Kitayama, Heine, Norenzayan, Buchtel)
Moral Foundation Theory (Haidt, Joseph, Graham, et al., building on Shweder)
Civil Religion (Rousseau, Bellah)
Social Exchange Theory (Homans)
Moral coherence (Ditto and Liu)
Moral coordination (DeScioli and Kurzban)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt)
The Blank Slate (Pinker)
Us and Them: The Science of Identity (Berreby)
Obedience to Authority (Milgram)
Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo)Â Â
It is impossible to fairly represent the depth, complexity and intellectual fullness of any of the thinkers I will be discussing here. But if one was intent on being perfectly comprehensive, one would never be finished, and so all one can do is be humble and make a start. I try to avoid setting up straw men, but Iâm afraid in some instances I may come dismayingly close to doing that. Not only have some of these thinkers been incredibly generative, many write on challenging topics in ways that are not entirely accessible. Sometimes it is a writer whose work I must read in translation and a quick comparison between two translations shows meaningful differences that proves the importance of being able to read the material in the original language. In other cases, even when written in a language I am competent in, what the writer really meant by what they wrote is a matter of considerable disagreement and debate. But it is also a fact that having, necessarily, read only a limited amount of each thinkerâs writing, even when written in clear and comprehensible language, I can easily and quite accidentally misunderstand and misrepresent what they said and what they meant by what they said by my cherry picking. (Dear Reader, if you believe you find such an error, please point it out to me.)
  I should also mention, Dear Reader, that when I place citations in this series on Groupishness, it is because the citation is a source for my thinking: via either agreement or disagreement. Sometimes I read a source and come to the opposite conclusion. Rather like the convention that one can re-tweet something as much as a mark of disapproval as approval. [Enjoy!]
But, out of all the similar topics that have been concretely written of and discussed widely, I perversely want to find a meaningful definition for a nebulous word like âgroupishness.â
Because included in any discussion of the term âgroupishnessâ must be the acknowledgement that much confusion and disagreement abounds as to what is properly considered a characteristic of the individual and what is a characteristic of the group.
Next:Â Measuring Groupishness: Trait of the Individual Versus an Individual's Groupish Cultural Commitment
Dan Kahan asks: What influence do religiosity and science comprehension have on (or relationship do they have with) climate change risk perceptions?
I am going to argue that an interesting way to view this issue is to re-frame the question.
Dan Kahan's original post: MAPKIA! episode 1: religiosity, science comprehension & climate change
I don't think religiosity and science comprehension influence climate change risk perceptions. I do think they have something of a relationship. I am going to focus on religiosity, it being a cultural component I have some experience observing. I turn first to George Homans, the late, great sociologist.
 âBut democratic institutions do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in a society, and they cannot live long unless the society is of a certain kind. . . . Democracy cannot be successful unless the nation is well educated and enjoys a standard of living so high that men do not have to worry about sheer survival. Just how high the standard of education and the standard of living need to be we cannot say, but we recognize that at least some minimum level must be achieved.â Homans, The Human Group, 1950, p. 465
It is my observation that individuals who are strongly religious in the US tend to have a personal sense of resource restriction. (A personâs sense of resource restriction is subjective, not objective. A millionaire can have a sense of resource restriction and a church mouse can have a sense of resource abundance.) It isnât just that climate change threatens their groupish cultural identity: it asks more of them than they remotely feel capable of offering. They feel that they and their descendants will not flourish if the resource restrictions that responding to climate change requires are put into place.
Conversely, those who perceive considerable climate change risk are in a place where they feel that any resource restrictions that might be required are not really going to be a problem for them. They feel that they and their descendants will be better off (particularly compared to the alternative of doing nothing) if the resource restrictions that responding to climate change requires are put into place. Their sense of their own resource abundance (a combination of personal ability, external resources, evaluation of resources in the community) allows them to feel entirely equal to the problem at hand.
So the interesting question to ask for me would be: What influence does life experience have on religiosity and science comprehension and their relationship with climate change risk perceptions?
I canât resist adding Homansâ observations from 1950 and note that, at that time, his perception was that it was the political left that was the greater threat to democracy. Or that is how I read it.
âConflict is built deeply into any social order, which would be uninteresting without it. As usual, the question is: How much conflict and in what areas? If social conflict does not go too deep, representative government provides a method for deciding the issues, with much salutary release of emotion. We are all ready to accept a large amount of verbal violence in our politics. Our tolerance for it is high, and we admire a man that gives and takes hard knocks. But if conflict goes deep enough, as the United States once learned, and as the communist propagandists know well, democratic methods do not lead to the peaceful resolution of conflicts but to civil war. For democracy to survive, the members of society must enjoy some area of consensus, supported by the informal contacts of daily life, by formal communication networks, and by common ideals.â Homans, The Human Group, 1950, p. 465Â
I suspect Dan Kahan would like to see scientific consensus become a basis for our common ideals, but that would be new, I think, and mean we would have to be quite a bit different a society than the one we are today.
âIn some sense, fulfillment of democratic ideals depends upon the capacity and motivation of citizens to be active, attentive participants in civil discourse and to be capable of processing political information objectively. . . . some citizens seem to be more logical, thoughtful, and open-minded than others. Some evidence suggests, albeit tentatively, that ideological asymmetries may exist when it comes to the role of motivation in political reasoning as practiced by liberals and conservatives.â (P. 1)
In closing:
âIt should be noted, at least in passing, that epistemic disadvantages (such as attitude bolstering and avoidance of disconfirming information) might translate into real political advantages (such as commitment and loyalty) when it comes to the ballot box. At the same time, the refusal to consider opposing points of view in good faith may hinder the functioning of a democratic society. An unwillingness to consider or express attitude incongruent information may be related to a lower capacity for perspective-taking, which has been linked to stereotyping and intergroup bias. These outcomes, too, could affect the nature of political discourse in a pluralistic society. To the extent that the avoidance of dissonance-arousing situations exacerbates political gridlock and ideological polarization, a detailed scientific understanding of the role of ideology in motivating dissonance avoidance is sorely needed. It may even inspire the design of novel communication strategies that will help to overcome ideological divides that otherwise seem unbridgeable.â (P. 6)
Just to be clear, Nam, Jost and Van Bavel are not simply arguing that conservatives and liberals have different viewpoints, but that they are different human kinds. They propose that conservatives are innately, biologically, inherently different sorts of people than liberals, and that one of the symptoms of that difference is their avoidance of cognitively dissonant information. As a big fan {with caveats, of course} of Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk and its group-grid schema for describing four different cultures, I always feel a bit hobbled by papers going the blunt-object route of differentiating only liberals and conservatives. I start wondering about the presence of communitarianism versus individualism and âhierarchistsâ versus âegalitarians.âÂ
But I must work at least somewhat within the confines offered by the actual paper under consideration, so liberals and conservatives (sigh) it is. Iâve written on this topic before, but apparently I am unable to resist an opportunity to do so again.
The authors of the paper propose to measure the willingness of conservatives versus liberals to engage in âcognitive dissonanceâ when faced with having to write a âcounter-attitudinalâ essay. One experiment set up the participants to express their preference for Obama or Bush and also for Mac versus PC. The second experiment used Clinton and Reagan for the politically-charged contrast and then tea versus coffee for the non-politically charged choice. Participants were asked to express their preference and then were either begged politely to write a counter-attitudinal essay (high choice) or simply told to write a counter-attitudinal essay (low choice).
The authors hypothesized that conservatives would be considerably less likely to write a counter-attitudinal essay in the high choice condition, particularly when compared with the ânon-politicalâ essay. Imagine their delight when not a single Bush supporter agreed to write a pro-Obama essay in the high choice condition.
It is hard to assess whether or not the authors have successfully supported their argument with these experiments. The first problem for me was when they tried to use a âprodâ to get the participants to fill out the essay, as they said âto foster compliance.â The instructions said, and I quote: âan important aspect of general intelligence is the ability to craft logical arguments arguing positions you may not personally endorse.â (P. 3)
My immediate thought was that this might successfully prod intellectuals and people who wish to appear generally intelligent, but that it might not be much of an inducement to people who did not aspire to the ability to âcraft logical argumentsâ and could be intimidated or annoyed by such a message. I would be concerned about an essentially âegalitarianâ viewpoint being embedded in this message. It also seems to me that inherent in the statement is a prod to those who value diversity and have a cultural commitment to being open to the ideas of the âother sideâ to prove their moral worth, something fairly meaningless for those whose cultural values do not include diversity and being open to the other side. I may argue that it is best to support both the White Sox and the Cubs on the field as both representing Chicago, and bring values that advocate for diversity and include a cultural commitment to being supportive of the âotherâ side, but most people who watch professional sports are there because they have a team they prefer, relish rooting for them, and they are there to see them win. People who donât care one way or the other are unlikely to pay the price for admission.
So that people who identify as conservatives might not see anything worthwhile in âprovingâ their general intelligence and might be much more interested in staying true to the home team may have less to do with cognitive dissonance and more to do with cultural values. It might also have to do with communitarianism versus individualism, but it is hard to say in the context of these experiments.
Beyond those concerns, I wondered about the choice of timing for the experiment involving Obama and Bush. The authors themselves offer, in explaining their choices of Clinton and Reagan for the second experiment:Â
âFor instance, the fact that Obama was the current President (and would be seeking re-election) may have increased resistance among his ideological adversaries (who were in the midst of selecting his Republican opponent during the time of data collection). Conversely, Obama supporters may have been more willing to argue in favor of Bush because he was no longer running the country, or because of strong national support for him in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.â (P. 4)
In their âGeneral Discussionâ section they posit that the results were weaker in the Clinton/Reagan experiment compared to the Obama/Bush experiment because, perhaps, âboth presidents left office with high job approval ratings and are now considered to be among the two best presidents in recent history.â Indeed, or it could be that they quizzed Bush supporters just as they were groupishly gearing up to wage political battle.
I would be interested to see an experiment that assessed liberals and conservatives to write counter-attitudinal essays that were more symmetrical in timing and consequence. The Obama/Bush experiment in particular seems likely to be tainted by the cultural/environmental impacts of an impending election. I donât like to use the word âpriming,â but it may be applicable.
But, ultimately, all of this pre-supposes that it is deleterious to democracy to have people who avoid writing counter-attitudinal essays as participants. I donât agree with that assessment at all. I think American democracy is precisely designed to manage just such realities of the human condition: the balance of power between the branches of government, the differing make-up of the legislative bodies at the federal level, the proliferation of states and their rights.
ARE CONSERVATIVES BIOLOGICALLY DEFECTIVE AS POTENTIAL PARTICIPANTS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS?
I donât think the argument that conservatives are biologically, inherently different kinds of people holds much water. This is just a round-about way to say, âWe are morally good. They are morally bad.â Conservatism and liberalism are, *very* broadly speaking, descriptions of cultural viewpoints, and culture, from my perspective, is a complex response to the environment. Change the environment sufficiently and you change perhaps the entire culture, perhaps individuals, and even then, different people even in the same broad environment will have different responses to and experiences within that culture that will color their ideological and political response. A situation that âcausesâ one person to become more liberal may âcauseâ another to respond by becoming more conservative.Â
My favorite way to illustrate this point is to use self-report responses of Chris Mooney in The Republican Brain and Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Part of our sense of our own culture is certainly coalitional: by which I mean what scale of our personal groupishness we feel should we be paying attention to. Iâm quoting myself here, from my blog entry "Us and Them," Openness, Groupishness, Care, Harm and Loyalty
I believe our Us and Them is scalable, can have a differing focus. We can be concerned about our family, city, state, nation, other nations, all of humanity. But we will tend to give a few primacy unless and until some event awakens our concern. Both Mooney and Haidt shared stories of adjusted moral coalitional thinking immediately after the 9/11 attacks. First, Mooneyâs take:
âThis phenomenon [that âfear makes liberals more conservative, and even authoritarianâ] accounts nicely for the âliberal hawks,â like Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to attack Iraq in the early 2000s. It also explains why some of these hawks later recoiled in horror at what they had done. (I should know: I was a liberal hawk who awoke from the trance, and even felt a need to do intellectual penance for it afterwards.)â Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain, p. 107
In his book, The Righteous Mind, Haidt mentions that after 9/11 he felt the irresistible urge to place an American flag sticker on his car. He assuaged his sense of violating the standards of his liberal coalition by placing a UN flag on the other side. Mooney believes this is explained by an increase in fear, and mentions increased activity in the amygdala. I disagree. I think that 9/11 and the threat it was perceived to be to America and Americans awakened the slumbering nation-scale coalition within them. The moral mapping for this scale of coalition is there, available as necessary, just unused until it is perceived as necessary. Mooney gets âhawkish.â Haidt feels a need to show more muscular bonding with his country. It fades as the sense of threat passes not because of reduced fear but because of a sense of reduced threat: that level of coalition is fine. America will be fine. Time to move on to the real issues and problems, like climate change.
