If everyone gets the exact same amount of pie–then all is well, we on the right say./Image: Licensed Adobe stock, Yong Hian Lim.
Greetings, Alt-reading lovers! Here you are in our library again! Excuse the dust, as we’re doing a bit of remodeling–to make room for more books, of course. Oh, how it fils us with glee to see someone so interested in books, reading, and yet still somehow committed reducing the amount of intelligence and progress in the world. A good right-wing-er! Jolly good stuff, eh, Spread Your Right Wings (SYRW) readers? As is common here on this little website, we are going to synthesize points made by to separate instances of the written word to make a third, much less wise point. Today we are looking at two fascinating reads, one an article, one a book. What we’ll end up with is an artiook or a bookicle, whichever clumsy phrase you prefer.
Too Bad, Not So Sad
In an article on Decentralize Today, author David Grace notes that conservatives dinghuses, like us, here at (SYRW) often approach life and every societal problem with the “Exactly Dividing the Dinner Check” compulsion. We feel like, everyone should pay for what they got, and then everybody (read: we) is happy. Why should we divide the cost by the number of people who ate, when some ordered pricier dishes, some ordered expensive wines, etc. Fair enough–at a tiny dinner party. We genius conservatives want to extrapolate this developmentally-infantile thinking onto complicated, nuanced political issues where it just doesn’t make sense, because, unlike at dinner with a few friends, cultural forces, intellectual movements, governmental missions, and lots more are at play, not to mention what each party brings to the table in terms of personal and affiliate-group. history But we Alt-ers think everyone should get out of the system what we perceive they put into it. We shouldn’t have to fork over taxes to bankroll social safety net programs that we don’t benefit from. Doesn’t that make sense?
“‘Conservatives’ core idea of what is ‘fair’ is that everyone pays only for what they get and that no one should have to pay for what anyone else gets. It’s the ‘exactly dividing the dinner check’ syndrome applied to running an entire society,” Grace writes, This is a bit of a misnomer, we at SYRW say, because it’s more like the “you pay for what you get” syndrome applied to running an entire society.
Related: See how these Trump admin members played “Two Truths and a Wish.”
Indeed, it’s hard to convince someone that a greater good is achieved, a social contract to live in a just and cooperative society where we all lift each other up is fulfilled, when their thinking on delicate, immensely complex topics like, for just one example, Medicaid, begins and ends with, “We all put in x, and we all get back the equivalent of x.” Any problematic situations that occur for other–always other–people after that, let alone before that, are NMP–Not My Problem. Yup–it’s all about what we on the right perceive as “fair.” Shhhhhhhhhh! Stop talking beyond that! Stop making us have to think and feel beyond that. Our Mommies and Daddies taught us when we were in first grade that as long as you don’t intend to cheat anyone, everything works out A-okay. We’re taking that “philosophy” to the grave.
A Kick In the Moral Gut
In a recently published, and much-loved book here in the SYRW offices, The Righteous Mind, author Jonathan Haidt notes that his decades of research into moral psychology taught him that moral judgments are arrived at based on intuitions, or gut feelings about what is right and what is wrong. Reason comes into play after that. How does this explain the seeming oceans of disagreements between conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, especially in the Era of Trump? Well, for Haidt’s insightful, accessible observations, and even some solutions to the deep divides that exist in U.S. culture these days, you’ll have to run out and buy his book.
We’ll say in our brief article here, that, yes, our gut feeling is to agree with him. Unfortunately, some things that seem to us on the right to be things that everyone should feel in their guts are right or wrong. And apparently, liberals feel that way, too, about their own moral judgments, Who knew? And, Haidt, points out, we are not only inherently moral animals, but inherently moralistic animals, who judge others’ stances on important cultural issues as themselves “right” or “wrong.”
Haidt is concerned with lessening political divisions and increasing cooperative behaviors. He writes: “Intuitions come first, so anything that we can do to cultivate more positive social connections will alter intuitions, and thus, downstream, reasoning and behavior.” He gives the intriguing example of requiring Congresspeople to live in Washington D.C. to encourage them to make meaningful bonds with each other, thus increasing their gut feeling that they should work on compromises with each other as friends.
“But nowadays,” writes Haidt, “most Congressmen fly to D.C., huddle with their teammates and do battle for three days, and then fly home on Thursday night. Cross-party friendships are disappearing; Manichaeism and scorched Earth politics are increasing.”
And: How to use your interior design choices to further endanger a “Republic at Risk.”
It would seem like “gut feelings” would be the same for everyone, given how basic they are to our behavior. But, no, this is not the case, as Haidt points out. So we need to find ways to connect, dear SYRW readers, so we can solve our collective problems. Easier said than done, we know,
Check, Please!
And immediately, that dinner-check compulsion kicks in for us conservatives: “Why should I have to give anything to anyone else?” Meanwhile, the liberals take a decidedly more flower-power view, something like, “We must all work together, or our society disintegrates apart.”
To complicate matters further, though, Haidt says the genes of conservatives and liberals predispose them to respond to certain feelings and then adhere to certain ideas. How to compete with genes, dear readers?
We’re not sure, but we still aren’t paying for our friend who got the extravagant dessert at dinner just now!
Perhaps this quote from Haidt’s book will provide some guidance: “Our politics will become more civil when we find ways to change the procedures for electing politicians and the institutions and environments within which they interact.” He also notes that we must remember that each side in our cultural debates consists of “good people who have something important to say.” Oh….fine!
Also: DIY hacks to take your Alt-game back to the 19th century where we all belong!
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© 2018 Akbar Khan
