Left? Right? Wrong! Our Difficulty Understanding Politics

Left? Right? Wrong!

Our Troubles With Understanding Politics: Considering the Work of Jonathan Haidt

Please join us in Auerbach 320 or online this Wednesday, Nov. 9, from 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. for our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club as Kevin Skelly presents the topic: “Left? Right? Wrong! Our Troubles With Understanding Politics: Considering the Work of Jonathan Haidt.”

To join the meeting online click here. If you have trouble joining, call Brian Skelly at 413-273-2273.

The main content of this presentation is from the work of American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose field is “moral foundations theory”, studying the evolutionary origins of moral reasoning. His TED Talk, “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives,” reveals much of the key background psychology behind human political differences and challenges us to envision how we might better harness all this toward achieving outcomes that are more functional, more sustainable, and more just.

This leads us to see that the classic “Left” -“Right” descriptive polarity of politics is an impoverished spectrum incapable of capturing both large-scale and fine-grained value differences among people. In fact, humans and human society are multidimensional phenomena, requiring more descriptive parameters and more dimension. Consider how many factors go into determining the exact behavior of a tropical storm, including water temperature and currents, prevailing wind patterns, and so many other factors that the largest computers still have trouble adequately predicting them. Likewise, we need to gear up our tools of descriptive political analysis if we ever hope to understand and wend our way through the political storms we face.

It is noteworthy that in every society, there is both a left and a right, even to the extreme, and we can hardly imagine the case being otherwise. The reasons for this, Haidt argues, have deep evolutionary roots. Both sides represent important perspectives on human values shared by everyone across the political spectrum but not in the same proportions or priority rankings.

In particular, the findings of social psychology reveal some distinct cross-cultural patterns of how liberals and conservatives differ from each other with regard to five key sets of concerns, namely:

Harm/Care

Fairness/Reciprocity

Ingroup/Loyalty

Authority/Respect

Purity/Sanctity (disgust)

(One could ask: what may be missing from this list?)

Whereas focus on the top two are paramount for liberals with the bottom three fading considerably in comparison, conservatives hold all five in a much more concerted cluster. Pointedly, what we do not see is a reverse mirror-image relationship between liberals and conservatives in regard to this set of values.

With his dictum that “morality both binds and blinds”, Haidt is warning us that our evolutionary history has geared us for forming groups based on both inclusionary and exclusionary criteria and then fighting it out. He thinks we can and should do much better with our evolutionary patrimony if we resist our urge to divide and recognize some purpose in the differences in our natural proclivities, such that the inevitable patterns of political difference we see in every human society has the evolutionary intent – or makes way for an opportunity -  of maintaining a balance between those who are more conservative by nature and those who are more liberal by nature, making way for a sustainable tradition of peace and community. All this, if we can only resist and outgrow our lust for division and exclusion. 

Kevin Skelly is a retired Information Technology Specialist and longtime student of and participant in the labor movement in various capacities. He is currently engaged in graduate labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

 

An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group. Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses. 

Please be a part of us as we continue this great tradition online!

 

For more information, please contact Brian Skelly: bskelly@hartford.edu