So fear makes a person more conservative, but it also happens to be a biologically inherent condition? Or that is part of the argument.
In this case, I argue not that fear makes a person more conservative but *what* they fear that results in identifying themselves as conservative or be classed by others as conservative. Liberals have fears, they are just at a different âlevelâ of the âscale.â Or so I propose. When you start fearing for your country, you âbecomeâ a conservative, or more conservative. When you start fearing climate change, you âbecomeâ a liberal, or more liberal. At least these days.
So, I do not think that conservatism is biologically inherent and evidence of a person being a different human kind. Their difference is a result of culture and experience, and their culture and experience result in their difference. But even so, am I not essentially agreeing that conservatives are more fearful? I am offering nothing to overturn the suggestion that people expressing conservatism, even if they arenât inherently different people, are fearful, closed off and avoidant of cognitive dissonance.
ARE CONSERVATIVES CULTURALLY DEFECTIVE AS POTENTIAL PARTICIPANTS IN THE DEMOCRATICÂ PROCESS?
So, even if conservatism is âonlyâ cultural and not biological, isnât it still a Big Problem for democracy? The egalitarian viewpoint appears to be that such is so. Their cultural commitment is to âdiversityâ and âopen-mindednessâ and they believe that a basic moral requirement of a proper civil citizen is to be able to be appropriately open-minded, thoughtful, logical and, well, liberal. Or at least not so conservative they canât value and prefer open-mindedness, thoughtfulness, and logic. As if those values arenât defined by culture and cultural preferences.Â
I propose that conservatism is an appropriate and defensible cultural response to certain sorts of environmental experiences. I see conservatism as a response to an experience of Not Enough, and liberalism as a response to an experience of Plenty. What will trigger one or another in this or that place or in this or that person is idiopathic and ridiculously complex, but the presumption that a person having a conservative âresponseâ to the environment is wrong to do so is simply that. A presumption. The authors of the paper may simply be suffering from a failure to be able to adopt the perspective of conservatives and be closed off to the idea that what seems obvious and easy from their combined cultural viewpoint and experiences might not be either obvious or even possible in other circumstances. I say this not to mock them, but to suggest that perspective-taking is actually extremely difficult and not something anyone I know is casually successful at, conservative or liberal.
IN CONCLUSION
We count on and trust our culture to provide some ready answers so that we do not have to produce a world of thought for each challenge we face. It helps us make sense of the world and it provides the sense we have of the world. Culture and person mutually constitute one another, and even such concepts as logic and truth are filled with cultural meaning. Iâm not saying any one individual canât have a definition of logic or for truth, only that in a pluralistic society, they have to accept that their definition is unlikely to be universal, and that is what makes it pluralistic. Once we are all ideological liberals, it simply isnât a pluralistic society any longer.
Thinking about the CCR Egalitarians: Equalists v. Meritocrats
I've been thinking about the Egalitarian "half" of the Cultural Cognition of Risk Group-Grid schema.
SNOB V. JERK
I have an illustrative set-up that I use to describe the basis for my delineation of the terms "snob" and "jerk."
Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are forced to attempt to pronounce a phrase that is in French, even though your French accent is not good and you are aware of it. The person you are speaking to starts making fun of you. What do they say?
A "Jerk" would abuse you for speaking French at all. (Bourbonnais, IL is now properly pronounced "Boor-bone-us." Versailles, MO is now properly pronounced "Ver-sayles." I propose that there is a language that is properly called "American" and deconstructing the pronunciation of French words is at the heart of it.)
A "Snob" would make fun of you for your poor French pronunciation, and possibly correct it. A "Selfish Snob" might mention that he has been to France as the basis for authoritatively correcting the pronunciation. A "Controlling Snob" might mention that she learned French from a wonderful French woman who taught at her private school. [In the "you can't make this stuff up" category, a DJ at the local classical station has begun giving the English translation of French-titled pieces because of regular calls to the station complaining about his French accent. I am clearly a "Snob" for listening to classical music at all, no?]
MERITOCRAT V. EQUALIST
One can observe among those groups that fall into the âEgalitarianâ southern half of the Cultural Cognition of Risk Group-Grid analysis two quite different ideological moral viewpoints that I will call âEqualismâ and âMeritocracy.â Equalism is the sense that no person is inherently superior to another and I associate it with the Communitarian east. Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas referred to those who fall into the southeast quadrant as the âsectariansâ [Risk and Culture, 1982]. Conversely, âMeritocracyâ lives in the Individualist southwest and argues that people be should be judged on their personal merit and accepts and expects differentiation of ability.
In my conception, "Controlling Snobs" can be Equalists. They believe in leveling the playing field via community efforts, and believe "the system" can and should be managed. A problem is that sometimes the Equalists feel strongly they know best what leveling efforts are required, despite objections from those for whom the efforts are being made. "Selfish Snobs" can be Meritocrats. The are entirely comfortable with letting individuals compete freely for resources and are more concerned with limiting community efforts to control the individual. For them, "the system" needs to be limited even as it is managed. (I am not arguing that Equalism or Meritocracy comprise either supersets or functional limits of Egalitarian viewpoints, only that they are observable among them.)
[Just to round out the story, "Selfish Jerks" are comfortable letting individuals and communities compete, as they believe a properly functioning system will manage it all, but that one should not mess with the system. "Controlling Jerks" perceive that the system will properly manage as long as everyone knows and functions in their proper place. Broadly speaking.]
The orthodox labels for the north and south spokes of the CCR grid-group compass continue to bother me. Nonetheless, I will use them. It seems easy to me for people to (mis)understand those terms as bare-faced descriptions of social organization, with Hierarchists producing significant hierarchy and Egalitarians creating flat social structures. In my conception, it isnât that the egalitarian social constructs have no structural hierarchy and hierarchical social constructs have no structural egalitarianism. It is the moral authority that groups and their adherents point to that determines their egalitarian or hierarchical orientation. Social constructs are the handmaidens of the groupâs sense of where moral authority properly falls: nearly identical social organizations can be formed around perfectly âoppositeâ cultural viewpoints, the difference will be in their justification for that structure and their conception of the basis for living within the confines of that structure, not the design of the structure itself.
THE EQUALIST/MERITOCRAT EGALITARIAN DIVIDE
From my observations, more than a few people straddle this Equalist/Meritocrat âEgalitarianâ divide, depending on the circumstance. Equalism allows a parent to be comfortable with all children getting ribbons on Field Day where a Meritocrat would be annoyed. It allows a school to see no problem with requiring the one child who did well on a test remain with her classmates failed as they re-do a chapter (See School Equalism below). One can find in the same person contradictory Equalist and Meritocratic impulses. They âstraddleâ the Individualist/Communitarian divide at the Egalitarian spoke, sometimes falling on the Individualists side, sometimes the Communitarian. Straddling Equalists can feel it is important to silence or shout down studies on differences in IQ between men and women and between this âraceâ or that, as they ascribe profound importance to things like IQ tests as actually measuring real superiority, while, simultaneously, arguing for every advantage they can get for their own child, making sure they live in âsafeâ neighborhoods with good schools and abandon the unsafe neighborhoods and bad schools to those who cannot afford to equal them in income.
True Equalists would never seek an advantage for their child or would ideologically commit their children to equalizing experiences. But today's high SES Communitarian American faces a community that values individual achievement and a growing divide between the haves and have-nots that makes it more and more difficult for their children to be able to achieve the lifestyle they, as high SES Americans, feels is the correct lifestyle. True Meritocrats would not be troubled by findings of difference, no matter what the basis, and competition is comfortable for them.
But these are not polar opposites, but rather kissing cousins, because they both believe that the social order is created by human beings, run by human beings, and can/should be altered/fixed/played by human beings. One can straddle this divide because one believes moral authority resides in humanity, and one is only waffling over whether that moral authority is substantially communal or individual in orientation. Moral authority resides in humanity, either individually (Meritocrats) or collectively (Equalists), and so does moral responsibility.
Similarly, it is challenging for an Equalist with Meritocratic leanings to reconcile themselves to the idea that men and women are biologically different in any meaningful way because biological difference opens the door to meritocratic difference that one way will merit more than the other. People in other quadrants can see arguments against male and female biological difference as bizarre or even immoral.
The true polar opposites of Egalitarian Equalists and Meritocrats are the Hierarchists to the north on the grid, who believe the power is in the creator of the social order and we human beings merely respond/play our role/are helpless in the face of it. In this view, a supra-human agent (God, Allah, YHWH, Brahma) or a supra-human agency (invisible hand of the market, fate, nature) is the inherent creator of the social order and cannot be controlled/fixed/managedâonly insulted (in the case of an agent) or interfered with in ways that inhibit its proper function (free market fundamentalism). The Communitarian side tends to organize around a supra-human agent and a received social order. The Individualist side tends to focus on a supra-human agency that is both uncompromising and fickle. In both cases, the social order is perceived as fragile and interference as immoral.
This underlying, functional difference in cultural viewpoint is why ânorthâ Individualists do not unite politically with âsouthâ Individualists. For Meritocrats, the focus is on the individual being allowed to achieve their full potential. A counter example might be Free Market Fundamentalists for whom the focus is on allowing the system to work.
STRADDLING EQUALISTS/MERITOCRATS
It has been on my mind that Straddling Equalists/Meritocrats have some ideas about wgat is allowable to judge a person on and what is not, generally viewable as the sort of distinctions employers are allowed to make about potential employees. (Strict Free Market Fundamentalists would not want to limit employers and Strict Meritocrats would not want to limit the competition of individuals.)
Things that are allowed to be the basis of merit for high SES Americans Straddling Meritocracy and Equalism:
   IQ
   Income/wealth
   Attractiveness
   Geographical location
   Education
   Criminal record
Things not allowed:
   Race
   Gender
   âClassâ (Even though Social Economic Status or âclassâ is profoundly influences by all of the things that are allowed)
A high SES American Equalist would be profoundly upset to be called a racist, a sexist or a classist.
The Deep Meritocrats are completely comfortable with any sort of basis for meriting, and are sometimes proudly âDarwinianâ in their adoption of survival of the fittest.
It appears to me that Equalists and Meritocrats experience a world where their personal agency is effective. That experience of effective agency grounds their cultural worldview. It is an Egalitarian who creates concepts like Locus of Control (see Locus of Control below) where feeling that one is *not* in control produces measures as pathological and results in poor life/health outcomes. For Hierarchists, imagining that one was in control would be the pathology.
THE AMISH ARE NOT EGALITARIANS
That might not seem to be a statement of profound insight, but Wildavsky and Douglas make just that assessment in Risk and Culture (1982). I must disagree with Wildavsky and Douglasâ argument that the Amish placement on the group-grid schema would be what I would call Equalists and they called sectarians (p. 105-108). They argue that the Amish are strongly egalitarian because of their systemic use of âlevelingâ techniques like choosing bishops by lot (sort of), having no specialized training for ministers or any paid ministry, and restricting farm size and careers. They ignore the strongly gender-based role restrictions and allow as Egalitarian a system that is only âegalitarianâ for male members. They dismiss the Amish for their many schisms, and seem to be predicting their demise, but schism doesnât necessarily produce fewer Amish, just more groups. Wildavsky and Douglasâ definition of what constitutes social success (income levels, large group sizes) seems to blind them to the success that the Amish have achieved. Conversely, they seem to praise what they perceive as the more strongly hierarchical Hutterites for their stability, as they define stability, but describe differences that make the Hutterites profoundly more Communitarian than the Amish, and only somewhat more Hierarchical.
From my perspective, the Amish are correctly termed âHierarchistsâ because of the reasons they give for their structural egalitarianism. The Amish have a hierarchy, a social order, that they believe has been ordained by God. That puts them north on my grid, not south. The Amish social construction is based on their conception of a social order created by a supra-human agent, and they are equal in being less than God (all are equal in the eyes of the Lord). From this perspective, any strength, goodness, or positive quality that one may possess is dwarfed by Godâs inherently superior qualities. In my observation, Equalism functionally elevates the human individual and has no room for the sort of submissiveness that is ideologically acceptable and desirable among the Amish.
