I first ran across “Timely Tips for Having a Civil Political Conversation” four years ago, and thought it was important then; when Terry Paulson wrote, “the shrill and explosive nature of the comments made about this election make serious political dialogue in America difficult at best,” I could only agree. Four years later, it’s only gotten worse. Despite the issues that divide us, I truly believe that if folks would take Dr. Paulson’s advice to heart and follow it, we’d all be a lot better off.Of course, to do that requires humility and the willingness to respect those who hold positions with which we disagree; and a lot of folks find that hard, and far too many dogmatically reject the idea. As Dr. Johnathan Haidt has pointed out, doing that requires people to be able “to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning,” and some people find that very difficult.
Category Archives: Culture and society
Next time . . .
. . . you might want to consider that “No Parking” really means “No Parking,” even if you do drive a BMW . . .
Where are the defenders of privacy now?
The folks of the pro-abortion lobby would have you believe that they hold a woman’s privacy as sacrosanct.Apparently, that only applies to liberal women. Conservative women, in their view, don’t have rights—they’ve forfeited them from the heinous crime of departing from liberal orthodoxy.If what’s been done to Sarah Palin and her family this time doesn’t make you sick, and worried about the direction politics is taking in this country, then you don’t deserve this country. There is absolutely no place in political discourse for hacking into a candidate’s e-mail, much less using that to publish their e-mails, e-mail addresses, unlisted numbers, private photos, and voicemail messages. If the Bush administration did this to terrorists, these folks would be rioting in the streets—but if you do it to a Republican, it’s OK?For shame. For shame!
Moral psychology and voting right (or left)
Dr. Johnathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has written an absolutely fascinating article titled “What Makes People Vote Republican?” This isn’t another piece of boilerplate liberal condescension after the manner of Thomas Frank, or another disciple of George Lakoff peddling the idea that if Democrats just wrap liberal ideas in conservative language, people will all vote the way they ought to (i.e., for the Democrat). Rather, it’s a careful analysis using the language and tools of what Dr. Haidt calls “moral psychology” which aims to rebuke and replace those models:
Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
The model Dr. Haidt works with here is complex, though not complicated, but I think this paragraph summarizes the results of his research clearly enough:
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at http://www.yourmorals.org/.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
This produces a result with which many conservatives are familiar: as Dr. Haidt told the New York Times‘ Judith Warner,
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.
I’d always attributed that to the effects of the liberal echo chamber that is the MSM; it’s interesting to think that there’s something deeper and more significant to it. It’s also interesting, and encouraging and heartening as well, that Dr. Heidt offers hope and a possible way forward to address the problem he’s identified. It’s a remarkable article, and perhaps one which could have as great an effect as the work of Frank and Lakoff—only in, I think, a much more productive direction for our country. My thanks to Mark Hemingway and John Derbyshire for calling attention to it.
Setting the record straight
There have been a lot of folks on the Left beating up on evangelicals for, well, not beating up on Sarah Palin. “She’s a working mom, her oldest daughter is pregnant before marriage, she . . . she . . . what do you mean, you don’t want to tar and feather her?! You hypocrites!” Such folks would do well to read the thoughtful reflections of Dr. Alan Jacobs and the Anchoress on this issue. (And if that doesn’t work, they can try Thomas Lifson.)And speaking of Alan Jacobs, I could wish more people on both sides of the political fence understood this:
It’s actually possible to have some sympathy for a political candidate—to think that a candidate is being treated unfairly—whom you have no plan to vote for. It is not the case that all compassion is partisan.
Community organizing and the vision of Barack Obama
Byron York has a good article up on the National Review website on Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer, his accomplishments, and the way in which that shaped his political vision and approach. (See also Stephen Malanga in City Journal for an account of his transition to politics.)
Barack Obama should be proud of himself
Well, the despicable innuendos that Bristol Palin, Gov. Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, is the real mother of four-month-old Trig Palin have been abruptly decapitated by brute fact: Bristol Palin is in fact five months pregnant. The McCain campaign knew about it and decided to make the matter public in order to silence the baseless rumors.As a pastor, I’ve married a fair number of couples; I’ve only had one who were still virgins when they said “I do.” I wish that wasn’t the reality in our society, but it is—as, I suspect, it has been in most societies, though the sex-drenched nature of ours makes it harder. I believe premarital sex is a sin and an unhelpful behavior, but I also know full well that we are all sinners, and many of us guilty of far worse. In my own ministry, I choose to address that particular sin by moving couples toward marriage and toward spiritual and relational maturity, including a deeper understanding of the meaning of sex and its place in their relationship. If a couple is willing to accept that responsibility, and its consequences, and make the commitment to building a strong marriage, that’s all I ask of them. I could wish that Ms. Palin had not had sex with her boyfriend, as I could wish for many girls around this country; the fact that she had the courage and grace to commit to her unborn child and to that child’s father is admirable, especially in the face of the public scrutiny that that would entail. (To accept the even greater scrutiny that was bound to come with the VP nomination, when she was surely given a veto by her mother, is admirable as well.) To do as she did—yes, she fell short of what she had been taught, as we all do; and then as Christ calls us to do, she got up and, together with her family, responded to it as redemptively as possible. To have done otherwise would have been a far greater sin than any she has in fact committed.All this is a very common drama in homes around this country. We as Christians try to raise our children to do what is best, and I hope none of my daughters will ever find themselves in this position; but they’re sinners just as we’re sinners. Given the power of sexual attraction and the drive of our hormones, we may do our best to teach and encourage them to save sex for marriage, but even with the best of intentions, they may not. If they get pregnant before marriage, we won’t love them any less, though it will be less than what we hope for them; we will stand by them and give them the support and care they need to go forward from that point as God would have them live. I think it’s a sad commentary on this day and age that such a story could produce a headline like “Assessing the Political Impact of Bristol Palin’s Pregnancy”; that such a thing should have a political impact just seems wrong.This is where I give major, major kudos to Barack Obama. I’ve written about him sharply at points, in large part because of my disappointment—I had hoped for a great deal from him, perhaps more than was really realistic of anyone, and especially of someone in politics; but there are moments when I can still see clearly the reasons for my initial hopes. This is one of them.
