| The Problem Restated
It's a well-known fact that college tends to have a liberalizing effect on people. The exposure to different points of view does that to people. But it's equally well-known that a lot of college graduates are still Republicans, even conservatives. Furthermore, the impact of college on promoting cognitive development has also been widely noted-well, at least within the field of cognitive development. From all this comes an interesting question: What are these people thinking?
Equally puzzling-and quite related-is the question of why liberals and Democrats have been so consistently politically inept for so long, given that they're much more sophisticated, as a whole, when it comes to policy analysis. This diary offers my answer to these questions: Level Four Republicans focus their attention and higher level cognitive skills on getting what they want, rather than trying to understand the world in a broadly objective manner. This is a rather straightforward consequence of their interests and values, which are not substantially changed by growing more conscious.
The notion that conscious evolution inherently equates to a similar growth in moral and ethical responsibility is just one of those liberal myths that comes from hanging around with people whose parents raised them right. Not everyone is like that.
Development vs. Interest
One of the main points of Kegan's approach to cognitive development is that he stresses a common structure of consciousness that applies across the full range of cognition. There is clinical evidence for this, but it does not mean that people actually use the same level of cognition at all times. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence that specialized knowledge does not translate into other contexts-and, indeed, does not necessarily get assimilated by those directly and repeatedly exposed to it.
For example, even college biology students, who learn in detail about evolution can retain the mistaken, but commonplace folk impression that evolution is essentially progressive, as if higher intelligence were the whole point of it, despite the fact that there are so staggeringly many more insects than there are higher mammals. Thus, an important part of education is not simply the inculcation of new knowledge, but the much more difficult elimination of old, false knowledge. In short, capacity to think at any level is no guarantee that one will think at that level, as opposed to simply relying on what one already thinks one knows.
Above all, one must be interested in something in order to pay attention to it, and think about it, and one must be very interested indeed to pay so much attention that one will willingly discard what one thinks one already knows. This is difficult enough on an individual basis, but when one is part of a social group, it is all the more difficult.
Someone at Level Five may be much more capable of sophisticated moral reasoning than someone at Level Three. But if the person at Level Five dislikes struggling with human problems (as, for example, many physical scientists do) while the person at Level Three has spent their life wrestling with moral dilemmas (counseling troubled youth, for example), then the Level Three person will have a much firmer grounding, a much surer instinct, and a much stronger motivation to address, understand and solve problems.
And this, then, is the fundamental key to all that follows: conservatives are much more interested in power, control and running things. Indeed, it is their most central concern. Liberals are much more interested in understanding things, making things work, sharing the fruits of these endeavors and furthering the unfolding of human potential-all of which amounts to an incredible dissipation of attention, since it leads to limitless different forms of endeavor, while power-seeking focuses on just one.
This difference is captured by many different writers and researchers in many different ways. It can be seen in George Lakoff's Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models for conservatism and liberalism, for example. It can be seen in the Social Dominance Theory of Jim Sidanius and Felicia Prattom with its characteristic "Social Dominance Orientation" (SDO) that Robert Altemeyer called "the other authoritarianism." And it can be seen in Phil Agre's article, "What is Conservatism And What Is Wrong With It?" that was the focus of attention at MyDD shortly after the 2004 election, just to name a few prominent examples.
The Really Big Picture
Humans evolved as small-band hunters and gatherers. We lived in relatively flat social hierarchies, and were generally peaceful-which is not to say without conflict. But we lived in an environment where there was lots of space, and the optimal solution to conflict was simply moving on. Our lives were dominated by the logic of cooperation. Small bands needed that to survive on an ongoing basis, and bands generally needed to cooperate for survival in longer time-frames. (The payoff for bad behavior in a single encounter was generally not worth it in the long run.) Relatedly, we had relatively few possessions, and our survival and well-being depended largely on non-zero-sum resources: knowlege and skills.
This state lasted for tens of thousands of years, roughly until we ran out of space. That's when agriculture started catching on in a big way. Large-scale settlements, large-scale surpluses, not-so-flat hierarchies, and, oh yes, wars. The more possessions we had, the less secure we became. Our lives became dominated by the logic of competition. Only here's the thing: competition only succeeds in dominating us because it exploits the continued presence of cooperation. If everyone was competing all the time, and no one was cooperating, then nothing would actually get done. And thus, the logic of cooperation was always alive, even where the logic of competition appeared to be all-defining.