A FINAL COMPARISON
If the assessment is that the system hinders equality, it is Egalitarianism, either of the Equalist or Meritocratic (or other) persuasions. If the assessment is that the system demands equality, it is Hierarchism, even if the system produces the functional appearance of egalitarianism.
_____________________________________________________________
School Equalism
"To see the full spectrum of tea party morality in a single case, consider (or better still, Google) a transcript on Glenn Beck's website titled 'Best caller ever?,' which relates one man's moment of enlightenment. The exchange, which aired live in late September, starts with karmic outrage. A father in Indiana, proud of his daughter's work ethic and high grades, learned that she would have to retake a social studies test because most of the studentsâwho, he says, run around after school instead of studyingâhad failed it. The teacher confirmed that yes, the whole class would have to take the test several more times because 'we have to wait for the other children to catch up.' The father asked if his daughter could work on new material while the other kids retook the test. The teacher said no, it would 'make the other children in the class feel not as equal.'" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703673604575550243700895762.html
Locus of Control
"The development of locus of control is associated with family style and resources, cultural stability and experiences with effort leading to reward.[citation needed] Many internals have grown up with families modeling typical internal beliefs; these families emphasized effort, education, responsibility and thinking, and parents typically gave their children rewards they had promised them. In contrast, externals are typically associated with lower socioeconomic status. Societies experiencing social unrest increase the expectancy of being out-of-control; therefore, people in such societies become more external." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control#Familial_origins
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Within Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk, the assessment of scientific consensus is a key component of public policy discourse around risk assessment: how do we, particularly as Americans, assess the risk of climate change, vaccines, swimming pools, gun control and speed limits on highways. Any public policy issue that we face becomes fodder for scientific inquiry.
It seems to me insufficient attention is being paid to the distinctly moral component of cultural worldview risk assessments. Not no attention. But insufficient attention. At times it seems as if Dan Kahan is arguing that scientific consensus has been added as a moral authority for each of the cultural viewpoints: Bible + scientific consensus, individual moral compass + scientific consensus, market fundamentalism + scientific consensus. He argues that people, substantially, disagree not on whether to support science but what the actual scientific consensus is. Â It makes it appear as if his concern is with getting people opposed to the mainstream scientific viewpoint to behave themselves and accept the scientific consensus. I don't think that is what he is actually, precisely, trying to argue, but I think it is a comprehensible reading of his statements over time (1). Berreby might not approve, but I pretty much agree with the idea that people view science as a validating tool for truth, and that is (stated differently) what I think Kahan is trying to get at.
âOrdinary people reliably make use of all manner of DRS [decision relevant science] -- medical science is only one of many kinds -- not because they are experts on all the matters to which DRS speaks but because they are themselves experts at discerning who knows what's known to science.
âYet ordinary members of the public do disagree--often quite spectacularly--about certain elements of DRS. These conflicts are not a consequence of defects in public comprehension of science, however. They are a product of the the failure of ordinary members of the public to converge in the exercise of their normal and normally reliable expert ability to recognize who knows what about what. Dan Kahan http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/7/five-theses-on-science-communication-the-public-and-decision.html
 In my construction of a moral-authority group-grid schema (see below), someone might be able to form a hierarchical viewpoint around a mechanism such as the scientific enterprise, similar to the hierarchical view I assign to free market fundamentalism, but it seems to me that such a mechanism of scientific consensus as an actual moral authority would end up having to supplant other moral authorities and does not easily become an existing moral authority plus one. I donât think people are placing science in moral authority so much as viewing it as a universally-admired test for the validity of an argument. They are using their argumentative reasoning capacity, knowing full well that many people find scientific arguments convincing, are themselves convinced that science does reveal truth, but that they know what the truth is and science is just failing to get there. Yet.
At other times Kahan seems to be arguing that the scientific enterprise should try to communicate its findings in ways that avoid antagonizing the cultural viewpoints--while pretty much ignoring or discounting the idea that a particular scientific consensus might form around one or another cultural worldview at the expense of others. This seems problematic, if it is true that is what he is arguing. Moral groupishness is one of the defining characteristics of cultural viewpoints. There are any number of matters that are more a concern for moral coordination than for function in everyday life, and these include matters where there is substantial scientific consensus.Â
âIt is possible, I believe, to use scientific methods to identify when such entanglements are likely to occur, to structure procedures for averting such conditions, and to formulate strategies for treating the pathology of culturally antagonistic meanings when preventive medicine fails. Integrating such knowledge with the practice of science and science-informed policymaking, in my opinion, is vital to the well-being of liberal democratic societies.â Dan Kahan http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2012/7/1/the-cultural-certification-of-truth-in-the-liberal-republic.html
A problem with this proposition is that people will have to give up the (as far as I can tell) universal compulsion to morally coordinate and enforce moral coordination. Well, universal in the sense that groups will have individual members who guard the group boundaries via moral coordination. The desire to have oneâs moral viewpoint predominate is not a trivial matter. End up on the wrong side of the culture war and what was once a noncontroversial moral viewpoint will become essentially illegal and one will become liable in a court of law. No one wants to be shunned, and we instinctively seem to know that if we are not in proper moral coordination, that may be our fate. Hence, there are those who busily enforce moral coordination and also keep track of their own moral coordination.
It seems tome that it is common for people to say things for the sole purpose of morally coordinating, and if one doesnât recognize it for that or if one actively opposes that moral viewpoint and must say so, conflict is a likely result. I suggest that there are conversations initiated for the sole purpose of establishing moral coordination, or perhaps assessing might be the better word. Two people, both gauging the level of moral coordination between them. Once a minimum level of moral coordination has been established, later conversations can be used to strengthen or simply maintain that sense of moral coordination. Later conversations would continue to assess both the mutual moral coordination but, through specific topics such as gossip, also help each individual understand what is being asked to continue to be in moral coordination.
What is the calculation to be made of the moral costs for allowing immorality to stand? For remaining silent when one feels strongly something is immoral? How does one avoid creating âculturally antagonistic meaningsâ when one is embedded in a moral viewpoint and it just makes sense. I unintentionally upset someone when I said that circumcision was cultural, something I did not consider controversial; that person felt strongly that circumcision is mutilation and became infuriated. If one believes only ignorant people donât believe in evolution, how in the world is one going to avoid being culturally antagonistic if the opportunity arises to communicate the science of evolution to a non-believer? If one believes that climate change is the most important challenge we face as human beings, how does one avoid being culturally antagonistic in the face of vociferous opposition?
The public view of smoking is one of those cultural changes that I observed in my own lifetime. It went from cool to a public menace in a very short period of time. Smoking was most effectively discouraged not by scientific findings or laws but by social stigma. The social consensus allowed the laws to be enacted and enforced. Even now, with the laws in place and the social stigma generally high, the science continues to show that the best way to prevent smoking in youths is to use social norming: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070719170315.htm.
There are times when scientific consensus imperils no cultural viewpoint and is still completely ignored. I believe the scientific consensus is that wearing high-heeled shoes is bad for a personâs health: feet, back, tendons, muscles, ligaments and cartilage (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). I donât believe it is remotely controversial, though Sarah Jessica Parker technically blames wearing cheap high-heeled shoes with plastic soles for her foot problems. Still, I donât think anyone suspects women who like wearing them will give them up, cheap or expensive, until actual personal pain makes it necessary. Or fashions change.
Another sort of conflict over science can be primarily cultural, for instance teaching evolution in schools. The fight around teaching evolution in schools is a fight for cultural supremacy. What our children are taught as captive members of the public school curriculum is a matter of deep concern. When one side wins this sort of culture war and the government appears to side with them, the "losing" side must essentially abandon public schools that they will continue to fund through their tax dollars, exacerbating anti-government sentiment and a sense of being persecuted. Fundamentalist Christians are turning to private schools, home schools and creation museums to prevent their children from being taught evolution. The sense that there is a moral requirement (freedom from religion) to keep their viewpoint out of the public classrooms effectively removes them from the public classrooms, further isolating them.
But they do not reject science. They turn to scientists to make their case for them, and they have substantial faith in the scientific endeavor. Just not in certain fields that threaten their religious convictions, like evolutionary biology, geology and paleontology. Frankly, the antagonism seems fairly mutual. I spent time at a conference for evolutionary theorists and it was pretty clear a certain percentage of them were expending a great deal of energy trying to explain religion and religiosity in a desire to explain them out of existence. They clearly viewed organized religion as hindering peace and prosperity, reason and rationality. And also their cultural viewpoint, though they didnât mention that part of it. They seemed to pretty clearly see themselves as purveyors of truth against ignorance, which may be true, but is an attitude not particularly conducive to avoiding antagonizing other cultural viewpoints.
When we are morally coordinating, we donât see the other side as equally valid. We see it as pernicious, immoral, and in need of correction/destruction. Making detailed notes about our differences, like CCR does, may not ameliorate that tendency.
The biggest concerns for researchers like Dan Kahan in the science of science communication via CCR are matters where scientific consensus suggests we need to respond as a society to a problem, like climate change. In these cases, it becomes a matter of designing public policy to respond to a threat, and people with a strong sense of the dangers can become extremely frustrated by the delaying tactics of those who do not have the same assessment. The question of science = truth in these matters inevitably comes down to lining up opposing scientists, questioning the science, and accusing the scientific community of groupthink. Kahanâs theory of cultural cognition suggests the possibility of scientific communities potentially having a groupthink problem, though Kahan himself argues against it. Climate change skeptics do not argue that the scientific endeavor is wrong, but that bias is preventing science from functioning properly. Climate change skeptics are convinced they are seeing something that the scientific consensus is missing, and are incredibly energetic about getting their concerns aired in all available public forums. But, as Kahan repeatedly points out, they do not dismiss science as an endeavor, only the misguided science cimate change scientists are pursuing.
Another problem in evaluating the science = truth equation is precisely what one means when one says âscience.â Yes, I am digging up the old âhard scienceâ versus âsoft scienceâ debate. But specifically, how different scientific fields define the word âtheoryâ is informative. In biology, I was taught that a theory was âa broad explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is substantiated by a large body of evidence. It shows (1) consistency with vast amounts of data, and (2) the ability to make predictionsâ (Biology, Brooker, et al., Second Edition). Conversely, Jeffrey Jensen Arnettâs Human Development: A Cultural Approach, defines theory as a âframework that presents a set of interconnected ideas in an original way and inspires further researchâ (2012). There is quite some distance between biology's "broad explanation" that is "substantiated by a large body of evidence" and psychology's "framework" that "inspires further research." I was glad to learn the difference, as it gave me some understanding of the persistence of flimsy psychological theories that manage to be impressively generative. One wonders how each of these fields would functionally define the word âscience."
When most people talk about science in a colloquial way, they do seem to mean something akin to science = truth. Science is a powerful argumentative tool with a proven track record. And they tend to habitually reverse it: what I know to be true must be scientific. If the scientists havenât figured it out how right I am yet, it is only because they are culturally biased, âso smart they are stupid,â playing the funding game, or contaminated by the pursuit of fame and fortune and corporate stock bonanzas. Each cultural viewpoint has a ready explanation for science gone bad.
Science ends up stuck between a rock and a hard place. Individual scientists will want to argue for the validity of their methods and the usefulness of their results, but the scientific method requires its practitioners to acknowledge that their conclusions are always partial, incomplete placeholders, open to further testing and evidence. These are scientists who are likely to be strongly committed to their sense of the robustness of the current consensus conclusions. There is a humbling moral story here. Science = truth because it acknowledges its inability to certify truth, only to offer current thinking based on the best available evidence. Its track record is impressive; it proves both the reality of its inability to certify truth and the usefulness of its methods to solve difficult and intractable problems. It has earned its place as the trump card in risk assessment disagreements, and must find a way to deal with the consequences of that status.
The interesting questions raised by the science of science communication via CCR encourage me to contemplate whether a plurality approach or a mutuality approach is most likely to succeed in overcoming public policy impasses. A question for another day.
But notice what a vaccine is not. A vaccine is not a cure-all, but a targeted intervention. As a small pox vaccine is not useful to fight a case of measles, so science cannot solve every problem. And there are cases where the side effects of the vaccine are more harmful than the infection itself and so vaccinations are not the norm. Continuing the analogy, there are rare cases where individuals have debilitating or fatal responses to vaccination, and science has been the source of some life-threatening complications in the lives of both civilians and scientists. There have been some dramatic moments when those believing they were pursuing worthwhile science have done more harm than good (Tuskegee, Guatemala). There are some people in whom vaccines never take, and a personâs immunity can wane over time. A seemingly-devoted scientist can find their professional ethical commitments compromised by the demands of career, family or ideological commitments that seem to be more important than some details of the scientific method [Stapel]. We find ways to rationalize behaviors that provide us with what we want, need, expect.
