I’ve often wondered why there are so many people who are kind and generous in their personal lives, even selfless toward family and friends, but seem indifferent about broader social justice or the suffering of billions in faraway places, and who will even support policies and ideologies that cause or perpetuate harm to their fellow humans. Some will even respond angrily, at times with contempt, to those who speak out for what would seem to be fairly unassailable values, like equality, human rights, or providing for the weaker members of society.

Yet these are some of the same people who will stop to help you if your car breaks down, go out of their way to comfort a neighbor, or donate generously to charities. Studies have shown consistently that conservatives give more money to charity than liberals, and not just to their churches.

Are they just uninformed about the repercussions of their political choices? Misled by the misinformation and obfuscation in the profit-driven media? Duped by politicians’ use of appealing but meaningless buzz phrases like “family values” that don’t refer to any actual platform or policy position? Driven by outright prejudice and intolerance?

Maybe, but I came across a fascinating theory, in this article [via Arts & Letters Daily]: Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. And then I looked up more information about the theory itself, which is laid out here: When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize [pdf], by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. It’s linked to from the Moral Foundations Theory Homepage, where there is more reading on the subject, and even an offer of $1000 to anyone who can improve on or refute the theory.

The theory goes something like this. I hope I’m not mangling it too much with my paraphrasing and condensing. Liberals recognize two basic foundations of morality: one is based on notions of fairness, justice, reciprocity, and equality and the other on the belief that people should take care of the weak and not do each other harm. By that measure, the stance of conservatives who oppose, for instance, gay marriage and social welfare, or support preemptive wars, would appear not to be driven by morality. But the theory goes on to posit that conservatives have three additional foundations that make up their moral domain: loyalty to one’s inner circle, respect for authority, and the imperative to preserve purity and sanctity. Both conservatives and liberals place a high value, implicitly, on fairness and not doing harm, but for conservatives those values only make up two fifths of their gut-level intuition of what is right and proper.

Haidt and Graham explain that the five moral foundations are to a greater or lesser extent common to nearly all human societies, both historical and current, and are believed to be evolutionary adaptations, while the moral underpinnings of liberalism, which recognize only two of the five foundations, are a modern phenomenon found only among secular Westerners. Since these moral foundations are hard wired into our evolutionary make up, they function as instincts and are not necessarily subject to change by applying reason.

So while it may be disconcerting to try asking a conservative why he doesn’t question the validity of a bloody war waged on lies only to get bluster and anger in response, and maybe an accusation of being unpatriotic, it may be that the very question, from his point of view, was first and foremost an affront to his instinctive moral sense of loyalty and respect for authority.

I’m not suggesting that this theory should give conservatives a free pass for supporting harmful and unfair policies. But it’s a useful way to understand what often seems like willful intransigence and rigidity.

On the other hand, the implications are more troubling to me than comforting. If it’s true that authority, loyalty, and purity are hard wired moral foundations that exist deep in the psyche of conservatives, by their very nature they conflict with ideals of openness, public dissent, and acceptance of difference.

The view of many social justice researchers is that “political conservatism is a form of motivated social cognition: people embrace conservatism in part ‘because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity, and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals.’” (Haidt and Graham) Haidt and Graham offer the moral foundations theory as a caveat, an addition to the social cognition theory, but it seems to me that the deeply held instincts of conservatives, assuming the theory is correct, only reinforce and justify the “motivated social cognition.”

It seems to me that if you embrace a solid and inflexible point of view, one that conveniently and neatly coincides with your existing moral construct, you don’t have to ever worry about feeling jostled or unbalanced by new information, because you can feel free to dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant to your insular worldview. And if one of your essential moral foundations is staunch loyalty to your group, even the possibility of changing your stance so that it no longer conforms to the group’s would in itself be fundamentally disloyal.

The smiling church ladies who seem so polite and friendly when you see them at the rummage sale may be showing you their best face only because it’s an imperative within their social group to show courtesy and respect to strangers. Just underneath that veneer they may very well be deeply offended and contemptuous of your very being. It could be that you have tattoos, an untidy appearance, a revealing outfit, a same-sex partner on your arm: if this theory is correct, then any of those factors, it seems, would constitute a breach of their deeply held moral foundation of purity and sanctity. So that if we perceive a tightness to their smile, it may not be all in our imagination.