This started to change in Western World with the Italian Renaissance, when the lost classical heritage that had been preserved by Islam was first transmitted back to the West, and began a process of reorienting the entire culture around worldly knowledge, and non-zero-sum logic of cooperation. The foothold for this logic was small and tentative at first, but it grew, however unsteadily, from generation to generation. With the printing press, the information revolution really started to take off. The static wealth held in land was challenged by the growth of commerce and manufacturing-the later eventually gaining an enormous boost in the industrial revolution.
In Western Europe, the primary political division was between these two centers of wealth-the old, static aristocratic conservatives, and the new, dynamic, bourgeois liberals, though of course both groups had plenty of internal divisions, with some very conservative aspects to bourgeois culture, and some very liberal aspects found in at least some parts of the aristocracy. America, as a settler nation, had a somewhat more chaotic political landscape. Particularly after the Civil War, the bourgeois elites-the megawealthy robber barons and their surrounding social sets, subjects of Edith Wharton's novels-became the centers of a new, contradiction-riddled conservative philosophy that continues to this day. It combines the hierarchy and fixation on eternal principles characteristic of land-based aristocratic conservatism with the dynamic competition of the marketplace, which does everything imaginable to undermine eternal verities and fixed hierarchies-at least when left to its own devices.
There was just one thing: not only was this philosophy internally contradictory, it failed to deliver what it promised. True, some people did become fabulously wealthy. And the general wealth of society substantially increased. But so did the poverty of a substantial, and growing number of people-immigrant labor in the East, independent farmers in the West, and sharecroppers in the South. It took two generations of struggle, but finally, after the massive collapse of the Great Depression, a more reality-based politics came to the fore, and with the New Deal, America's national welfare state was born, creating a mixed economy in which both competition and cooperation were given their due.
This arrangement finally laid the groundwork for broadly-shared prosperity, such as the world had never seen before. Movement conservatives simply hated it. The Civil Rights Movement gave them their big opening, and white racial backlash became the foundation on which they began to take back their lost power. Every advance of formerly subordinated groups-blacks, women, Mexican-Americans, gays and lesbians, etc.-became an opportunity for conservatives to further extend their resentment-based backlash politics, a politics that never actually delivered any substantial material benefit to those it appealed to. At the same time, the pace of technological and economic change accelerated rapidly, and the political opening arose to begin massive exporting of manufacturing jobs. While historically, the social liberalism of equality for women, minorities and gays arose as a result of economic liberalism, so the two were inextricably joined, the new realities of incipient "globalization" created conditions for undercutting economic liberalism, even as the cultural momentum for social liberalism continued to expand.
A key to the successful spread of conservative ideology was the weakness and complicity of organized labor in the United States, and in turn a key to this was the McCarthy-era purges of Communists, ex-Communists and fellow-travelers from the ranks and leadership of almost all organized labor, with the resulting takeover by a decidedly culturally conservative leadership, symbolized by the leadership of AFL-CIO chief George Meany. Under Meany, labor was increasingly often a culturally conservative force, failing to educate its members about the need to embrace new allies, overcome old prejudices, and develop an independent political analysis, rather than taking their lead from business, party politicians or other sectors.
This is the context in which conservative elites proceeded, over time, to build a political power structure of well-funded institutions specifically to make war upon the liberal New Deal order and everything it had given birth to. Throughout the Cold War, they used the labels of "Communism" and "creeping socialism" to marshal their attacks, but their real enemy was simply the mixed economy that all of Western Europe adopted--in somewhat scattered fashion from the 1880s through WWII, and then in highly organized form out of the ashes of that terrible conflict. That mixed economy was very much driven by pragmatic concerns, with only the broadest of ideological frameworks. In contrast, the movement conservative counter-attack was highly ideological. And this, finally, is where this big-picture story brings us back to the topic of cognitive development and the political successes of movement conservatism.
Reflection, By Way of A Preface For What Is To Come
It is commonly assumed that liberalism and conservatism comprise two similarly constituted entities, and there is some superficial truth to this supposition. However, as the above overview suggests, liberalism is much more oriented outward, toward the diversity of the world, it is driven by an engagement with reality and the human condition, dating back at least as far as Renaissance humanism. Conservatism, on the other hand, is driven by a concern with hierarchical control and its justification. It is much more ideological in the sense of being impervious to what happens in the world, and being guided solely by its beliefs. In short, liberalism is empirical, scientific, reality-based, conservatism is doctrinal, religious, faith-based. This is true even of secular, free-market conservatives. They worship them their saints, be they Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan or Ayn Rand.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which conservatism has no ideology. If one looks back at the chart of Kegan's levels from "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", one sees "Ideology" as object at Level 5, meaning it is subject at Level 4 (although not shown on the chart), and is not present at all at level 3. What is meant by ideology in this sense is an organizing structure of political ideas. To really have such ideas, and not merely reflect on their surface appearances, one must be able to stand outside of the political system they describe. This is why such ideas cannot be fully accessed until one reaches Level 4. Being able to treat such ideas as objects for reflection, inspection and analysis implies having a context for evaluating them, and ideology is the name for what that context is. However, at Level 4, one does not have that context as an object to reflect upon. One has that context as subject to reflect with.