Science is not perfect, nor are the men and women who practice it as an endeavor. Anyone who is supposing science has come to a false conclusion has some statistical backing for that perception and probably science has gotten something wrong for the very reason being presumed. But even people who disagree with some particular conclusion a scientific discipline has formed a consensus around still substantially agree with and support the scientific endeavor (1).
Cultural world-views will have an impact on what questions are asked, what answers seem possible, and in the current environment, concerns about what projects will be able to get funding will also adjust scientific pursuits. Our natural biases will lead us to maintain moral coordination and resist anything that might threaten our cultural worldview. Scientific inquiry suggests this is so [2][3].
Does the scientific endeavor overcome these limitations? Oneâs very conception of the scientific endeavor will impact oneâs trajectory as a scientist. Is one a Kuhnian or a Popperian? Is science a fallible human endeavor, as hierarchical and dialectical as anything human-created? Is it contaminated by the profit motive, individual or corporate or enriched by them? Is the idea that science pursues truth a myth [4]? Is falsifiability a necessary boundary for science? Does scientific consensus constitute a moral imperative to act? Does science constitute a supra-human endeavor, where the efforts of thousands of individual scientists ameliorates the effortful errors of any one scientist and produces a solution superior to what any one scientist could have induced from their observations? Is science self-correcting? How do culture and science interact?Â
And what is culture? Is it an infection that must be cured? Is it an achievement that should be celebrated? The majority of my interest in âcultureâ and âscienceâ revolves around societal assessments of ârisk.â How risky is gun ownership? How risky is limiting legal access to guns? How risky is abortion? How risky is limiting legal access to abortion? Thus my interest falls in line with Cultural Theory of Risk, as elucidated by Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky, Steve Rayner and many others.
âCultural studies tell us that attitudes towards risk, and towards everything else, vary according to the way people make sense of their experiences (Thompson 1980a & b; 1982 a & b; Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). In particular, the quality of riskiness is ascribed to different actions from one culture to the next, according to the different cosmological frameworks in which the persons in different cultures interpret the events in their lives.Â
âOur perspective that shared culture defines the social unit leads to an examination of culture as a general regulatory mechanism for human behavior. Culture is a set of plans, instructions, and rules, or, less purposively, a means of social accounting. This concept of culture as a control system starts from the assumption that much of human thought is basically both social and public.â (P. 3 Measuring Culture, J.Gross & S. Rayner, 1985)
I have my own ideas about culture that I am sure are not unique to me but that, as of yet, I have not found someone else articulating for me. So I will make an effort to build my own definition for culture.Â
Culture is a complex communal response to the environment: material, physical, mental. Culture is a form of resource management where resources include those found in nature, within the group of individuals comprising the culture, and the sort of technology used. Culture is potentially a mechanism of adaptation at the evolutionary scale. Culture is comprised of moral, authoritative, linguistic and aesthetic norms that are created, shared and supported wherever human beings congregate. Human kind have used culture to adapt to their environment and to shape their environment for millenia. Though components of cultures may seem irrational, particularly to non-participant outside-observers, culture is a broadly preservational response to the availability of material, physical and mental resources both within the group and in the wider environment. Cultural solutions that make clear and obvious sense in one environment can easily be maladaptive in another. Cultures are malleable and adaptive. Cultural solutions that produce desired results will be retained/adopted. Those that are no longer working are abandoned, sometimes quite rapidly. Changes outsiders want that are not experienced as productive are not adopted. People create culture and culture influences people. Disgust, for instance, is one of the most culturally malleable emotions we have [5].
There are no coherent human groups formed without culture. The âcultureless conceit,â as I currently term it, causes us to feel that how we live is right, natural and productive of good while what those people over there are doing that is distinctive, weird, profoundly groupish and irrational is culture. They wear the same things. We wear whatever jeans and t-shirts we want. We raise our children in the natural way productive of the best people. They distort their children with their child-raising practices. My conception of the cultureless conceit is probably a variant of naive realism.Â
It appears not uncommon for some people to believe that science is free of cultural influences (which are bad and it would be bad if science were influenced by culture).Â
â. . . policymakers acknowledge that social or psychological conditioning as well as political or economic interests may color their fellow citizensâ perceptions of risk. Nevertheless, they often express a naive conceit that the validity of a laymanâs perceptions of the importance of some risk compares unfavorably to an expertâs value-free assessment of the probabilities and magnitudes of alternative outcomes. The issue, to some of them, of different risk perceptions is reduced to a question of greater or lesser accuracy, of how well someone is capable of envisaging what a probability of one in six, or one in three, really means.
âSuch a viewpoint pays insufficient heed to the problem that cultural bias is already present in the selection of the evidence on which the mathematical assessment of probability is based. Different perceivers can, and do, legitimately disagree about the figures and values used to calculate the probability of an outcome, as well as over whether any particular value for that probability is acceptable (De Finetti 1974). It is our contention that the four prototypical patterns of culture exert a strong hold over the selection of the evidence that determines a mathematical assessment of risk, just as they do over the selection of concern within the most exotic societies.â (P. xi-xii, Measuring Culture, Gross & Rayner, 1985)
I do wonder about the basis for this preference (that science is free of cultural viewpoint limitations). It could be that to deny that science will have a cultural viewpoint is a form of the cultureless conceit. Or it could be that an individual is a meliorist of the sort that sees science as a supra-human agent created by the system of science, the mass accumulation of the pure movement of the scientific method through a scientific field and through individual scientists within that field. It could also be that one can simply dislike the (potential) implication that cultural âbiasâ means that scientific results are rendered invalid. It could also be that to accept cultural influences on the individual goes against a personâs cultural worldview, as described in Cultural Theory of Risk. Mary Douglas offers this in her introduction to Gross & Rayner 1985:
âThere is a striking vagueness about how society works compared with the elaboration of input/output or stimulus/response theories about the individual psyche. The same lack of balance, as between social influences and individual ratiocination shows in many other matters, over the whole range of social issues. Psychopathology depends upon some clear characterization of the kinds of social support or failure of support that may account for clinical depression or mania or suicide. The vast literature on anomie and anomia has not produced an account of social influences that serves the limited scope of those problems, still less an account that would serve for disciplining and enlightening the discussion of production incentives for workers or learning in children. Yet these are not peripheral matters, but central to the concerns of a liberal democratic industrial society.
âI am tempted more and more to believe that the political primacy of liberal principles has unintentionally led the compartmentalization of knowledge to this peculiar impasse. Nothing else could account for the hard clear focus on the concept of the isolated individual while the individualâs social being is put in the shade. It is as if recognition of any constraints upon individual cognition which may come from social interaction would be a philosophical embarrassment. Yet, for the full understanding of individual freedom, the social context needs to be put under scrutiny and schematized.â (P. xvii-xviii, Mary Douglas, Introduction to Measuring Culture, Gross & Rayner, 1985)
Interestingly, Dan Kahan, in an elaboration of Cultural Theory of Risk into Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk (CCR), describes cultural worldview conflicts with specific consensus-based scientific conclusions as âpollution,â a âtragedyâ and as a âweird pathology.â Kahan seems to argue for a sort of limited immunity conferred by an expertâs professional environment, though he is decidedly open to the possibility of intra-disciplinary conflicts being cultural-worldview based.Â
It seems to me, as Mary Douglas suggests above, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, that Cultural Cognition Theory of Risk is an intellectual victim of cultural worldviews that cannot accept that the cognition of an individual is essentially incapable of being pure and objective. Another Cultural Theory of Risk adherent, Steve Rayner, describes the conflict this way:
âTraditional empiricism has tended to reify the feedback process [âhuman knowledge obtained through experience with forces that would continue to exist in the absence of human agency (Barnes 1974; Bloor 1976)â], according the artifactual status of objective knowledge to the information that it is seen to provide, while seeking to separate the culturally determined components of knowledge and reducing them to the status of subjective values. The convenience of the fact/value dichotomy is clearly attractive to the exponents of science for policy who seek clear and simple solutions to complex problems (Cohen 1985). Alas, it does grievous violence to our ability to find real solutions.â (P. 99, S. Rayner âCultural Theory and Risk Analysis,â Social Theories of Risk 1990)
In fact, later in his essay, Rayner identifies the âegalitariansâ as being particularly threatened by Cultural Theory of Risk.
âThe systematic deconstruction of oneâs worldview by an analytic device, such as cultural theory, is threatening to almost everyone (including some of us cultural theorists). We cherish our individuality and prefer to think of ourselves as independent thinkers who have arrived at a worldview that in a significant sense is a truer reflection of reality than competing ideas. However, the specific accusation of inherent conservatism [in cultural theory] and support of industry against labor and the environment has a characteristically egalitarian ring. It certainly appears egalitarians are more threatened by such deconstruction than markets or hierarchies, such that they see cultural theory as an instrument of market and bureaucratic power.â (P. 112, S. Rayner âCultural Theory and Risk Analysis,â Social Theories of Risk 1990)
Despite the potential cultural difficulties, it seems important to continue to observe that science is performed by individuals who have cultural commitments outside of specific pursuits of the scientific endeavor that can and will impact their performance as scientists. But that doesnât mean that this renders science invalid or even unreliable. It doesnât mean it is wrong endeavor. I imagine, statistically, one would find working scientists representing all quadrants, though statistics have shown how particular scientific endeavors have been heavily populated by people with particular political viewpoints [4]. I just donât agree with the presupposition that science having a cultural viewpoint is inherently destructive of the scientific enterprise.
It is in fact science, through the systematic study of many cultures worldwide, that has delineated the impact of culture far beyond fetishistic differences in clothing and art forms. Culture is a deep complex and it is constituted of things both (seemingly) trivial and (apparently) great.
I accept, for instance, that if Amish children were required to attend public schools, and graduate from high school, these children would learn individualistic American ways and Amish culture and religion would be destroyed. That is their internal assessment, and it seems a fair one. Whether or not that culture deserves to continue is a question other people may feel strongly about. The goal of their culture is not to create great scientists or industrialists, and it does not tend to create them. Their goal, largely, is to create efficient small-scale entrepreneurs (farmers, carpenters, homebuilders, bakers, quilters) and homemakers along strong gender-divided lines to maintain their cohesive labor-intensive community.
If, as Popper suggests, science is about problem solving, then it seems important to consider what problems science and scientists will consider worth solving, which will be dependent to some degree on cultural viewpoints. From one perspective, CCR holds the potential to vaccinate individual scientists from a potentially vital failure to acknowledge their own cultural viewpoint and break the illusion of neutrality. That seems to me to be the draw of some climate change skeptics to CCR, a perspective Dan Kahan resists [5].Â
Alternatively, acknowledging this nugget of information could render scientists less effective and water down their sense of their ability to identify useful problems and solve them, inadvertently destroying their effective, solution-oriented culture. Perhaps when egalitarians feel the need to reject cultural theories, they are accurately expressing a cultural necessity. Science may be the vaccine that, despite a few failures in effectiveness or bad reactions in individuals, may be the best solution for some particularly virulent problems. This may be one of those cases where the cultural viewpoint is entirely embedded in the cultural success, and âfixingâ it destroys it. Rather than pressing for a more pure acknowledgment of âtruth,â one accepts that the costs of letting a particular detail of truth go is worth it. The Star Fleet âPrime Directiveâ comes to mind . . .Â
âAs the right of each sentient species to live in accordance with its normal cultural evolution is considered sacred, no Star Fleet personnel may interfere with the normal and healthy development of alien life and culture. Such interference includes introducing superior knowledge, strength, or technology to a world whose society is incapable of handling such advantages wisely. Star Fleet personnel may not violate this Prime Directive, even to save their lives and/or their ship, unless they are acting to right an earlier violation or an accidental contamination of said culture. This directive takes precedence over any and all other considerations, and carries with it the highest moral obligation. (Giancarlo Genta, Lonely Minds in the Universe: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Springer, 2007, p. 208.)
Cited in quoted materials:
Barnes, B. 1974. Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bloor, D. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Cohen, B.L. 1985. âCriteria for Technology Acceptability.â Risk Analysis 5(1):1-3.
De Finetti, B. 1974. âThe True Subjective Probability Problem.â In C.A.S. Stael von Holstein, ed., The Concept of Probability in Psychological Experiments. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Douglas, M. and A. Wildavsky. 1982a. âHow Can We Know the Risks We Face?: Why Risk Selection is a Social Process.â Risk Analysis 2(2):49-51.
