I’ve often wondered why there are so many people who are kind and generous in their personal lives, even selfless toward family and friends, but seem indifferent about broader social justice or the suffering of billions in faraway places, and who will even support policies and ideologies that cause or perpetuate harm to their fellow humans. Some will even respond angrily, at times with contempt, to those who speak out for what would seem to be fairly unassailable values, like equality, human rights, or providing for the weaker members of society.

Yet these are some of the same people who will stop to help you if your car breaks down, go out of their way to comfort a neighbor, or donate generously to charities. Studies have shown consistently that conservatives give more money to charity than liberals, and not just to their churches.

Are they just uninformed about the repercussions of their political choices? Misled by the misinformation and obfuscation in the profit-driven media? Duped by politicians’ use of appealing but meaningless buzz phrases like “family values” that don’t refer to any actual platform or policy position? Driven by outright prejudice and intolerance?

Maybe, but I came across a fascinating theory, in this article [via Arts & Letters Daily]: Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, by Jonathan Haidt. And then I looked up more information about the theory itself, which is laid out here: When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize [pdf], by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. It’s linked to from the Moral Foundations Theory Homepage, where there is more reading on the subject, and even an offer of $1000 to anyone who can improve on or refute the theory.

The theory goes something like this. I hope I’m not mangling it too much with my paraphrasing and condensing. Liberals recognize two basic foundations of morality: one is based on notions of fairness, justice, reciprocity, and equality and the other on the belief that people should take care of the weak and not do each other harm. By that measure, the stance of conservatives who oppose, for instance, gay marriage and social welfare, or support preemptive wars, would appear not to be driven by morality. But the theory goes on to posit that conservatives have three additional foundations that make up their moral domain: loyalty to one’s inner circle, respect for authority, and the imperative to preserve purity and sanctity. Both conservatives and liberals place a high value, implicitly, on fairness and not doing harm, but for conservatives those values only make up two fifths of their gut-level intuition of what is right and proper.

Haidt and Graham explain that the five moral foundations are to a greater or lesser extent common to nearly all human societies, both historical and current, and are believed to be evolutionary adaptations, while the moral underpinnings of liberalism, which recognize only two of the five foundations, are a modern phenomenon found only among secular Westerners. Since these moral foundations are hard wired into our evolutionary make up, they function as instincts and are not necessarily subject to change by applying reason.

So while it may be disconcerting to try asking a conservative why he doesn’t question the validity of a bloody war waged on lies only to get bluster and anger in response, and maybe an accusation of being unpatriotic, it may be that the very question, from his point of view, was first and foremost an affront to his instinctive moral sense of loyalty and respect for authority.

I’m not suggesting that this theory should give conservatives a free pass for supporting harmful and unfair policies. But it’s a useful way to understand what often seems like willful intransigence and rigidity.

On the other hand, the implications are more troubling to me than comforting. If it’s true that authority, loyalty, and purity are hard wired moral foundations that exist deep in the psyche of conservatives, by their very nature they conflict with ideals of openness, public dissent, and acceptance of difference.

The view of many social justice researchers is that “political conservatism is a form of motivated social cognition: people embrace conservatism in part ‘because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity, and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals.’” (Haidt and Graham) Haidt and Graham offer the moral foundations theory as a caveat, an addition to the social cognition theory, but it seems to me that the deeply held instincts of conservatives, assuming the theory is correct, only reinforce and justify the “motivated social cognition.”

It seems to me that if you embrace a solid and inflexible point of view, one that conveniently and neatly coincides with your existing moral construct, you don’t have to ever worry about feeling jostled or unbalanced by new information, because you can feel free to dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant to your insular worldview. And if one of your essential moral foundations is staunch loyalty to your group, even the possibility of changing your stance so that it no longer conforms to the group’s would in itself be fundamentally disloyal.

The smiling church ladies who seem so polite and friendly when you see them at the rummage sale may be showing you their best face only because it’s an imperative within their social group to show courtesy and respect to strangers. Just underneath that veneer they may very well be deeply offended and contemptuous of your very being. It could be that you have tattoos, an untidy appearance, a revealing outfit, a same-sex partner on your arm: if this theory is correct, then any of those factors, it seems, would constitute a breach of their deeply held moral foundation of purity and sanctity. So that if we perceive a tightness to their smile, it may not be all in our imagination.

