I have long been deeply skeptical about some of Barack Obama's core political assumptions revolving around the culture wars-that they are a more or less symmetrical, irrational distraction from real, pragmatic problem-solving perpetrated by left as well as the right, which are rooted in the 60s and the Baby Boom generation, but have no real relevance to the problems of today.
Having lived through the entire period from the 1960s onward, it seems quite clear to me that the 1960s represented a fundamental rupture with the past, in which fundamental and pervasive institutionalized forms of prejudice-most notably against women, blacks and other racial minorities-were dramatically challenged, morally delegitimized, and largely dismantled. In response to this, political conservatives organized a sustained backlash, and used it to attack not just the breakthrough advances of the 1960s, but a wide range of New Deal political advances and their extensions as well, which largely benefited the working class whites, and helped to create the modern middle class. As such, there was never any sort of symmetry between the sides in the culture war, nor was there anything irrational in fighting against the politics of reaction. Finally, given that the 1960s saw the fall of age-old structures of race and gender oppression, it was quite clear that culture wars didn't start in the 1960s, except in the terms of "bully logic"-"It all started when he hit me back!"
These objections to Obama's ideology are well-known in the blogosphere, at least, if not always well-understood. So, too, is another characteristic of his ideology touched on above-his belief that he, and others following in his spirit, can transcend the culture wars, and bring our country together, which he claims is what's necessary in order for us to solve today's problems and move ahead.
Of course, I and others have repeatedly pointed out that this is not how our most significant problems get solved. But I don't want to revisit that debate here, merely take note of it. Rather, what I want to focus on is an unexpected contradiction that seems to emerge from the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
You see, Haidt argues that morality is more broadly based than liberals commonly assume, and that conservatives acting in ways that liberals regard as immoral-opposing equality, for example-are actually acting based on a different morality, which has its own internal validity. While this would appear to validate Obama's stance of reaching out to conservatives, but Haidt also argues that the underlying differences between liberal and conservative morality are quite substantially deeply rooted, and no mere passing phenomena of a bygone era. He doesn't claim the differences are insurmountable, but he does see them as far more challenging and difficult to grapple with than Obama's feel-good optimism would seem to recognize. If Haidt's understanding of moral differences between left and right are correct, culture war differences cannot simply be set aside to deal with "more important problems." After all, our moral views are central to how we decide what's important in the first place.
Richard Shweder (1990) has long argued that the individual-centered moralities of Kohlberg and Turiel reflect just one of three widespread moral "ethics," each based on a different ontological presupposition. In the "ethic of autonomy" the moral world is assumed to be made up exclusively of individual human beings, and the purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the zone of discretionary choice of 'individuals' and to promote the exercise of individual will in the pursuit of personal preferences" (Shweder et al., 1997, p.138).Rights, justice, fairness, and freedom are moral goods because they help to maximize the autonomy of individuals, and to protect individuals from harms perpetrated by authorities and by other individuals. The "ethic of community," in contrast, has a different ontological foundation. It sees the world not as a collection of individuals but as a collection of institutions, families, tribes, guilds or other groups. The purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the moral integrity of the various stations or roles that constitute a 'society' or a 'community,' where a 'society' or 'community' is conceived of as a corporate entity with an identity, standing, history, and reputation of its own" (Shweder et al., 1997, p.138) Key virtues in this ethic are duty, respect, loyalty, and interdependence2. Individuals are office-holders in larger social structures which give individual lives meaning and purpose. Finally, the "ethic of divinity" is based on the ontological presupposition that God or gods exist, and that the moral world is composed of souls housed in bodies. (See Bloom, 2004, for evidence that this presupposition is the natural, default assumption of our species.) Each soul is a bit of God, or at least a gift from God, and so the purpose of moral regulation is to "protect the soul, the spirit, the spiritual aspects of the human agent and 'nature' from degradation" (Shweder et al., 1997, p. 138). If the body is a temple housing divinity within, then people should not be free to use their bodies in any way they please; rather, moral regulations should help people to control themselves and avoid sin and spiritual pollution in matters related to sexuality, food, and religious law more generally.
From Shweder's perspective it is clear that social justice is the ethic of autonomy writ large, but the two other ethics-community and divinity-are at work in most cultures and in many Western subcultures. Political conservatism is often defined by its strong valuation of institutions and its concern that ideologies of "liberation" often destroy the very structures that make society and well-being possible (Muller, 1997).
It is, to say the least, intellectually challenging, and non-trivial to contemplate how such fundamentally different sorts of ethics might be reconciled or harmonized.
Haidt also writes:
The five foundations theory offers a surprisingly simple explanation of the "culture war" going on in the United states, and in other democracies such as Israel (see Hunter, 1991, on the battle in many countries between the "orthodox" and the "progressivists"). The five foundations theory can also explain two puzzling features of the 2004 American presidential election. The first puzzle is that a plurality of Americans who voted for George Bush said in a well publicized but poorly designed exit poll that their main concern was "moral values." The second puzzle is that political liberals in the United States were shocked, outraged, and unable to understand how "moral values " drove people to vote for a man who, as they saw it, tricked America into an unwinnable war, cut taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor, and seemed to have a personal animosity toward mother nature. Our explanation of these two puzzles, and of the culture war in general, flows from this simple proposition: the morality of political liberals is built on the harm and fairness foundations, while the morality of political conservatives is built upon all five foundations.
I am not arguing that these differences can't be bridged, only that they can't be set aside and ignored, just because we'd like it better that way. And this, to me, represents a fundamental misperception of reality on Obama's part.