Douglas, M. and A. Wildavsky. 1982b. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thompson, M. 1980a. An Outline of the Cultural Theory of Risk. Working Paper of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), WP-80-177. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA.
Thompson, M. 1980b. âAesthetics of Risk: Culture or Context.â In R.C. Schwing and W.A. Albers, eds. Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? New York: Plenum Press.
Thompson, M. 1982a. âA Three Dimensional Model.â In M. Douglas, ed. Essays in the Sociology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Thompson, M. 1982b. âThe Problem of the Centre.â In M. Douglas, ed. Essays in the Sociology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/6/7/five-theses-on-science-communication-the-public-and-decision.html
What is Wrong with the Science of Communicating the Science of Science Communication
It seems to me that Cultural Cognition of Risk (CCR) theory faces two distinct challenges to its being more widely adopted (& cited) in intellectual material and being included in considerations about science communication among the learned elite. One I will call the cultureless conceit: the innate sense all human beings seem to have that they just do what is right, good and normal and those other people over there doing weird and distinctive things have a culture. So discussions revolving around culture that includes them can feel unnatural or even alarming.
The other, bigger, problem is the perception that culture is an immoral influence on people. Particularly in the egalitarian quadrants that the learned elite substantially inhabit, I have observed that culture is often viewed as an immoral system that induces individuals to abdicate their personal moral responsibility to assess situations âobjectivelyâ and causes them to judge things via a cultural viewpoint. To do so is weak, immoral and wrong. In these low-grid quadrants, perhaps more strongly expressed on the individualistic side, culture is a bad word. This means that the foundational concepts within Cultural Cognition of Risk theory run counter to the low-grid cultural worldviews, and their sense that having done or believed something for cultural reasons means they have been fundamentally immoral. CCR is telling them that they cannot help but be immoral. From this perspective, CCR is implicitly indicting their moral competence and needs to be rejected.
A corollary is that, as a consequence, work in psychology that either builds from an individualistic viewpoint (e.g. Moral Foundation Theory) or fights the good fight by building up the moral wall between conservatives and liberals (e.g. Moral Foundation Theory, anything from John Jost, Republican Brain theories, current American work on disgust in conservatives) is considerably more popular. I pick on MFT, and while Jonathan Haidt himself tries to be quite even-handed in the application of his own theory, which gets him in trouble with some on the left, mostly I find people perfectly willing to believe that there is (a) something wrong with conservatives for being so innately disgust-driven or (b) something wrong with liberals for having such a âlimitedâ moral palette. (A related phenomenon is the universality of infrahumanization, but that is a topic for another time.)Â
What is the solution? Applying the theory (CCR) to itself, one would need to find different language to talk about the impact of cultural viewpoints without âaccusingâ anyone of being a victim of culture. I have pretty good luck speaking to liberal groups and individuals, even when I wore plain dress, about CCR. For one, I emphasize these are moral viewpoints rather than describing them as cultural viewpoints. I also simply do not give the theoryâs name, though I do properly attribute to Kahan et al. and discuss specific studies like âThey Saw a Protest.â I try to just lay out the group-grid scales. The most common response I see from political liberals is for them to insist they are not in any of the quadrants; they are in the mythical center-filling group sometimes called âthe hermits.â Their moral viewpoint precludes them from accepting they are subject to a particular âgroupishâ framework, but are radical individualists thinking for themselves with an objective overview of it all. In concert with a great many other radical individualists who think pretty much the same thing. I do not mock. I sympathize. Try telling a Christian that they are being unloving and one will have similar difficulties.
What I find universal among groups I present this to is a desire for good and evil to be placed somewhere on the grid and I must go to some trouble to insist that good and evil does not reside in the group-grid axis but rather in the hearts of men and women.
Regular readers of this blog, all three of you, may notice that I have set aside plain dress. This does not mean I am no longer a Conservative Quaker or that I have been kicked out or, as we would say, read out of meeting, far from it. Within Conservative Quakerism, plain dress is an individual leading (where does that contradiction land on the group-grid axis?) and so it is well within the realm of our religious understanding that I would and could wear it for ten years and then set it aside. My new wardrobe does allow me to blend into a fairly wide array of American cultural settings where I once stood out like a sore thumb, a change that has proven interesting. But, without the bonnet, Gemeinschaft Girl no longer seems appropriate, and since Dan Kahan could never spell it, I took pity on him and adapted two words that probably are familiar to him: anomaly and outlier.
Iâm going to start with my response to his (at this point two-post series) on cultural cognition âprofilingâ(1)(2). And I will start with where I find we are in agreement.
A âweakâ group way of life inclines people toward an individualistic worldview, highly âcompetitiveâ in nature, in which people are expected to âfend for themselvesâ without collective assistance or interference (Rayner, 1992, p. 87). In a âstrongâ group way of life, in contrast, people âinteract frequently in a wide range of activitiesâ in which they âdepend on one anotherâ to achieve their joint ends. This mode of social organization âpromotes values of solidarity rather than the competitiveness of weak groupâ (ibid., p. 87). (1)
The only thing I would add to this is the observation that âweakâ group ways of life seem to appear amidst a sense of resource abundance and that âstrongâ group ways of life seem to appear amidst a sense of resource restriction. The further observation that these perceptions may or may not be objectively accurate, but nonetheless inform peopleâs assessment of risks and ultimate behaviors, seems well within the construct of CCR, if all of this is bit intellectually interpolative on my part.
The difficulty is not the individualist/communitarian part of the scale, but the hierarchical/egalitarian north and south poles of the group-grid schema, or the high-grid/low-grid designations, that feels incompletely bounded.
A âhighâ grid way of life organizes itself through pervasive and stratified ârole differentiationâ (Gross & Rayner 1985, p. 6). Goods and offices, duties and entitlements, are all âdistributed on the basis of explicit public social classifications such as sex, color, . . . a bureaucratic office, descent in a senior clan or lineage, or point of progression through an age-grade systemâ (ibid, p. 6). It thus conduces to a âhierarchicâ worldview that disposes people to âdevote a great deal of attention to maintainingâ the rank-based âconstraintsâ that underwrite âtheir own position and interestsâ (Rayner 1990, p. 87).
Finally, a low grid way of life consists of an âegalitarian state of affairs in which no one is prevented from participation in any social role because he or she is the wrong sex, or is too old, or does not have the right family connectionsâ (Rayner 1990, p. 87). It is supported by a correspondingly egalitarian worldview that emphatically denies that goods and offices, duties and entitlements, should be distributed on the basis of such rankings. (1)
I have not, yet, had a chance to read Gross & Rayner, 1985, or Rayner, 1990, yet, so I will accept Danâs interpretation as representative. And problematic. Iâm not sure whether to conclude that the group-grid axis of CCR and my conception are actually elucidating differing schemas and not talking about the same observed groups at all or whether my conception is simply wrong. My conception of the hierarchists, as I have noted elsewhere, is not that they are in love with the hierarchy but that they are convinced of the moral authority of the system that produces the hierarchy or the moral authority that they believe created the system. For example, one can place moral authority in the Constitution and believe that it creates a moral system of government, or one can place moral authority in God/the Bible and believe that it creates a moral system of society and government. It follows fairly easily that these sources of moral authority become inviolable in some ways for high-grid individuals.Â
High-grid viewpoints are not any more about maintaining oneâs position and interests than low-grid viewpoints. The interesting, and frustrating to egalitarians, thing about high-grid viewpoints is that it absolutely includes lower status people who are not particularly being rewarded under the system. They support the system because they see essential Good in it, not that they themselves expect to be immediately rewarded by it. High-grid/communitarian individuals, in particular, will perceive limited resources that are rightly shared under their system. Each person has his or her place and good is accomplished by fulfilling oneâs role.
High-grid individuals see a moral system that produces justice by being a Good system. Moral authority is invested in the system. Individuals are viewed as weak and prone to moral error. The system either helps to rein in wayward behavior (high-grid/communitarian) or, more fatalistically, (high-grid/individualistic) individuals are powerless within the system and suffer fairly natural consequences (and should not be protected from such natural consequences) for behavior that goes against the system. The system is the corrective, whether created by a benevolent God or the invisible hand of the market.Â
Conversely, in my conception, low-grid individuals consider the best systems as nonmoral and tend to view systems as fundamentally prone to being immoral. Moral authority is invested in the individual. Systems corrupt otherwise morally competent individuals to behave immorally. The snippet above describes an egalitarian culture that denies hierarchy based on the sorts of things hierarchical individuals have tended to organize themselves around, but it does not mention the sorts of things that do seem to egalitarians to be appropriate ways of determining status: education, where one lives, how one earns oneâs living, how much wealth one possesses. It isnât that there is no hierarchy, it is just not organized around the same principles. People without wealth or a Harvard degree will sometimes chafe under this more unofficial but fully functioning hierarchy.Â
So when Dan asserts, I believe on behalf of Douglas and Wildavsky, thatÂ
âThe same orientation toward environmental risk [that there is little or no environmental risk] should be expected for individuals who adhere to the hierarchical worldview: in concerns with environmental risks, they will apprehend an implicit indictment of the competence and authority of societal elites.â (1)
I am just not seeing it. I have definitely observed hierarchical-individualists who, as he mentioned, dismiss environmental concerns because, ultimately, it will restrict commerce. I donât know any hierarchical-communitarians who feel that environmental concerns are âan implicit indictment of the competence and authority of societal elites.â Iâm not even sure who the societal elites are in America. Each cultural viewpoint seems to have established its own system of elites. However, I do know hierarchical-communitarians who feel that environmental concerns are an implicit indictment of God and Godâs power and dominion. Hence my differing construction of what high-grid means and how it is lived out.
In my system of organization, when the system is considered nonmoral, the system is egalitarian. (When the system is considered created by a moral authority that imbues it with moral integrity, the system is hierarchical.) So Communism as elaborated in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin would be egalitarian, which is what it claimed, and not hierarchical/conservative, as some intellectuals like to now assess it as. A corollary would be that under egalitarian systems, leaders would tend to be considered superior as individuals and superior in their personal moral character, which hierarchists would perceive as egalitarians engaging in a cult of personality. Under hierarchical systems, leaders would be bound to claim their authority via the true higher moral authority, whatever that was, and could not claim to be personally morally superior only morally acceptable by behaving within the bounds set out by the higher authority, which egalitarians see as a hierarchical habit of forgiving their leaders for any and all moral indiscretions and a general indifference to that leaderâs personal moral integrity.
Stanley Fish, in his recent opinion piece in the NYTimes, nicely describes the system (in this case the government) as nonmoral (his âgovernment of lawsâ):
âA government of men is one in which laws issue from the will and desires of those who happen to be in authority. In a government of laws the preferences of men (and women), even those holding high office, are checked by the impersonal requirements of an impersonal law.â
He also offers up some of the opposing perspective: âItâs constitutional [secession], in this view, because a government in the act of eroding constitutional values is itself unconstitutional and has become a tyranny.â Or as I would put it for this viewpoint, the originally moral system set up by the Constitution has been corrupted by individuals into an immoral system. For the hierarchical individualist Tea Partier who perceives the governmentâs moral authority as enshrined in the Constitution, those advocating and legislating around a nonmoral conception of government are morally corrupt and corrupting. [I donât frankly think there is anything humans engage in that is entirely nonmoral.]Â
So, back to CCR theory. One thing that I donât see addressed in CCR is the human habit of espousing and claiming an ideal without actually implementing that ideal. The ideological commitment that egalitarians have to tolerance is, in my observation, as successfully practiced by its believers as the Christian theological commitment to love as Christ loved: some absolute saints, some absolute sinners, a great deal of failure to meet the ideal. Similarly, one can have an ideological commitment to autonomy, and one can feel one has achieved this if one has sufficient personal material, physical and mental resources, but one cannot actually be autonomous. From my cultural viewpoint, one can be unaware of oneâs interdependence, but that is an error not a success story.
It seems to me that CCR theory faces two distinct challenges to its being more widely adopted (& cited) in intellectual material. One I will call the cultureless conceit: the innate sense all human beings seem to have that they just do what is right, good and normal and those other people over there doing weird and distinctive things have a culture. So discussions revolving around culture that includes them can feel unnatural or even alarming.