So is there any hope? Haidt theorizes that Western liberals have shed the core foundations of authority, loyalty and purity through movement and exposure to diversity: how can you hold on to the values of your inner circle when there is none to speak of, because you and many of the people around you have moved from thousands of miles away? He explains that those who voted for Kerry in 2004 live primarily near coastal areas and waterways, where there is the most movement and diversity, while those who voted for Bush tend to live in central parts of the country where there is less movement. If there’s any lesson from this, it seems to me that it should be on the importance of increasing diversity and mobility, and fostering the open mindedness that comes from stepping outside one’s comfort zone.

From The Guardian:

“I remember the day I learned Ringo’s drumming was “bad”. So bad Paul had done some of it for him…. I read somewhere the beautiful thought that Ringo’s role was to be our surrogate in the band, the Beatle who was also a fan of the Beatles, in awe of the “real ones” from the nearest possible proximity….

“So the sham notion of a “democracy of talent” within these great groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast. Or, paradoxically, the reverse: the urge to pronounce the solo careers so thin and cheesy that the magic was proven to be in the lucky conjunction of a bunch of ordinary blokes, raised temporarily above their station as much by history and our love as by any personal agency; if the Beatles didn’t exist we’d have had to invent them, and perhaps we did….

“Maybe the search for the Fifth Beatle was always destined to end … with the conclusion that the Fifth Beatle is YOU. For evidence, one only needs to listen to The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Here was music to ride like a froth of sea foam atop a tsunami wave of adulation and yearning for, well, itself. What were little-girl-screams if not the essential heart of the Beatles’ true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track consisting of the band itself? Getting by with a little help from my friends indeed….

“A real music would have some modesty, and we’d have a proper reverence for its history, a proper sense of its distance from ourselves. Our pop life, then, is maybe the collapse of musical expertise into raw expression - the collapse of singing into screaming, even when it’s only the possibility of screaming, or the audience’s screaming, or the guitar’s….

“We try to cover our embarrassment at how much we believe. For this whole story really is a naked egalitarian dream, isn’t it?”

My own embarrassment is not at what I believe. If anything I’m more embarrassed by my sense of devotion and love when it comes to popular music (and by that I mostly mean Green Day). I don’t feel taken in by the sham of talentless bands who manage to make me feel exhilarated in spite of their ineptitude, nor by the realization that loving popular music is a kind of collective suspension of rational sense and taste. I don’t think of myself as someone who has taste, and I’m indifferent to whether or not the members of the bands I love have “talent.” I’m grateful for their unabashed faith and perseverance: had they been self conscious or even sensible they may have felt too stupid and embarrassed to be up there in front of people, screaming like idiots, and just quit, and that would have been a shame. A tragedy, even.

The Beatles don’t exactly do it for me, even though I think they’re pretty wonderful. But that doesn’t matter. I think you can read Lethem’s piece and substitute The Beatles with whatever kind of popular music has an effect on you.

Popular music isn’t thought of as great because it’s a high art form: it’s great because it’s so simple, like screaming out loud. Or falling down hard and having that moment of raw sensation, where there’s no thought but, “Ow! Damn that smarts!”

I think Lethem is talking, among other things that I’m not exactly sure I understand, about the conflation of genius and stupidity found in popular music when it’s good enough to knock you over. We want to believe in the genius and specialness of something we hold so dear, but then we look closely and find ordinariness. We find out that Ringo is a lousy drummer, or that Billie Joe doesn’t read music, but why that should matter to us I’m not sure. It’s a kind of comfort, actually. We think: If they’re ordinary then they’re just like me, and I could be them, and in fact I am them: I’m just as good and just as important. Which in a real sense you are, because everybody is good and important. But then the genius is in there too, undeniably, even though it’s hard to pin down: is Billie Joe a genius when he drops his pants and waggles his pee pee? Could you make that argument with a straight face? You can revel in the stupid and endearing things he does, and gawk at him lovingly like he’s someone you might know, but then he also has this completely intimidating and inscrutable part to him that creates this music that makes you feel something indescribable.