Barack Obama addressed a gaggle of reporters this afternoon to discuss the latest goings-on with Hurricane Gustav. After brief opening comments on the much-hyped, overly politicized hurricane, reporters were curious about one thing: 17-year-old Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, made public today.“I have heard some of the news on this and so let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics,” the Democrat said forcefully. “It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he continued.The candidate who himself was born to a teenage mom, reminded reporters, “You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”
Straight on, square up, dead on point, and absolutely right. Sen. Obama truly should feel proud, because he’s struck a blow for the good here, and not least for decency and fairness in our politics; I think there are a lot of folks in this country who don’t understand that this kind of thing is off limits, and that unfortunately places like Democratic Underground and Daily Kos are among them, but the more people listen to him here, the better off we are. (And if anyone could get people to listen on this point, it’s probably him.)Incidentally, I’m also in complete agreement with Sen. Obama on this:
When asked about an “unnamed McCain advisor” accusing the Obama campaign of spreading despicable rumors surrounding Bristol Palin online, Obama interrupted the reporter mid-question. “I am offended by that statement. There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us,” he said directly. “Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired,” he added.
Based on the way Sen. Obama has run his campaign so far, there’s no plausible reason to doubt his statement. And if there was in fact someone on the McCain campaign staff accusing his campaign of doing this—well, let’s just say that John McCain has fired people for less already this political season, and in that case, he should put boot to butt personally.HT: JustJuls
Minor note
I wrote a piece a little bit ago on “Sense of place and the ’08 election,” riffing a bit on a Peggy Noonan column and a Beldar blog post. It occurred to me a moment ago that someone should tell Peggy Noonan not to worry quite so much: whatever else they may be, both Delaware and Alaska are most definitely places.
Blob spirituality
“Spirituality” is a big word these days, a vogue word; even people who don’t like the word “religion” or anything to do with it are often proud to call themselves “spiritual.” I think for instance of the comedian Bill Maher, who says, “I would describe my spirituality as exactly the opposite of having a religious affiliation”; having seen a good bit of his work, I’d agree. Of course, while most people would say that being “spiritual” is a good thing—even that, as the Buddha put it, “Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, people cannot live without a spiritual life”—there’s little consensus on what exactly that is. Which for many is the point; they would stand with the guru Baba Ram Dass (aka Dr. Richard Alpert, Harvard psychology professor and LSD advocate), who declared, “The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”That statement captures, I think, why so many people set “spirituality” over against religion—religion requires adherence to something outside the self, while it’s perfectly possible, in this view, to be “spiritual” on one’s own terms. For all of that, though, “spirituality” tends to fall into predictable forms. One big one is nature spirituality; the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, declared, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” On a lighter note, the Scottish actor and comedian Billy Connolly once said he loved fishing because “it’s like transcendental meditation with a punchline.” Folks like this would agree with the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki that our spiritual needs “are ultimately rooted in nature, the source of our inspiration and belonging.”Another view might be described as “self-oriented spirituality”—rather than looking for the god in nature, look for the god in yourself. This sort of spirituality can take higher forms, as captured by the American intellectual Felix Adler, who wrote, “The unique personality which is the real life in me, I can not gain unless I search for the real life, the spiritual quality, in others. . . . For it is only with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other, that the god hidden in me, will consent to appear.” Unfortunately, it can also take quite crass forms that simply put a spiritual veneer over complete self-absorption. It’s easy to say, with the Dalai Lama, that “our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness,” but if your self is your temple and there’s nobody but you to tell you whether an act is kind or not, there’s nothing to stop our natural tendency to use what we say we believe to justify doing what we want to do.With the language of spirituality everywhere, it’s easy to forget that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, a reaction against views of life that were either all in the head, all about “definitions, explanations, diagrams, and instructions,” or all about work, consisting of little but “slogans, goals, incentives, and programs”—views of life which, as the pastor and writer Eugene Peterson notes, took over the church as much as anywhere, thus tending to take spirituality out of religion, and out of the life and work of the church. He continues, in his brilliant book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, with these words:
There comes a time for most of us when we discover a deep desire within us to live from the heart what we already know in our heads and do with our hands. But “to whom shall we go?” Our educational institutions have only marginal interest in dealing with our desire . . . In our workplaces we quickly find that we are valued primarily, if not exclusively, in terms of our usefulness and profitability—they reward us when we do our jobs well and dismiss us when we don’t. Meanwhile our religious institutions . . . prove disappointing to more and more people who find themselves zealously cultivated as consumers in a God-product marketplace.
In consequence, as Eugene notes,
“spirituality” . . . has escaped institutional structures and is now more or less free-floating. . . . The good thing in all this is that . . . hunger and thirst for what is lasting and eternal is widely expressed and openly acknowledged.
The downside is that this is a view of spirituality which is set against religion, which is to say, against any sort of external shape, governance, direction, or even definition; it’s a view which intentionally sees spirituality as formless and unconfined. The problem is, we can’t live without forms, and in the absence of anything else, we tend to take the forms with which we’re already comfortable and familiar. As a consequence, though our spiritual longing is driven by the desire to “liv[e] beyond the roles and functions handed to us by the culture . . . much of it ends up as a spirituality that is shaped by terms handed out by the same culture.” There lies the lost opportunity of American spirituality, and one of the great challenges for the church in our country.