The other problem is the perception that culture is an immoral influence on people. Particularly in the egalitarian quadrants that the learned elite substantially inhabit, I have observed that culture is often viewed as an immoral system that induces individuals to abdicate their personal moral responsibility to assess situations âobjectivelyâ and causes them to judge things via a cultural viewpoint. To do so is weak, immoral and wrong. In these low-grid quadrants, particularly on the individualistic side, culture is a bad word. This means that the foundational concepts within Cultural Cognition of Risk theory run counter to their cultural worldview, and the theory's argument that people do/believe things for cultural reasons means they have been fundamentally immoral. CCR is telling them that they cannot help but be immoral. From this perspective, CCR is implicitly indicting their moral competence and needs to be rejected.
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TEDTalks as a platform for âIdeas worth spreadingâ has become incredibly successful in recent years, now with over 800 thousand subscribers on YouTube and 1.5 million monthly visitors to ted.com. As their motto suggests, TED has sought out and given wide exposure to people with revolutionary ideas. It is their hallmark, and many people, myself included, have found inspiration in the ingenious, beautiful and thought provoking ideas presented on the TED stage. So it may come as a surprise that TED has recently removed from distribution two popular talks given by brilliant speakers with revolutionary ideas. Ironically, these two talks, one entitled The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake, and the other The War on Consciousness by Graham Hancock, were given at a TEDx event with the theme Visions for Transition: Challenging Existing Paradigms and Redefining Values.
Contextualizing Human Origin Stories in Mixed-Culture Classrooms
This article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of IfĂĄ divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by IfĂĄ practitionersâ claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, I argue that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographic instance. In particular, it is argued that in order to credit the assumption of divinatory indubitability, representational notions of truth must be discarded in favour of what I call a âmotileâ conceptualization, which posits truth as an event in which trajectories of divinatory meanings (called âpathsâ by diviners) collide. In advancing such an analysis, the article exemplifies what I call an âontographicâ approach, dedicated to mapping the ontological premises of native discourse through the production of concepts which, while not the native concepts themselves, comprise their close equivalents. Elaborated in greater detail elsewhere (Holbraad 2012b), this is put forward as my take on what the editors of Hau call âethnographic theory.â (Holbraad 2012a)
It is problematic for those who are instructing students who are not destined for academia to nonetheless insist that the human origin story that is meaningful and useful in their own lives as scientists or academicians (evolution) must be meaningful and useful in their students lives. An approach that might be helpful in these situations, should any student be troubled by this origin story called evolution, would be to offer that science and academia form a particular culture where evolution is the human origin story used to describe not only our past but to explain our present and to try to predict our future. It is necessary for those visiting this culture to learn this human origin story and to understand what science and academia are saying about humanityâs past, present and future. But that does not mean it must overwrite or negate important human origin stories those students and their cultural cohort may have. Nonetheless, the students should be made to understand, for studies in science and in academia, it is necessary and important to learn this particular human origin story.
I can understand that most if not all scientists and academicians would balk at calling it a human origin story, since story suggests fiction and what they propose is that their human origin explanation is actually true. They could, perhaps, call it a human origin explanation or a human origin perspective. But they should understand that those who don't adopt it will perceive it as a human origin story that is not to be privileged as truth. And that if they find that infuriating, they should understand that they also will be evoking that emotion in perhaps some of their students.
Does science and academia want their human origin story privileged? Absolutely. All cultural cohorts do. All feel they have understood the truth and that others are benighted. What is important to remember is that for some students passing through classes in science and academia, evolution as a human origin story will not meaningfully express their cultural cohortâs past, will not imbue its present and will not be welcome as a part of their understanding of their future. The desire for scienceâs truth to prevail is not mysterious, but neither is the desire of other cultures to preserve their own sense of the truth. When we ask people to set aside their human origin story, we are asking them to abandon their cultural sense of who they are, why they are here, how they should behave and how to think about the future. If their future is not in science or the academy, abandoning all of that may not be remotely worth it. Instead of asking them to abandon it, we could ask them merely to spend a little time understanding a foreign cultureâs human origin story, one they need not adopt if they are not going to embed themselves in that culture, and give them permission to explore ideas without having to overthrow their own culture and the morality built upon it. If we can acknowledge that there are boundaries to the privilege given to evolution as a human origin story, that it can be explored without being adopted, understood without being accepted, some tension might be able to be released around this issue.
And science and academia really need to understand the importance of differing human origin stories to their adherents and the deep cultural meaning that they hold. When scientists and academicians consider that what they are engaging is actually the truth and everything else is nonsense, they wander into dangerous territory whenever they leave their culture behind and head into other cultures. If they can understand that theirs is as cultural a viewpoint as anyone elseâs, they may be able to avoid troublesome episodes that cause hurt and mistrust to multiply and hinders their own research and exploration. An instructive case involved the Havasupai tribe of the Grand Canyon, where the tribe insists they offered their blood for genetic research to help them understand the diabetes devastating their tribe and discovered it had been used for purposes that they considered to undermine their culture. From Amy Harmonâs article in the New York Times on this issue:
 Another article [academic article published using Havasupai DNA], suggesting that the tribeâs ancestors had crossed the frozen Bering Sea to arrive in North America, flew in the face of the tribeâs traditional stories that it had originated in the canyon and was assigned to be its guardian.
Listening to the investigators, Ms. Tilousi felt a surge of anger, she recalled. But in Supai, the initial reaction was more of hurt. Though some Havasupai knew already that their ancestors most likely came from Asia, âwhen people tell us, âNo, this is not where you are from,â and your own blood says so â it is confusing to us,â Rex Tilousi said. âIt hurts the elders who have been telling these stories to our grandchildren.â
Others questioned whether they could have unwittingly contributed to research that could threaten the tribeâs rights to its land. âOur coming from the canyon, that is the basis of our sovereign rights,â said Edmond Tilousi, the tribeâs vice chairman. (Harmon, 2012)
Unfortunately, biologists are not usually trained as anthropologists, and they can fail to understand the minefield they are walking in cases like these. I think it would be good if they did.
Every believer in a human origin story wants that human origin story to be universally adopted. We all want to be morally coordinated. (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2012). We all want to be right and for what we believe to be true. But right and true are often culturally-bound and insisting on the superiority of oneâs being right and true make dialogue across cultures impossible. Privilege evolution in the classroom, in the sciences and academia, just acknowledge that other human origin stories are privileged elsewhere and often serve meaningful cultural purposes that evolution would not equal in those cultures. Acknowledge that science and academia constitute a culture, a fruitful one, a beautiful one, but one that still has to communicate with other cultures in respectful and not just superior ways.
References
DeScioli, P and Kurzban, R. 2012. A Solution to the Mysteries of Morality. Psychological Bulletin of the American Psychological Association.
Harmon, Amy. 2012. Indian Tribe Wins Fight to Limit Research of its DNA. 4/21/2010. New York Times. Retrieved 2/15/2012.
Holbraad, Martin. 2012a. Truth beyond doubt: Ifa oracles in Havana. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (1): 81â109.
Holbraad, Martin. 2012b. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthroplogy of Cuban Divination, University of Chicago Press.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.
It occurs to me that those of the statistical liberal moral/cultural viewpoint have one broad conception of what it means to "care" morally, while those of the statistical conservative moral/cultural viewpoint have a differing broad conception of what it means to "care" morally. I see a few different ways to slice and dice it, but I will start by discussing it from the perspective of Moral Foundation Theory (hereafter MFT). MFT, as put forward by this motley crew, has a moral foundation known as âcare/harm.â Per their website, they describe it so:
This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
One of the weaknesses of their definition of this foundation, and its use in MFT, is that it underplays that a key component of moral systems is defining who/what deserves care/moral concern and who/what does not, and also what actually constitutes harm. When they talk about those of the liberal moral viewpoint placing their moral emphasis on âcare/harm,â they are being too imprecise with their definition of both of those words, care and harm, and glossing over real differences in the basic moral calculations individuals make to determine what constitutes care and what constitutes harm. MFT emphasizes individual moral viewpoints, as their testing is done at the individual level, and while they broadly aggregate those into liberal, conservative and libertarian as political groups, it does not seem to me that they are actively seeking to address the group dynamics that might drive these differing viewpoints. In fact, I suspect that they would argue that innate differences in individuals (including, among other things, visceral disgust responses, need for closure, authoritarian personality types) are what influence a person to hold a particular moral viewpoint and political orientation. I am troubled by the argument that individual moral calculations in response to questionnaires are expressions of an innate difference, when it is clear that many moral responses are culturally sensitive. From my reading, it seems clear that disgust responses are particularly and rather spectacularly susceptible to cultural influence (what invokes a disgust response, what does not).
More comfortably for me, Cultural Cognition of Risk Theory (hereafter CCR) emphasizes cultural viewpoints, mapping perceptions of risk into four cultural viewpoints under a âgroup-gridâ matrix. The âgroupâ axis delineates viewpoints ranging from âindividualistâ to âcommunitarianâ and the âgridâ axis delineates viewpoints ranging from âhierarchistâ to âegalitarian,â which are then combined to label the quadrants: hierarchist-communitarian, hierarchist-individualist, egalitarian-communitarian and egalitarian-individualist.Â
This theory (CCR) emphasizes group identity, that individuals will adopt what they perceive to be the viewpoint of their group and be influenced to accept or adopt information that aligns with their cultural viewpoint both in style and in substance. (See: A Complete and Accurate Account of How Everything Works) CCR proposes ideological symmetry in the tendency of people across the political spectra (CCR uses a grid, not a line to delineate viewpoints) to have identity-protective reasoning influence their participation in public discourse. I think this is an incredibly useful way to understand our political conflicts in the US: different cultural viewpoints have developed differing assessments of the risks associated with certain issues, and our natural groupishness inclines us to see the validity and profundity of arguments in line with our culture (and its proponents who understand things as we do) and to disparage the validity and profundity of arguments and its proponents who do not.
It is part of my proposal (not unique to me) that it is helpful to think about human beings as forming coalitions, which would be culturally determined as being more or less durable and important (gender, family, nation, work, team formation in the face of crisis), and that any person will not only have multiple coalitional loyalties, but also that those coalitions will have differing foci. One person may focus their concern most on family, another city, another state, another national, another international. There are limits as to how much focus any one person can bring to a particular level of coalition and attention will shift as need and perceived threat (aka âriskâ) arises. Much of this is culturally malleable, but urgency and agency will combine to place focus and action where the person most feels it needs to be.Â
As I have mentioned, repeatedly, I am uncomfortable with the arguments that those of the statistical conservative moral viewpoint (hereafter âConservatives) have a personality pathology of xenophobia and closed-mindedness that is innately, biologically, evolutionarily determined and, in the end, more primitive than those of the statistical liberal moral viewpoint (hereafter âLiberalsâ) who lack these unfortunate qualities. Instead, I suggest that we are all âcapableâ of turning our attention to a local coalition when needs there seem great, and when our concerns at that local coalition-level are met (or we choose to ignore them, like Dickensâ âtelescopic philanthropyâ), we are then enabled to turn our attention to wider coalitions or potential coalitions. Alternatively, something may bring our attention to larger-scale coalition needs, but once that larger-scale coalition is no longer considered to be under threat, we will return to our attention to our favored local coalition (family, work, religious community). So that, after 9/11, some Americans would have found themselves widening their level of coalitional concern to the national level while others would have found themselves contracting their level of coalitional concern from âuniversalâ (or international or perhaps transnational) to national. New York City residents, by contrast, would have perhaps found their attention forcibly placed on the local if their family had needs, but widened to beyond their doors if their familyâs needs were met but others in the coalition of New Yorkers had needs they felt they could meet.
Deciding what level of coalitional concern is most important is a cultural decision, and one that is answered differently by different people in different circumstances. US society benefits from people with their attention at all levels of coalition. I wonder if it is only because of our affluence that we have the energy and ability to have such a large coalition of Liberals who place their focus outside of what they might consider parochial local coalitions to a wider scope of transnational coalition. I discuss this at further length here. Both Conservatives and Liberals in the US wish to improve their coalitions by the addition of new people, but the perspective on how to add to the coalition properly is in dispute. But they are the same in that both cultures will seek to add to their cultural coalitions by assimilating newcomers to their moral systems, their cultural views, their sense of proper moral authority.
I donât prefer the orthodox CCR labels for the âgridâ axis of the CCR matrix (hierachists and egalitarians). I feel that âhierarchistâ is fundamentally a derogatory term in the US (1), even to those who would be functionally and accurately labeled hierarchists in the CCR system, and that âegalitarianâ lets those whose cultural viewpoint maps to that area bask in an imagined (and in the US, morally superior) egalitarianism they do not remotely achieve. I agree with the CCR matrix functionally, and accept their measurement of where political assessments of risk fall on the matrix; I disagree with the labels used, and I propose a labeling system for what I perceive organizes cultural viewpoints along the grid axis of the CCR matrix that I call the Moral Authority Group-Grid matrix.
