In my previous diary, "Fool's gold", I wrote about Paul Krugman's blog post from last week, "The War on Demand". After quoting a bit from Krugman's set-up, (shortened version):
.... it's becoming clear that many people don't so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can't possibly believe what I'm saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment - never mind that all I'm saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.
So what's going on here?
I summarized:
Krugman went on to suggest three things: First, there's a basic inability to see how shortfalls in demand are even possible. Although Krugman doesn't realize it, this derives in part from arrested cognitive development, explicable in terms of Kegan's typology. Put simply, Level 3 thinking, in which the individual is the product of their social surround, cannot stand outside of itself, and comprehend the social system as a system. And that is what you must be able to do in order to understand shortfalls in demand. Second, there's a fixation on Strict Father monetary morality--although, again, Krugman doesn't explicitly discuss the Strict Father angle as such. Third, there's a failure of traditional Friedmanite monetarists to realize that they are "part of the problem" in they eyes of the newly-emergent demand-deniers.
In that diary, I focused on the first item, tying it to a Kegan-style analysis of the role of cognitive complexity. I had already discussed the issue of moral economic visions before. But now I want to talk about the relationship between the two.
You see, the problem with folks like Obama is not that they want to try to mediate between liberals and conservatives. After all, the central liberal values of tolerance and respect for individual conscience are heavily slanted toward favoring such mediation. No, the problem is that Obama wants to mediate on the lowest possible level of cognitive complexity--and conservatives, of course, just keep dragging that level down, down, down the dark ladder, as Joanie Mitchell would say.
In Kegan's typology, Level 4 corresponds with modernism, self-authorship, and ideology. It is the level at which the individual steps back from society and makes their own decisions about what is right and just--and takes responsibility for doing so. Level 3 is the level of traditionalism, where one simply accepts the social world as one finds it. These two levels correspond quite well to traditional liberalism and conservatism. And while it's certainly true that traditional society has liberal as well as conservative content to it (just read the Gospels, if you have any doubt), once one fastens on to autonomy as a central liberal value, it should be quite obvious that one cannot fairly ask a liberal to "compromise" with conservatives using a Level 3 framework that not only denies the value of autonomy, but that cannot even really grasp it.
Of course one could make a similar argument about the unfairness of asking conservatives to compromise with liberals using a Level 4 framework. As I discussed in "Fools gold", anyone operating at a lower level will be unable to really grasp crucial concepts that are central to the next-highest level.
Which is why, really, one simply can't accept conservatives as equal bargainers, mo matter how much one might want to. This does not, however, mean that one must reject paying any attention to them. It's simply that one can't grant them the sort of dominating and defining role that they naturally seek and assume, based on their Level 3 logic of defining the self in terms of society, and assuming that this justifies their view and their view alone as "right" and "natural".
As an example of what I'm driving at, consider the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which Gingrich abolished when he became Speaker in 1995. The OTA provided an objective screening process to create a common foundation for policy discussions. And Gingrich just hated that--as well he should, raging egomaniacal narcissist that he is. And here we have to distinguish between two distinct strands of conservatism: the moderate conservatism of Edmund Burke and the reactionary conservatism of Joseph de Maistre....
The Burkean conservative may not be able to properly grasp the logic of Level 4, for venerating the existing order is central to the Burkean outlook. Yet, the Burkean can still accept the necessity, even the wisdom of gradual change, and this implies at least a limited measure of openness to empirical evidence and argument.
In contrast, reactionary conservatives, along the lines of de Maistre, are at war with the very idea of secular rational empiricism--even though they will readily pretend to speak with its stolen authority when it suits their purposes, and they can get away with it. In truth, these people cannot actually even fully function at Level 3. They are only congruent at best with Level 2 consciousness, developed fully in late childhood.
Adolescence is the transitional period between Levels 2 and 3, and one form of resistence to becoming fully adult is to cling to simplistic Level 2 ways of thinking while trying to deal with Level 3 sorts of questions and challenges. This is, for example, the essense of libertarianism's "your not the boss of me" appeal to 13-year old boys.
Throughout the New Deal Era, the Fifth Party System, and even--in most respects--the first half or more of the Sixth Party Era, Burkean conservatives were relatively content to play under Level 4 rules. No GOP leaders prior to Gingrich saw the OTA as a source of evil. Moreover, even William F. Buckley saw reactionary extremists such as the John Birch Society, as a liability for the conservative movement as a whole. (Yes, it was more a practical consideration than a principled one, but still he meant it, and in the realm of practical politics, that's what counted most.) All this suggests that there are ways to bridge the Level 3/Level 4 gap, however imperfectly, and the ways to do this are, of course, to be discovered by empirical inspection of how such bridging was actually accomplished. (This parallels something that Kegan discusses, regarding ways to support the transition from one stage to another.)
One key factor, however, stands out: Burkean conservatives actually wanted to bridge that gap. They wanted social peace, even if it sometimes meant accepting things they didn't necessarily want in and of themselves. Indeed, maintaining social peace was part of their key desiderata. So they were deeply motivated to find common ground with liberals. Reactionary conservatives, OTOH, want nothing of the sort. Indeed, they are never so alive as when they are at war--at home even more than abroad. And this is the most blatant and easy-to-grasp difference we can point to--although it is deeply misleading to only notice this attitudinal difference without understanding its deeper cognitive roots. The Level 2 reactionary conservative is at war with the very possibility of an empirical foundation for common reasoning. Which is why any evidence for a position they reject--that Obama is legitimately President, for example--is not only rejected out of hand, but treated as evidence of an entirely different sort: evidence of a conspiracy to deceive.
Failure to grasp the true nature of conservatism--the differences between Burkeans and reactionaries, between conservative "moral values" and levels of cognition, between Level 3 and Level 2--underlies the essential folly of Obama's naive, ideologically blinkered and doomed attempts to "mediate" between liberals and conservatives.
The alternative, however, is not simply implacable warfare against conservatives. After all, conservative support for the welfare state--particularly Social Security and Medicare--remains incredibly strong. And even on issues like gay rights, younger conservatives are coming around to positions considered radical only a few years ago.
Hence, the alternative to Obama-style muddle-headed efforts to "mediate" in ill-defined ways is to deepen our understanding of what we are about, the better to find ways that actually speak to those aspects of those we need to dialogue with which can listen to what we have to say. Furthermore, this need not mean any compromise in our fundamental values as progressives. To the contrary, it may actually involve a deepening understanding of those values. It is, after all, much easier to reach out to othes, when we are most firmly centered in ourselves.
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