So is there any hope? Haidt theorizes that Western liberals have shed the core foundations of authority, loyalty and purity through movement and exposure to diversity: how can you hold on to the values of your inner circle when there is none to speak of, because you and many of the people around you have moved from thousands of miles away? He explains that those who voted for Kerry in 2004 live primarily near coastal areas and waterways, where there is the most movement and diversity, while those who voted for Bush tend to live in central parts of the country where there is less movement. If there’s any lesson from this, it seems to me that it should be on the importance of increasing diversity and mobility, and fostering the open mindedness that comes from stepping outside one’s comfort zone.

From The Guardian:

“I remember the day I learned Ringo’s drumming was “bad”. So bad Paul had done some of it for him…. I read somewhere the beautiful thought that Ringo’s role was to be our surrogate in the band, the Beatle who was also a fan of the Beatles, in awe of the “real ones” from the nearest possible proximity….

“So the sham notion of a “democracy of talent” within these great groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast. Or, paradoxically, the reverse: the urge to pronounce the solo careers so thin and cheesy that the magic was proven to be in the lucky conjunction of a bunch of ordinary blokes, raised temporarily above their station as much by history and our love as by any personal agency; if the Beatles didn’t exist we’d have had to invent them, and perhaps we did….

“Maybe the search for the Fifth Beatle was always destined to end … with the conclusion that the Fifth Beatle is YOU. For evidence, one only needs to listen to The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Here was music to ride like a froth of sea foam atop a tsunami wave of adulation and yearning for, well, itself. What were little-girl-screams if not the essential heart of the Beatles’ true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track consisting of the band itself? Getting by with a little help from my friends indeed….

“A real music would have some modesty, and we’d have a proper reverence for its history, a proper sense of its distance from ourselves. Our pop life, then, is maybe the collapse of musical expertise into raw expression - the collapse of singing into screaming, even when it’s only the possibility of screaming, or the audience’s screaming, or the guitar’s….

“We try to cover our embarrassment at how much we believe. For this whole story really is a naked egalitarian dream, isn’t it?”

My own embarrassment is not at what I believe. If anything I’m more embarrassed by my sense of devotion and love when it comes to popular music (and by that I mostly mean Green Day). I don’t feel taken in by the sham of talentless bands who manage to make me feel exhilarated in spite of their ineptitude, nor by the realization that loving popular music is a kind of collective suspension of rational sense and taste. I don’t think of myself as someone who has taste, and I’m indifferent to whether or not the members of the bands I love have “talent.” I’m grateful for their unabashed faith and perseverance: had they been self conscious or even sensible they may have felt too stupid and embarrassed to be up there in front of people, screaming like idiots, and just quit, and that would have been a shame. A tragedy, even.

The Beatles don’t exactly do it for me, even though I think they’re pretty wonderful. But that doesn’t matter. I think you can read Lethem’s piece and substitute The Beatles with whatever kind of popular music has an effect on you.

Popular music isn’t thought of as great because it’s a high art form: it’s great because it’s so simple, like screaming out loud. Or falling down hard and having that moment of raw sensation, where there’s no thought but, “Ow! Damn that smarts!”

I think Lethem is talking, among other things that I’m not exactly sure I understand, about the conflation of genius and stupidity found in popular music when it’s good enough to knock you over. We want to believe in the genius and specialness of something we hold so dear, but then we look closely and find ordinariness. We find out that Ringo is a lousy drummer, or that Billie Joe doesn’t read music, but why that should matter to us I’m not sure. It’s a kind of comfort, actually. We think: If they’re ordinary then they’re just like me, and I could be them, and in fact I am them: I’m just as good and just as important. Which in a real sense you are, because everybody is good and important. But then the genius is in there too, undeniably, even though it’s hard to pin down: is Billie Joe a genius when he drops his pants and waggles his pee pee? Could you make that argument with a straight face? You can revel in the stupid and endearing things he does, and gawk at him lovingly like he’s someone you might know, but then he also has this completely intimidating and inscrutable part to him that creates this music that makes you feel something indescribable.

I keep meaning to get back to writing here. I’ve been feeling discouraged, frustrated, and angry, and it’s been a reason not to write, because what could I offer besides bitching and moaning? But on the other hand, perhaps I would feel less defeated if I were to send my little electronic packets of words out to the cyber-ether, where not many will read them but at least they won’t be sitting around here at home, festering and smelling like sour milk.

Did you know that there are people — reasonably intelligent and normal people — who think that global warming is not real? Sure, I knew that was the Bush administration’s position for some time, but even they had to give it up in the face of the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists. Yet there are those who insist that environmentalists have a self-interested agenda. And it’s not just environmentalism they look on with skepticism, though that’s the most glaring position it would seem very difficult to justify being against: how can you be against the preservation of clean air and water, open natural spaces, plant and animal species, and a reasonably stable climate? It makes sense for corporations to be against all that is good, of course: they have a financial interest in engaging in practices that harm the environment. Yet they’ve successfully taken average citizens onto their platform, citizens who will happily spew venom on those who would dare speak out for the air, water, and soil.