Underlying the levels of coalition we engage (which are widely similar in scope across civilizations, though the details are heavily influenced by cultural concerns) is a cultural sense of the proper placement of moral authority. I propose that Liberals place moral authority in the individual and have a strong sense of the importance of personal agency independent of a system (these are CCRâs âegalitariansâ). Conservatives place moral authority in âthe systemâ as created or generated by a moral power (God, Allah, YHWH, tradition, the Bible, the Constitution, the free market, law of the street). While Conservatives will still have as strong sense of personal agency, it will be under and within the system their moral authority has provided them (these are CCRâs âhierarchistsâ).
So, in my formulation, the proper placement of moral authority (and power) is the functional difference in âgridâ characteristics of these cultural viewpoints. âMechanistsâ experience a moral authority that is supra-human. It may be sentient and omniscient like the Christian God as revealed in the Bible, or be more like the uncaring and unconscious (but powerful and morally pure) âinvisible handâ of the Free Market, or it can be consciously man-made, like the Constitution, or imbued with moral authority via tradition. Mechanists sense that they are a small part of a larger moral system, something more powerful than they are as individuals, something more wise, over which they have (and should have) little or no control. It is not possible, in the mechanistâs conception, to place moral blame on a mechanistâs moral authority or the systems it has created, rather responsibility falls to the individual (family, nation) to be in proper relationship with the moral authority and within the system this moral authority has created. Mechanists do still experience a sense of personal agency, though they will experience it as constrained or contained by the systems that the supra-human agency has rightly and properly created.Â
This sense that moral blame cannot be placed on the source of moral authority is symmetrical: both mechanists and activists experience their moral authority as unimpeachable.
For the âactivists,â moral authority is in the individual. Their sense of personal agency is imbued with an urgency that they are responsible for all truly moral action in the world. It seems natural to them that moral failings do not fall on the individual (who is the source of true moral authority) but on the faulty systems the world creates, and they emphasize taking action to correct and change immoral systems. Inaction can be seen as immoral in and of itself. The activist sense is that the individual will succeed morally and functionally unless the system is immoral and dysfunctional. They inevitably see the system as in need of correction, if not destruction.Â
Political liberals would congregate statistically in the activist quadrants, ranging from individualists like atheist activists to communitarians like environmental activists. Statistical political conservatives would congregate in the mechanist quadrants, ranging from individualists like free-market fundamentalists to communitarians like the Amish. My âLiberalâ label roughly combines both communitarian and individualist egalitarians, and my âConservativeâ label roughly combines communitarian and individualist hierarchists. (The above group-grid shows potential placement of culturally identifiable groups in the US; it has no hard data to support it.)
I propose that these differing allocations of moral authority result in differing definitions of who qualifies for care and what constitutes harm, differences that are insufficiently captured in MFT.
CULTURAL VIEWS ON CARE: DOWNTRODDEN vs. BROKEN
So it has been much on my mind, recently, that the preferred mode of thinking about those considered deserving of care and privileged moral concern by Liberals are those who are downtrodden, those who are injured or kept from full functioning by the system, and the focus of action will be on changing the system. Conservatives, meanwhile, privilege those who are broken as in need of care, and this care will be focused on fixing the individual not the system. To reiterate, intimately tied in with these calculations on care is the cultureâs fundamental understanding of where to place moral authority. If Liberals place moral authority in the individual, as I believe they do, then it becomes natural to place blame and responsibility on the system and desire it to be fixed rather than fixing the individual. In fact, it becomes a sort of blasphemy to place blame on the individual or to suggest the individual needs to be fixed. Rather than wondering whether or not the system needs to change, a significant part of the moral calculation for Liberals is who is more downtrodden. Conversely, if Conservatives place moral authority in the system (via the agency that created that system), then it becomes necessary to place blame and responsibility on the individual and desire to fix the person rather than fix the system. It is not the system that needs to be corrected, except perhaps to return it to a previously pure state that has been adulterated by Liberal changes, and concerns around brokenness will only be to determine if someone has actually been harmed and what the appropriate aid would be.Â
No one places moral blame on their moral authority; everyone places blame (and responsibility) elsewhere. Broadly speaking, a primary conflict between the moral systems as expressed in these two cultures will be where moral authority legitimately resides and functionally whether to privilege social justice (heal the individual by fixing the system) or charity (directly aid the individual).
An example that comes to mind for me is a Liberal I know with a concern for Spanish-speaking immigrants who feels the best way to aid them is to agitate for changes in the system through protests, legislation, organizing and marches, including dramatic marches through the scorching border deserts of the American Southwest. A Conservative I know with a concern for Spanish-speaking immigrants organizes an âEnglish for speakers of Spanishâ class. It seems to me that the Liberal is concerned with changing the system and has his gaze on lifting up the downtrodden, while the Conservative is concerned with assimilating the Spanish-speaking immigrants into the coalitions that are important to her. The Liberal perceives that the system should broaden itself to accommodate the needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants; the Conservative perceives that the Spanish-speaking immigrant needs to be helped to speak the majority language, fit in better, and perhaps qualify for better jobs.Â
More theoretically, a Conservative might also have a concern about illegal immigration (something that injures the coalition) and desire to strengthen laws designed to remove illegal immigrants from the country; I propose they do not perceive this as a change to the system, but a failure of the system to function as it is designed to function by the interference of people trying to change or game the system. They would perceive illegal immigration as a threat to the functioning, coherence and stability of important coalitions, like the national coalition. Meanwhile a Liberal might have a concern about homophobic businesses refusing to offer services for gay weddings or owners of businesses expressing opposition to such weddings, and so boycott and protest such businesses. They perceive a need to change the laws to make such weddings legal and to constrain individuals from refusing services for such weddings or from otherwise expressing opposition to such weddings.
Some may argue that many Liberals are in the âhelping professions,â like psychotherapy, which focus on healing the broken. I donât know of any systematic statistical analysis of therapist political affiliations, but anecdotally it does seem to attract a large number of Liberals. This potential dominance might seem to argue against my sense of Conservatives seeking to heal brokenness and Liberals seeking to aid the downtrodden. I plan to discuss this at length in a separate blog entry, but Ethan Watters has a fascinating book called Crazy Like Us on the globalization of the American views on mental health and mental illness that do not always translate as well or as universally as we might like to think.
RECAP: TWO VIEWS OF CARE
Aid the Downtrodden: the system is the problem that needs to be fixed; moral authority is rightly placed in the individual. The system only holds down the individual. The system is moral or immoral (and produces morality or immorality); the individual is not ultimately responsible for any immorality: the system is.
Help the Broken: the individual is the problem that needs to be fixed; moral authority is embedded in the system via its Creator. Each individual has a place in the system, if they will accept it. The individual is moral or immoral (and produces morality or immorality); the system is not responsible for any immorality: individuals are.
Here are a few examples that I believe show how these differences sometimes play out.
DAVID BROOKS and ALLEN FRANCES
NYTimes columnist David Brooksâ piece âThe Psych Approachâ elicited a response from Allen Frances (Donât Blame Everything on Psychology) that allows me to illustrate my thinking.Â
Iâll start with a quote from Francesâ response to Brooksâ article:
What Brooks doesn't know about psychology is a lot. Everything he says about it has a shallow ring, is misinformed, and displays the same bias and ulterior motive. Brooks is a complacent apologist for the status quo. Whenever events scream out that there is an obvious defect in one of his cherished social policies, Brooks comes to its defense with a muddled pop psychological explanation -- hoping in the process to deflect attention away from any serious policy discussion of what has gone wrong and what can be done to correct it. The consistent tactic is to rationalize a failing public policy by putting all the blame on messed up individual psychology.
Fairly hostile. One wonders what horrible social policy Brooks was defending and how he was blaming individual psychology. From Brooksâ article:
In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure, like poor neighborhoods, bad nutrition, schools that are too big or too small. But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning â the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.
Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, itâs become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress. Schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, are among the best college prep academies for disadvantaged kids. But, in its first survey a few years ago, KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasnât the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.
Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw I.Q. and are probably more malleable. . . .Â
Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control.
As I read his argument, children are having trouble managing their response to chaotic and/or impoverished home environments, and schools are trying to bolster childrenâs coping skills in the face of these challenges. It seems, well, caring. But Frances appears infuriated.
What's wrong with this picture? First off, correlation doesn't mean causality. The kids with traumatic childhoods are also independently likely to have many other obstacles -- economic, environmental, and genetic -- to achieving good school performance.
But the real problem. In Brooks' proposed solution, the kids need somehow to be made more psychologically healthy so that they can cope resiliently with the [sic] their difficult school and life situations. This call for government psychological engineering is surprisingly discrepant with Brooks' usual conservative ideology, but it does serve his larger purpose of distracting attention from the enormous and unprecedented societal and economic inequalities that confront our children and are also ripping apart our civil fabric. Improving our kids performance in school won't come from some vague, quixotic psychological fix. It requires they have better lives and better schools and that means us becoming a fairer society.
Brooks supports the idea of attempting to fix the broken, but for Allen that is not acceptable. The only acceptable thing is to understand the children as downtrodden and fix the system. Coping mechanisms will only gloss over the real issues. Who is being more caring? Is Brooks more caring because he believes psychological programs can help traumatized children cope and perhaps have a better life outcome than they might othewrise have had, or is Frances more caring because he wants to fix the underlying issue and provide real life improvement for these children? I think the truly compassionate response is to say we need both viewpoints pursued, and neither is fundamentally immoral.
JONATHAN HAIDT and CHRIS HEDGES
Jonathan Haidt, one of the primary formulators of MFT, recently published a book called, The Righteous Mind, which I have read. In it, he lays out the broad theory of MFT and offers a wide-ranging discussion on the moral conflicts he sees as embedded in our political conflicts. He confesses in the book to having adjusted his own political identity from one that was unabashedly liberal to what he considers centrist. Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and political advocate of left religious liberalism in the US. In 2002, he published a book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that I read at that time. His writing had always interested me and Iâve enjoyed his perspective. I was shocked and dismayed to read Hedgesâ review of The Righteous Mind, âThe Righteous Road to Ruin.â Hedges bizarrely and unfairly mischaracterized the content of Haidtâs work and engaged in a sort of character assassination by offering as Haidtâs opinion quotes from The Righteous Mind where Haidt was clearly describing the opinions of others. Haidt composed a reply: âChris Hedges Joins the Tea Party.â
It seems to me, now, that what Hedges is railing against is his sense that Haidt is abandoning the downtrodden by not actively condemning the Conservative viewpoint he articulates in his book, and that this omission is as much a sin (of inaction) as the original (to Hedges) immoral viewpoint. This is from Hedges' book review:
Haidt lists six primary concerns of those he considers morally wholeâcare, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He believes liberals, because they do not sufficiently value fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity, are morally deficient. The attributes he champions, however, when practiced among social conservatives, often mask a rapacious cruelty to the weak and oppressed. Slaveholders in the antebellum South, courteous and chivalrous to their own class, church going, fiercely loyal to the Confederacy, in short morally whole in Haidtâs thesis, created a hell on earth for African-Americans. One could say the same about many German Nazis and members of most cults. Haidt, although he acknowledges this dilemma in his moral constructions, would do well to ask himself whether there is something deeply flawed in a model of moral behavior that a slaveholder, a member of a cult or a fascist could attain.
It is perfectly clear from Haidtâs work that he in no way considers liberals morally deficient. I canât decide if Hedges misapprehends the difference between normative (how people should act) and descriptive (how people do act) work in morality or if he rejects descriptive workâHaidt clearly states that he is trying to be descriptive and not normative in his work. But Haidtâs silence on the immorality of the Conservative viewpoint he describes is what I feel induced Hedges to condemnation and contempt. Hedges needs moral systems âpracticed among social conservativesâ to be labeled immoral because they âoften mask a rapacious cruelty to the weak and oppressed,â or, as I would formulate it, privilege the system and fail to pay moral attention to the downtrodden.