Level 3 conservatism has none of this. It simply accepts the status quo as the way the world is, and the way the world is is the way it should be. God wills it so. By its very structure, Level 3 cannot question the world it is embedded in. To question that world is to destroy it-and destroy the Level 3 self as well. What the Level 3 self does have, in place of ideology, is a catalog of virtues. As noted on the chart referred to above, it has "Enduring Dispositions" as objects, and those enduring dispositions that are most praiseworthy are what we commonly call "virtues."
So long as the world does not change, or changes only relatively slowly, we can get by just fine by relying on such virtues, as contextualized by our various social roles (what is subject at Level 3). But it's the nature of the modern world that change has accelerated to the point that the old roles no longer work in all situations, and thus the virtues prove inadequate as well. Indeed, Kohlberg's work with moral development was facilitated by posing dilemmas in which there was no "right' answer, in which two different sets of values collided. The failure of virtues in a Level 4 world is thus just one example of a repeated phenomena: as each level is pushed to its limits, the old moral guidelines need replacing with more subtle ones.
The conservative rap on this is that liberals have no values at all, or that they are moral relativists, who will allow anything. But this simply reflects the Level 3 inability to reflect on its own subjective foundations which it mistakenly takes to be absolute. Level 4 recognizes and acknowledges that subjectivity. But that hardly means that "anything goes." Rather, it means a more particular attention to the specifics of each individual case. In In Over Our Heads, Kegan compares Level 3 to driving a car with automatic transmission, and Level 4 to driving stick. The kinds of decisions that the culture as a whole (the automatic transmission) makes for one at Level 3, one must make on one's own at Level 4. Of course people can make mistakes, but they can also respond much more consciously and intentionally as well, taking into account important distinctions that broad cultural rules cannot possibly do justice to.
There are, of course, Level 4-and even Level 5-conservatives out there. They are, in principal, capable of constructing ideologies that are comparable to liberalism's level of systematicity. Generally, however, they do not do this. Instead, they tell stories. Newt Gingrich did this in several books, and in the cable broadcast course he taught while Speaker. Francis Fukiyama did this in The End of History. Stories are narratives, they are a form of sequential thinking. They can, of course, be logically constrained. They can be multifaceted. They can be incredibly convoluted and complex. In short, they need not be limited to sequential thinking. But sequential thinking is where they are grounded.
The classic conservative narrative is the narrative of The Fall from Grace in a past Golden Age. If only we can return to some past Golden Age, all will be well and good, conservatives tell us. The classic liberal/progressive narrative is the opposite-the narrative of progress. But conservatives in recent decades have excelled at co-opting liberal narratives, and casting past narratives of progress as proof that we have already achieved everything worthwhile-and somehow lost it again. Thus, the immigrant experience of past generations is not a lesson we can carry forward in our own lives, or a source of compassion for those living that experience today. Instead it is a source of entitlement-"My ancestors came here legally, and they struggled hard to give me a better life, and those people are just trying to steal what my family had to work hard for."
While liberals and progressives have by far the greater number of storytellers, conservatives have gained an incredible strategic advantage by harnessing the storytellers the do have, and widely disseminating their stories. They have also inculcated storytelling into the activities of activists at all levels, and in all manner of different roles. Above all, conservative media figures, such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, are predominantly story-tellers. They routinely tell outrageous lies precisely because that is the purpose and their function: they are mythmakers. And liberals have an incredibly hard time dealing with this, in part because they do not understand that myths are absolutely vital for us as human beings-and that some myths can be absolutely true.
This is one of the great disconnects in liberal politics today. We have the majority of storytellers. And the majority of real-life stories, too. And yet our political establishment disdains these strengths. Hollywood's money is fine. Their creative input is not simply not wanted-it is despised. We're going to take a closer look at this--and other disconnects--in our next installment.
(Unless, of course, my muse runs away with me. We shall see.)
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