Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Practical application of the 6 moral values

This essay references Jonathan Haidt's research on moral values and the differences between liberals and conservatives: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
Please acquaint yourself with this work before reading this essay.

I have often wondered why Conservative communities seem to be long-lived and have low turnover (we can call that resilience) compared to liberal communities. Conservative Jews or Christians would say it's because they have God on their side, but that conflicts with the observation that Buddhist monasteries are also resilient. And that there seems to be different Gods involved between Islamist villages, Hindu villages, Taoist monasteries, Traditional African villages, and Judaeo-Christian ones. Also, some liberal Christian communities have a high turnover. So the God hypothesis is out.

The other observation I've made is that the conservative, resilient communities also are not usually joyful places to be in, especially after a while, because there is too much repression, not enough individual creativity and diversity. They tend to have abuses of power by leaders, domination, sexual scandals.

Both of these observations (having resilient communities which are no fun, or transient communities where people can thrive for a bit) can be explained with Jonathan Haidt's 5 (or 6, if one accounts for many US conservatives and libertarians) moral values. The first two have liberals scoring higher on than conservatives, whereas the last 3 have liberals scoring lower than conservatives (on the average). To define liberals and conservatives, there are personality traits, the most important one being openness to new experiences (liberals score higher than conservatives). Understanding this fundamental difference helps understand why liberals score high on the first two and low on the last 3, with the converse for conservatives. Openness to new experience is correlated with openess to other people's reality (#1),  an inclination to define fuzzier in-group out-group boundaries (#3), hence a concern with the welfare of those outside of one's in-group (#2), a propensity to distrust leaders who paint the world in black and white categories (#4), and a tolerance for mixing and re-evaluating of categories. But why should these 5 values also explain the observations above about resilience of and joy in intentional communities?  Let's go through the 5 moral values and see:

1. Care/Compassion. Without care and compassion for people, regardless of their competence, their attractiveness, their usefulness to the community, their health, their age, their sexuality, etc, the human spirit can't thrive. Things can get hyper-rational, not enough heart.
2. Justice/equity. Necessary to avoid jealousy/resentment internally, but also to avoid being resented by the external world. Life is no fun when people harbor resentments.
3. Ingroup/solidarity. This is obviously essential to having a cohesive group, whether that group is a couple, a family, a community, a company or a nation. Liberals generally don't know how to do it, put their individual (or family if in a community) needs first, or don't care. Things that can help with this one are a common religion, ideology, or mission, a unifying leader, sex and deep intimacy (not practical on levels of organization greater than a small community, but it works well for couples, polyamorous communities/cultures and bonobos).
4. Respect for authority. This could be a unifying leader, but doesn't have to be. Without this one, practical things don't get done because competent or experienced leaders (in specific areas of expertise) are shot down or given the same weight  as incompetent or inexperienced newbies. The community falls apart or gets outcompeted by the rest of the world where competence matters. Liberals are obsessed with tyrannical, or unearned leadership, but it is not the only leadership that exists. If a competent leader in a particular area of expertise can also incorporate the first two values above, it increases their usefulness to the group.
5. Sanctity/purity. This is associated with how rigid the boundaries are between categories, either physical or otherwise. A highly permeable membrane is typical of liberals. Disgust is exhibited when rigid membranes are crossed, an emotion stronger with conservatives. Like all of these, this one has an evolutionary use: it prevents freeloaders (or parasites from other species) from taking over the group, by having strict adherence to resource boundaries and also agreements. Violators are punished by conservative people, whereas liberals are laxer with freeloaders, to the detriment of the group. Caveat: free loaders could be anyone. It describes a certain type of behavior: getting a benefit from the group and paying less or no cost (labor, money, time, etc) than what needs to be paid to sustain the group, or getting a disproportionately high benefit to one's cost(such that if everyone did it, the group could not survive). It's not meant as a term of judgement, it's just a useful category when studying group thriving and survival.
6. Individual liberty. If people are deprived of some control over their lives, they become unhappy (there is some empirical research on this I need to find and quote. Some is in Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis).

Each of these 6 values can also have negative consequences (oftentimes with people not being conscious of them right away, in which case they can be called "shadows") for either human flourishing and/or for the survival of the group:
1. If compassion is not tempered by good boundaries and accountability (number 5), freeloaders can take over, taking advantage of "soft targets".
2. If equality of outcome is enforced (as opposed to equality of opportunity), individual liberty (value #6) suffers, especially as the number of members of the group increases. Also, efficiency suffers because competency levels differ among individuals, so enforced equality could make the community less competitive and/or less thriving. Equal opportunity on the other hand often leads to choosing different ways of using one's gifts, oftentimes based on gender or other biological or cultural factors. This is not a problem unless one has an ideology (which coincidentally is not consistent with social science research) that believes differences are an unnecessary cultural construct.
3. Ingroup solidarity could entail outgroup demonization, which usually leads to war and hurting potential allies. It's an easy way to unite a group by demonizing a scapegoat or another group, but there are other ways to develop ingroup solidarity.
4. Respect for authority can lead to tyrannical and/or incompetent leaders. These are one kind of freeloaders, who take more from the group than they give back, and can lead to misery by restraining individuals too much with their tyranny.
5. An obsession with purity can lead to punishment and misery for innocent people, some of whom could contribute alot to the group. Imagine what would have happened if Issac Newton had been punished by puritans for his homosexuality... Also, combining categories can lead to new concepts and ideas. Part of the creative process involves crossing conceptual boundaries and combining previously separate categories. Too much punishment of people using freeloading strategies can stifle creativity in everyone.
6. Too much individual liberty can threaten ingroup solidarity and respect for authority.

It seems odd to me that people can be divided so neatly into these categories (and also cross-culturally), where one group scores high on two of the values and the other group scores high on the other 3 values. But upon deeper examination, this is not true, except for averages. It might start out that conservatives don't value individual liberty so much, but if they are going to survive, that value must increase. This has happened to many religious conservatives in the US, becoming more libertarian. Similarly, liberals might start out with an aversion to ingroup loyalty, but if they are to survive, that value must increase. Unfortunately many young SJWs seem to adopt ingroup solidarity combined with outgroup aversion. Another example of how people can change is that when conservatives are made to feel safe (and hence probably open to new experience), they effectively become more liberal (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/). So there is a negative feedback that social evolution effectuates, to bring liberals towards more conservative values, and vise versa. BTW, it would be wrong to conclude from the Yale experiment that conservatives are somehow less enlightened than liberals. In some circumstances, too much openness to new experience is counter-productive and has less survival value and in some circumstances it makes sense to be scared.

An open question is whether liberals evolve to score lower on the first two, higher on the last 3, or both.

Also, the results depend on the level of organization that is probed in the survey. In the original survey, that level is the nation (questions like "are you proud of your country?"). What if instead the focus shifted to the couple relationship, family or village/community level? Would it be possible that some people score high on all 5 moral values? I would call those people integrated in the Jungian sense. Those people could be screened for membership to potentially successful intentional communities.