CHARLES MURRAY and THOMAS EDSALL
I read Charles Murrayâs recent book, Coming Apart, with much interest. He juxtaposes the cultural world of the 1950s he grew up in and compares it on many measures with today. He argues that while the elites have continued with an essentially 1950s social morality, the non-elites have abandoned the moral choices that would allow them to succeed.Â
Murray offered two solutions to the problem he raises. Murray proposes that these elites âpreach what they practice,â in opposition to their professed morality of tolerance which (he suggests) has influenced the non-elites to behavior that is not in their best interest. Secondly, and this is advice where Murray has practiced what he preaches, he believes the educated elite should move out of their âSuper Zips,â their high-IQ, high-quality education, culturally-homogenous, safe enclaves and live in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods. I didnât see that Edsall addressed this recommendation, which was one of Murrayâs few concrete offerings.
As I read it, Murray sees the small-town America life he experienced in the 1950s as the ideal of America, though he explicitly mentions that it should be minus the rampant sexism and racism. This was a world where the president of Maytag lived near the piano teacher and the sons of executives (like Murray) mingled with the sons of linemen (like my father), living in the same neighborhoods (or close by), going to the same schools, drinking the same beer, driving the same cars, watching the same television shows, embracing the same wider culture. A large part of his concern, from my perspective, is that the culture of the elites and the culture of the non-elites are too far apart for mutual trust and prosperity, and that by ârubbing elbows,â that mutuality and respect can return. Murray sees the non-elites as broken by following the wrong prescription for a happy life, and that it can be fixed by the elites living among the non-elites. Elites would then understand the challenges the non-elites face better. Also, this would help build a community with more shared values and habits, a community that would also share the same risks, environment, schools, roads, shops, policing &etc. This exposure would also show the non-elites what it takes to prosper: self-discipline and a sort of moral regularity. Murray has considerable concern about the US beginning to produce a self-sustaining class of elites whose isolation both feeds and reproduces their privilege, something that was not true in the 1950s.
Thomas Edsall, in his article âWhat to Do About Coming Apart?â, offers this: â
Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able â in Murrayâs view â and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murrayâs framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap. Â
A great deal of Edsallâs article explicates Murrayâs other books and controversies and the policies they encouraged, which seems a warning from Edsall for Liberals to take Murray seriously. Edsall reads Murray as believing that the problem is the lower average intelligence of the non-elites and the problematic morality of the individuals of the non-elite classes (blaming the downtrodden) and refusing to acknowledge that it is actually the system to blame. Murrayâs prescriptions, elites preaching what they practice and elites moving into socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods, do not match Edsallâs reading, and I think Edsall has missed the point of Murrayâs thinking because he is too morally troubled by Murrayâs perceived placing of blame on the downtrodden.
Edsall prefers Walter Russell Meadâs take on the challenges facing America:
 The 21st century, Mead adds,
âmust reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.â
Edsall concludes, approvingly,
Meadâs predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it is his thinking, more than Murrayâs, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries â a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially âintractable.â Meadâs way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murrayâs, it is also more on target.
I canât help thinking Edsall finds Meadâs take preferable to Murrayâs prescription because of his sense that the system is in error and the system must be fixed, and that proposing to fix individuals is simply fundamentally anathema to his cultural worldview, even if that might improve the quality of their lives.
A month or so after the above, Edsall offered an article in the New York Times called âThe Reproduction of Privilegeâ that seemed to me to be entirely in line with Murrayâs findings that we are seeing the creation of a permanent class of elites (something Murray clearly does not approve of and thinks should not happen), though in his case Edsall makes no attempt to offer any solutions.Â
THE TRADE-OFFS REALITY WHEN IT COMES TO DEFINITIONS OF CARE
There are trade-offs between differing cultures, good and well-being achieved in one that cannot be achieved in another, and ills that are engendered in one that are not in another. The problem for those too embedded in the moral viewpoint of their own culture is that they are blind to the possibility that good and well-being could be achieved in the other culture and that the people embedded in that other culture (and its moral viewpoint) could possibly be good people with good intentions and good lives.
I think that it is important to note that from the Liberal cultural viewpoint, what they consider brokenness is best diagnosed and treated by professionals. Brokenness for them tends to be a biological issue requiring something akin to medical aid. From the Conservative cultural viewpoint, brokenness can be a result of a rupture in the individualâs relationship with the moral authority or the system it has created, which other members of the system (or the moral authority itself) can indeed help heal without reference to professionals. It can also be that professional treatment, even if considered valid or of potential assistance, is unavailable due to lack of resources, and so what aid is possible is rendered.Â
An experience I had became the impetus for my thinking on the difference of care between Liberals and Conservatives. Many years ago now, a member of a liberal Quaker meeting (which is peopled by cultural Liberals) lost a family member. I read about it in a Quaker newsletter. It was a short piece, but it made it clear that this family member had suffered from addiction issues and mental illness and had died rather young as a result of medical complications relating to poor self-care, or at least that is how I remember it now. It was several months before I saw this person and, though feeling somewhat self-conscious because of the length of time that had passed, expressed my condolences. I was thanked, and informed that I was the first fellow Quaker to do so. Frankly, I was stunned.
More recently, while attending an evangelical Quaker congregationâs worship (which is peopled by cultural Conservatives), an infrequent and fairly new attender stood up in the middle of âopen worshipâ and informed the congregation that a family member had died suddenly, very young, of unknown causes just a few days before. The worship service stopped, congregation member encircled this person with silent and vocal prayer, and the community rallied around to help raise money for a funeral, organize a service, and generally render aid to this person and the family, though neither this person nor any of the family were technically members of the congregation.
I do not think these examples are atypical. I am not a proper member of either the Conservative or Liberal cultures, but I had sort of bought into the rhetorical moralizing and anticipated that the Liberals would be open, accepting and, well, nice and the Conservatives would be closed, groupish, and cold. That was precisely the opposite of my experience. There were absolutely exceptions in either direction, with a few really warm Liberals and a few really cold Conservatives, but it appears to me that being warm, friendly, and welcoming is simply more valued as a way of expressing oneself and representing oneâs group among Conservatives. Among the Liberals, it was left to individuals to connect with me or not and there was no successful effort to meaningfully express welcome to me as an individual. This is, perhaps, what Jonathan Haidt means when he insists that Liberals are less groupish, but I perceive a different sort of groupishness that, for one thing, requires members (and visitors) to Liberal religous groups not mind being left to their own devices to an extent than makes me uncomfortable when I experience it.Â
It appears to me that the Liberal culture, which prides itself on its individualism and where members seem to have a strong sense of the importance of personal agency, can fail to render aid unless they perceive the person to be downtrodden and even in those cases will tend to prefer to act to change the system that they perceive to be immoral and not perceive that the individual can be aided much personally. The downtrodden, from this perspective, need a moral system within which they will naturally lead happier, healthier and more rewarding and rewarded lives. Another aspect to keep in mind about the downtrodden is that they are not actually equal, being suppressed from full capacity by the system, and so will not be perceived to be in real competition for the resources Liberal culture prizes.
The Liberal project of aiding the downtrodden requires broadly able peopleânot broken onesâto render and sustain such aid. I suspect part of the reticence to even express condolences, much less render more direct aid, to a fellow Quaker who had lost a family member under these circumstances is the dual sense that (1) a fellow liberal Quaker is able and that (2) the one who was lost was not able, and thus an embarrassment and a drain on societal resources. They would have had every opportunity (not being downtrodden) to succeed, and they had not done so. This embedded perspective, rarely articulated, turns ableness into an acceptable, meritocratic status test. More able (financially, mentally, physically) means higher status. Too low in these, and one is presumed to be less capable of contributing meaningfully to society, and less capable of leading a life worth living. It undergirds, with conceptions of the primacy and possibility of personal control, Liberal ethical support for assisted suicide (persons of diminished or about-to-be-diminished capacity mentally or physically deserve the right to not experience life in such a diminished capacity). It is one backdoor through which left-wing support for programs such as eugenics enter into Liberal thought. It is also a currently-acceptable line of reasoning for aborting babies that are forecast to be statistically less likely to be mentally and/or physically able than the average, and for aborting babies if the mother/parents are less mentally/physically and/or financially able than they believe they need to be. [One example of this thinking explicated here: Pregnant at 49.]
Conversely, the Conservative project of aiding the broken does not require unbroken people to render such aid or place all that much emphasis on ableness, and one will find, at least among the social conservatives I have been embedded with, much language around mutual brokenness (Iâve been where you are) and a general sense of it being acceptable to be less intelligent, less handsome, less wealthy than others. A life worth living is not as much measured by ableness as it is by fulfilling familial, communal and societal roles and expectations. The trade-off here is that there seems to be less of an embedded sense of âpersonal powerâ and anyone who finds the roles allotted impossible or undesirable to fulfill will not feel welcome.
PARSING CARE AS A MORAL VERB
So letâs return to MFTâs care/harm moral foundation:
This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
It is necessary that we will privilege one kind of caring over another, that we must use a sort of moral algebra to calculate what moral challenges to embrace and what moral challenges to ignore. Our cultures help us determine what is important and what is not. We cannot possibly concern ourselves, as individuals and as cultures, with absolutely every possible moral concern. Coalitional concerns for the downtrodden override coalition-maintaining concerns for members of the coalition who are broken and in need of aid. From this viewpoint, advocating the teaching of coping mechanisms to âtraumatized childrenâ deserves a contemptuous blog-entry trouncing. Who is being kind? Who is being gentle? Who is being nurturing? Which is more important, social justice or charity?
One of the things Arthur Brooks argues in Who Really Cares? Is that Conservatives are more charitable than Liberals because Liberals ideologically believe in their tax dollars as functioning as their charitable work. I would argue that the Liberal moral habit is to aid the downtrodden in a hands-off way, for instance through government programs and through political advocacy, and to not commit themselves or their resources directly to individuals because of their sense that the real issues involved are systemic issues and that individual challenges are best met not by direct intervention through personal charity, but by changing âthe systemâ or, in the case of âtrueâ brokenness, by the careful intervention of professionals. I would argue they see their tax dollars as more appropriately aiding the properly downtrodden than charity does.
Conservatives get in the biggest trouble with Liberals when they conceive of something as brokenness that requires healing that Liberals do not conceive of that way at all, for instance homosexual behavior or pornography. Conversely, Liberal promotion of downtrodden groups they perceive in need of elevation will baffle and annoy Conservatives who perceive no real need there.
Letâs look at MFTâs Dictionary which was
 (created by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt) -- For use with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (www.liwc.net), this dictionary provides information on the proportions of virtue and vice words for each foundation on whatever corpus of text you are interested in. (http://moralfoundations.org/index.php?t=othermaterials)âÂ
These are the virtue words for the care/harm foundation:Â
Can I categorize these words as either a downtrodden care concern or a broken care concern? Perhaps safe, protect, shield, shelter, secur*, benefit, defen*, guard and preserve are more indicative of a concern for the downtrodden. One of the characteristics of downtrodden care versus broken care is that the downtrodden recipient of care is generally someone to be elevated and helped by someone who is not downtrodden. There is an inherent chivalry in this sort of care. Broken care has more of a concern of aiding with less of a sense of the one offering aid necessarily being any less broken. Words that seem specific to concern for the broken include compassion, particularly in its specific meaning as "suffering with." The other words (peace, empth*, sympath*, care, caring, amity) seem equally applicable to both. Who deserves care and what constitutes harm are not trivial questions, and a part of a cultural viewpoint is to determine how one calculates this moral balance. It is interesting to note that words for âtake care of your ownâ would not be included under "care" in MFT, but separated out into the âbindingâ (culturally- and overtly-approved by Conservatives only) foundations of Loyalty/betrayal and Authority/subversion.
One more look at my Moral Authority Group-Grid matrix with broken versus downtrodden:
I propose that Activist cultural emphasis on the moral authority of the individual will prevent acceptance of theories of aid that focus on the brokenness of the individual, while Mechanist cultural emphasis on the moral authority of the supra-human agency they perceive creating the received system will prevent acceptance of theories of aid that focus on the way the system harms individuals: the downtrodden. Individualist cultural concerns around the tyranny of the majority will conflict with Communitarian cultural concerns about group-defined correct behaviors. Each perspective has a validity that deserves to be recognized, an internal coherence and consistency that should not be denied, and insight to offer to the quest for truth. As Richard Shweder offers: âthe knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.â
***************
(1) Richard Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue?
P. 108 âThe contemporary American mistrust of hierarchy and ready-made association of hierarchy with tyranny, exploitation, and over-reaching entitlement reflect what happens to hierarchy in a democrat market society, in which âtake care of oneâs ownâ is replaced with âsurvival of the fittest.ââ
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The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular. The essays in this book are meant to illustrate and give character to that universal and fundamental truth.
Richard A. Shweder, Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.