How can this be? I know that power and money provide access to all sorts of means of persuasion, but have people simply taken leave of their senses?

I always hear this mantra that there are two sides to every issue, that each side’s viewpoint is only a matter of personal opinion, and that furthermore each side is, of course, biased. Where do I begin to poke holes in this theory? First of all, there are frequently more than two sides to any given issue. There is the matter of which goals are considered most pressing and which strategies are likely to be most successful in achieving them. Some of those considerations may in fact be a matter of opinion, but fundamentally those opinions come down to: do you think that humanity should be shit on or do you think it should be saved? If you think that humanity should be shit on so that someone — who is not even you — can get rich, then frankly your opinion sucks.

And bias? Does no one understand what bias is anymore? For a statement to be biased, meaning it cannot be trusted at face value, there has to be a reason for the person making the statement to want to lie. There has to be self-interest. A corporation that wants to continue selling cars or oil, and the politicians who are supported by that corporation or own substantial stock in it, have a great deal of self-interest in saying that the corporation’s products do not harm the environment, so their statements cannot be accepted at face value as true. They have to be verified, or at the very least approached with skepticism. On the other hand, a poor shmuck who is trying to get you to recycle doesn’t have anything to gain personally or financially, so when she tells you that recycling your newspaper will help spare a couple of trees, she has no hidden agenda. She could be wrong, but not intentionally, because she has no reason to lie; therefore she has no bias.

And if you think she’s simply mistaken, then you can consult the empirical evidence collected by the world’s environmental scientists to verify her claims. If you don’t trust the scientific consensus because you think the scientists are just plain lying, what could possibly be their motive? What self interest do they have in making up false claims? None.

The self interest test is especially easy to apply in today’s grim political climate: since there are almost no left-leaning politicians or parties in the U.S., any private citizen who speaks out strongly for environmental protection or social justice cannot be parroting or supporting anyone’s political agenda, since almost no one who is in power or has any hope of getting into a position of power is relying on those views as their political platform. Only former politicians who are safely out of the running will touch these issues. It’s political suicide to care about what happens to humanity, or even to talk about it. And we the people are the ones who are letting it happen: people in power are not going to suddenly decide to do what is right, we have to collectively make it impossible for them not to.

I read an interesting article on the origin of the term “white trash,” which eloquently points out once again how deep classism runs in our society, and how, like racism, continues to be alive and well, but, unlike racism, rarely gets even so much as a mention in public discourse. Looking down on those who are suffering, and blaming them for their own victimization, acts like a relief valve: it means we don’t have to do anything to change the system, because it’s not identified as the cause of the hardship and degradation of untold millions. And of course it keeps the most oppressed classes in society apart, since their members don’t want to be identified with or mistaken for one another.

“The term white trash dates back not to the 1950s but to the 1820s… And best guess is that it was invented not by whites, but by African Americans. As a term of abuse, white trash was used by blacks—both free and enslaved—to disparage local poor whites…. The term registered contempt and disgust, as it does today, and suggests sharp hostilities between social groups who were essentially competing for the same resources—the same jobs, the same opportunities, and even the same marriage partners.

“While white trash is likely to have originated in African American slang, it was middle-class and elite whites who found the term most compelling and useful and they who, ultimately, made it part of popular American speech….

“Southern secessionists and proslavery apologists countered that it wasn’t the lack of access to good farm land, nor the lack of compulsory education, nor the lack of religious influence that made poor white trash so worthy of the contempt heaped upon them…. That is, the cause of poor white depravity was not attributable to any economic or social system—it was to be found in their inherited traits….

“The long and disturbing history behind the term white trash reverberates with meaning today…. Those who use the term today would do well to consider its history.”

I used to write about consumer spending and personal spending here sometimes, because I think there’s a broader political issue in there somewhere about opposing capitalism and creating a fairer, more balanced world, but I found it increasingly hard to put my finger on exactly what I think that might be. The anti-consumerism movements that exist out there tend to be either patronizing and moralistic, many going so far as to indulge in a kind of competitiveness as to who can mortify their own materialistic, and therefore debased, desires the most, or they only look at what’s wrong with overconsumption from an environmental standpoint, which is valid but doesn’t address the issue of uneven distribution of resources and wealth, or they are content with just making fun of yuppies (Adbusters comes to mind…).

