As Jonathan Haidt and Yoel Inbar have found, social psychology has a liberal bias: while conservatives make up twice as much of the general population as liberals, they are only six percent of the field, and many of that six percent are reluctant to say so publicly. This is for good reason: liberals tend not to like people who aren’t like them—and they act accordingly: Inbar’s survey of social psychologists found that over a third of them would attempt to hurt the career of someone to the right of them. Though social psychologists have thought for many decades that disliking people who are different in some relevant way—who are members of thedes considered elthedish by their own (that is, who are in groups that are outgroups from the vantage point of one’s own group)—is the sole province of so-called ‘right-wing authoritarians’ (or, as the original developer of this line of thought, Theodor Adorno, put it, ‘fascists’), recent research by George Yancey has shown that this is not the case:
Those who dehumanize Christians are not right-wing authoritarians but rather a different population from those authoritarians. But we also saw that such individuals were willing to use authority figures against conservative Christians, just as it is predicted that right-wing authoritarians are willing to do. … [T]hose individuals are religious and political progressives. Kind of throws a wrench in the wheels of the arguments that political and religious conservatives react in a way that is uniquely oppressive to out-group members.
It’s not at all unlikely that the overwhelmingly progressive character of social psychology—just like that of academia and the media as a whole—led the field to be more critical of the opponents of progressivism than of progressivism itself, to focus on finding the characteristics they consider negative of their enemies and fail to examine their own group for those characteristics. This may be one reason why Jonathan Haidt has called for the field to work to correct its overwhelmingly progressive makeup.
Even Haidt himself has fallen victim to this tendency, though he has since corrected for it.
Haidt is best known for his moral foundations theory, which, in its most well-known form, posits that there are five core moral values—avoidance of harm, fairness, loyalty, deference to legitimate authority, and purity/avoidance of disgust—and that, though liberals and conservatives both value the first two, only conservatives value the last three.
(It’s interesting that this theory was originally developed in an attempt to understand cross-cultural variation, not American politics, but that’s where it found its most popular application—probably because American politics is really about cross-cultural variation.)
However, Haidt eventually noticed that liberals, contra the common assertion that they, unlike conservatives, are realists who only care about concrete harm, actually do care about purity.
It can be seen in the liberal tendency to moralize food and eating, beyond its nutritive/material aspects. (See this fabulous essay by Mary Eberstadt comparing the way the left moralizes food and the right moralizes sex). It can be seen in the way the left treats environmental issues and the natural world as something sacred, to be cared for above and beyond its consequences for human—or even animal—welfare. …
See the movie Avatar, to see the ultimate liberal moral fantasy about “Eywa,” the god of nature, actually defeating the evil corporate plunderers (and the U.S. Marines as well). And see this essay by Ross Douthat, on the pantheism of Avatar.
Can anyone understand Avatar who lacks all intuitions of purity/sanctity?
Yes, progressives really do make decisions based on intuitions of purity vs. disgust. It took Haidt a while to notice (though it is to his credit that he did), and none of this made it into the popular consciousness (surprise, surprise!), but it’s obvious to anyone who has seen something like a painting titled “Oh That’s Disgusting”, about how scientists’ engineering of a frost-resistant tomato is “alarming” and “straight out of science fiction” (as if that’s a bad thing!), that those intuitions are there.
They’re there, and they’re worrying: while conservative purity, Haidt says, opposes things like casual sex, liberal purity opposes technological advancement. Apparently some people would prefer sitting around a campfire singing praises to Mother Gaia until they die of smallpox (eliminated in the 20th century) or botulism (prevented by the preservatives the painter of “Oh That’s Disgusting” is so concerned by) to losing their precious authenticity to some nefarious devices.
But what’s even more worrying is that this goes against the core of Western culture, all the way back to ancient Greece: the drive to understand the world and make use of this knowledge. There’s simply no point to a society that doesn’t go anywhere, that doesn’t do anything; but between the attacks on Silicon Valley, the fretting over technology sapping us of our ‘authenticity’, and the belief that a technological advance being “straight out of science fiction” is a bad thing, liberal purity presents a serious problem.
And, as with all problems, the first step is to acknowledge that it exists.
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Nick B. Steves