I’m thinking about the issue again because I’m reading a book called Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine. She writes:

“Part of me is disgusted by Americans’ sense of entitlement to vast quantities of everything. At the same time I am loath to ally myself with any movement, right or left, that starts by telling people not to desire. I don’t want to tell the girls in the store that it’s wrong to want those frivolous shoes, because I don’t want to risk suggesting they give up the sexy dream of dancing the night away.”

And I agree with her. Of course it isn’t anyone’s place to tell anyone else what they should or should not enjoy. And even if it were somehow acceptable to do so, asking people to deprive themselves of the small pleasures is entirely beside the point and serves no political purpose. What frustrates me is that I think there’s a valid political issue hiding in there, in the disgust at excessive consumption and the knowledge of its consequences — reinforcing inequality, further enriching the already-rich, squandering resources — but I’m not aware of a political philosophy that articulates why making one choice rather than another matters, or how it matters, and to whom, or how a movement based around that issue can be shaped and its message disseminated.

Moralizing is the wrong way to go. It’s not a moral issue, it’s a political issue. It isn’t wrong — it’s not “a sin” — to enjoy a nice pair of frivolous shoes, nor is forgoing them a meaningful political act. Does it become meaningful if one goes a few steps further and makes a conscious choice not to amass hundreds of pairs of shoes to go with every possible outfit? Or when one chooses to ride a bike, walk, or take mass transit rather than drive a gas-guzzling SUV? Maybe, but it seems to me those choices can only become significant as a political statement when they are a part of a broader movement that includes not only an ideological and philosophical underpinning but also achieves some kind of critical mass. I’m happy not to contribute my nickels and dimes to Wal-Mart, and that does literally constitute, I believe, a tangible non-support of that company, but I don’t think I’ll be bringing down capitalism and global inequality any time soon by doing so.

There’s an aspect of the feminist movement that places a great emphasis on recognizing that the personal is political. Sometimes I think that’s taken to excess: focusing obsessively on the personal can easily slide into becoming all about me, me, me and risks losing sight of broader issues. But even when arguments about whether or not it’s okay to shave your legs become bogged down in details that can come to seem tiresome or trivial, there’s a meaningful core issue there: when you don’t shave your legs and you’re not alone in making that choice but part of a larger movement that has written volumes about the political implications of leg shaving, you’re making it more acceptable for other women not to shave their legs, and are therefore adding to the choices at their disposal, and allowing them, in the process, to add themselves to the chorus of hairy voices letting society know that women don’t exist only to be stereotypically attractive to men.

If the feminist movement can make it acceptable to be hairy, why doesn’t the anti-capitalist movement take a page from their book and work to make it acceptable to be poor? We’re poor already — the median income in the US is $23,000 a year — we just aren’t allowed to walk around looking like we’re poor without being made to feel ashamed. The feminist message that you are acceptable just the way you are is fundamentally a compassionate message. It’s not that you can’t doll yourself up if you enjoy doing so — though there are some who take that stance — what’s important is for you to have a choice: being dolled up is not an imperative, and it isn’t shameful to just go out in public looking like yourself.

Movements like Voluntary Simplicity, which Levine discusses, are very much centered on the individual, not on society’s responsibility to address inequality nor to help make the outward appearance of poverty socially accepted. They offer a sort of spiritual pep rally aimed at convincing individuals that not having stuff, and not having to work as hard to acquire it, is more satisfying than having it. I happen to agree, but not for any lofty spiritual reason: I don’t like stuff and I don’t like spending money, which I don’t have anyway. And if simplifying my life means I’m supposed to create a plan to declutter my home, as the simplicity movement recommends, honestly I find lying on the couch watching TV and eating ice cream to be way simpler. (The ice cream doesn’t cost much, especially if you consider how delightful it is, and I think that as long as you watch TV with a critical mind it does not in fact rot your brain.)

Then there’s a whole slew of experts writing about the psychology of consumer spending, whose premise seems to be that consumers are craven, lustful souls who are helpless before the irresistible lure of a shiny gadget. Hmm, sounds reminiscent of anti-feminists who love to say that women can’t resist pretty dresses and perfumes…. Granted that corporate advertisers are at fault for their shameless attempts to manipulate the public with their relentless and dishonest pitches, but I don’t believe that we the public are by nature hapless fools who can’t resist the siren song of a wide screen TV. Corporations are doing their damndest to enrich themselves in any way they can, but the broader culture is helping them by reinforcing the message that having nice stuff not only makes you happy but is necessary to gain the respect and admiration of your peers — and the culture is, collectively, us! It’s up to us to create and disseminate an alternative message which, it seems to me, could start with fostering acceptance of one another as we really are.